ended side of
life: belief in life and its enjoyment.

Just as before, they never mentioned him so as not to lower (as they
thought) their exalted feelings by words; but this silence about him had
the effect of making them gradually begin to forget him without being
conscious of it.

Natasha had grown thin and pale and physically so weak that they all
talked about her health, and this pleased her. But sometimes she was
suddenly overcome by fear not only of death but of sickness, weakness,
and loss of good looks, and involuntarily she examined her bare arm
carefully, surprised at its thinness, and in the morning noticed her
drawn and, as it seemed to her, piteous face in her glass. It seemed to
her that things must be so, and yet it was dreadfully sad.

One day she went quickly upstairs and found herself out of breath.
Unconsciously she immediately invented a reason for going down, and
then, testing her strength, ran upstairs again, observing the result.

Another time when she called Dunyasha her voice trembled, so she called
again--though she could hear Dunyasha coming--called her in the deep
chest tones in which she had been wont to sing, and listened attentively
to herself.

She did not know and would not have believed it, but beneath the layer
of slime that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable, delicate
young shoots of grass were already sprouting, which taking root would so
cover with their living verdure the grief that weighed her down that
it would soon no longer be seen or noticed. The wound had begun to heal
from within.

At the end of January Princess Mary left for Moscow, and the count
insisted on Natasha's going with her to consult the doctors.

CHAPTER IV

After the encounter at Vyazma, where Kutuzov had been unable to hold
back his troops in their anxiety to overwhelm and cut off the enemy and
so on, the farther movement of the fleeing French, and of the Russians
who pursued them, continued as far as Krasnoe without a battle. The
flight was so rapid that the Russian army pursuing the French could
not keep up with them; cavalry and artillery horses broke down, and the
information received of the movements of the French was never reliable.

The men in the Russian army were so worn out by this continuous marching
at the rate of twenty-seven miles a day that they could not go any
faster.

To realize the degree of exhaustion of the Russian army it is only
necessary to grasp clea