by A. N. Wilson
There were plenty of women that summer, even if his military career was slow to get off the ground. In July, Tolstoy, through the intervention of Prince Gorchakov himself (a friend of his father’s), got a transfer from the Danube to the Crimea. It was a slow journey – from Bucharest, through Russia, and from Tekucha Berlad and Aslui to Kishinyov, where he remained until November. It was not until the end of the year that he finally got his transfer to the 5th Light Battery of the 12th Artillery Brigade. In the intervening months, the journal is a simple record of tarts, remorse, and reading (Bleak House, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Henry Esmond, Schiller’s Die Räuber, George Sand, Balzac, what not). In his lassitude, he alternates between thinking that he has got consumption and making religious resolutions. ‘I wish to believe in the religion of my fathers and to respect it,’ is one typical diary entry. Another is, ‘Wrote quite well, but not much, had dinner, wrote a bit more, ran after a wench. . . .’5 Tolstoy, like all true writers, carried his life about with him, created the very cocoon of observant detachment, indolence and sensuality in which a creative mind flourishes.
When he got to the Crimea, one of his commanding officers noticed this at once. The 5th Light Battery of the 12th Artillery Brigade had suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Inkerman and were now quartered some fifteen versts from Sebastopol. It was rough. Each officer had a little barrack-hut knocked up for him by the soldiers out of planks. An officer senior to Tolstoy, Y. I. Odakhovsky, noticed how Tolstoy would retreat to his squalid hut. ‘If I dropped in on him in his barrack, I often found him at his literary work,’ this intrusive fellow informs us, ‘but he did not discuss his work with anyone.’6
Odakhovsky, writing his memoirs after Tolstoy had become a celebrated writer, would like us to believe that he and Tolstoy got along famously. It is perfectly possible that they did, in spite of Tolstoy’s observation in his diary that ‘Odakhovsky, the senior officer, is a nasty, mean little Pole. . . . Filimonov, in whose battery I am, is the dirtiest creature you could imagine. . . .’7 Like many detached minds, Tolstoy was perfectly capable of deriving enjoyment from the company of those he despised (and, conversely, capable of hating, in the pages of his diary, those whom in life he found congenial). It was a gift which was to bring him torment when he married, but as a shy young aristocrat, stuck in a mess with a miscellaneous group of men, it helped him through.
After a day of mysteriously silent scribbling in the hut, the young count would emerge and dine with his fellow officers in the mess. Odakhovsky was fascinated by the subtle manner in which Tolstoy could exercise power over his companions. It was Tolstoy who got them playing silly nursery games. It was Tolstoy who, amid the general merriment and drunkenness, got his commanding officer Filimonov to balance on one leg on a tent peg. Moreover, it was Tolstoy who was in charge of giving prizes for these japes, and they were always surprised by the fact that he had noticed, precisely, the little tastes and predilections of his companions. The man who had a particular penchant for oranges would find himself getting an orange if he stood on the tent peg for long enough; whereas the man who had hardly ever mentioned to anyone his taste for honey-cake would be given some honeycake. The officers began to be aware that there was a ‘chiel amang them’, noticing and observing and storing things in his memory.8
The power of this young man had not, in Odakhovsky’s recollections, been of the kind you would look for in an assertive subaltern. It was in the two areas of observation and subversion that it was apparent. At dinner there was often criticism of the way the campaign was being organised, of the way the engineers had armed the fortifications, of the placement of guns. It felt good humoured. There were a lot of laughs. But Tolstoy was usually at the bottom of them. Yet he was not a leader. He seemed to be something of a joke. They were amused alike by the ugliness of their new companion, as by his manners; his surly silences were broken by passages of fluent and ultra-well-spoken ‘dinner conversation’ of a kind which would have been more appropriate at the table of a Moscow princess than in a mud hut in the Crimea. They were half amused and half troubled by his extreme moral vulnerability. Sometimes he would simply disappear and they did not know where he was. They would find him in old clothes sitting with the house serfs, or chasing girls, or playing cards.9
The progress of the war during the autumn of 1854 became ugly. After the unsuccessful Russian attempt to beat off the French and English at the Battle of Alma, the siege and bombardment of Sebastopol could begin in earnest.
