In the night of May 10-11 Tolstoy witnessed a scries of attacks and counterattacks under heavy fire. Over a thousand dead and wounded on the Russian side, and as many among the French. The following night, second attack: in all, five hundred men out of commission. During the day of the twelfth, hostilities were suspended to pick up the dead. "The morale is falling lower every day," Tolstoy wrote, "and there is more than one sign that people arc beginning to feel the possibility of Sevastopol being taken."28 In the meantime he had received Aunt Pelagya Yushkov's letter of recommendation and forwarded it to the general. But another two weeks and more went by without news of his transfer. He imagined himself staying in the 4th Bastion until the end of the war. "No doubt it is better sol" he wrote in melancholy.80 On May 15 he learned that he had been transferred and put in command of a two- cannon mountain battery 011 the Belbek River, fourteen miles behind Sevastopol. According to a legend as attractive as it is unlikely, the new tsar, Alexander II, was so deeply moved by Sevastopol in December, of which he read the galleys, that he gave orders to remove its author from danger. Unfortunately, it is difficult to believe that between April 30, when the manuscript was sent to Nckrasov, and May 15, when Tolstoy's transfer came through, the text could have rcachcd St. Petersburg and been read, set up and submitted to the sovereign, and that his decision could have traveled from St. Petersburg back to the Crimea. Hie truth was that Aunt Pclagya's letter, added to Tolstoy's application, had persuaded Prince Gorchakov to humor his young relative, whose literary renown was growing.
In his new quarters, far from the clamor of battle, Tolstoy made an earnest attempt, at first, to carry out his duties. He officiated in person at drill, supervised his unit's supplies and was outraged by the fraud he saw on every side. Most detachmcnt leaders spent the mess money exactly as they pleased, appropriated the remainder for themselves and falsified their accounts. When, out of honesty, Tolstoy tried to show a credit balance in his books, he compromised all his fellow officers and earned a reprimand from General Krizhanovsky, commander of artillery: "What on earth have you done, Count?" said the general. "The State has organized things this way in your own interest. You have to have something to fall back on in case the battery accounts show a deficit! That is why every battery commander must have some funds on hand. You are making trouble for everyone."
"I do not see why I must keep those funds with me," Tolstoy replied. "The money belongs to the State, not to me."31
In the end, however, he abandoned this uncompromising position. "It is easy to steal—so easy that it is impossible to avoid it!" he fumed.82 He had sworn to be good to his "dear little soldiers," but sometimes their stupidity drove him to distraction. Then he became Count Leo Tolstoy, who saw red and hit hard: "Beat the men I was drilling. It's amazing how revolting and wretched I can be, how I can disgust myself!" And later, "Laziness, lack of character, vanity . . . ; bragged to my officers . . . ; showed off to the battery leaders ... It is really absurd that, after beginning to draw up rules at fifteen, I should still be doing so at thirty,t without having adopted or applied a single one." The most serious fault he had to hold against himself was still his love of gambling. In the tedium of his life in camp he became obsessed by the cards once again: to be sure of winning, he spent whole days practicing, playing against himself, noting infallible combinations for stos: "(1) The ante will be one-sixteenth of the amount to be lost; (2) Raise or lower the ante on the thirteenth card; erase score of first series up to chosen card . . . etc."
Unfortunately, every win on paper corresponded to a loss in the field. And the old familiar words erupted between the columns of figures in the diary: "Laziness . . . Stupidity . . . Despair . . . Lust . . ."
However, he kept on writing. The insults he fired at himself were answered by the compliments his readers addressed to him. The censor had passed Sevastopol in December without any major cuts and, as a
t In fact, he was only twenty-seven and a half at the time.
result, the entire literate public had been placcd in contact with the awful reality of war for the first time in Russian history. "All of us who love Russian literature," Panayev wrote to Tolstoy, "are praying God to spare you!"83 "Tolstoy's article on Sevastopol is a wonder!" Turgenev wrote to Panayev. "I cried when I read it, I shouted 'hurrah!' "3* And Pisemsky, the author, growled, "This little officer will outstrip us all!" From the critics, response was the same as from the writers. The success of Childhood and Boyhood was surpassed. "Nowhere docs the author express his admiration, and yet we arc compelled to admire; there is not one exclamation point in all his descriptions, and we are astonished at every turn" (Fatherland Notes). "Sevastopol is the work of a master, rigorously pondered, rigorously executed, with vigor and concision . . ." (The Muscovite).
The emperor, profoundly impressed, ordered the account to be translated into French and published in the newspaper Le Nord,\ and the young empress wept over this frank narrative of her people's tribulations. Her tears did much to enhance the fame of the person who was still signing himself L.N.T. On June 30, 1855 he wrote in his diary, "It seems I really am beginning to be known in Petersburg!"
The second installment, Swastopol in May, awoke the censor's suspicions. After an initial pruning, when the text had already been set up, the chairman of the Censor Committee demanded to see it himself. Shocked at the author's audacity, he deleted all the passages that seemed "anti-patriotic" to him, and the editors of The Contemporary? printed the mutilated version. Nekrasov wrote to the author, storming against the crimes of the ccnsor, but adding, "Your work will not be lost, of course. . . . The truth, in the form in which you are introducing it into our literature, is something totally new. I know no author today who can compel the reader to love and sympathize as deeply with him as you can. . . . Your debut is so auspicious that even the most conservative souls are forced to hold out very high hopes."36 And Tolstoy commented in his diary, "It seems the blues* have grown suspicious of me on account of my articles. I only wish Russia always had writers as moral as I; nothing in the world could force me to turn meek and mild, or write for the mere pleasure of it, without any idea or purpose." In the meantime he had been awarded the St. Anne Cross, fourth degree, for courage under fire and, together with a few of his comrades, had written a satiric ditty called the "Song of Sevastopol":
t French-language Russian newspaper printed in Brussels.
• The military police.
The toppest brass Sat down to meet And pondered long; Topographers Lined paper black; But all forgot The deep ravine They had to cross!
The song was inspired by the disastrous engagement of August 4, 1855!—the battle of Chernaya—in which the Russians lost eight thousand men, three generals and sixty-nine officers. Tolstoy, who had not been directly involved in the conflict, wrote to Aunt Toinette that day: "I am safe and sane; but my morale has never been lower."3®
A few days later, on August 27,$ a heavy bombardment began in preparation for the French assault on Malakov Hill. Tolstoy was in Sevastopol when the Zouaves and MacMahon's voltigeurs charged. The sun was blinding. A cool breeze shook the leaves in the trees along the boulevard and swept up the dust of the ruined houses. Necklaces in puffs of white smoke appeared all along the line of fortifications. The explosions shook the ground with dull violence. Then the cannon-fire subsided, and the dry rattle of rifle-fire was heard. Soldiers came pouring back into the streets helter-skelter. A white-faced officer cried out, "The attack!" And suddenly Tolstoy saw a red, white and blue flag floating over Malakov. "It made me cry to see the town in flames and the French flags over our bastions," he wrote to Aunt Toinette. "These last few days I have become increasingly obsessed by my desire to leave the army."37