War and Peace (181 page)

These first days, up to the 8th of September, when the prisoners were brought up for a second examination, were the most painful for Pierre.

On the 8th of September, there came into the prisoners’ coach-house an officer of very great consequence, judging by the respectfulness with which he was addressed by the soldiers on guard. This officer, probably
some one on the staff, held a memorandum in his hand, and called over all the Russians’ names, giving Pierre the title of “the one who will not give his name.” And with an indolent and indifferent glance at all the prisoners, he gave the officer on guard orders to have them decently dressed and in good order before bringing them before the marshal. In an hour a company of soldiers arrived, and Pierre with the thirteen others was taken to the Virgin’s Meadow. It was a fine day, sunny after rain, and the air was exceptionally clear. The smoke did not hang low over the town as on the day when Pierre had been taken from the guard-room of the Zubovsky rampart; the smoke rose up in columns into the pure air. Flames were nowhere to be seen; but columns of smoke were rising up on all sides, and all Moscow, all that Pierre could see, was one conflagration. On all sides he saw places laid waste, with stoves and pipes left standing in them, and now and then the charred walls of a stone house.

Pierre stared at the fires, and did not recognise parts of the town that he knew well. Here and there could be seen churches that had not been touched by the fire. The Kremlin uninjured, rose white in the distance, with towers and Ivan the Great. Close at hand, the cupola of the Monastery of the New Virgin shone brightly, and the bells for service rang out gaily from it. Those bells reminded Pierre that it was Sunday and the festival of the birth of the Virgin Mother. But there seemed to be no one to keep this holiday; on all sides they saw the ruin wrought by the fires, and the only Russians they met were a few tattered and frightened-looking people, who hid themselves on seeing the French.

It was evident that the Russian nest was in ruins and destroyed; but with this annihilation of the old Russian order of life, Pierre was unconsciously aware that the French had raised up over this ruined nest an utterly different but strong order of their own. He felt this at the sight of the regular ranks of the boldly and gaily marching soldiers who were escorting him and the other prisoners; he felt it at the sight of some important French official in a carriage and pair, driven by a soldier, whom they met on their way. He felt it at the gay sounds of regimental music, which floated across from the left of the meadow; and he had felt it and realised it particularly strongly from the memorandum the French officer had read in the morning when he called over the prisoners’ names. Pierre was taken by one set of soldiers, led off to one place, and thence to another, with dozens of different people. It seemed to him that they might have forgotten him, have mixed him up with other people.
But no; his answers given at the examination came back to him in the form of the designation, “the one who will not give his name.” And under this designation, which filled Pierre with dread, they led him away somewhere, with unhesitating conviction written on their faces that he and the other prisoners with him were the right ones, and that they were being taken to the proper place. Pierre felt himself an insignificant chip that had fallen under the wheel of a machine that worked without a hitch, though he did not understand it.

Pierre was led with the other prisoners to the right side of the Virgin’s Meadow, not far from the monastery, and taken up to a big, white house with an immense garden. It was the house of Prince Shtcherbatov, and Pierre had often been inside it in former days to see its owner. Now, as he learnt from the talk of the soldiers, it was occupied by the marshal, the Duke of Eckmühl.

They were led up to the entrance, and taken into the house, one at a time. Pierre was the sixth to be led in. Through a glass-roofed gallery, a vestibule, and a hall, all familiar to Pierre, he was led to the long, low-pitched study, at the door of which stood an adjutant.

Davoust was sitting at a table at the end of the room, his spectacles on his nose. Pierre came close up to him. Davoust, without raising his eyes, was apparently engaged in looking up something in a document that lay before him. Without raising his eyes, he asked softly: “Who are you?”

Pierre was mute because he was incapable of articulating a word. Davoust was not to Pierre simply a French general; to Pierre, Davoust was a man notorious for his cruelty. Looking at the cold face of Davoust, which, like a stern teacher, seemed to consent for a time to have patience and await a reply, Pierre felt that every second of delay might cost him his life. But he did not know what to say. To say the same as he had said at the first examination he did not dare; to disclose his name and his position would be both dangerous and shameful. Pierre stood mute. But before he had time to come to any decision, Davoust raised his head, thrust his spectacles up on his forehead, screwed up his eyes, and looked intently at Pierre.

