The Crimean War: A Hisory

by Orlando Figes

When Tolstoy was on duty at the bastion, his rations from the city were carried out to him by Alexei, a duty involving considerable danger.49 The cannonade was incessant. Every day, 2,000 shells landed on the bastion. Tolstoy was afraid, but he quickly got the better of his fear, and discovered a new courage in himself. Two days after grumbling at being treated as cannon fodder, he confided to his diary: ‘The constant charm of danger and my observations of the soldiers I’m living with, the sailors and the very methods of war are so pleasant that I don’t want to leave here.’ He began to feel a close attachment to his fellow-soldiers in the bastion, one of whom would later remember him as a ‘fine comrade’ whose stories ‘had captured the spirit of us all in the heat of the battle’. As Tolstoy wrote to his brother, expressing an idea that would lie at the heart of War and Peace, he ‘liked the experience of living under fire’ with these ‘simple and kind men, whose goodness is apparent during a real war’.50 For