When Duty Calls Louder Than Love — War and Peace

Before the campaign opens, Rostóv receives a letter from his parents telling him briefly of Natásha's illness and the breaking of her engagement to Prince Andrew, which they explain by her having rejected him, and again asking him to retire and come home. He does not even attempt to get leave. He writes that he is sorry, and will do all he can to meet their wishes. To Sónya he writes separately: nothing but honour could keep him from the country, but at the commencement of a campaign he would feel dishonoured, in his comrades' eyes and his own, if he preferred his happiness to duty to the Fatherland. This shall be their last separation; when the war is over, if he is alive and still loved, he will throw up everything and fly to her.

It is, in fact, only the campaign's start that keeps him from going home to marry. The autumn hunt and Christmas with Sónya had opened a vista of rural peace he had never known: a splendid wife, children, borzois, neighbours, service by election. Now that it must be otherwise, he feels contented with regiment life, as is natural to him. On returning from furlough he is joyfully welcomed, sent for remounts, and brings back from the Ukraine excellent horses that earn commendation. In his absence he has been promoted captain and is again allotted his old squadron. The regiment moves into Poland on double pay, new officers and horses arrive, and everybody is infected with the merry excitement of a war's beginning.

Headquarters broods, intrigues, and argues each step of the retreat; for the Pávlograd hussars, in fine summer with sufficient supplies, it is simple and agreeable. They regret leaving billets or a pretty Polish lady, not the general trend of affairs. They camp gaily before Vílna, then retire to Sventsyáni, remembered as the drunken camp, where Rostóv on the first day changes his sergeant major and cannot manage men who have appropriated five barrels of old beer. On the thirteenth of July they take part in a serious action for the first time. On the twelfth a storm of rain and hail finds two squadrons bivouacked in trodden rye. Rostóv and young Ilyín, sixteen, his protégé as he himself once was Denísov's, sit in a hasty shelter. Zdrzhinski, long mustaches onto his cheeks, comes from the staff and glorifies Raévski at Saltánov as a Russian Thermopylae: the general led his two sons onto the dam under terrific fire. Rostóv, water trickling down his neck, knows from Austerlitz and 1807 that men always lie about exploits, as he himself has done; crowding on a dam could have affected only a dozen nearest men, and he would not have taken Pétya or even Ilyín there. He says nothing. One has to pretend not to doubt a tale that redounds to the glory of our arms. Ilyín, seeing he does not relish it, runs out and comes splashing back: a tavern two hundred yards away, and Mary Hendríkhovna is there.