The following month, in October, with the weather already turning cold, the fighting intensified. From October 17 onwards, British field artillery and naval batteries kept up a relentless attack on Sebastopol and its defences.
One day during that week, the London Times correspondent happened to meet Lord Cardigan, Colonel-in-Chief of the Light Brigade and a friend. He asked the journalist, in a ridiculous tone of voice which he adopted for mocking men he considered effeminate, ‘What was the firing for last night?’
Russell, knowing of Cardigan’s notoriety for picking a quarrel, said that he did not know what the firing was for and attempted to hurry past.
‘You hear, Squire,’ said Cardigan, to his companion, ‘this Mr. William Russell knows nothing of the reason for that firing. I daresay no one does.’ And then he added, ‘I have never in my life seen a siege conducted on such principles.’
Since Cardigan had never in his life seen a siege of any description, nor any military engagements, this was perhaps not surprising. Only a small number of very old men in the army could remember the last war. Cardigan’s best training for the events which followed had been on the hunting field, which perhaps partly explains why he led his regiment in that famous charge a week later at the Battle of Balaclava. The heroics of the Charge of the Light Brigade had about as much effect on the progress of the war as if Cardigan had stayed at home and chased foxes. As the winter set in, and the soldiers on both sides found the struggle against cold and disease quite as hard as their engagements with one another, it became more and more clear that the idea of a cavalry invasion of the Crimea by the French and the British had been totally insane. Everything hung, not on the great battles, but on the progress of the Siege of Sebastopol. And it was in the middle of that struggle that Tolstoy found himself. He had missed the famous battles of Inkerman and Balaclava, and had read the newspaper accounts of them with a mixture of rage and awe. Inkerman, from the Russian point of view, was perhaps the most shaming engagement of them all, with a numerically superior Russian army repulsed by the Western Allies and more than ten thousand Russian men killed in a single day. ‘Horrible slaughter!’ Tolstoy said to his diary. ‘It will weigh on the souls of many! Lord forgive them!’
Here was a completely futile waste of life. In 1812, Russians had died because Napoleon wanted to take their country over. In 1854, they were dying because of the incompetence of a small band of upper-class buffoons, with no particular aim in view. None of the battles of the Crimea need have happened.
After Inkerman, Tolstoy, who was stationed at a place called Kishinyov, applied for a transfer to Sebastopol itself and his request was granted. On his way, he fell in with British and French prisoners of war. He admired them. Physically and morally they seemed more impressive to him than their Russian counterparts.
Conditions in Sebastopol were appalling. He was only a week there on this visit and frequently got lost among the labyrinth of batteries. There were five hundred big-calibre guns facing the enemy to the south. Almost more than the military scale of the operation, Tolstoy was impressed by the spirit of the place. ‘There wasn’t so much heroism in the days of ancient Greece.’ The dying and the dead lay everywhere. Women and priests brought them water, sacrament, comfort. A dogged willingness to die rather than surrender had taken possession of them all. When Vice-Admiral Kornilov, one of the chief participants of the Siege, went round among the troops and asked if they were willing to die, there was something almost gleeful about the way the soldiers shouted back,
‘We’ll die, your Excellency, hurrah!’ Twenty-two thousand Russians had died already in the conflict and Kornilov, soon enough, was of their number.
