‘The Emperor! The Emperor! The marshal! The duke! . . .’and the sleek cavalry soldiers had hardly ridden by when a carriage rattled up drawn by grey horses. Pierre had a passing glimpse of the serene, handsome, fat, white face of a man in a three-cornered hat. It was one of the marshals. The marshal’s eye was caught by Pierre’s big, striking figure; and in the expression with which he frowned and looked away Pierre fancied he saw pity and the desire to conceal it.
The general in charge of the transport whipped up his lean horse, and galloped after the carriage with a red, panic-stricken face. Several officers met in a group; the soldiers came round them. All had excited and uneasy faces.
‘What did he say? What was it he said? . . .’ Pierre heard.
While the marshal was driving by, the prisoners had been hustled together into one group, and Pierre caught sight of Karataev, whom he had not yet seen that morning. He was sitting, wrapped in his little military coat, leaning against a birch-tree. His face still wore the same look of joyous emotion as when he had been telling the story of the merchant, but it had another expression too, a look of subdued solemnity.
Karataev looked at Pierre with his kindly, round eyes, that were bright now with tears, and there was an unmistakable appeal in them. He evidently wanted to say something to him. But Pierre was in too great dread for himself. He made as though he had not seen that look, and hastily walked away.
When the prisoners set off again Pierre looked back. Karataev was sitting under the birch-tree by the edge of the road, and two Frenchmen were bending over him in conversation. Pierre did not look again. He went on limping up the hill.
There was the sound of a shot behind, at the spot where Karataev was sitting. Pierre heard that shot distinctly, but at the moment that he heard it, he recalled that he had not finished reckoning up how many stages
were left to Smolensk, the calculation he had begun before the marshal rode by. And he began to reckon. Two French soldiers ran by Pierre, one holding a still smoking gun. They were both pale, and in the expression of their faces—one of them glanced timidly at Pierre—there was something like what he had seen in the young soldier at the execution in Moscow. Pierre looked at the soldier and remembered how, the day before j^esterday, the man had burnt his shirt in drying it before the fire, and how the others had laughed at him.
The dog began to howl behind at the spot where Karataev was sitting. ‘Silly creature! what is she howling for?’ thought Pierre.
The prisoners, his companions marching at his side, like him, refrained from looking back to the place whence came the sound of the shot and the dog’s howl. There was a set look on all their faces.
XV
The cavalry transport, and the prisoners, and the marshal’s baggage-train, halted at the village of Shamshevo. All crowded together round the campfire. Pierre went up to a fire, ate some roast horse-flesh, lay down with his back to the fire, and at once fell asleep. He fell into the same sort of sleep that he had slept at Mozhaisk, after the battle of Borodino.
Again the facts of real life mingled with his dreams; and again some one, himself or some one else, was uttering thoughts in his ear, and the same thoughts, indeed, as had come in his dream at Mozhaisk.
Life is everything. Life is God. All is changing and moving, and that motion is God. And while there is life, there is the joy of the consciousness of the Godhead. To love life is to love God. The hardest and the most blessed thing is to love this life in one’s sufferings, in undeserved suffering.
‘Karataev!’ flashed into Pierre’s mind. And all at once there rose up, as vivid as though alive, the image, long forgotten, of the gentle old teacher, who had given Pierre geography lessons in Switzerland. ‘Wait a minute,’ the old man was saying. And he was showing Pierre a globe. This globe was a living, quivering ball, with no definite limits. Its whole surface consisted of drops, closely cohering together. And those drops were all in motion, and changing, several passing into one, and then one splitting up again into many. Every drop seemed striving to spread, to take up more space, but the others, pressing upon it, sometimes absorbed it, sometimes melted into it.
‘This is life,’ the old teacher was saying.
‘How simple it is and how clear,’ thought Pierre. ‘How was it I did not know that before? God is in the midst, and each drop strives to expand, to reflect Him on the largest scale possible. And it grows, and is absorbed and crowded out, and on the surface it disappears, goes back into the depths, and falls not to the surface again. That is how it is with him, with Karataev; he is absorbed and has disappeared.’
‘You understand, my child,’ said the teacher.
‘You understand, damn you! ’ shouted a voice, and Pierre woke up.
