War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [532]
After the suffering he had endured, Prince Andrei felt a bliss such as he had not experienced for a long time. All the best and happiest moments of his life, especially his most distant childhood, when he had been undressed and put in his little bed, when the nanny had sung to lull him to sleep, when, burying his head in the pillows, he had felt happy in the mere consciousness of life, presented itself to his imagination not as the past, but as a reality.
The doctors were bustling about a wounded man, the shape of whose head seemed familiar to Prince Andrei; they were lifting him and calming him.
“Show me…Oooh! oh! oooh!” his moaning, broken by sobs, was heard, frightened and resigned to his suffering. Hearing those moans, Prince Andrei wanted to weep. Whether it was because he was dying without glory, or because he was sorry to part with life, or from those memories of long-lost childhood, or because he was suffering, others were suffering, and this man was moaning so pitifully before him, he wanted to weep childlike, kind, almost joyful tears.
The wounded man was shown his cut-off leg in a boot caked with blood!
“Oh! Oooh!” he sobbed like a woman. The doctor, who was standing in front of the wounded man, screening his face, stepped away.
“My God! What is this? Why is he here?” Prince Andrei said to himself.
In the unfortunate, sobbing, exhausted man whose leg had just been removed, he recognized Anatole Kuragin. They were holding him up in their arms and offering him water in a glass, the rim of which he could not catch in his trembling, swollen lips. Anatole was sobbing deeply. “Yes, it’s he; yes, this man is closely and painfully connected with me by something,” thought Prince Andrei, not yet understanding clearly what he saw before him. “What is this man’s connection with my childhood, with my life?” he asked himself, without finding an answer. And suddenly a new and unexpected memory from the world of childhood, purity, and love came to Prince Andrei. He remembered Natasha as he had seen her for the first time at the ball in 1810, with her slender neck and arms, with her frightened, happy face ready for rapture, and in his soul love and tenderness for her awakened, stronger and more alive than ever. He now remembered the connection between him and this man, who was looking at him dully through the tears that filled his swollen eyes. Prince Andrei remembered everything, and a rapturous pity and love for this man filled his happy heart.
Prince Andrei could no longer restrain himself, and he wept tender, loving tears over people, over himself, and over their and his own errors.
“Compassion, love for our brothers, for those who love us, love for those who hate us, love for our enemies—yes, that love which God preached on earth, which Princess Marya taught me, and which I didn’t understand; that’s why I was sorry about life, that’s what was still left for me, if I was to live. But now it’s too late. I know it!”
XXXVIII
The dreadful sight of the battlefield covered with corpses and wounded, combined with a heaviness of the head, and with the news that twenty generals he knew well had been killed or wounded, and with the awareness of the impotence of his once-strong arm, made an unexpected impression on Napoleon, who ordinarily liked to survey the dead and wounded, thereby testing his inner strength (as he thought). On that day the terrible sight of the battlefield overcame that inner strength, in which he placed his merit and greatness. He hastily left the