But then again, on November 15, Tolstoy was withdrawn from Sebastopol to a small Tartar village called Eski-Simferopol, four miles away from Sebastopol. He spent the winter here and discovered among the smart Russian exiles an atmosphere almost surreal in its remoteness from the war. There was drinking, hunting, dancing, as at a Russian country houseparty in peacetime. And, most fatal attraction of all, there was gambling. Perhaps the consciousness that at any moment he might be sent into action and killed increased Tolstoy’s insane passion for cards. There would be an extraordinary procedure in which, after particularly heavy losses, he would make his confession to his fellow offcers, lament his folly, beat his breast. They had no idea whether he was serious or not. One thing was certain. The losses were serious. By January 1855, he had gambled away (shtoss was his particular game) all the money he owned, and a lot more besides. Then, on January 28, came the big crash. ‘Played shtoss for two days and nights. The result is understandable – the loss of everything – the Yasnaya Polyana house. I think there’s no point in writing – I’m so disgusted with myself that I’d like to forget about my existence. . . .’10
Dickens, Pushkin and Dostoyevsky have all given us glimpses of this self-destructive madness. Tolstoy, interestingly enough, writes very little about it. Nikolay Rostov’s stupidity over gambling in War and Peace was nothing to Tolstoy’s. He was compelled to go on playing until he had lost his birthright, the very house where he was born. The big house at Yasnaya Polyana was sold and transferred to another site to pay off all these card debts. When Tolstoy was to return there, it was not to the old memories, which in any case he did not have, of his parents, but a new world of his own invention. Was that part of the reason he gambled? The thrill of gambling, like that of religion, is precisely its offer of excitingly capricious rewards, or alternatively, annihilation. The real gambler may not want to be dispossessed, but on one level, he needs to be. ‘When shall I cease at last to lead a life without purpose or passion or to feel a deep wound in my heart and know of no means of healing it?’ he had asked his journal in November 1854.11
How was the month of February spent? He had now lost his house, and was in danger of losing everything. But throughout February he played and played. Two hundred roubles on February 8. Another seventy-five on February 12. Two hundred more at the beginning of March – all to Odakhovsky, who assures us in his memories of the game that the losses were only slight. At this period an ensign’s annual pay in the army of Nicholas I was two hundred and nine silver roubles.12
It was not the army of Nicholas I much longer. Alexander Herzen, the political exile, describes a morning in London in that spring of the Crimean War:
On the morning of the fourth of March I went as usual at eight o’clock into my study, opened The Times, read a dozen times and did not understand, did not dare to understand the grammatical sense of the words at the head of the news column: The Death of the Emperor of Russia. Hardly knowing what I was doing, I rushed with The Times in my hands into the dining-room; I looked for the children and the servants to tell them the great news, and with tears of joy in my eyes gave them the newspaper. . . . I felt as though several years had rolled off my shoulders. It was impossible to stay indoors. . . . I ordered champagne. . . . In the streets, on the Exchange, in the restaurants, people were talking of nothing but the death of Nicholas: I did not see but one man who did not breathe more easily from knowing that that sore was taken out of the eye of humanity, and did not rejoice that the oppressive tyrant in the big boots had at last returned to the clay. . . .13
Tolstoy, now stationed at Balbek, took the oath of allegiance to the new Tsar, the reforming Tsar, Alexander II, the man to whom liberals like Herzen looked in hope for an end to the autocracy, and a crushing of the bureaucratic power of the chinovniks, the secret terror of the ‘Third Division’, ancestor of today’s K.G.B. They could have no conception of the horrors which lay in store. As far as life in the Crimea was affected, it was still Nicholas I’s army, and his war. Shortly after they took the oath of allegiance, the men of the 3rd moved into Sebastopol itself. For Tolstoy there followed six months of close observation of war, and soldiering in earnest.
The Crimean was one of those wars, like the First World War in Europe, in which issues of great general principle between the nations become resolved into bloody and pointless quarrels over tiny little patches of land. It was a war which got no one anywhere; but the same could be said of the Siege of Troy. It is remarkable how much the Crimean War still – after a century in which there have been bigger wars, and more urgent wars – has its legendary power. For the British, as well as its strange legacy of woollen garments (cardigans and balaclavas being a rather sinister reminder of those frozen troops on the Inkerman heights), there is the saintly figure of Florence Nightingale, and one of the greatest celebrations of military defeat in English verse. For the Russians, there was the Siege of Sebastopol, an enterprise which called forth all their powers of endurance in the face of great agony, and the mingled pleasures of isolation from the rest of the world, and intense suffering in a totally worthless cause.
