War and Peace (119 page)

During his stay at Bleak Hills all the family dined together, but every one was ill at ease, and Prince Andrey felt that he was being treated as a guest for whom an exception was being made, and that his presence made all of them feel awkward. The first day Prince Andrey could not help being aware of this at dinner, and sat in silence. The old prince noticed his unnatural dumbness, and he, too, preserved a sullen silence, and immediately after dinner withdrew to his own room. Later in the evening when Prince Andrey went in to him, and began telling him about the campaign of the young Prince Kamensky to try and rouse him, the old prince, to his surprise, began talking about Princess Marya, grumbling at her superstitiousness, and her dislike of Mademoiselle Bourienne, who was, he said, the only person really attached to him.

The old prince declared that it was all Princess Marya’s doing if he were ill; that she plagued and worried him on purpose, and that she was spoiling little Prince Nikolay by the way she petted him, and the silly tales she told him. The old prince knew very well that he tormented his daughter, and that her life was a very hard one. But he knew, too, that he could not help tormenting her, and considered that she deserved it. “Why is it Andrey, who sees it, says nothing about his sister?” the old prince wondered. “Why, does he suppose I’m a scoundrel or an old fool
to be alienated from my daughter and friendly with this Frenchwoman for no good reason? He doesn’t understand, and so I must explain it to him; he must hear what I have to say about it,” thought the old prince, and so he began to explain the reason why he could not put up with his daughter’s unreasonable character.

“If you ask me,” said Prince Andrey, not looking at his father (it was the first time in his life that he had blamed his father), “I did not wish to speak of it—but, if you ask me, I’ll tell you my opinion frankly in regard to the whole matter. If there is any misunderstanding and estrangement between you and Masha, I can’t blame her for it—I know how she loves and respects you. If you ask me,” Prince Andrey continued, losing his temper, as he very readily did in these latter days, “I can only say one thing; if there are misunderstandings, the cause of them is that worthless woman, who is not fit to be my sister’s companion.”

The old man stared for a moment at his son, and a forced smile revealed the loss of a tooth, to which Prince Andrey could not get accustomed, in his face.

“What companion, my dear fellow? Eh! So you’ve talked it over already! Eh?”

“Father, I had no wish to judge you,” said Prince Andrey, in a hard and spiteful tone, “but you have provoked me, and I have said, and shall always say, that Marie is not to blame, but the people to blame—the person to blame—is that Frenchwoman …”

“Ah, he has passed judgment!… he has passed judgment!” said the old man, in a low voice, and Prince Andrey fancied, with embarrassment. But immediately after he leapt up and screamed, “Go away, go away! Let me never set eyes on you again!…”

Prince Andrey would have set off at once, but Princess Marya begged him to stay one day more. During that day Prince Andrey did not see his father, who never left his room, and admitted no one to see him but Mademoiselle Bourienne and Tihon, from which he inquired several times whether his son had gone. The following day before starting, Prince Andrey went to the part of the house where his son was to be found. The sturdy little boy, with curls like his mother’s, sat on his knee. Prince Andrey began telling him the story of Bluebeard, but he sank into dreamy meditation before he had finished the story. He was not thinking of the pretty boy, his child, even while he held him on his knee; he was thinking of himself. He sought and was horrified not to find in himself either remorse for having provoked his father’s anger, or regret at
leaving home (for the first time in his life) on bad terms with him. What meant still more to him was that he could not detect in himself a trace of the tender affection he had once felt for his boy, and had hoped to revive in his heart, when he petted the child and put him on his knee.

“Come, tell me the rest,” said the boy. Prince Andrey took him off his knee without answering, and went out of the room.

As soon as Prince Andrey gave up his daily pursuits, especially to return to the old surroundings in which he had been when he was happy, weariness of life seized upon him as intensely as ever, and he made haste to escape from these memories, and to find some work to do as quickly as possible.

“Are you really going, Andrey?” his sister said to him.

“Thank God that I can go,” said Prince Andrey. “I am very sorry you can’t too.”

