imself in the open world and saw hundreds of new
faces, that feeling was intensified. Throughout his journey he felt like
a schoolboy on holiday. Everyone--the stagecoach driver, the post-house
overseers, the peasants on the roads and in the villages--had a
new significance for him. The presence and remarks of Willarski who
continually deplored the ignorance and poverty of Russia and its
backwardness compared with Europe only heightened Pierre's pleasure.
Where Willarski saw deadness Pierre saw an extraordinary strength
and vitality--the strength which in that vast space amid the snows
maintained the life of this original, peculiar, and unique people.
He did not contradict Willarski and even seemed to agree with him--an
apparent agreement being the simplest way to avoid discussions that
could lead to nothing--and he smiled joyfully as he listened to him.

CHAPTER XIV

It would be difficult to explain why and whither ants whose heap
has been destroyed are hurrying: some from the heap dragging bits of
rubbish, larvae, and corpses, others back to the heap, or why they
jostle, overtake one another, and fight, and it would be equally
difficult to explain what caused the Russians after the departure of the
French to throng to the place that had formerly been Moscow. But when
we watch the ants round their ruined heap, the tenacity, energy, and
immense number of the delving insects prove that despite the destruction
of the heap, something indestructible, which though intangible is the
real strength of the colony, still exists; and similarly, though in
Moscow in the month of October there was no government and no churches,
shrines, riches, or houses--it was still the Moscow it had been in
August. All was destroyed, except something intangible yet powerful and
indestructible.

The motives of those who thronged from all sides to Moscow after it had
been cleared of the enemy were most diverse and personal, and at first
for the most part savage and brutal. One motive only they all had in
common: a desire to get to the place that had been called Moscow, to
apply their activities there.

Within a week Moscow already had fifteen thousand inhabitants, in a
fortnight twenty-five thousand, and so on. By the autumn of 1813 the
number, ever increasing and increasing, exceeded what it had been in
1812.

The first Russians to enter Moscow were the Cossacks of Wintzingerode's
detachment, peasants from the adjacent villages, and