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Prince Andrew had, as he had had in Petersburg society, two quite opposite reputations. Some, a minority, acknowledged him to be different from themselves and from everyone else, expected great things of him, listened to him, admired, and imitated him, and with them Prince Andrew was natural and pleasant. Others, the majority, disliked him and considered him conceited, cold, and disagreeable. But among these people Prince Andrew knew how to take his stand so that they respected and even feared him.
“I should wish for nothing else, nothing, if only I were there,” thought Rostóv. “In myself alone and in that sunshine there is so much happiness; but here … groans, suffering, fear, and this uncertainty and hurry … There—they are shouting again, and again are all running back somewhere, and I shall run with them, and it, death, is here above me and around … Another instant and I shall never again see the sun, this water, that gorge! …”
He remembered these words in Bonaparte’s address to his army at the beginning of the campaign, and they awoke in him astonishment at the genius of his hero, a feeling of wounded pride, and a hope of glory. “And should there be nothing left but to die?” he thought. “Well, if need be, I shall do it no worse than others.”
“It has begun! Here it is, dreadful but enjoyable!” was what the face of each soldier and each officer seemed to say.
Prince Andrew felt that an invisible power was leading him forward, and experienced great happiness.
One single sentiment, that of fear for his young and happy life, possessed his whole being.
“Your Excellency, here are two trophies,” said Dólokhov, pointing to the French sword and pouch. “I have taken an officer prisoner. I stopped the company.” Dólokhov breathed heavily from weariness and spoke in abrupt sentences. “The whole company can bear witness. I beg you will remember this, Your Excellency!”
“we owe today’s success chiefly to the action of that battery and the heroic endurance of Captain Túshin and his company,”
Prince Andrew thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain.
There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.
So the way in which these people killed one another was not decided by Napoleon’s will but occurred independently of him,
“Now they will stop it, now they will be horrified at what they have done!” he thought, aimlessly going toward a crowd of stretcher bearers moving from the battlefield.
The European system was already founded; all that remained was to organize it.
Europe would in this way soon have been, in fact, but one people, and anyone who traveled anywhere would have found himself always in the common fatherland.
So poignant to the modern EU we have today
I should have demanded the freedom of all navigable rivers for everybody, that the seas should be common to all, and that the great standing armies should be reduced henceforth to mere guards for the sovereigns.
From the moment she had been told that morning of Prince Andrew’s wound and his presence there, Natásha had resolved to see him. She did not know why she had to, she knew the meeting would be painful, but felt the more convinced that it was necessary.
Since the battle of Borodinó and the pillage of Moscow it had borne within itself, as it were, the chemical elements of dissolution.
A feeling stronger than friendship sprang up between them; an exclusive feeling of life being possible only in each other’s presence.
