1855

On 6th January (o.s.) he wrote to his Aunt:

[20]On ne se bat plus en rase campagne, à cause de l'hiver qui est extraordinairement rigoureux, surtout à présent; mais le siège dure toujours.... J'avais parlé je crois d'une occupation que j'avais en vue et qui me souriait beaucoup; à présent que la chose est décidée, je puis le dire. J'avais l'idée de fonder un journal militaire. Ce projet auquel j'ai travaillé avec le concours de beaucoup de gens très distingués fut approuvé par le prince et envoyé à la décision de sa Majesté, mais l'empereur a refusé.

Cette déconfiture, je vous l'avoue, m'a fait une peine infinie et a beaucoup changé mes plans. Si Dieu veut que la campagne de Crimée finisse bien et si je ne reçois pas une place dont je sois content, et qu'il n'y ait pas de guerre en Russie, je quitterai l'armée pour aller à Pétersbourg à l'académie militaire. Ce plan m'est venu, 1° parce que je voudrais ne pas abandonner la littérature dont il m'est impossible de m'occuper dans cette vie de camp, et 2° parce qu'il me paraît que je commence à devenir ambitieux, pas ambitieux, mais je voudrais faire du bien et pour le faire il faut être plus qu'un Sub-Lieutenant; 3° parce que je vous verrai tous et tous mes amis.

In May he wrote again to his brother:

From Kishinéf on 1st November (o.s.), I petitioned to be sent to the Crimea, partly in order to see this war, and partly to break away from Serzhpoutóvsky's staff, which I did not like, but most of all from patriotism, of which at that time, I confess, I had a bad attack. I did not ask for any special appointment, but left it to those in authority to dispose of my fate. In the Crimea I was appointed to a battery in Sevastopol itself, where I passed a month very pleasantly amid simple, good companions, who are specially good in time of real war and danger. In December our battery was removed to Simferópol, and there I spent 6 weeks in a squire's comfortable house, riding into Simferópol to dance and play the piano with young ladies, and in hunting wild goats on the Tchatyrdag [the highest point of the chain of mountains running across the southern part of the Crimea] in company with officials. In January there was a fresh shuffling of officers, and I was removed to a battery encamped on the banks of the Belbék, 7 miles from Sevastopol. There I got into hot water: the nastiest set of officers in the battery; a Commander who, though good-hearted, was violent and coarse; no comforts, and it was cold in the earth huts. Not a single book, nor a single man with whom one could talk; and there I received the Rs. 1500 [= about £180 at that time] for the newspaper, sanction for which had already been refused; and there I lost Rs. 2500, and thereby proved to all the world that I am still an empty fellow, and though the previous circumstances may be taken into account in mitigation, the case is still a very, very bad one. In March it became warmer, and a good fellow, an excellent man, Brenévsky, joined the battery. I began to recover myself; and on 1 April, at the very time of the bombardment, the battery was moved to Sevastopol, and I quite recovered myself. There, till 15 May (o.s.) I was in serious danger, i.e. for four days at a time, at intervals of eight days, I was in charge of a battery in the 4th Bastion; but it was spring and the weather was excellent, there was abundance of impressions and of people, all the comforts of life, and we formed a capital circle of well-bred fellows; so that those six weeks will remain among my pleasantest recollections. On 15 May Gortchakóf, or the Commander of the Artillery, took it into his head to entrust me with the formation and command of a mountain platoon at Belbék, 14 miles from Sevastopol, with which arrangement I am up to the present extremely well satisfied in many respects.

The transfer of Tolstoy from Sevastopol to Belbék was not, as he supposed when he wrote this letter, a whim of Gortchakóf's or of the Commander of the Artillery, but a result of his having written the first of his three sketches of the siege of Sevastopol, Sevastopol in December. The article, though not published in the Contemporary till June, had been read in proof by the Emperor Alexander II [Nicholas had died 2nd March, n.s.], and had caused him to give instructions to 'take care of the life of that young man,' with the result that Tolstoy was removed from Sevastopol. The Dowager Empress Alexándra Fédorovna also read the story and, it is said, wept over it.

