Suddenly, there was a gTcat stir in the officcs. General Serzhputovsky had decided to transfer his staff to Silistra, on the right bank of the Danube. Headquarters were set up on a hilltop in the elegant gardens of Mustapha Pasha, governor of the besieged town. A vast and detailed panorama spread out below: the blue Danube, broad and sparkling, dotted with islands, the town, fortresses, the network of trenches crazing the surface of the earth; and from afar, a mass of little worms could be seen swarming about inside these furrows: the Russian soldiers. Perched on a wagon with telescope in hand, Tolstoy admired the view, which he found "poetic." The roses in Mustapha Pasha's garden perfumed the air around him. To while away the time, he exchanged a few blasЈ comments with the other young ordnance officers who, like him, were spectators at the inoffensive and charming game of war. At that distance it required a great effort of imagination to believe that those little black specks marching toward those little gray specks were men, about to kill each other.
The firing quickened during the night, because the Turks wanted to prevent the Russians from completing their earthworks. The Cannon joined in. Spasmodic flashes, dull explosions, trembling earth—one evening Tolstoy counted one hundred explosions per minute. "And yet," he wrote to Aunt Toinette, "none of this, up close, is anything like as frightening as it seems. . . . With these thousands of cannon balls, thirty or so men on both sides were killed."8 'Hie tranquil bookkeeping of the strategist!
Sometimes lie rode out to the trenches with an order. There the anonymous figures in the painting suddenly turned into creatures of flesh and blood, with their fatigue and fear, dirt, wounds. ... lie inhaled one gasp of this horror and rode quickly back to his balcony seat, from which the view of the battlefield was so enjoyable. A mine exploding under an enemy redoubt was a lovely display of fireworks: "T his was a sight and emotion of the kind one never forgets!"10
At last, Prince Corchakov decided to make the final assault. The entire staff went down to the trenches. Mingling with the group of ord- nancc officers and aides-de-camp, Tolstoy observed his chief. As usual, he saw in him a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous—his eternal holy hatred of statues. Gorchakov seemed grotesque to him, "with his tall figure, his hands behind his back, his cap shoved back and his spectacles and way of talking like a turkey-gobbler."11 But "he is so taken up with the progress of operations as a whole that balls and bullets do not exist for him. lie exposes himself to danger so simply that one would think he had no notion of it and is involuntarily more afraid for him than for oneself. ... He is a great man, that is, an able and honest man."12
On the eve of the day set for the attack, five hundred Russian cannon bombarded the fortifications. The firing went on without pause all through the night of June 8-9. The attack was set for three in the morning. "There we all were," Tolstoy later wrote, "and, as always 011 the eve of a battle, we were all pretending not to think of the coming day more than any other day, and all of us, I am certain, felt something clutch at our hearts (and not a little clutch, but a big one) at the thought of the attack. . . . The time just before an engagement is always the worst, for it is only then that one has time to be afraid. . . . The feeling (of fear) subsided as the hour approached and, around three, when we were all waiting for the cluster of rockets that was to give the signal for attack, I was in such a cheerful frame of mind that I should have been cruelly disappointed had someone comc to tell me it was not to take place."13
What he feared most happened. Just as dawn was beginning to break, an aide-de-camp brought General Gorchakov a message from Field Marshal Paskcvich, ordering him to raise the siege. "I can say without fear of being mistaken," Tolstoy wrote in the same letter, "that the news was received by all, soldiers, officers and generals, as a real misfortune, especially since we knew, from the spies who came over from Silistra, and with whom I very often had occasion to talk myself, that if this fort was taken—and nobody doubted it would be—Silistra could not hold out more than two or three days longer."
What Tolstoy did not know, or refused to take into account, was that part of the Army of the East sent by England and France had already disembarked at Varna, and Austria was calling up a reserve of ninety-five thousand men at the Russians' backs and massing troops along the frontier. While he fretted and chafed, he admired Prince Gorchakov's equanimity in such trying circumstances. To have laid such careful plans for an engagement only to be deprived of their fruition at the last moment was, in his eyes, a kind of injustice. Only a very superior person could bear the blow without reeling. "He [Gorchakov], who is always so moody, did not display one instant of ill humor; on the contrary, he was glad to be able to avoid the slaughter for which he would have had to accept responsibility," he wrote.14
His esteem for his commanding officer increased during the retreat, which Gorchakov directed in person, "refusing to leave before the last of the soldiers had gone." Austria, with Prussia's support, had ordered Russia to evacuate the Danubian Principalities, and Tsar Nicholas I grudgingly complied, in order to avoid additional international complications. What looked like a simple operation on paper became in reality a chaotic and painful exodus. 'Hiousands of Bulgarian peasants, who were afraid of being massacred by the Turks once the Russians had gone, came down from their villages with their wives, children and livestock and herded themselves into plaintive crowds around the few remaining bridges over the Danube. Traffic bccame so badly blocked that Prince Gorchakov, moved to tears, was forced to refuse a passage to the late arrivals. With his aides-de-camp around him, he received deputations of harassed and bewildered refugees who did not understand Russian, explained as best he could why the army must have priority use of the road, invited them to follow the troops on foot, without wagons, and offered money from his own pay to the neediest. Inflamed by his example, Tolstoy wrote in his diary on June 15, "The siege of Silistra has been lifted. I have not yet been under fire but my position among my fellow officers and superiors is assured. My health is good and, as to the moral side, I am firmly resolved to devote my life to serving my fellow men. For the last time I tell myself, 'If I have not done something for someone else within three days, I shall kill myself.'"
Eight days later he was still alive, but his deeds of selflessness had been confined to playing cards and borrowing money: "A humiliating position for anyone, but especially for me," he wrote on June 23, 1854, in his diary. The following day he recorded this rather curious thought, for a lover of mankind, "I spent the whole evening talking to Shubinf about our Russian slavery. It is true that slavery is an evil, but an extremely nicc evil."
Once again, he was in Bucharest with very little to do, reading, meditating, writing. His teeth were troubling him more and more, so he consented to an operation: on June 30 a fistula was removed, after he had been anesthetized with chloroform. "I behaved like a coward," he sternly observed when he recovered consciousness. And on July 7 he sketched a mocking picture of himself in his diary:
"What am I? One of the four sons of a retired licutcnant-colonel, orphaned at the age of seven and brought up by women and foreigners, who, having acquired neither social nor academic education, became independent at the age of seventeen; without any great fortune or any solid position in socicty, and above all, without principles; a man who has mismanaged his affairs to the last degree, wasted the best years of his life in futile and joyless agitation and finally expatriated himself to the Caucasus to escape from his creditors and, even more, from his habits; whence, on the strength of his father's former friendship with the commander, he contrived to get himself transferred to the Danube army; an ensign, twenty-six years old, practically penniless except for his pay (for the money he has from other sources must go to pay off his debts), without influential connections, without social poise, without any knowledge of any trade, without innate talent, but possessed of boundless pride. Yes, that is my social position. Now let us look at my personality.