Clear For Him Suddenly

What a read last night.  My older one and I finally finished Book One of "War and Peace" before bed.  The build up to the Battle of Austerlitz is so vivid and plausible.  Prince Bolkonsky is confident but the narrator’s voice keeps reminding us that the Russians and Austrians have surrendered the heights and are marching down into the fog, where they cannot see.  We are reminded of where the enemy is supposed to be, knowing the wily Napoleon is certainly planning to be somewhere else.

And when the enemy is finally confronted, there is chaos. The proud Russian troops turn in on themselves.  A mad rush ensues.  Horses, canons, men and arms all crush one another in terror and meet at the face of and ice shelf.  The men in front yell back that the ice won’t hold but the men in the back keep pushing on ignoring the calls to stop, till the first horse and then the first man falls through the ice and into the water.

Prince Bolkonsky is wounded.  He is cognizant but cannot speak when he meets Napoleon for the first time, lying on the field, barely alive, with his hero standing over him.  And later, when Napoleon confronts the wounded officers as prisoners, Bolkonsky is there.  He is so disillusioned with his former glorious hero that he cannot even utter a word when the emperor asks him to speak.  Fame and glory are suddenly and clearly meaningless.  Whatever it was that he had been fighting for has been dispelled, as if by magic.  Everything is very clear for him suddenly.  And when the French depart he is left behind, for dead.

I am trying to recall the snippets I remember from my first read of this book.  Somehow this remarkable passage wasn’t one that remained accessible, though it certainly should have.  Perhaps the issue was I had no one to talk about it with outside of the Nineteenth Century Russian Literature class I was in. I finished this this chapter and made sure my older one was still awake.  “Amazing right?”  “Yeah, that was intense.”  The crush of the canons and the horses on the ice, the fatuous civility of Napoleon still reverberated around her bedroom, bouncing off between us.

Sunday, 02/19/17