In the late afternoon a patrol sergeant came into the church with two soldiers and informed Pierre he had been pardoned and would now be going to a special barracks set aside for prisoners of war. Without taking in a word of this, Pierre got to his feet and walked off with the soldiers. He was escorted to the top end of the field where some sheds had been knocked together out of charred planks, beams and other bits of wood, and taken into one of them. It was dark inside, and he was suddenly surrounded by a diverse group of men, about twenty of them. He stared at them without the slightest idea who they were, why they were there, or what they wanted from him. He could hear words coming at him, but they seemed inconclusive and irrelevant; he had no idea what they meant. He gave some answers to the questions put to him, but with no clear idea of who was listening or how his answers would go down with them. He was looking at faces and bodies, but they all seemed equally meaningless.
From the moment Pierre had witnessed the grisly murder carried out by men who hadn’t wanted to do it he had felt as if the mainspring of his soul that kept everything in him balanced and working and gave him a semblance of life had been torn out, and it all seemed to have collapsed into a pile of meaningless rubbish. Without Pierre fully realizing it, all his faith had been undermined, faith in the good order of the universe, in the souls of men, in his own soul, even in God. This was something Pierre had experienced before, but never with this kind of intensity. Whenever he had been assailed by doubts like these in the past they had arisen from a sense of his own guilt, and at the bottom of his heart Pierre had always known that salvation from this kind of despair and doubt lay in his own hands. But now he felt he wasn’t to blame for the world collapsing before his eyes and leaving nothing but meaningless ruins behind. He felt powerless; there was no way back to his old faith in life.
There were men all round him in the darkness. He seemed to be an interesting distraction for them. They were telling him something and asking questions, then they took him away and he ended up in a corner of the shed next to some men who were talking on all sides, and laughing.
‘Anyway, me old mates, that same prince
Sitting in the straw with his back against the wall, still and silent, Pierre kept opening and closing his eyes. The moment he closed them he could see the terrible face of the factory hand, terrible because of its sheer simplicity, and the faces of the men forced into murder, and they were even more terrible because of the anguish written all over them. So he would open his eyes again and stare blankly into the surrounding darkness.
Next to him sat a stooping little man who made his presence felt by the stench of sweat that came wafting from him every time he made any movement. This man was fiddling around with his feet in the darkness, and, although Pierre couldn’t see his face, he could sense him continually glancing his way. As his eyes grew more used to the dark Pierre realized that this man was unwrapping his footcloths, and the way he was doing it caught Pierre’s imagination.
After unwinding the strings from one of his legs he tidied them away and then tackled the other leg, glancing up at Pierre. While one hand was still hanging up the first leg-string, the other hand was busy unwinding the string on the other leg. With this meticulous procedure, in a swift succession of neat and tidy circular movements, the man unrolled his footcloths and hung them up on pegs in the wall overhead, took out a knife, cut off a piece of something, snapped the knife shut, put it away at the head of his sleeping-place, eased himself into a more comfortable position and sat there with his arms clasped round his knees, staring straight at Pierre. Pierre was aware of something rather pleasant, something rounded and reassuring, in those neat, circular movements, the man’s nicely tidied corner, even the very smell of him. He couldn’t take his eyes off him.
‘Seen a lot o’ trouble in your time, sir, ’ave you?’ said the little man suddenly. And there was so much concern and such simplicity in the sing-song voice that Pierre couldn’t get an answer out through the trembling of his jaw and his rising tears. Barely a second later, leaving no time for Pierre to start looking embarrassed, the little man went on in the same pleasant tones:
‘There you are, sweetie, don’t you worry,’ he said, in the gently soothing sing-song voice of an old Russian peasant woman. ‘Don’t you worry, old pal. Trouble’s short, life’s long! Oh yes, me dear. And we’re gettin’ on fine, thank God. No nastiness ’ere. They’m all men same as you an’ me, bad and good among ’em,’ he said. He was still speaking as he got nimbly to his knees and then to his feet, and walked off somewhere, coughing to clear his throat.
