War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [689]
In Dorogobuzh, while the convoy soldiers, having locked the prisoners in a stable, had gone to loot their own storehouses, several of the imprisoned soldiers tunneled under the wall and escaped, but they were caught by the French and shot.
The former order, introduced at the departure from Moscow, that the captive officers would go separately from the soldiers, had long since been abolished; all those who could walk went together, and since the third march Pierre had been reunited with Karataev and the bowlegged purplish dog, who had chosen Karataev for its master.
Karataev, on the third day after leaving Moscow, came down with that fever in which he had been lying in the Moscow hospital, and as he grew weaker, Pierre withdrew from him. Pierre did not know why, but ever since Karataev had begun to weaken, he had had to make an effort to approach him. And approaching him and listening to the quiet moaning with which Karataev usually lay down during their halts, and sensing the increased smell that Karataev now gave off, Pierre moved further away from him and did not think about him.
In captivity, in the shed, Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from superfluity; but now, in these last three weeks of the march, he had learned a new and more comforting truth—he had learned that there is nothing frightening in the world. He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree. He had learned that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and that those limits are very close; that the man who suffers because one leaf is askew in his bed of roses, suffers as much as he now suffered falling asleep on the bare, damp ground, one side getting cold as the other warmed up; that when he used to put on his tight ballroom shoes, he suffered just as much as now, when he walked quite barefoot (his shoes had long since worn out) and his feet were covered with sores. He learned that when, by his own will, as it had seemed to him, he had married his wife, he had been no more free than now, when he was locked in a stable for the night. Of all that he, too, later called suffering, but which at the time he hardly felt, the main thing was his bare feet, covered with sores and scabs. (Horsemeat was tasty and nutritious, the saltpeter bouquet of the gunpowder they used instead of salt was even agreeable, there were no great cold spells, and walking in the daytime always made him hot, while at night there were campfires; the lice that ate him warmed his body pleasantly.) One thing was painful at first—his feet.
On the second day of the march, when Pierre examined his sores by the campfire, he thought it would be impossible to step on them; but when everybody got up, he went along limping, and then, having warmed up, walked without pain, though by evening his feet were still more frightful to look at. But he did not look at them and thought of other things.
Only now did Pierre understand the full force of human vitality and the saving power of the shifting of attention that has been put in man, similar to the safety valve in steam engines, which releases the extra steam as soon as the pressure exceeds a certain norm.
He did not see or hear