It was, perhaps, at this time (though I am not sure of the date) that Tolstoy found himself obliged to consent to the sale of the large wooden house in which he had been born, for the wretched price of 5000 'assignation roubles' (about £170). The house was taken to pieces, and removed to the estate of the purchaser, where it still stands, though not now in use.

Apropos of the above letter it should be mentioned that the Fourth Bastion was the one English writers call 'the Flagstaff Bastion.' It formed the southernmost point of the fortifications, as a glance at the accompanying map will show, and it was for a long time the point exposed to the fiercest fire.

Throughout the siege Tolstoy was accompanied by Alexis, one of the four serfs presented to the young Tolstoys when they entered the University. This man (who figures in more than one of Tolstoy's works under the name of Alyósha) brought him his rations to the bastion, a duty involving considerable danger. What the bastions were like in the first months of the siege, we learn from the following passages in the first part of Sevastopol:

...You want to get quickly to the bastions, especially to that Fourth Bastion about which you have been told so many and such different tales. When any one says, 'I am going to the Fourth Bastion,' a slight agitation or a too marked indifference is always noticeable in him; if men are joking they say, 'You should be sent to the Fourth Bastion.' When you meet some one carried on a stretcher, and ask, 'Where from?' the answer usually is, 'From the Fourth Bastion.'...

...Beyond this barricade the houses on both sides of the street are unoccupied: there are no signboards, the doors are boarded up, the windows smashed; here a corner of the walls is knocked down, and there a roof is broken in. The buildings look like old veterans who have borne much sorrow and privation; they even seem to gaze proudly and somewhat contemptuously at you. On the road you stumble over cannon-balls that lie about, and into holes full of water, made in the stony ground by bombs. You meet and overtake detachments of soldiers, Cossacks, officers, and occasionally a woman or a child—only it will not be a woman wearing a bonnet, but a sailor's wife wearing an old cloak and soldier's boots. Farther along the same street, after you have descended a little slope, you will notice that there are now no houses, but only ruined walls in strange heaps of bricks, boards, clay and beams, and before you, up a steep hill, you see a black untidy space cut up by ditches. This space you are approaching is the Fourth Bastion.... Here you will meet still fewer people and no women at all, the soldiers walk briskly by, traces of blood may be seen on the road, and you are sure to meet four soldiers carrying a stretcher, and on the stretcher probably a pale, yellow face and a blood-stained overcoat....

The whiz of cannon-ball or bomb near by, impresses you unpleasantly as you ascend the hill, and you at once understand the meaning of the sounds very differently from when they reached you in the town.... You have hardly gone a little way up, when bullets begin to whiz past you right and left, and you will perhaps consider whether you had not better walk inside the trench which runs parallel to the road; but the trench is full of such yellow, liquid, stinking mud, more than knee deep, that you are sure to choose the road, especially as everybody keeps to the road. After walking a couple of hundred yards, you come to a muddy place much cut up, surrounded by gabions, cellars, platforms, and dug-outs, and on which large cast-iron cannon are mounted, and cannon-balls lie piled in orderly heaps. All seems placed without any aim, connection, or order. Here a group of sailors are sitting in the battery; here, in the middle of the open space, half sunk in mud, lies a shattered cannon; and there a foot-soldier is crossing the battery, drawing his feet with difficulty out of the sticky mud. Everywhere, on all sides and all about, you see bomb-fragments, unexploded bombs, cannon-balls, and various traces of an encampment, all sunk in the liquid, sticky mud. You think you hear the thud of a cannon-ball not far off, and you seem to hear the different sounds of bullets all around—some humming like bees, some whistling, and some rapidly flying past with a shrill screech like the string of some instrument. You hear the awful boom of a shot which sends a shock all through you, and seems most dreadful.