“I know this man,” he said, in a frigid, measured tone, obviously reckoning on frightening Pierre. The chill that had been running down Pierre’s back seemed to clutch his head in a vice.

“General, you cannot know me, I have never seen you.”

“It is a Russian spy,” Davoust interrupted, addressing another general in the room, whom Pierre had not noticed. And Davoust turned away.
With an unexpected thrill in his voice, Pierre began speaking with sudden rapidity.

“Non, monseigneur,”
he said, suddenly recalling that Davoust was a duke, “you could not know me. I am a militia officer, and I have not quitted Moscow.”

“Your name?” repeated Davoust.

“Bezuhov.”

“What proof is there that you are not lying?”

“Monseigneur!”
cried Pierre in a voice not of offence but of supplication.

Davoust lifted his eyes and looked intently at Pierre. For several seconds they looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre. In that glance, apart from all circumstances of warfare and of judgment, human relations arose between these two men. Both of them in that one instant were vaguely aware of an immense number of different things, and knew that they were both children of humanity, that they were brothers.

At the first glance when Davoust raised his head from his memorandum, where men’s lives and doings were marked off by numbers, Pierre was only a circumstance, and Davoust could have shot him with no sense of an evil deed on his conscience; but now he saw in him a man. He pondered an instant.

“How will you prove to me the truth of what you say?” said Davoust coldly.

Pierre thought of Ramballe, and mentioned his name and regiment and the street and house where he could be found.

“You are not what you say,” Davoust said again.

In a trembling, breaking voice, Pierre began to bring forward proofs of the truth of his testimony.

But at that moment an adjutant came in and said something to Davoust.

Davoust beamed at the news the adjutant brought him, and began buttoning up his uniform. Apparently he had completely forgotten about Pierre. When an adjutant reminded him of the prisoner, he nodded in Pierre’s direction with a frown, and told them to take him away. But where were they to take him—Pierre did not know: whether back to the shed or the place prepared for their execution which his companions had pointed out to him as they passed through the Virgin’s Meadow.

He turned his head and saw that the adjutant was repeating some question.

“Yes, of course!” said Davoust. But what that “yes” meant, Pierre could not tell.

Pierre did not remember how or where he went, and how long he was going. In a condition of complete stupefaction and bewilderment, seeing nothing around him, he moved his legs in company with the others till they all stopped, and he stopped.

There was one idea all this time in Pierre’s head. It was the question: Who, who was it really that was condemning him to death? It was not the men who had questioned him at the first examination; of them not one would or obviously could do so. It was not Davoust, who had looked at him in such a human fashion. In another minute Davoust would have understood that they were doing wrong, but the adjutant who had come in at that moment had prevented it. And that adjutant had obviously had no evil intent, but he might have stayed away. Who was it, after all, who was punishing him, killing him, taking his life—his, Pierre’s, with all his memories, his strivings, his hopes, and his ideas? Who was doing it? And Pierre felt that it was no one’s doing. It was discipline, and the concatenation of circumstances. Some sort of discipline was killing him, Pierre, robbing him of life, of all, annihilating him.

From Prince Shtcherbatov’s house the prisoners were taken straight downhill across the Virgin’s Meadow to the left of the monastery of the Virgin, and led to a kitchen garden, in which there stood a post. A big pit had been dug out near the post, and the freshly turned-up earth was heaped up by it. A great crowd of people formed a semicircle about the pit and the post. The crowd consisted of a small number of Russians and a great number of Napoleon’s soldiers not on duty: there were Germans, Italians, and Frenchmen in various uniforms. To the right and left of the post stood rows of French soldiers, in blue uniforms, with red epaulettes, in Hessians and shako. The prisoners were stood in a certain order, in accordance with a written list (Pierre was sixth) and led up to the post. Several drums suddenly began beating on both sides of them, and Pierre felt as though a part of his soul was being torn away from him by that sound. He lost all power of thought and reflection. He could only see and hear. And there was only one desire left in him, the desire that the terrible thing that was to be
done should be done more quickly. Pierre looked round at his companions and scrutinised them.

