It was clear and frosty. A dark, starlit heaven looked down on the black roofs and the dirty, dusky streets. Only by looking up at the sky could Pierre distance himself from the disgusting squalor of all earthly things as compared with the heights to which his soul had now been taken. As he drove into the Arbat a vast firmament of darkness and stars opened out before Pierre’s eyes. And there in the middle, high above Prechistensky Boulevard, amidst a scattering of stars on every side but catching the eye through its closeness to the earth, its pure white light and the long uplift of its tail, shone the comet, the huge, brilliant comet of 1812, that popular harbinger of untold horrors and the end of the world. But this bright comet with its long, shiny tail held no fears for Pierre. Quite the reverse: Pierre’s eyes glittered with tears of rapture as he gazed up at this radiant star, which must have traced its parabola through infinite space at speeds unimaginable and now suddenly seemed to have picked its spot in the black sky and impaled itself like an arrow piercing the earth, and stuck there, with its strong upthrusting tail and its brilliant display of whiteness amidst the infinity of scintillating stars. This heavenly body seemed perfectly attuned to Pierre’s newly melted heart, as it gathered reassurance and blossomed into new life.
VOLUME III
PART I
CHAPTER 1
The latter part of 1811 saw a new build-up in the concentration and arming of troops in Western Europe, and in 1812 these forces – millions of men if you include those in transport and provisioning – moved from west to east, closing in on the frontiers of Russia, where the Russian forces had been similarly gathering since 1811.
On the 12th of June the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier, and war began. In other words, an event took place which defied human reason and all human nature. Millions of men set out to inflict on one another untold evils – deception, treachery, robbery, forgery, counterfeiting, theft, arson and murder – on a scale unheard of in the annals of law-courts down the centuries and all over the world, though at the time the men responsible did not think of these deeds as crimes.
What led to this extraordinary occurrence? What causes lay behind it? Historians, in their simple-minded certitude, tell us that the causes of this event were as follows: the violence done to the Duke of Oldenburg; non-observance of the Continental System;1 Napoleon’s megalomania; Alexander’s obstinacy; mistakes made by diplomats, and so on.
It follows, then, that all Metternich, Rumyantsev or Talleyrand2 would have had to do, between getting up in the morning and partying in the evening, was exert themselves just a little and make a nice job of phrasing some diplomatic note, whereupon all Napoleon would have had to do was write to Alexander saying, ‘Esteemed brother, I consent to the Duke of Oldenburg having his duchy back,’ and there would have been no war.
We can well understand why contemporaries might have seen things that way. We can understand why Napoleon might have attributed the cause of the war to the machinations of the English (indeed, he said as much from St Helena). We can further understand why English members of parliament thought the war had been caused by Napoleon’s megalomania; why the Duke of Oldenburg blamed the war on the violence done to him; why those in trade explained the war in terms of the Continental System, which was bringing Europe to its knees; why veterans and old-world generals blamed it all on their being called up for service again; why legitimists of the period would insist on the necessity of getting ‘back to basics’, and diplomats of the day put it down to the 1809 alliance between Russia with Austria not being properly concealed from Napoleon, plus the clumsy wording of Memorandum No. 178. We can well understand how these – and other causes, endless in number, infinite in their proliferation because of the endless points of view available – might have appeared to contemporaries. But for us, the descendants of these people, as we contemplate this vast accomplishment in all its enormity and seek to penetrate its dreadful simplicity, these explanations seem inadequate. It is beyond our comprehension that millions of Christian men should have killed and tortured each other just because Napoleon was a megalomaniac, Alexander was obstinate, the English were devious and the Duke of Oldenburg was badly done by. We can see no connection between these circumstances and the stark reality of murder and violence; we cannot see how an affront to a duke could have induced thousands of men to rampage through the other end of Europe, slaughtering the inhabitants of Smolensk and Moscow and getting slaughtered in return.
