The stores, the prisoners, and the marshal's baggage train stopped at the village of Shamshevo. The men crowded round the campfires. Pierre went up to the fire, ate some roast horseflesh, lay down with his back to the fire, and immediately fell asleep. He again slept as he had done at Mozhaysk after Borodino. Again real events mingled with dreams, and again someone, he or another, gave expression to his thoughts, even to the same thoughts expressed in the dream at Mozhaysk. Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. While there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in innocent sufferings. Karataev came to Pierre's mind. Suddenly he saw a long-forgotten kindly old man who had given him geography lessons in Switzerland. Wait a bit, said the old man, and showed a globe: alive, a vibrating ball without fixed dimensions, its whole surface drops closely pressed together, moving and changing places, sometimes merging, sometimes dividing. Each drop tried to spread out and occupy as much space as possible, but others compressed it, sometimes destroyed it, sometimes merged with it. That is life, said the old teacher. How simple and clear it is, thought Pierre. God is in the midst, and each drop tries to expand so as to reflect Him to the greatest extent. There now, Karataev has spread out and disappeared. Do you understand, my child?
Do you understand, damn you, shouted a voice, and Pierre woke up. A Frenchman who had just pushed a Russian soldier away was squatting by the fire, roasting meat on a ramrod, sinewy red hands turning it, brown morose face visible by the charcoal. It's all the same to him, he muttered. Brigand, get away. Pierre turned and gazed into the darkness. The Russian soldier sat near the fire patting something. Looking more closely Pierre recognised the blue-grey dog, wagging its tail. Ah, he's come, said Pierre, and Plat, he began, but did not finish. Suddenly a crowd of memories awoke: the look Platon had given him under the tree, the shot, the dog's howl, the guilty faces of the two Frenchmen, the lowered smoking gun, Karataev's absence at this halt. He was on the point of realising that Karataev had been killed, but just at that instant, he knew not why, the recollection came of a summer evening with a beautiful Polish lady on the veranda of his house in Kiev. Without linking up the events of the day or drawing a conclusion, he closed his eyes, seeing the country in summertime mingled with bathing and the liquid vibrating globe, and sank into water so that it closed over his head.
Before sunrise he was awakened by shouts and loud rapid firing. French soldiers ran past. The Cossacks, one of them shouted, and a moment later a crowd of Russians surrounded Pierre. For a long time he could not understand what was happening. All around his comrades were sobbing with joy. Brothers, dear fellows, darlings, old soldiers exclaimed, weeping, as they embraced Cossacks and hussars. One offered clothes, another boots, a third bread. Pierre sobbed, could not utter a word, hugged the first soldier who approached him, and kissed him, weeping. Dolokhov stood at the gate of the ruined house, letting disarmed Frenchmen pass. They talked loudly until they reached him; he gently switched his boots with his whip and watched with cold glassy eyes that boded no good, and they became silent. His Cossack counted, marking each hundred with a chalk line on the gate. The second hundred. Filez, filez, Dolokhov kept saying, having adopted the expression from the French, and when his eyes met the prisoners' they flashed with a cruel light. Denisov, bareheaded and with a gloomy face, walked behind some Cossacks who were carrying the body of Petya Rostov to a hole that had been dug in the garden.