'So this is it, the Fourth Bastion! This is that terrible, truly dreadful spot!' So you think, experiencing a slight feeling of pride and a strong feeling of suppressed fear. But you are mistaken; this is still not the Fourth Bastion. This is only the Yazónovsky Redoubt—comparatively a very safe and not at all dreadful place. To get to the Fourth Bastion you must turn to the right, along that narrow trench, where a foot-soldier, stooping down, has just passed. In this trench you may again meet men with stretchers, and perhaps a sailor or a soldier with spades. You will see the mouths of mines, dug-outs into which only two men can crawl, and there you will see the Cossacks of the Black Sea Battalions, changing their boots, eating, smoking their pipes, and, in short, living. And you will see again the same stinking mud, the traces of camp life, and cast-iron refuse of every shape and form. When you have gone some three hundred steps more, you come out at another battery—a flat space with many holes, surrounded with gabions filled with earth, and cannons on platforms, and the whole walled in with earthworks. Here you will perhaps see four or five soldiers playing cards under shelter of the breastworks; and a naval officer, noticing that you are a stranger and inquisitive, is pleased to show you his 'household' and everything that can interest you.... He will tell you (but only if you ask) about the bombardment on the 5th of October; will tell you how only one gun in his battery remained usable and only eight gunners were left of the whole crew, and how, all the same, next morning, the 6th, he fired all his guns. He will tell you how a bomb dropped into one of the dug-outs and knocked over eleven sailors; he will show you from an embrasure the enemy's batteries and trenches, which are here not more than seventy-five to eighty-five yards distant. I am afraid, though, that when you lean out of the embrasure to have a look at the enemy, you will, under the influence of the whizzing bullets, not see anything; but if you do see anything, you will be much surprised to find that this whitish stone wall which is so near you, and from which puffs of white smoke keep bursting—that this white wall is the enemy: is him, as the soldiers and sailors say.

It is even very likely that the naval officer, from vanity, or merely for a little recreation, will wish to show you some firing. 'Call the gunner and crew to the cannon'; and fourteen sailors—clattering their hob-nailed boots on the platform, one putting his pipe in his pocket, another still chewing a rusk—quickly and cheerfully man the gun and begin loading.

Suddenly the most fearful roar strikes not only your ears but your whole being, and makes you shudder all over. It is followed by the whistle of the departing ball, and a thick cloud of powder-smoke envelops you, the platform, and the moving black figures of the sailors. You will hear various comments by the sailors concerning this shot of ours, and you will notice their animation, the evidences of a feeling which you had not perhaps expected: the feeling of animosity and thirst for vengeance which lies hidden in each man's soul. You will hear joyful exclamations: 'It's gone right into the embrasure! It's killed two, I think.... There, they're carrying them off!' 'And now he's riled, and will send one this way,' some one remarks; and really, soon after, you will see before you a flash and some smoke; the sentinel standing on the breastwork will call out 'Ca-n-non,' and then a ball will whiz past you and squash into the earth, throwing out a circle of stones and mud. The commander of the battery will be irritated by this shot and will give orders to fire another and another cannon, the enemy will reply in like manner, and you will experience interesting sensations and see interesting sights. The sentinel will again call 'Cannon!' and you will have the same sound and shock, and the mud will be splashed round as before. Or he will call out 'Mortar!' and you will hear the regular and rather pleasant whistle—which it is difficult to connect with the thought of anything dreadful—of a bomb; you will hear this whistle coming nearer and faster towards you, then you will see a black ball, feel the shock as it strikes the ground, and will hear the ringing explosion. The bomb will fly apart into whizzing and shrieking fragments, stones will rattle into the air, and you will be bespattered with mud.

At these sounds you will experience a strange feeling of mingled pleasure and fear. At the moment you know the shot is flying towards you, you are sure to imagine that this shot will kill you, but a feeling of pride will support you and no one will know of the knife that is cutting your heart. But when the shot has flown past and has not hit you, you revive, and, though only for a moment, a glad, inexpressibly joyous feeling seizes you, so that you feel some peculiar delight in the danger—in this game of life and death—and wish that bombs and balls would fall nearer and nearer to you.

