The Longest Night
War and Peace Week 31: Book 3, Part 2, Chapters 23–29
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Welcome to week 31 of War and Peace 2024
This week, we have read Book 3, Part 2, Chapters 23–29.
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This week’s theme: The Longest Night
Welcome to the longest night in War and Peace.
On this eve of battle, who is the better company: Andrei, Tolstoy or Napoleon?
Andrei: Dark and brooding; picturing his own dead body in the ditch; feeling he has nothing to live for now.
He is angry with the Pierres and Bonapartes of this world: those who dare to treat war as art, or dream, or game; when life is nothing but deceit and disappointment, self-preservation with our backs to the wall.
And yet: life refuses to give up on Andrei. When everyone else has gone to sleep, he is haunted by the mysterious happiness of Natasha; the intolerable happiness of Anatole. Love and hate, those old friends, drag him from the abyss of death into the abyss of life. Life will not let go. Life will not relent.
Tolstoy: Petulant, tetchy, salty; arguing through the night with historians and great men. Wrong, wrong, wrong, the lot of them. Let me show you why; let me show my working.
And yet: his hand hesitates on the page. Why is this night so long? Why are you afraid to begin? Continue the story; tell us the worst. But no. While you talk, everyone still lives.
Napoleon: Sucking on a throat sweet, sipping his punch. One eye on tomorrow, the other on history.
His orders are perfect; his preparations: immaculate. His body, shaved and brushed; his son, already immortal and playing the globe like a ball. There is nothing to do but wait and think; take the night air.
And yet: check your bodyguards have biscuits; are well fed. Tomorrow, you may need them; you may need them like never before.
That thought crawls implike from your mind, as dawn breaks and the first shots ring out on the field of Borodino.
So who do you choose for company in your last long hours on Earth, in the night before the nightmare? Andrei, Tolstoy or Napoleon?
Take your time. We've got all night.
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Chapter 23: Hare in the Headlights
Pierre accompanies Bennigsen, passing points that Tolstoy tells us will be of great significance to the battle and to Pierre at a later stage. He eavesdrops on the generals discussing the army’s positions but is unable to follow any of it. Count Bennigsen countermands Kutuzov’s preparation of an ambush, ordering hidden troops to occupy the high ground.
Why is Pierre unable to follow the conversation?
What is Tolstoy telling us about the preparations for battle?
Pierre listened to him, straining each faculty to understand the essential points of the impending battle, but was mortified to feel that his mental capacity was inadequate for the task.
If you're lost right now, you're in pleasant company: Pierre doesn't have the foggiest. But neither really does General Bennigsen, who sabotages Kutuzov's plans for an ambush. The brown hare, too, is confused. But at least it knows this is no place to be.
In the middle of the wood a brown hare with white feet sprang out, scared by the tramp of the many horses, grew so confused that it leapt along the road in front of them for some time, arousing general attention and laughter, and only when several voices shouted at it did it dart to one side and disappear in the thicket.
Who is the hare? Pierre, us, life itself? The battlefield is nothing like Pierre imagined, and the hare is beyond all our expectations. Oblivious to history, it belongs to another world where, in just a few hours, tens of thousands of men will not kill each other.
Hares are bad omens in many cultures, a portent of fires and great catastrophes. They appear at dusk and move so fast as to appear invisible. In this chapter, the hare emerges from a birch wood. Our eyes remain on the birches as we become Andrei in the next chapter, considering their bare trunks. Andrei does not see the hare.
Further reading:
Chapter 24: The Magic-Lantern
On the evening before battle, Andrei contemplates his own death in the company of a row of birch trees. He views life as a magic lantern show: a great deception without meaning. He talks with Captain Timokhin, then hears a man stumble and swear outside. He is irritated to discover Pierre, who has come to see the battle because it interests him.
Why has Andrei decided that life has no meaning? What is missing from his thoughts?
On birches and magic lanterns
And from the height of this perception all that had previously tormented and preoccupied him suddenly became illumined by a cold white light without shadows, without perspective, and without distinction of outline.
A bright evening in August and a cold white light in Andrei. So changed from Austerlitz, from infinite skies and aged oaks. Here is Andrei, the birch tree, his branches lopped off: ‘Narrow and burdensome and useless to anyone.’
