his own division joined him at table. The conversation naturally turned on the peace. The two officers, Rostov’s comrades, like the greater part of the army, were not satisfied with the peace concluded after Friedland. They said that had they kept on a little longer it would have meant Napoleon’s downfall; that his troops had neither provisions nor ammunition. Nikolay ate in silence and dra :k heavily. He finished two bottles of wine by himself. The inward ferment working within him still fretted him, and found no solution. He dreaded giving himself up to his thoughts, and could not get away from them. All of a sudden, on one of the officers saying that it was humiliating to look at the French, Rostov began shouting with a violence that was quite unprovoked, and consequently greatly astounded the officers.
‘And how can you judge what would be best!’ he shouted, with his face suddenly suffused with a rush of blood. ‘How can you judge of the action of the Emperor? What right have we to criticise him? We cannot comprehend the aims or the actions of the Emperor!’
‘But I didn’t say a word about the Emperor,’ the officer said in justification of himself, unable to put any other interpretation on Rostov’s violence than that he was drunk.
But Rostov did not heed him.
‘We are not diplomatic clerks, w 7 e are soldiers, and nothing more,’ he went on. ‘Command us to die—then we die. And if we are punished, it follows we’re in fault; it’s not for us to judge. If it’s his Majesty the Emperor’s pleasure to recognise Bonaparte as emperor, and to conclude an alliance with him, then it must be the right thing. If we were once to begin criticising and reasoning about everything, nothing would be left holy to us. In that way we shall be saying there is no God, nothing,’ cried Nikolay, bringing his fist down on the table. His remarks seemed utterly irrelevant to his companions, but followed quite consistently from the train of his own ideas. ‘It’s our business to do our duty, to hack them to pieces, and not to think; that’s all about it,’ he shouted.
‘And to drink,’ put in one of the officers, who had no desire to quarrel.
‘Yes, and to drink,’ assented Nikolay. ‘Hi, you there! Another bottle! ’ he roared.
PART VI
I
In the year 1808 the Emperor Alexander visited Erfurt for another interview with the Emperor Napoleon; and in the highest Petersburg society a great deal was said of the great significance of this meeting.
In 1809 the amity between the two sovereigns of the world, as Napoleon and Alexander used to be called, had become so close that when Napoleon declared war that year with Austria, a Russian corps crossed the frontier to co-operate with their old enemy Bonaparte against their old ally, the Austrian Emperor; so close that in the highest society there was talk of a possible marriage between Napoleon and one of the sisters of the Emperor Alexander. But, apart from foreign policy, the attention of Russian society was at that time drawn with special interest to the internal changes taking place in all departments of the government.
Life meanwhile, the actual life of men with their real interests of health and sickness, labour and rest, with their interests of thought, science, poetry,, music, love, affection, hatred, passion, went its way, as always, independently, apart from the political amity or enmity of Napoleon Bonaparte, and apart from all possible reforms.
Prince Andrey had spent two years without a break in the country. All those projects which Pierre had attempted on his estates, and changing continually from one enterprise to another, had never carried out to any real result—all those projects had been carried out by Prince Andrey without display to any one and without any perceptible exertion. He possessed in the highest degree the quality Pierre lacked, that practical tenacity which, without fuss or any great effort on his part, set things in working order.
On one estate of his, three hundred serfs were transformed into free cultivators (it was one of the first examples in Russia), in others forced labour was replaced by payment of rent. On Bogutcharovo a trained midwife had been engaged at his expense to assist the peasant-women in childbirth, and a priest, at a fixed salary, was teaching the children of the peasants and house servants to read and write.
, Half his time Prince Andrey spent at Bleak Hills with his father and his son, who was still in the nursery. The other half he passed at his Bogutcharovo retreat, as his father called his estate. In spite of the indifference to all the external events of the world that he had shown to Pierre, he studiously followed them, received many books, and, to his own surprise, when people coming fresh from Petersburg, the very vortex
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of life, visited him or his father, he noticed that those people, in knowledge of all that was passing in home and foreign politics, were far behind him, though he had never left the country.