But again the sentinel, in his loud, thick voice, shouts 'Mortar!' again a whistle, a fall, an explosion; and mingled with the last you are startled by the groans of a man. You approach the wounded man just as the stretchers are brought. Covered with blood and dirt he presents a strange, not human, appearance. Part of the sailor's breast has been torn away....

'That's the way with seven or eight every day,' the naval officer remarks to you, answering the look of horror on your face, and he yawns as he rolls another yellow cigarette.

As the siege progressed, things became worse, and in the last part of Sevastopol Tolstoy, after telling how one of the characters felt satisfied with himself, continues:

This feeling, however, was quickly shaken by a sight he came upon in the twilight while looking for the Commander of the bastion. Four sailors stood by the breastwork holding by its arms and legs the bloody corpse of a man without boots or coat, swinging it before heaving it over. (It was found impossible in some parts to clear away the corpses from the bastions, and they were, therefore, thrown out into the ditch, so as not to be in the way at the batteries.) Volódya felt stunned for a moment when he saw the body bump on the top of the breastwork and then roll down into the ditch, but luckily for him the Commander of the bastion met him just then and gave him his orders, as well as a guide to show him the way to the battery and to the bomb-proof assigned to his men. We will not speak of all the dangers and disenchantments our hero lived through that evening; how—instead of the firing he was used to, amid conditions of perfect exactitude and order which he had expected to meet with here also,—he found two injured mortars, one with its mouth battered in by a ball, the other standing on the splinters of its shattered platform; how he could not get workmen to mend the platform till the morning; how not a single charge was of the weight specified in the Handbook; how two of the men under him were wounded, and how he was twenty times within a hair's-breadth of death. Fortunately a gigantic gunner, a seaman who had served with the mortars since the commencement of the siege, had been appointed to assist Volódya, and convinced him of the possibility of using the mortars. By the light of a lantern, this gunner showed him all over the battery as he might have shown him over his own kitchen-garden, and undertook to have everything right by the morning. The bomb-proof to which his guide led him was an oblong hole dug in the rocky ground, 25 cubic yards in size and covered with oak beams nearly 2-1/2 feet thick. He and all his soldiers installed themselves in it.

It was during one of his sojourns in the Fourth Bastion, that Tolstoy noted down in his Diary the following prayer:

Lord, I thank Thee for Thy continual protection. How surely Thou leadest me to what is good. What an insignificant creature should I be, if Thou abandoned me! Leave me not, Lord; give me what is necessary, not for the satisfaction of my poor aspirations, but that I may attain to the eternal, vast, unknown aim of existence, which lies beyond my ken.

It was due to Tolstoy's own choice that he was exposed to the rough life of the bastion, for Prince Gortchakóf, at whose house he was a constant visitor, had offered him an appointment on his staff. This offer, which at Silistria he had so ardently desired, Tolstoy declined, having come to the conclusion, subsequently expressed in his writings, that the influence exercised by the staff on the conduct of a war is always pernicious! This opinion not only influenced his conduct, and expressed itself in his novels, but fitted into a general view of life he ultimately arrived at, a view the consequences of which must be dealt with in the sequel to this work. For the moment, let it suffice to mention that whereas he shows a keen appreciation of Admiral Kornílof's achievement in rousing the spirit of the garrison, he nowhere praises Todleben's achievement in organising the defence of the town and improvising that 'labyrinth of batteries' in which Tolstoy used constantly to lose his way. He says, for instance:

Now you have seen the defenders of Sevastopol.... The principal, joyous thought you have brought away is a conviction of the strength of the Russian people; and this conviction you gained, not by looking at all these traverses, breastworks, cunningly interlaced trenches, mines and cannon, one on top of another, of which you could make nothing; but from the eyes, words and actions—in short, from seeing what is called the 'spirit' of the defenders of Sevastopol.