Cold white light is a cruel thing: he regards all his past ideals of glory, reform, and romantic love as badly daubed false images. The only truth now is his imminent death, which will also be of little note: he sees his body rotting in a hole as the world moves on.
The magic lantern was an early form of slide projector and an antecedent of photography and film. In the early nineteenth century, showmen began using the technology to scare and spook in horror shows called phantasmagoria. Leo Tolstoy belonged to the first generation to grow up in the age of photography and would live long enough to appear on film.
Andrei compares his life to the birch trees. The word birch comes from a Proto-Indo-Eurpean root word bhereg-, meaning ‘to shine, bright, white.’ This is in keeping with the harsh, cold light that illuminates his life without mystery or shadow. But in British mythology, the birch may be associated with regeneration and new beginnings. It has a sparse, haunting appearance, but it is a pioneer species in young woodland.
Further reading:
Chapter 25: To understand too much
Pierre asks Andrei and the other officers about the war. Andrei launches into an argument against military leadership while in favour of the spirit of the individual soldier. When the two friends are alone, Andrei says that war is not a game but the most horrible thing in life. They say farewell, and alone, Andrei thinks of Natasha’s soul, ‘fettered by her body’ and how Anatole neither understood nor valued it.
Why does Andrei think taking prisoners makes war cruel?
What is it that Natasha thinks Andrei cannot understand about her story?
‘The aim of war is murder, the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country's inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft.’
Andrei has some timeless truths to tell about the nature of war. They are written by a writer who had developed a repugnance for war, ideas that would mature into pacificism and anti-militarism that inspired future generations.
But I am also interested in how Andrei’s voice is not entirely his own. He is partly a mouthpiece for Tolstoy’s ideas, and he also sounds increasingly like his father. I feel like his spirit has become translucent, ghost-like, as he expects and hopes for oblivion in tomorrow’s battle.
Natasha was not satisfied with her own words: she felt that they did not convey the passionately poetic feeling she had experienced that day and wished to convey.
This memory recalls Andrei’s thoughts on listening to Natasha sing, ‘conscious of a strange world completely alien to him and brimful of joys unknown to him.’ He was brought to tears by ‘a sudden, vivid sense of the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable within him, and that limited and material something that he, and even she, was.’
This is far from ‘the cold white light’ of his earlier thoughts. This is a warm firelight with flickering shadows, the mysteries held within a unique experience, its story, and its re-telling. Here is something that he briefly knew, and Natasha knows, which now makes him jump up, ‘as if someone had burnt him’, jolting his spirit back into life.
Chapter 26: Baby Kings
On the eve of battle, Napoleon is being pampered and pummelled by his valet. M. de Beausset arrives from Paris with a painting of Napoleon’s son, who is, for some reason, called the King of Rome. Napoleon senses the historic moment and assumes a look of paternal tenderness. He displays the painting to his troops and issues his proclamation to the army: Victory depends on you.
What are Napoleon’s main concerns in this chapter? How do they contrast with Andrei’s thoughts before battle?
This chapter invites us to compare Napoleon with Andrei: affectation with sincerity; Napoleon with one eye on posterity, Andrei, staring coldly into oblivion. Napoleon has the painting of his son carried out to his troops in a parody of the procession of the Holy Mother of Smolensk.
Tolstoy tells us that ‘for some reason everyone’ called Napoleon’s son ‘The King of Rome.’ Traditionally, this had been the courtesy title of the heir apparent of the Holy Roman Empire. For centuries, the Habsburgs had ruled this conglomeration of central European states, now vanquished and broken up by Napoleon.
His son’s grandfather was the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, now styled as the Emperor of Austria. Francis allied with Russia and Britain to force Napoleon to abdicate in 1814. When Napoleon was forced from power a second time in 1815, he abdicated in favour of his four-year-old son, who briefly became Napoleon II. His wishes were ignored, and the Bourbon monarchy was restored.
