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The stores, the prisoners, and the marshal's baggage train
stopped at the village of Shamshevo. The men crowded together
round the campfires. Pierre went up to the fire, ate some roast
horseflesh, lay down with his back to the fire, and immediately
fell asleep. He again slept as he had done at Mozhaysk after the
battle of Borodino.
Again real events mingled with dreams and again someone, he
or another, gave expression to his thoughts, and even to the same
thoughts that had been expressed in his dream at Mozhaysk.
"Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes
and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life there
is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love
God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life
in one's sufferings, in innocent sufferings."
"Karataev!" came to Pierre's mind.
And suddenly he saw vividly before him a long-forgotten, kindly
old man who had given him geography lessons in Switzerland. "Wait
a bit," said the old man, and showed Pierre a globe. This
globe was alive- a vibrating ball without fixed dimensions. Its
whole surface consisted of drops closely pressed together, and
all these drops moved and changed places, sometimes several of
them merging into one, sometimes one dividing into many. Each
drop tried to spread out and occupy as much space as possible,
but others striving to do the same compressed it, sometimes destroyed
it, and sometimes merged with it.
"That is life," said the old teacher.
"How simple and clear it is," thought Pierre. "How
is it I did not know it before?"
"God is in the midst, and each drop tries to expand so
as to reflect Him to the greatest extent. And it grows, merges,
disappears from the surface, sinks to the depths, and again emerges.
There now, Karataev has spread out and disappeared. Do you understand,
my child?" said the teacher.
"Do you understand, damn you?" shouted a voice,
and Pierre woke up.
He lifted himself and sat up. A Frenchman who had just pushed
a Russian soldier away was squatting by the fire, engaged in roasting
a piece of meat stuck on a ramrod. His sleeves were rolled up
and his sinewy, hairy, red hands with their short fingers deftly
turned the ramrod. His brown morose face with frowning brows was
clearly visible by the glow of the charcoal.
"It's all the same to him," he muttered, turning
quickly to a soldier who stood behind him. "Brigand! Get
away!"
And twisting the ramrod he looked gloomily at Pierre, who
turned away and gazed into the darkness. A prisoner, the Russian
soldier the Frenchman had pushed away, was sitting near the fire
patting something with his hand. Looking more closely Pierre recognized
the blue-gray dog, sitting beside the soldier, wagging its tail.
"Ah, he's come?" said Pierre. "And Plat-"
he began, but did not finish.
Suddenly and simultaneously a crowd of memories awoke in his
fancy- of the look Platon had given him as he sat under the tree,
of the shot heard from that spot, of the dog's howl, of the guilty
faces of the two Frenchmen as they ran past him, of the lowered
and smoking gun, and of Karataev's absence at this halt- and he
was on the point of realizing that Karataev had been killed, but
just at that instant, he knew not why, the recollection came to
his mind of a summer evening he had spent with a beautiful Polish
lady on the veranda of his house in Kiev. And without linking
up the events of the day or drawing a conclusion from them, Pierre
closed his eyes, seeing a vision of the country in summertime
mingled with memories of bathing and of the liquid, vibrating
globe, and he sank into water so that it closed over his head.
Before sunrise he was awakened by shouts and loud and rapid
firing. French soldiers were running past him.
"The Cossacks!" one of them shouted, and a moment
later a crowd of Russians surrounded Pierre.
For a long time he could not understand what was happening
to him. All around he heard his comrades sobbing with joy.
"Brothers! Dear fellows! Darlings!" old soldiers
exclaimed, weeping, as they embraced Cossacks and hussars.
The hussars and Cossacks crowded round the prisoners; one
offered them clothes, another boots, and a third bread. Pierre
sobbed as he sat among them and could not utter a word. He hugged
the first soldier who approached him, and kissed him, weeping.
Dolokhov stood at the gate of the ruined house, letting a
crowd of disarmed Frenchmen pass by. The French, excited by all
that had happened, were talking loudly among themselves, but as
they passed Dolokhov who gently switched his boots with his whip
and watched them with cold glassy eyes that boded no good, they
became silent. On the opposite side stood Dolokhov's Cossack,
counting the prisoners and marking off each hundred with a chalk
line on the gate.
"How many?" Dolokhov asked the Cossack.
"The second hundred," replied the Cossack.
"Filez, filez!"* Dolokhov kept saying, having adopted
this expression from the French, and when his eyes met those of
the prisoners they flashed with a cruel light.
*"Get along, get along!"
Denisov, bareheaded and with a gloomy face, walked behind
some Cossacks who were carrying the body of Petya Rostov to a
hole that had been dug in the garden.
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