To everything a man can do off his own bat and by his own effort, Tolstoy is keenly alive and sympathetic; but when it comes to a complex, co-ordinated plan, involving the subordination of many parts to one whole, he is suspicious or even hostile. Had he remained a subordinate officer, or even a novelist, it would not have been specially necessary to draw attention to this peculiarity; but that we may understand his later teachings, it is important to note all the roots of feeling from which they grew, and this one among the rest.

To get on however with our tale. One evening, while Tolstoy was sitting with the adjutants of Count Osten-Sáken, Commander of the Garrison, Prince S. S. Ouroúsof, a brave officer and first-rate chess player (he took part in the International Chess Tournament of 1862, in London) and a friend of Tolstoy's, entered the room and wished to speak to the General. An adjutant took him to Osten-Sáken's room, and ten minutes later Ouroúsof passed out again, looking very glum. After he had gone, the adjutant explained that Ouroúsof had come to suggest that a challenge should be sent to the English to play a game of chess for the foremost trench in front of the Fifth Bastion: a trench that had changed hands several times and had already cost some hundreds of lives. Osten-Sáken had naturally refused to issue the challenge.

On 16th August Tolstoy took part in the battle of the Tchérnaya (Black River) in which the Sardinian contingent, which had arrived in May to reinforce the Allies, much distinguished itself. This last attempt to relieve Sevastopol failed, as its forerunners had done. Three days later Tolstoy wrote to his brother saying that he had not been hurt, and that 'I did nothing, as my mountain artillery was not called on to fire.'

The end of the siege was now approaching, and on 8th September Tolstoy, having volunteered for service in Sevastopol, reached the Star Fort on the North Side of the Roadstead just in time to witness the capture of the Maláhof by the French, as he has described in Sevastopol in August.[21]

On the North Side of the Roadstead, at the Star Fort, near noon, two sailors stood on the 'telegraph' mound; one of them, an officer, was looking at Sevastopol through the fixed telescope. Another officer, accompanied by a Cossack, had just ridden up to join him at the big Signal-post.... Along the whole line of fortifications, but especially on the high ground on the left side, appeared, several at a time, with lightnings that at times flashed bright even in the noonday sun, puffs of thick, dense, white smoke, that grew, taking various shapes and appearing darker against the sky. These clouds, showing now here now there, appeared on the hills, on the enemy's batteries, in the town, and high up in the sky. The reports of explosions never ceased, but rolled together and rent the air.

Towards noon the puffs appeared more and more rarely, and the air vibrated less with the booming.

'I say, the Second Bastion does not reply at all now!' said the officer on horseback; 'it is quite knocked to pieces. Terrible!'

'Yes, and the Maláhof, too, sends hardly one shot in reply to three of theirs,' said he who was looking through the telescope. 'Their silence provokes me! They are shooting straight into the Kornílof Battery, and it does not reply.'

'But look there! I told you that they always cease the bombardment about noon. It's the same to-day. Come, let's go to lunch; they'll be waiting for us already. What's the good of looking?'

'Wait a bit!' answered the one who had possession of the telescope, looking very eagerly towards Sevastopol.

'What is it? What?'

'A movement in the entrenchments, thick columns advancing.'

'Yes! They can be seen even without a glass, marching in columns. The alarm must be given,' said the seaman.

'Look! look! They've left the trenches!'

And, really, with the naked eye one could see what looked like dark spots moving down the hill from the French batteries across the valley to the bastions. In front of these spots dark stripes were already visibly approaching our line. On the bastions white cloudlets burst in succession as if chasing one another. The wind brought a sound of rapid small-arm firing, like the beating of rain against a window. The dark stripes were moving in the midst of the smoke and came nearer and nearer. The sounds of firing, growing stronger and stronger, mingled in a prolonged, rumbling peal. Puffs of smoke rose more and more often, spread rapidly along the line, and at last formed one lilac cloud (dotted here and there with little faint lights and black spots) which kept curling and uncurling; and all the sounds blent into one tremendous clatter.

'An assault!' said the naval officer, turning pale and letting the seaman look through the telescope.

Cossacks galloped along the road, some officers rode by, the Commander-in-Chief passed in a carriage with his suite. Every face showed painful excitement and expectation.

