“Tomassov used to shudder at the mere thought of the moral torture he had escaped; and he nursed in his heart a boundless gratitude to the two people who had saved him from that cruel ordeal.  They were wonderful!  For him love and friendship were but two aspects of exalted perfection.  He had found these fine examples of it and he vowed them indeed a sort of cult.  It affected his attitude towards Frenchmen in general, great patriot as he was.  He was naturally indignant at the invasion of his country, but this indignation had no personal animosity in it.  His was fundamentally a fine nature.  He grieved at the appalling amount of human suffering he saw around him.  Yes, he was full of compassion for all forms of mankind’s misery in a manly way.

“Less fine natures than his own did not understand this very well.  In the regiment they had nicknamed him the Humane Tomassov.

“He didn’t take offence at it.  There is nothing incompatible between humanity and a warrior’s soul.  People without compassion are the civilians, government officials, merchants and such like.  As to the ferocious talk one hears from a lot of decent people in war time—­well, the tongue is an unruly member at best and when there is some excitement going on there is no curbing its furious activity.

“So I had not been very surprised to see our Tomassov sheathe deliberately his sword right in the middle of that charge, you may say.  As we rode away after it he was very silent.  He was not a chatterer as a rule, but it was evident that this close view of the Grand Army had affected him deeply, like some sight not of this earth.  I had always been a pretty tough individual myself—­well, even I... and there was that fellow with a lot of poetry in his nature!  You may imagine what he made of it to himself.  We rode side by side without opening our lips.  It was simply beyond words.

“We established our bivouac along the edge of the forest so as to get some shelter for our horses.  However, the boisterous north wind had dropped as quickly as it had sprung up, and the great winter stillness lay on the land from the Baltic to the Black Sea.  One could almost feel its cold, lifeless immensity reaching up to the stars.

“Our men had lighted several fires for their officers and had cleared the snow around them.  We had big logs of wood for seats; it was a very tolerable bivouac upon the whole, even without the exultation of victory.  We were to feel that later, but at present we were oppressed by our stern and arduous task.

“There were three of us round my fire.  The third one was that adjutant.  He was perhaps a well-meaning chap but not so nice as he might have been had he been less rough in manner and less crude in his perceptions.  He would reason about people’s conduct as though a man were as simple a figure as, say, two sticks laid across each other; whereas a man is much more like the sea whose movements are too complicated to explain, and whose depths may bring up God only knows what at any moment.