Further reading:
Chapter 27: Impossible Dispositions
History teaches us that Napoleon used his genius mind to identify where to attack, issued dispositions to that effect, and then directed his army to victory. According to Tolstoy, none of this happened. It was obvious to anyone that the French should focus their attack on the left flank. None of his dispositions could be executed, and he was too far from the action to direct the battle. It was as if Napoleon wasn’t there.
How does this chapter affect your expectations about the coming battle?
In this chapter, Tolstoy's feeling salty and that boy Napoleon must attend.
Teacher Tolstoy's going to tear apart your homework, scribble in the margins and correct your grammar. Proving forever that the pen is mightier than the sword, Literary Leo crosses Numbskull Napoleon out of history:
None of his orders were followed, and he was nowhere near the battle when it counted. And there was no need for "that special and supreme quality called genius."
Chapter 28: A Common Cold
Napoleon had a cold at Borodino, but this was not why the French lost, says Leo. To believe so goes against reality and human dignity, for it was ‘the coincidence of will of all’ that determined the outcome, and not the genius or otherwise of one man. As it was, Napoleon performed his role of ‘appearing to command’ calmly and with dignity. It was just all a fiction.
‘At the battle of Borodino Napoleon shot at no one and killed no one. That was all done by the soldiers. Therefore it was not he who killed people.’ Do you agree? What point is Tolstoy making here?
Napoleon's got the sneezles. But that's not going to stop history.
A slow read forces us to spend a whole day on this chapter. Which creates for me the following web of feeling:
The reader is now impatient for the battle to start. Enough with the lecturing, Tolstoy! But no, while you talk, everyone still lives. The writer hesitates, reluctant to leave his blackboard and his maps, frightened of the imaginative canyon into which he must soon descend.
Napoleon considers pulling a sicky, calling the whole thing off. But no. Not even the Great Man's word can stop it.
Had Napoleon then forbidden them to fight the Russians, they would have killed him and have proceeded to fight the Russians because it was inevitable.
Stuck inside the holding pattern of history: the reader, writer and Napoleon twiddle their thumbs and turn the page...
Chapter 29: Biscuits for Bodyguards
After a second inspection of the lines, Napoleon enjoys a drink with the prefect de Beausset. He jokes and chats carelessly like a famous self-confident surgeon. But Napoleon cannot sleep. He makes sure his personal guard is well-fed and moans about his cold. At half-past five, he rides to Shevardino, and the battle begins.
Napoleon • Rapp • de Beausset
Why can’t Napoleon sleep?
What does he expect will happen tomorrow? What do you think will happen?
A few chapters ago, Andrei said that war is not a game, and here is his old hero declaring, ‘the chessmen are set up.’ The game has begun.
There's an uneasiness to Napoleon's lonely night. He's lost his senses to the cold, and something else seems to be nagging him.
He looked at his watch. It was still only four o'clock. He did not feel sleepy. The punch was finished and there was still nothing to do.
Perhaps it is the thought that he is a long way from home, with a dwindling and disease-ridden army, sucking on a throat sweet 70 miles from Moscow.
He goes out to check if his beloved Old Guard has had their rice. These are veterans of his Imperial Guard, known by the rest of the army as ‘the Immortals’ and referred to by Napoleon himself as ‘my children.’ Better fed and better equipped, they stand ready to defend him.
Does he suspect he may need them tomorrow? Is that fear at the bottom of his punch glass?
Dawn breaks. Shots fire. The game has begun.
The game is over.
Further reading:
Thank you for reading
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of War and Peace.
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And that’s all for this week. I love to hear your thoughts in the comments and the chat threads. Have a great week, and I’ll see everyone here next Sunday for more War and Peace 2024.
Beautiful summary, Simon. The suspension of time this past week with these chapters is so surreal. It reminds me of when an accident happens: Even though it occurs in mere seconds, time suspends and stretches to make it seem so much longer. Thank you, as always, for your guidance through this dark night.
This week's chapters have been hard but intriguing. The slow pace almost exhausting. The flashes of excoriating mockery zing like small fire weapons. Tolstoy drags his heels at throwing us into the day of battle, knowing what is to come. He stretches the elastic to a millimetre of snapping. I both hate and admire Tolstoy for what he is putting us through. Thank you for leading us through this crawl through Napoleon's vainglorious long night of self-absorption.