'It's impossible they can have taken it,' said the mounted officer.

'By God, a standard!... Look! look!' said the other, panting, and he walked away from the telescope: 'A French standard on the Maláhof!'

The point from which the officer in the story, and Tolstoy himself in reality, watched the assault through a telescope is the spot marked 'a' on the map on [page 112].

The loss of the Maláhof rendered the further defence of the town impossible, and the following night the Russians blew up and destroyed such munitions of war as they could not remove from the bastions. Tolstoy was deputed to clear the Fifth and Sixth Bastions before they were abandoned to the Allies. When telling me this he added, 'The non-commissioned officers could have done the work just as well without me.' While the destruction was proceeding, the Russian forces crossed the Roadstead by a pontoon bridge which had been constructed during the siege. The town south of the Roadstead was abandoned, and the defenders established themselves on the North Side, where they remained till peace was concluded in February 1856.

After the retreat, Tolstoy was given the task of collating the twenty or more reports of the action from the Artillery Commanders. This experience of how war is recorded produced in him that supreme contempt for detailed military histories which he so often expressed in later years. He says:

I regret that I did not keep a copy of those reports. They were an excellent example of that naïve, inevitable kind of military falsehood, out of which descriptions are compiled. I think many of those comrades of mine who drew up those reports, will laugh on reading these lines, remembering how, by order of their Commander, they wrote what they could not know.

Carrying among other despatches the report he had himself compiled, Tolstoy was sent as Courier to Petersburg; and this terminated his personal experience of war. He was still only Sub-Lieutenant, his hopes of promotion had come to nothing in consequence of a suspicion that he was the author of some soldiers' songs which were sung throughout the army at this time. No translation can do justice to these slangy, topical satires; but that the reader may have some idea of them, my wife has put into English the following stanzas:

In September, the eighth day,[22]

From the French we ran away,

For our Faith and Tsar!

Admiral Alexander,[23] he

Sank our vessels in the sea

In the waters deep,

In the waters deep.

'Luck to all I wish,' he said then.

To Baktchiseráy[24] he sped then;

'May you all be blowed!

'May you all be blowed!'

Saint Arnaud[25] got out of sight;

And in manner most polite,

Came round to our back,

Came round to our back.

And on Tuesday, I'm afraid

Had no saint come to our aid,

He'd have bagged us all,

He'd have bagged us all.

Our Liprandi, it is true

Captured 'trenchments not a few,

But to no avail!

Out of Kishinéf a force

Was expected: Foot and Horse,

And at last they came,

And at last they came.

Dannenberg was in command:

Strictly told to understand

Not to spare his men,

Not to spare his men.

Two Grand Dukes a visit paid:

But the French, quite undismayed,

Blazed away with shells,

Blazed away with shells.

Some ten thousand men were shot:

From the Tsar they never got

Any great reward!

Then the Prince[26] in anger spoke:

'Oh! our men are wretched folk:

'Why, they've turned their backs!

'Why, they've turned their backs!'

And in this great battle's flare

Heroes only two there were:

The two Royal Dukes!

George's Crosses they were given

And to Petersburg were driven

To be fêted there!

All the priests with heads bent down

Prayed our God the French to drown,

And there came a storm,

And there came a storm!

There arose a dreadful gale,

But the French just shortened sail,

And remained afloat!

Winter came. Sorties we made;

Many soldiers low were laid,

Near those bags of sand,

Near those bags of sand.[27]

For re'nforcements Ménshik prayed;

But the Tsar sent to his aid

Only Osten-Sáken,

Only Osten-Sáken.[28]

Ménshik, Admiral so wise,

To the Tsar writes and replies:

'Oh, dear Father Tsar,

'Oh, dear Father Tsar.

'Sáken is not worth a grain,

And your Royal youngsters twain[29]

They're no good at all!

They're no good at all!'

Royal wrath on Ménshik fell,

And the Tsar felt quite unwell

At the next review,

At the next review.

