War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [411]
“If I were a woman, Marie, I would be doing that. It’s a woman’s virtue. But a man must not and cannot forget and forgive,” he said and, though he had not thought of Kuragin till that moment, all his unvented anger suddenly rose in his heart. “If Princess Marya is now persuading me to forgive him, it means I ought to have punished him long ago,” he thought. And, no longer responding to Princess Marya, he began thinking of that joyful, spiteful moment when he would meet Kuragin, who (as he knew) was with the army.
Princess Marya begged her brother to wait one more day; she said she knew how unhappy their father would be if Andrei left without making peace with him; but Prince Andrei replied that he would probably come back soon from the army, that he would be sure to write to their father, and that the longer he stayed now, the more aggravated the discord would be.
“Adieu, André! Rappelez-vous que les malheurs viennent de Dieu, et que les hommes ne sont jamais coupables”*416 were the last words he heard from his sister as he was taking leave of her.
“So it must be!” thought Prince Andrei as he was driving out of the avenue of the house at Bald Hills. “She, a pathetic, innocent being, stays to be devoured by a senile old man. The old man feels he’s to blame, but cannot change himself. My boy is growing up and rejoices at life, in which he will be the same as everybody else, the deceived or the deceiver. I’m going to the army—why? I don’t know myself, and I wish to meet a man whom I despise, in order to give him an occasion to kill me and laugh at me!” Before, too, there had been the same conditions of life, but before they had all cohered, while now everything had fallen apart. Nothing but meaningless phenomena, without any connection with each other, presented themselves to Prince Andrei one after the other.
IX
Prince Andrei arrived in the general headquarters of the army at the end of June. The troops of the first army, whom the emperor was with, were stationed in a fortified camp on the Drissa; the troops of the second army were in retreat, with the aim of joining the first army, from which, it was said, they were cut off by large forces of the French. Everyone was displeased with the general course of military affairs in the Russian army; but of the danger of an invasion of the Russian provinces no one even thought, no one even supposed that the war would be carried further than the western Polish provinces.
Prince Andrei found Barclay de Tolly, to whom he had been assigned, on the bank of the Drissa. As there was not a single large village or settlement in the vicinity of the camp, all the huge number of generals and courtiers who were with the army settled within a radius of seven miles in the best houses of the hamlets on this and the other side of the river. Barclay de Tolly was staying some three miles from the sovereign. He received Bolkonsky drily and coldly, and said with his German accent21 that he would report his arrival to the sovereign so as to determine an assignment for him, and meanwhile he invited him to stay with his staff. Anatole Kuragin, whom Prince Andrei had hoped to find with the army, was not there: he was in Petersburg, and that news pleased Bolkonsky. Prince Andrei was taken up by the interest of being at the center of a huge, ongoing war, and he was glad to be free for a time of the vexation produced in him by the thought of Kuragin. In the course of the first four days, during which he was not called for anywhere, Prince Andrei rode around the entire fortified camp and, with the help of his knowledge and of conversations with well-informed people, tried to form some idea of it for himself. But the question of whether this camp was advantageous or not remained unresolved for Prince Andrei. He had already managed to draw from his military experience the conviction that in military matters the most profoundly devised plans meant nothing (as he had seen in the Austerlitz campaign), that everything