The two men at the end were shaven convicts; one tall and thin, the other a swarthy, hirsute, muscular fellow with a flattened nose. The third was a house-serf, a man of five-and-forty, with grey hair and a plump, well-fed figure. The fourth was a peasant, a very handsome fellow with a full, flaxen beard and black eyes. The fifth was a factory hand, a thin, sallow lad of eighteen, in a dressing-gown.

Pierre heard the Frenchmen deliberating how they were to be shot, singly, or two at a time. “Two at a time,” a senior officer answered coldly. There was a stir in the ranks of the soldiers, and it was evident that every one was in haste and not making haste, not as people do when they are getting through some job every one can understand, but as men hasten to get something done that is inevitable, but is disagreeable and incomprehensible.

A French official wearing a scarf came up to the right side of the file of prisoners, and read aloud the sentence in Russian and in French.

Then two couples of French soldiers came up to the prisoners by the instruction of an officer, and took the two convicts who stood at the head. The convicts went up to the post, stopped there, and while the sacks were being brought, they looked dumbly about them, as a wild beast at bay looks at the approaching hunter. One of them kept on crossing himself, the other scratched his back and worked his lips into the semblance of a smile. The soldiers with hurrying fingers bandaged their eyes, put the sacks over their heads and bound them to the post.

A dozen sharpshooters, with muskets, stepped out of the ranks with a fine, regular tread, and halted eight paces from the post. Pierre turned away not to see what was coming. There was a sudden bang and rattle that seemed to Pierre louder than the most terrific clap of thunder, and he looked round. There was a cloud of smoke, and the French soldiers, with trembling hands and pale faces, were doing something in it by the pit. The next two were led up. Those two, too, looked at every one in the same way, with the same eyes, dumbly, and in vain, with their eyes only begging for protection, and plainly unable to understand or believe in what was coming. They could not believe in it, because they only knew what their life was to them, and so could not understand, and could not believe, that it could be taken from them.

Pierre tried not to look, and again turned away; but again a sort of awful crash smote his hearing, and with the sound he saw smoke, blood,
and the pale and frightened faces of the Frenchmen, again doing something at the post, and balking each other with their trembling hands. Pierre, breathing hard, looked about him as though asking, “What does it mean?” The same question was written in all the eyes that met Pierre’s eyes. On all the faces of the Russians, on the faces of the French soldiers and officers, all without exception, he read the same dismay, horror, and conflict as he felt in his own heart. “But who is it doing it there really? They are all suffering as I am! Who is it? who?” flashed for one second through Pierre’s mind. “Sharpshooters of the eighty-sixth, forward!” some one shouted. The fifth prisoner standing beside Pierre was led forward—alone. Pierre did not understand that he was saved; that he and all the rest had been brought here simply to be present at the execution. With growing horror, with no sense of joy or relief, he gazed at what was being done. The fifth was the factory lad in the loose gown. As soon as they touched him, he darted away in terror and clutched at Pierre (Pierre shuddered and tore himself away from him). The factory lad could not walk. He was held up under the arms and dragged along, and he screamed something all the while. When they had brought him to the post he was suddenly quiet. He seemed suddenly to have grasped something. Whether he grasped that it was no use to scream, or that it was impossible for men to kill him, he stood at the post, waiting to be bound like the others, and like a wild beast under fire looked about him with glittering eyes.

Pierre could not make himself turn away and close his eyes. The curiosity and emotion he felt, and all the crowd with him, at this fifth murder reached its highest pitch. Like the rest, this fifth man seemed calm. He wrapped his dressing-gown round him, and scratched one bare foot with the other.