Straight to heaven he did fare

(Seems they wanted him up there)

Not a whit too soon,

Not a whit too soon!

As on his deathbed he lay;

To his son[30] he this did say:

'Now just you look out,

'Now just you look out!'

And the son to Ménshik wrote:

'My dear Admiral, please note,

You may go to hell,

You may go to hell!'

'And in place of you I'll name

Gortchakóf, you know, the same

Who fought 'gainst the Turks!

Who fought 'gainst the Turks!'

'With few troops he'll go ahead,

And a pair of breeches red

Shall be his reward,

Shall be his reward!'

As a matter of fact the responsibility for these songs, which gave satirical expression to the discontent then very generally felt, was not entirely Tolstoy's. They originated with a group of officers on the staff of Kryzhanóvsky, Commander of the Artillery, and some others (including Tolstoy) who used to meet at Kryzhanóvsky's rooms almost daily. One of this company used to preside at the piano, while the others stood round and improvised couplets. In such cases some one has usually to pay the piper, and that this one should have been Tolstoy, was a natural result both of the fact that he seems to have been the chief culprit, and of the attention his literary work was attracting at this time.

Another matter which appears to have done Tolstoy no good in the eyes of his superiors, was his refusal to fall in with a reprehensible practice which by long usage had become as well established as, for instance, among ourselves, is the purchase of peerages by contributions to Party funds.

Those in command of various divisions of the army, including the Commanders of Batteries, used to pay for various things, such as shoes for the horses, medicine, office expenses, and certain extras for the soldiers, for which no official allowance was made; and the way the money for this was obtained was by overestimating the cost and quantity of stores, and of the fodder required for the horses. The difference between the actual and estimated cost supplied a revenue which different Commanders used in different ways. Some spent it all for the good of the service, though in a manner not shown in the accounts; others did not scruple to make private profit of it. Tolstoy, during his command of a battery, refused to take a balance of cash which had accumulated, and insisted on showing it in the accounts. He thereby evoked the displeasure of less scrupulous Commanders and called down upon himself a rebuke from General Kryzhanóvsky, who did not consider that it lay with a Sub-Lieutenant in temporary command, to attempt to upset so well-established a custom. From his letters and memoirs we get clear indications of Tolstoy's feelings towards his brother officers; his distaste for the common run of them, and his preference for those who were gentlemanly. Here and there, in memoirs and magazine articles, one finds records of the impression he in his turn produced on his companions. One of them relates:

How Tolstoy woke us all up in those hard times of war, with his stories and his hastily composed couplets! He was really the soul of our battery. When he was with us we did not notice how time flew, and there was no end to the general gaiety.... When the Count was away, when he trotted off to Simferópol, we all hung our heads. He would vanish for one, two or three days.... At last he would return—the very picture of a prodigal son! sombre, worn out, and dissatisfied with himself.... Then he would take me aside, quite apart, and would begin his confessions. He would tell me all: how he had caroused, gambled, and where he had spent his days and nights; and all the time, if you will believe me, he would condemn himself and suffer as though he were a real criminal. He was so distressed that it was pitiful to see him. That's the sort of man he was. In a word, a queer fellow, and, to tell the truth, one I could not quite understand. He was however a rare comrade, a most honourable fellow, and a man one can never forget!

One who entered the battery just after Tolstoy left it, says he was remembered there as an excellent rider, first-rate company, and an athlete who, lying on the floor, could let a man weighing thirteen stone be placed on his hands, and could lift him up by straightening his arms. At a tug-of-war (played not with a rope, but with a stick) no one could beat him; and he left behind him the recollection of many witty anecdotes told in that masterly style of which he never lost the knack.