“What makes you say that?” said Princess Marya. “How can you say that when you are going to this awful war, and he is so old? Mademoiselle Bourienne told me he keeps asking about you.…” As soon as she spoke of that, her lips quivered, and tears began to fall. Prince Andrey turned away and began walking up and down the room.

“Ah, my God! my God!” he said. “And to think what and who—what scum can be the cause of misery to people!” he said with a malignance that terrified Princess Marya.

She felt that when he uttered the word “scum,” he was thinking not only of Mademoiselle Bourienne, who was the cause of her misery, but also of the man who had ruined his own happiness. “Andrey, one thing I beg, I beseech of you,” she said, touching his elbow and looking at him with eyes that shone through her tears. “I understand you.” (Princess Marya dropped her eyes.) “Don’t imagine that sorrow is the work of men. Men are His instruments.” She glanced upwards a little above Prince Andrey’s head with the confident, accustomed glance with which one looks towards a familiar portrait. “Sorrow is sent by Him, and not by men. Men are the instrument of His will, they are not to blame. If it seems to you that some one has wronged you—forget it, and forgive. We have no right to punish. And you will know the happiness of forgiveness.”

“If I were a woman, I would, Marie. That’s a woman’s virtue. But a man must not, and cannot, forgive and forget,” he said, and though till that minute he had not been thinking of Kuragin, all his unsatisfied revenge rose up again in his heart. “If Marie is beginning to persuade me
to forgive, it means that I ought long ago to have punished him,” he thought.

And making no further reply to Princess Marya, he began dreaming now of the happy moment of satisfied hate when he would meet Kuragin. He knew he was with the army.

Princess Marya besought her brother to stay another day, telling him how wretched her father would be, she knew, if Andrey went away without being reconciled to him. But Prince Andrey answered that he would probably soon be back from the army, that he would certainly write to his father, and that their quarrel would only be more embittered by his staying longer now. “Remember that misfortunes come from God, and that men are never to blame,” were the last words he heard from his sister, as he said good-bye to her.

“So it must be so!” thought Prince Andrey, as he drove out of the avenue. “She, poor innocent creature, is left to be victimised by an old man, who has outlived his wits. The old man feels he is wrong, but he can’t help himself. My boy is growing up and enjoying life in which he will be deceived or deceiving like every one else. I am going to the army—what for? I don’t know myself; and I want to meet that man whom I despise, so as to give him a chance to kill me and sneer at me!” All the conditions of life had been the same before, but before they had all seemed to him coherent, and now they had all fallen apart. Life seemed to Prince Andrey a series of senseless phenomena following one another without any connection.

Prince Andrey reached the headquarters of the army at the end of June. The first army, with which the Tsar was, was stationed in a fortified camp at Drissa. The second army was retreating, striving to effect a junction with the first army, from which—so it was said—it had been cut off by immense forces of the French. Every one was dissatisfied with the general course of events in the Russian army. But no one even dreamed of any danger of the Russian provinces being invaded, no one imagined the war could extend beyond the frontiers of the western Polish provinces.

Prince Andrey found Barclay de Tolly, to whom he was sent, on the bank of the Drissa. Since there was not one large village nor dwelling-place
in the neighbourhood of the camp, the immense multitude of generals and courtiers accompanying the army were distributed about the neighborhood for ten versts round in the best houses of the village on both sides of the river. Barclay de Tolly was staying four versts away from the Tsar. He gave Bolkonsky a dry and frigid reception, and said in his German accent that he would mention him to the Tsar so that a definite appointment might be given him, and that meanwhile he begged him to remain on his staff. Anatole Kuragin, whom Prince Andrey had expected to find in the army, was not here. He was in Petersburg, and Bolkonsky was glad to hear it. He was absorbed in the interest of being at the centre of the immense war that was in progress, and he was relieved to be free for a time from the irritability produced in him by the idea of Kuragin. The first four days, during which he was not called upon to do anything, he spent in riding round the whole of the fortified camp, and by the aid of his experiences and his conversations with persons of greater experience, he tried to form a definite idea about it. But the question whether such a camp were of use at all or not remained an open one in his mind. He had already, from his own military experience, formed the conviction that in war the most deeply meditated plans are of no avail (as he had seen at Austerlitz), that everything depends on how unexpected actions of the enemy, actions that cannot possibly be foreseen, are met; that all depends on how, and by whom, the battle is led. In order to settle this last question to his own satisfaction, Prince Andrey took advantage of his position and his acquaintances to try to get an insight into the character of the persons and parties who had a hand in the organisation of the army. This was the general idea he gained of the position of affairs.

