War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [503]
Narrow, and unnecessary to anyone, and burdensome as Prince Andrei’s life now seemed to him, he felt excited and nervous on the eve of battle, just as at Austerlitz seven years earlier.
The orders for tomorrow’s battle had been given and received. He had nothing more to do. But the most simple, clear, and therefore dreadful thoughts would not leave him in peace. He knew that tomorrow’s battle was to be the most dreadful of all he had taken part in, and the possibility of death presented itself to him, for the first time in his life, with no relation to the everyday, with no considerations of how it would affect others, but only in relation to himself, to his soul, vividly, almost with certainty, simply, and terribly. And from the height of that picture, all that used to torment and preoccupy him was suddenly lit up by a cold, white light, without shadows, without perspective, without clear-cut outlines. The whole of life presented itself to him as a magic lantern, into which he had long been looking through a glass and in artificial light. Now he suddenly saw these badly daubed pictures without a glass, in bright daylight. “Yes, yes, there they are, those false images that excited and delighted and tormented me,” he said to himself, turning over in his imagination the main pictures of his magic lantern of life, looking at them now in that cold, white daylight—the clear notion of death. “There they are, those crudely daubed figures, which had presented themselves as something beautiful and mysterious. Glory, the general good, the love of a woman, the fatherland itself—how grand those pictures seemed to me, how filled with deep meaning! And it’s all so simple, pale, and crude in the cold, white light of the morning that I feel is dawning for me.” Three main griefs of his life especially held his attention. His love of a woman, the death of his father, and the French invasion that had seized half of Russia. “Love! That girl who seemed to me all filled with mysterious forces! How I loved her! I made poetic plans of love, of happiness with her. Oh, you dear boy!” he said angrily aloud. “What else! I believed in some sort of ideal love, which was to keep her faithful to me for the whole year of my absence! Like the tender dove in the fable, she was to pine away in my absence. But it’s all so much simpler…It’s all terribly simple, and vile!
“My father also built at Bald Hills and thought it was his place, his land, his air, his muzhiks; but Napoleon came and, not knowing of his existence, brushed him aside like a chip of wood, and Bald Hills and his whole life fell apart. And Princess Marya says it’s a trial from on high. Why a trial, when he’s no more and never will be? Never will be again! He’s no more! So for whom is it a trial? The fatherland, the destruction of Moscow! And tomorrow I’ll be killed—not even by a Frenchman, but by one of our soldiers, like the one yesterday who fired his gun just next to my ear—and the French will come, take me by the feet and head, and fling me into a pit, so as not to have me stink under their noses, and new conditions of life will take shape, which will become habitual for other people, and I won’t know about them, and I won’t be there.”
He looked at the line of birches with their motionless yellow and green leaves and white bark gleaming in the sun. “To die, to be killed tomorrow, to be no more…so that all this is here and I am not.” He pictured vividly to himself his absence from this life. And the birches with their light and shade, and the fleecy clouds, and the smoke of the campfires—everything around was transfigured for him and appeared as something dreadful