His private Diary bears witness to the constantly renewed struggle that went on within him, as well as to his profound dissatisfaction with himself. Here, for instance, is an estimate entered in his Diary at the commencement of the war, while he was still at Silistria:

I have no modesty. That is my great defect. What am I? One of four sons of a retired lieutenant-colonel, left at seven years of age an orphan under the guardianship of women and strangers; having neither a social nor a scholarly education, and becoming my own master at seventeen; with no large means, no social position, and, above all, without principle; a man who has disorganised his own affairs to the last extremity, and has passed the best years of his life without aim or pleasure; and finally who having banished himself to the Caucasus to escape his debts and more especially his bad habits—and having there availed himself of some connection that had existed between his father and the general in command—passed to the army of the Danube at twenty-six, as a Sub-Lieutenant almost without means except his pay (for what means he has he ought to employ to pay what he still owes) without influential friends, ignorant of how to live in society, ignorant of the service, lacking practical capacity, but with immense self-esteem—such is my social position. Let us see what I myself am like.

I am ugly, awkward, uncleanly, and lack society education. I am irritable, a bore to others, not modest, intolerant, and as shame-faced as a child. I am almost an ignoramus. What I do know, I have learned anyhow, by myself, in snatches, without sequence, without a plan, and it amounts to very little. I am incontinent, undecided, inconstant and stupidly vain and vehement, like all characterless people. I am not brave. I am not methodical in life, and am so lazy that idleness has become an almost unconquerable habit of mine.

I am clever, but my cleverness has as yet not been thoroughly tested on anything; I have neither practical nor social nor business ability.

I am honest, that is to say, I love goodness, and have formed a habit of loving it, and when I swerve from it I am dissatisfied with myself and return to it gladly; but there is a thing I love more than goodness, and that is fame. I am so ambitious, and so little has this feeling been gratified, that should I have to choose between fame and goodness, I fear I may often choose the former.

Yes, I am not modest, and therefore I am proud at heart, though shame-faced and shy in society.

That is a grossly unfair estimate of himself, but shows just that sort of eager injustice to any one who fails to reach the high standard he sets up, that has always characterised him. His account is inaccurate in details. For instance, he was not seven, but nearly nine when his father died. He had not wrecked his affairs to the extent he suggests. Though his studies had been desultory, he had read widely, with a quick understanding and a retentive memory. He was master of the Russian, French and German languages, besides having some knowledge of English, Latin, Arabic, and Turco-Tartar. (Later in life he added a knowledge of Italian, Greek and Hebrew.) As for not yet having tested his cleverness: he had published stories for which the editor of the best Russian magazine paid him the rate accorded to the best-known writers; while his awkwardness in society did not depend on ignorance; on the contrary, he had grown up among people who paid much attention to manners, and he was himself gifted with social tact, which became plainly apparent as soon as he attained self-confidence. Any defect in his manners must have been merely a result of that nervous shyness natural to highly-strung, sensitive natures, conscious of powers of a kind society recognises but scantily. Yet, when all is said, his description gets home: over-emphatic and unfair, like much of his other writing, it still leaves you in no doubt as to what he meant, and hits the real points of weakness in the victim he is flaying.

On 5th March 1855 (old style) when he was just recovering from that fit of depression at Belbék which, as already mentioned, drove him to gamble, he writes in his Diary:

A conversation about Divinity and Faith has suggested to me a great, a stupendous idea, to the realisation of which I feel myself capable of devoting my life. This idea is the founding of a new religion corresponding to the present state of mankind: the religion of Christianity, but purged of dogmas and mysticism: a practical religion, not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth. I understand that to accomplish this the conscious labour of generations will be needed. One generation will bequeath the idea to the next, and some day fanaticism or reason will accomplish it. Deliberately to promote the union of mankind by religion—that is the basic thought which, I hope, will dominate me.

In that passage one has, quite clearly stated before he was twenty-seven, the main idea which actuated Tolstoy from the age of fifty onwards. Already by the literary work he accomplished amid the bustle and excitement of the siege, he was half consciously moving in the direction that allured him. During the three months that elapsed between leaving Bucharest and reaching Sevastopol, he wrote part of The Wood-Felling; a sketch of an expedition such as he had taken part in the Caucasus; and during the siege of Sevastopol he wrote the first two parts of Sevastopol and began Youth, a sequel to Childhood and Boyhood.