The Life of Tolstoy: First Fifty Years / Fifth Edition

by Aylmer Maude

The white flags are lowered, again the engines of death and suffering are sounding, again innocent blood flows, and the air is filled with moans and curses.

In Sevastopol, and in Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade (with its rhymes about 'hundred' and 'thundered,' and its panegyric of those who knew it was not their business to think, and at whom 'all the world wondered'), we have two typical expressions of conflicting views on war: the view of a man who knew it from the classics and was Poet Laureate, and the view of a man who was in the thick of it, and whose eyes were connected with his brain.

Thirty-four years later Tolstoy wrote a Preface to a fellow-officer's Recollections of Sevastopol. It could not pass the Censor, but has been used as a Preface to his own sketches of war in the English version of Sevastopol, translated by my wife and myself, and I cannot conclude this chapter better than by quoting a few sentences from it.

Speaking of the position of a young officer engaged in the Crimean war, he says:

To the first question that suggests itself to every one, Why did he do it? Why did he not cease, and go away?—the author does not reply. He does not say, as men said in olden times when they hated their enemies as the Jews hated the Philistines, that he hated the Allies; on the contrary, he here and there shows his sympathy for them as for brother men.

Nor does he speak of any passionate desire that the keys of the Church at Jerusalem should be in our hands, or even that our fleet should, or should not, exist. You feel as you read, that to him the life and death of men are not commensurable with questions of politics. And the reader feels that to the question: Why did the author act as he did?—there is only one answer; It was because I enlisted while still young, or before the war began, or because owing to inexperience I chanced to slip into a position from which I could not extricate myself without great effort. I was entrapped into that position, and when they obliged me to do the most unnatural actions in the world, to kill my brother men who had done me no harm, I preferred to do this rather than to suffer punishment and disgrace.... One feels that the author knows there is a law of God: love thy neighbour, and therefore do not kill him,—a law which cannot be repealed by any human artifice.

The merit of the book consists in that. It is a pity it is only felt, and not plainly and clearly expressed. Sufferings and deaths are described; but we are not told what caused them. Thirty-five years ago—even that was well, but now something more is needed. We should be told what it is that causes soldiers to suffer and to die,—that we may know, and understand, and destroy these causes.

'War! How terrible,' people say, 'is war, with its wounds, bloodshed, and deaths! We must organise a Red Cross Society to alleviate the wounds, sufferings and pains of death.' But, truly, what is dreadful in war is not the wounds, sufferings and deaths. The human race that has always suffered and died, should by this time be accustomed to suffering and death, and should not be aghast at them. Without war people die by famine, by inundations, and by epidemics. It is not suffering and death that are terrible, but it is that which allows people to inflict suffering and death....

It is not the suffering and mutilation and death of man's body that most needs to be diminished,—but it is the mutilation and death of his soul. Not the Red Cross is needed, but the simple cross of Christ to destroy falsehood and deception....

I was finishing this Preface when a cadet from the Military College came to see me. He told me that he was troubled by religious doubts.... He had read nothing of mine. I spoke cautiously to him of how to read the Gospels so as to find in them the answers to life's problems. He listened and agreed. Towards the end of our conversation I mention wine, and advised him not to drink. He replied: 'but in military service it is sometimes necessary.' I thought he meant necessary for health and strength, and I intended triumphantly to overthrow him by proofs from experience and science, but he continued: 'Why, at Geok-Tepe, for instance, when Skóbelef had to massacre the inhabitants, the soldiers did not wish to do it, but he had drink served out and then....' Here are all the horrors of war—they are in this lad with his fresh young face, his little shoulder-straps (under which the ends of his hood are so neatly tucked), his well-cleaned boots, his naïve eyes, and with so perverted a conception of life.