On the 8th of September into the prisoners’ coach-house walked an officer of some considerable standing, if the deference shown to him by the guards was anything to go by. This man, probably a staff-officer, held out a piece of paper and read through a list of all the Russian names. He had Pierre down as ‘the one who won’t give his name’. Almost too lazy even to glance at the prisoners, he told the officer on guard to have them tidied up and decently dressed before bringing them before the marshal. An hour later a squad of soldiers turned up, and Pierre was taken out with another thirteen men and marched over to the Virgin’s Field. It was a lovely day, sunny after rain, and the air was exceptionally clear. There was no pall of smoke as there had been on the day when Pierre had been taken out from the guard-room in the Zubovsky rampart; any smoke rose straight up in a column through the pure air. There were no flames anywhere, but columns of smoke rose up on all sides, and the whole of Moscow, as far as Pierre could tell, had burnt down in one huge conflagration. All over the place he could see empty spaces with nothing but stoves and pipes still standing, interspersed in a few places with the blackened walls of stone-built houses. Pierre stared at the ruins without recognizing parts of the town he knew well. Odd churches seemed to have survived here and there. The Kremlin had escaped; its towers and the belfry of Ivan the Great shone white in the distance. They could see the gleaming dome of the Novodevichy convent not far away, and the chiming of the bells was extraordinarily clear. The bells reminded Pierre that it was Sunday, and a special one: the Nativity of the Virgin. But there seemed to be no one there to celebrate. On every side there was nothing but charred ruins, and the only Russians they came across were a few ragged, scared-looking people, who scuttled away the moment they spotted the French.
Clearly the Russian nest had been ruined and destroyed, but Pierre felt instinctively that Russian order, thus annihilated, had been superseded in its nest by another, different kind of order, the rigorous order of the French. He could sense this in the serried ranks of marching soldiers stepping out boldly and breezily as they escorted him and the other prisoners. He could sense it in the sudden appearance of an important French official coming towards them, driven by a soldier in a carriage and pair. He could sense it in the merry strains of military music floating across the meadow from over on the left. And he had sensed it, too, with a sudden insight into what it was all about, when the list of names had been read out to them that morning by the newly arrived French officer. Pierre had been arrested by one set of soldiers, taken to one place and transferred to another along with dozens of different people. He could so easily have been forgotten or mixed up with other people, but no, his own answers under interrogation came back to him in the form of a new title: ‘the one who won’t give his name’. And under this title, which filled Pierre with dread, they were taking him somewhere, with absolute certainty on their faces that he and the other prisoners were the right ones, going to the right place. Pierre felt like a meaningless speck trapped in the wheels of some well-oiled machinery working away in a manner that he didn’t understand.
He and the other prisoners were escorted across to the right-hand side of the Virgin’s Field, not far from the convent, and taken up to a big white house with a huge garden. It was Prince Shcherbatov’s house; Pierre had often been there in former days as a guest of its owner. Now, he gathered from what the soldiers said, it was occupied by a marshal, the Duke of Eckmühl.
They were brought to the entrance and taken in one by one. Pierre was the sixth to be led in. Through the glass gallery they went, through the ante-room and the hall, all of them familiar to Pierre, until they came to the long, low study, where an adjutant stood waiting by the door.
Davout was sitting at a desk at the far end of the room with his spectacles on his nose. Pierre walked over to him. Davout was too busy with a document in front of him to look up. So, without looking up, he asked in the gentlest of tones, ‘Who are you?’
Pierre didn’t respond; he couldn’t have said a word. Davout was more than a French general to Pierre; to Pierre Davout was a man renowned for his cruelty. Looking into Davout’s icy features – he was behaving like a martinet of a teacher with limited patience who was waiting for an answer – Pierre sensed that a second’s delay could cost him his life, but he had no idea what to say. He couldn’t bring himself to say what he had said at the first interrogation, but to reveal his identity and social standing might be humiliating and even dangerous.
