These questions were like all questions posed in a courtroom: they ignored any essence of living truth – in fact, they made it impossible for any such essence ever to be discovered – and their sole purpose was to provide a conduit down which the court officials wanted to channel any answers from a defendant so as to bring him straight to the end of the inquiry – conviction. The moment he began to say anything not conducive to this end they would simply remove the conduit and let the flow go anywhere. Besides that, Pierre felt what all defendants feel in court, a sense of bafflement that left him wondering why he was being asked all these questions. He had a distinct feeling they were patronizing him, and just going through the motions of civility by providing a conduit that was nothing more than a subterfuge. He knew he was in their power; their power and that alone had brought him here, their power and that alone gave them the right to make him answer their questions, and the only purpose of the proceedings was to convict him. It followed, then, since they had all the power and a strong desire to convict him, there was no need for the subterfuge of questions and answers in a courtroom. It was perfectly obvious that the questioning was bound to lead to a guilty verdict. When asked what he had been doing when he was arrested Pierre assumed what tragic dignity he could and replied that he was taking a child he had rescued from the flames back to its parents. Why had he been fighting with a looter? Pierre said he had been defending a woman, the defence of a woman under attack being every man’s duty, and so on . . . They stopped him; this was out of order. Why had he been in the courtyard of a burning house, where he had been seen by several witnesses? He said he had gone out for a walk to see what was happening in Moscow. They stopped him again. The question wasn’t where was he going, but what was he doing so near to the fire. Who was he? They were repeating the first question put to him, which he had refused to answer. Again he replied that he couldn’t give them an answer.
‘Make a note of that. That’s bad. Very bad,’ came the stern comment from the general with the white whiskers and the purple-red face.
On the fourth day fire broke out in several places along the Zubovsky rampart.
Pierre was transferred with thirteen of the others to a coach-house belonging to a merchant’s mansion near the Crimean Ford. As he walked down the streets Pierre could hardly breathe for the smoke that seemed to hang over the whole city. Fires were raging on all sides. Until then Pierre had not grasped the significance of the burning of Moscow, and he was horrified as he gazed at the fires.
Pierre spent four more days in the coach-house of the mansion near the Crimean Ford, and in the course of them he learnt by listening to a conversation between the French soldiers that any day now the prisoners detained here could expect to hear their sentences handed down by a marshal. Which marshal, Pierre couldn’t find out from the soldiers. As far as the soldiers were concerned this marshal clearly represented power at its highest and most esoteric.
For Pierre these first days, ending on the 8th of September when the prisoners were arraigned and interrogated for the second time, were the hardest to bear.
CHAPTER 10
