en fence, a row of thirty year-old birches
with their lower branches lopped off, a field on which shocks of
oats were standing, and some bushes near which rose the smoke of
campfires--the soldiers' kitchens.

Narrow and burdensome and useless to anyone as his life now seemed to
him, Prince Andrew on the eve of battle felt agitated and irritable as
he had done seven years before at Austerlitz.

He had received and given the orders for next day's battle and had
nothing more to do. But his thoughts--the simplest, clearest, and
therefore most terrible thoughts--would give him no peace. He knew that
tomorrow's battle would be the most terrible of all he had taken
part in, and for the first time in his life the possibility of death
presented itself to him--not in relation to any worldly matter or with
reference to its effect on others, but simply in relation to himself, to
his own soul--vividly, plainly, terribly, and almost as a certainty. And
from the height of this perception all that had previously tormented and
preoccupied him suddenly became illumined by a cold white light without
shadows, without perspective, without distinction of outline. All life
appeared to him like magic-lantern pictures at which he had long been
gazing by artificial light through a glass. Now he suddenly saw those
badly daubed pictures in clear daylight and without a glass. "Yes,
yes! There they are, those false images that agitated, enraptured,
and tormented me," said he to himself, passing in review the principal
pictures of the magic lantern of life and regarding them now in the cold
white daylight of his clear perception of death. "There they are, those
rudely painted figures that once seemed splendid and mysterious.
Glory, the good of society, love of a woman, the Fatherland itself--how
important these pictures appeared to me, with what profound meaning they
seemed to be filled! And it is all so simple, pale, and crude in the
cold white light of this morning which I feel is dawning for me." The
three great sorrows of his life held his attention in particular: his
love for a woman, his father's death, and the French invasion which had
overrun half Russia. "Love... that little girl who seemed to me brimming
over with mystic forces! Yes, indeed, I loved her. I made romantic plans
of love and happiness with her! Oh, what a boy I was!" he said aloud
bitterly. "Ah me! I believed in some ideal love which was to keep her
faithful to me for the whol