e battle of
Friedland. They said that had we held out a little longer Napoleon would
have been done for, as his troops had neither provisions nor ammunition.
Nicholas ate and drank (chiefly the latter) in silence. He finished a
couple of bottles of wine by himself. The process in his mind went on
tormenting him without reaching a conclusion. He feared to give way to
his thoughts, yet could not get rid of them. Suddenly, on one of the
officers' saying that it was humiliating to look at the French, Rostov
began shouting with uncalled-for wrath, and therefore much to the
surprise of the officers:

"How can you judge what's best?" he cried, the blood suddenly rushing to
his face. "How can you judge the Emperor's actions? What right have
we to argue? We cannot comprehend either the Emperor's aims or his
actions!"

"But I never said a word about the Emperor!" said the officer,
justifying himself, and unable to understand Rostov's outburst, except
on the supposition that he was drunk.

But Rostov did not listen to him.

"We are not diplomatic officials, we are soldiers and nothing more," he
went on. "If we are ordered to die, we must die. If we're punished, it
means that we have deserved it, it's not for us to judge. If the Emperor
pleases to recognize Bonaparte as Emperor and to conclude an alliance
with him, it means that that is the right thing to do. If once we begin
judging and arguing about everything, nothing sacred will be left! That
way we shall be saying there is no God--nothing!" shouted Nicholas,
banging the table--very little to the point as it seemed to his
listeners, but quite relevantly to the course of his own thoughts.

"Our business is to do our duty, to fight and not to think! That's
all...." said he.

"And to drink," said one of the officers, not wishing to quarrel.

"Yes, and to drink," assented Nicholas. "Hullo there! Another bottle!"
he shouted.

In 1808 the Emperor Alexander went to Erfurt for a fresh interview with
the Emperor Napoleon, and in the upper circles of Petersburg there was
much talk of the grandeur of this important meeting.

CHAPTER XXII

In 1809 the intimacy between "the world's two arbiters," as Napoleon
and Alexander were called, was such that when Napoleon declared war on
Austria a Russian corps crossed the frontier to co-operate with our
old enemy Bonaparte against our old ally the Emperor of Austria, and in
court circles the possibility of marriage between Nap