This excellent resolution could not stand the test of everyday reality. It was a lamentable tug-of-war; whenever Lyovochka happened to be well-disposed toward his wife she was too busy to notice, and whenever she tried to draw closer to him she was cut by his indifference. These contretemps provide much material for the diaries of both. But Sonya, who had no other goal in life than to protect her marriage, was often the more bitter of the two. "I go into Leo Nikolayevich's room," she noted on November 17, 1903. "He is getting ready for bed and before lying down he pulls up his nightshirt and massages his stomach with a circular motion. His scrawny old man's legs are pitiful to behold. 'There/ he said, 'first I rub my stomach this way, and then that.' I see I shall never have another word of comfort or tenderness from him. What I predicted has come to pass: the passionate husband is dead; the friendly husband never existed; how could he be born now?"
A few weeks later these minor personal grcivanccs paled before an event involving the entire country: on January 27 (February 8), 1904, after long diplomatic tension, hostilities suddenly broke out between Russia and Japan. Without declaring war, the Japanese torpedo boats attacked the Russian fleet lying at Port Arthur, and put seven big ships out of commission; the disaster touched off an explosion of patriotism in Russia. Tolstoy was alarmed by this return of violence. "I am still not well," he wrote the following day, January 28, in his diary. "Liver ailing, and a cold ... I have thought deeply about this war that is beginning. I would like to write that at the beginning of something as dreadful as war, everybody offers hundreds of suppositions as to the meaning or consequences of the conflict, but not one person thinks about himself. . . . This is the best and clearest evidence that nothing can provide a remedy for evil, except religion."
In the days that followed he could think of nothing else. Five continents were waiting for him to speak: he began a pacifist article entitled Bethink YourselvesI But he sensed that even his great authority was not strong enough to stop the bloodshed. He read the papers feverishly, questioned peasants returning from town, rode to Tula himself to sec the dispatches from the front as soon as they came in. The villages resounded with accordions and weeping women. Drunken draftees staggered from door to door. The parents of those being sent complained to the master: one had been drafted illegally, another's papers were not in order . . . Tolstoy tried to remain calm, but he was sputtering with indignation.
"I cannot read these articles that glorify the grandeur and beauty of acts of bloodshed in order to excite the people's patriotism," he growled.
But as soon as a guest arrived from Tula, he asked:
"Well? What? What news from the front?"
Sonya did not dissimulate her anger with the Japanese for having struck treacherously, without warning. The cook at Yasnaya Polyana was mobilized to serve in General Gnrko's kitchen. Andrey, Tolstoy's fourth son, enlisted. His motives were not, it must be said, solely patriotic: he had just abandoned his wife and two children for another woman and, suddenly guilt-stricken, hoped to redeem himself through ordeal by fire. His brother Leo contented himself with loudly demanding a war to the death. Their father disapproved of both. But Sonya was proud to accompany Andrey to the rccruiting station at Tambov. He looked so handsome in his non-commissioned officer's uniform, his cap tilted to one side and his chest and back tightly molded in a sand- colored shirt, cantering his horse stylishly at the head of his unit! However, when they had all been sandwiched into the cars and the train pulled out, she was overcome by despair. The crowd wept and moaned. There was no more talk of patriotism. In an effort to put some heart into the draftees and their families, a general callcd out, "You show 'em what you're made of out there!" "Those words," Sonya wrote, "rang out, vile, out of place, absurd."
The North American Newspaper of Philadelphia had asked Tolstoy, which side he was on; he replied, "I am for neither Russia nor Japan; I am for the workers of both countries who arc being deceived by their governments and forced to take part in a war that is harmful to their well-being and in conflict with their conscience and religion." Despite his pacifist attitude, however, the old veteran flinched at the blows being struck at his country. lie confessed to Georges Bourdon, a French journalist who had come to interview him for Le
Figaro, that he was not always able to rise above the battle, and felt every Russian defeat in his bones. The inferiority of the Russian army was apparent from the first engagement. The theater, forty-five hundred miles away, was linked to the center of the country by a single railroad which was unfinished and would have been inadequate anyway, so the expeditionary forces were necessarily ill-supplied with food and ammunition. After several setbacks, the stronghold of Port Arthur, besieged by land and sea, fell to the Japanese on December 20, 1934 (January 2, 1905). Learning the news, Tolstoy mourned:
"Ah, that's not how they fought in my dayl Surrendering a fortress when you have ammunition and an army of forty thousand men! It's a shame!"
And he wrote in his diary for December 31:
"The surrender of Port Arthur has made me miserable. I suffer from it. Patriotism. I was brought up in that sentiment and I have not freed myself of it. Nor have I rid myself of personal selfishness or family and even class egotism. All these forms of selfishness are within me, but these is also within me a consciousness of the law of God and that consciousness holds the selfishness in check, so that I cannot yield to it completely. And, little by little, it atrophies."
February 1905 brought the disaster of Mukden; in May of that year, after an exhausting seven-month toil across three oceans, the Russian Baltic fleet entered the straits of Tsushima and met the enemy fleet, whose ships were faster, better armed and better protected. There was an uneven battle during which the best Russian ships were sunk or captured, despite heroic resistance. Casualties rose above seven thousand. Filled with mortification and grief, Tolstoy was no longer able to keep the balance between Russians and Japanese. "I care more for the Russians," he told Makovitsky. "My children, the muzhiks, are among them. The interests of one hundred million peasants are bound up with the army, and they do not want it to be beaten." Trying to explain to himself the causcs for this military disaster, he wrote in his diary on May 19, 19^5: "It has become plain to me that things could not and cannot happen any other way. No matter how poor Christians we are, we cannot avoid the fact that war is contrary to the Christian doctrine. Recently (during the last thirty years), this has become more and more obvious. That is why, in any conflict with a non-Christian people for whom the highest ideal is patriotism and military heroism, a Christian people must be defeated. ... I am not saying this to console myself for the fact that we have been beaten by the Japanese. The shame and humiliation arc as sharp as ever."
Pursuing this line of reasoning, he came to consider that his country's defeat was due to excessive materialism, the overemphasis on technology, and neglect of the great truths of the Sermon on the Mount. In his search for the guilty parties he even began sliding imperceptibly toward anti-Semitism. "This debacle," he wrote 011 June 18, "is not only that of the Russian army, the Russian fleet and the Russian State, but of the pseudo-Christian civilization as well. . . . The disintegration began long ago, with the struggle for money and success in so-called scientific and artistic pursuits, where the Jews got the edge on the Christians in every country and thereby earned the envy and hatred of all. Today the Japanese have done the same thing in the military field, proving conclusively, by brute force, that there is a goal which Christians must not pursue, for in seeking it they will always fail, vanquished by non-Christians."