On receiving Prince Andrey, the duty adjutant asked him to wait and went in to see the war minister. Five minutes later he returned, bowing low with great courtesy and, ushering Prince Andrey ahead of him, led him across the corridor and into a private room where the war minister was at work. The adjutant seemed to be using this exaggerated courtesy to protect himself from any attempt at familiarity on the part of the Russian aide. Prince Andrey’s joyful enthusiasm was considerably dampened as he walked to the door of the minister’s room. He felt humiliated, and the sense of humiliation soon transformed itself imperceptibly into a quite unjustified belief that they were treating him with contempt. His fertile mind immediately hit on the right attitude for him to adopt to be able to treat them, the adjutant and the minister of war, with equal contempt. ‘They’ve never smelled powder. I’m sure they think winning victories is the easiest thing in the world!’ he thought. His eyes narrowed with scorn; he walked very slowly into the war minister’s room. The feeling was reinforced when the minister of war, sitting at a big table, ignored his visitor for a full two minutes. The minister sat with his bald head, which retained some grey hair at the temples, bowed down between two wax candles; he was reading some papers and making pencilled notes on them. Determined to finish, he did not look up when the door opened and he heard the approaching footsteps.
‘Take this and give it to him,’ said the minister of war to his adjutant, handing him the papers, and still ignoring the Russian courier.
Prince Andrey felt that either the minister of war was less interested in the activities of Kutuzov’s army than in any of his other business, or this was the impression that he wanted to create. ‘Well,’ he thought, ‘why should I care?’ The minister squared off the remaining papers and put them to one side. Only then did he look up. He had the distinctive head of an intellectual, but the moment he turned to Prince Andrey, the war minister’s shrewd and concentrated look changed into a contrived facial expression that he had all too obviously grown used to assuming. His face was left wearing an inane smile – the forced smile, with no attempt to disguise the effort behind it, of a man who receives endless petitioners one after another.
‘From General Field-Marshal Kutuzov?’ he asked. ‘Good news, I hope? Has there been an encounter with Mortier? A victory? Not before time!’
He took the dispatch, which was addressed to him, and began to read it with a glum expression.
‘Oh my God! My God! Schmidt!’ he said in German. ‘What a disaster! What a disaster!’ He skimmed the dispatch, laid it on the table and glanced up at Prince Andrey, greatly preoccupied.
‘Oh my God, what a disaster! So, you say the action was decisive?’ (‘But Mortier wasn’t taken,’ he thought to himself.) ‘Very glad you’ve brought such good news, though the death of Schmidt is a heavy price to pay. His Majesty is sure to wish to see you, but not today. My thanks to you. Please go and rest. Come to the reception tomorrow morning, after the review. Anyway, I’ll be in touch.’
The inane smile, which had disappeared during the conversation, now returned to the war minister’s face.
‘
Prince Andrey left the palace with the feeling that all the excitement and pleasure that had been his following the victory had now drained away into the uncaring hands of the minister and his unctuous adjutant. His entire cast of mind had changed in an instant. The battle figured in his memory as something far away and long ago.
CHAPTER 10
In Brno Prince Andrey stayed with a Russian diplomat of his acquaintance, Bilibin.
‘My dear prince, I couldn’t have a more welcome guest,’ said Bilibin, advancing to meet Prince Andrey. ‘Franz, take the prince’s things to my bedroom,’ he said to the servant, who was ushering Bolkonsky in. ‘So, you’re the herald of victory? Splendid. I’ve been ill, as you can see. Not allowed out.’
After washing and dressing, Prince Andrey came into the diplomat’s opulent study and sat down to the dinner prepared for him. Bilibin settled down comfortably by the fireplace.
So long deprived of the niceties of cleanliness and sophistication, not only during his journey but throughout the whole campaign, Prince Andrey now felt a delightful sense of relaxation as he returned to the kind of luxurious surroundings he had been accustomed to since childhood. Besides which, after his Austrian reception, he was glad not so much to speak Russian – they spoke in French – but at least to talk to someone who was Russian, and a man who would presumably share the general Russian antipathy towards the Austrians, now at its sharpest.
