“All is well, and now you need feel no uneasiness.”
The other seems to be surprised. He is in a state of deadly anxiety, and he is urged to be calm! He is apparently waiting for something more, but this is really the end of the discussion. A motor-car has been summoned. He salutes and goes off.
“You need feel no uneasiness.” One of my comrades, who in his brief leisure moments is rereading Tolstoi’s War and Peace, and is blessed with a portentous memory, reminds me of the passage where Prince André Bolkonsky, aide-de-camp to General Bagration, comes to report to his chief what he has been able to find out about the forces that are threatening the Russian Army:
“While listening to him, Prince Bagration stared in front of him, and Prince André, while studying the strongly marked features of that face whose eyes were half-closed, wandering, and sleepy, asked himself, with an uneasy curiosity, what thoughts, what feelings were hidden behind that impenetrable mask?”
(The eyes, here, are also staring, but at some point far away, as if to see beyond the horizon of Verdun.)
“All is well,” says Bagration simply, as if what he has just heard had been anticipated by him.
And what he has just heard is the menace that weighs upon his army.
What our General has just heard has caused him no anxiety. He has answered, “All is well,” as if the menace could in no way alter his plans. Later on this recollection, throwing light on the phrase which had almost shocked me, was to assume a singularly precise outline in my mind, and to widen like those ripples which are formed in water when a stone is flung in and grow larger and larger until they reach the banks....