While the Tsar had been at Vilna, the army had been divided into three. The first army was under the command of Barclay de Tolly, the second under the command of Bagration, and the third under the command of Tormasov. The Tsar was with the first army, but not in the capacity of commander-in-chief. In the proclamations, it was announced that the Tsar would be with the army, but it was not announced that he would take the command. Moreover, there was in attendance on the Tsar personally not a commander-in-chief’s staff, but the staff of the imperial headquarters. The chief officer of the imperial staff was General-Quartermaster Volkonsky, and it contained generals, aides-de-camp, diplomatic officials, and an immense number of foreigners, but it was not a military staff. The Tsar had also in attendance on him in no definite
capacity, Araktcheev, the late minister of war; Count Bennigsen, by seniority the first of the generals; the Tsarevitch, Konstantin Pavlovitch; Count Rumyantsev, the chancellor; Stein, the former Prussian minister; Armfeldt, the Swedish general; Pfuhl, the chief organiser of the plan of the campaign; Paulucci, a Sardinian refugee, who had been made a general-adjutant; Woltzogen; and many others. Though those personages had no definite posts in the army, yet, from their position, they had influence, and often the commander of a corps, or even one of the commanders-in-chief, did not know in what capacity Bennigsen or the Tsarevitch or Araktcheev or Prince Volkonsky addressed some advice or inquiry to him, and could not tell whether some command in the form of advice came directly from the person who got it or through him from the Tsar, and whether he ought or ought not to obey it. But all this formed simply the external aspect of the situation; the inner import of the presence of the Tsar and all these great personages was, from a courtier’s point of view (and in the presence of a monarch all men become courtiers), plain to all. All grasped the fact that though the Tsar was not formally assuming the position of commander-in-chief, he did, in fact, hold the supreme control of all the armies in his hands, and the persons about him were his councillors. Araktcheev was a trusty administrator, a stern upholder of discipline, and careful of the safety of the Tsar. Bennigsen was a landholder in the neighbourhood, and seemed to feel it his function to entertain the Tsar there; while he was in reality, too, a good general, useful as an adviser, and useful to have in readiness to replace Barclay at any time. The Tsarevitch was there because he thought fit to be. The former Prussian minister, Stein, was there because his advice might be useful, and the Emperor Alexander had a high opinion of his personal qualities. Armfeldt was a bitter enemy of Napoleon, and had self-confidence, which never failed to have influence with Alexander. Paulucci was there because he was bold and decided in his utterances. The generals on the staff were there because they were always where the Emperor was; and the last and principal figure, Pfuhl, was there because he had created a plan of warfare against Napoleon, and having made Alexander believe in the consistency of this plan, was now conducting the plan of the whole campaign. Pfuhl was accompanied by Woltzogen, who put Pfuhl’s ideas into a more easily comprehensible form than could be done by Pfuhl himself, who was a rigid theorist, with an implicit faith in his own views, and an absolute contempt for everything else.

The above-mentioned were the most prominent personages about
the Tsar, and among them the foreigners were in the ascendant, and were every day making new and startling suggestions with the audacity characteristic of men who are acting in a sphere not their own. But, besides those, there were many more persons of secondary importance, who were with the army because their principals were there.

In this vast, brilliant, haughty, and uneasy world, among all these conflicting voices, Prince Andrey detected the following sharply opposed parties and differences of opinion.

The first party consisted of Pfuhl and his followers; military theorists, who believe in a science of war, having its invariable laws—laws of oblique movements, out-flanking, etc. Pfuhl and his adherents demanded that the army should retreat into the heart of the country in accordance with the exact principles laid down by their theory of war, and in every departure from this theory they saw nothing but barbarism, ignorance, or evil intention. To this party belonged Woltzogen, Wintzengerode, and others—principally Germans.