Admiral Kornilov began the formal defence of the fortress at Sebastopol with a religious procession, the clergy carrying banners, icons and crosses. The troops were all sprinkled with holy water. Religion and warfare, for the Holy Orthodox army, went hand in hand. It was part of a regimental commander’s duty to make sure that his men went to confession and received communion annually. A soldier, in one contemporary officer’s definition, is one ‘on whose powerful shoulders lies the obligation, dear to soul and heart, to defend the holy faith, the Tsar’s throne and native land; to strike down foreign foes and to wipe out domestic enemies. . . . A bad son of the Church can not be a son of the Fatherland.’14
Yet the piety of Russian officers did not make army life any easier for the men who served under them. One could as well have expected Lord Cardigan’s nominal membership of the Established Church to soften his love of military discipline. If one had to choose between serving in the British or Russian armies in the 1850s as an ordinary soldier, it is hard to know which was more horrible; but the Russians, just, have the edge on their enemies.
Nicholas I took particular pride in the fact that the death penalty, abolished in Russia by the Empress Elizabeth in the eighteenth century, had never been restored. It must have been a ‘fact’ of great comfort to the five Decembrists who were hanged in 1825. The army enforced discipline by means of the knout, and running the gauntlet. Once, very early in Nicholas I’s reign, when two Jews tried to escape the plague by running over the Turkish border, the Emperor wrote in his own hand, ‘send the guilty ones through one thousand men twelve times. God be thanked, there has been no death penalty with us, and I shall not introduce it.’15
This running the gauntlet meant walking between a file of one thousand men, each of whom was obliged to beat, club or kick the victim as he passed. The Jews who were trying to escape the plague in 1827 were thus sentenced to twelve thousand blows. Any man who refused to kick or beat his brother soldier as he passed would himself be given the same treatment. Running the gauntlet was a common form of punishment in the Russian army until the end of the ancien régime. One of the bitterest and most brilliant short stories of Tolstoy’s last period, After the Ball, describes it happening in our century.
A contemporary officer of Tolstoy’s in 1855 describes some of the other routine punishments which a soldier might expect. ‘For a mistake in drill to thrash the soldier with the scabbard or the iron ramrod, so that they carry him off to the lazaret [punishment block] on his cloak – that meant nothing. To knock out some of his teeth with the guard of the sabre so that the soldier should look more cheerfully at his commander and hold his head higher, or to bore his back with the sabre so that the soldier throws his chest out – this means to know posture and how to trai
n a soldier. If the soldier after such beatings coughs and spits blood, then he is glad. “Glory to God, your honour; in the autumn they will assign me to the unit.”’16
Tolstoy does not, in his journals, note any particular disapproval of the way in which the army conducted discipline. It is true that many soldiers are reported as having been glad to be posted to Sebastopol, whose hardships were nothing compared to the parade ground at home. But the evidence would suggest that Tolstoy was every inch an officer of his time. Although, in fits of melancholy, he would sit in the back yard with serfs, he never mingled with his own soldiers. His own men were awkward with him, and he with them. It required in him, Odakhovsky tells us, courage to go up to a man and tell him that his tunic was unbuttoned. He was revolted by his soldiers, and often beat them in fits of anger. The fastidiousness of one side of his nature hated the coarseness of army speech. Indeed, in the mess, he invented meaningless ‘cuss’ words to replace the filth and profanities of ordinary swear words. Yet, when he left them, his replacement learnt from his troops that there had never been such a swearer as Count Tolstoy.17
The contradictions in his own nature were as ridiculously marked, and as obvious to Tolstoy himself, as the contradictions in the world. Is it any wonder, as he watched the priests sprinkling the soldiers with holy water and encouraging them to kill their fellow men, that Tolstoy yearned for some form of Christianity which had cut loose from the Church? In March 1855 a conversation in the mess about religion set his mind once more on a religious bent. He went to confession, received communion, and that day he felt inspired ‘with a great idea, a stupendous idea, to the realisation of which I feel capable of devoting my life. This idea is the founding of a new religion appropriate to the stage of development of mankind – the religion of Christ but purged of beliefs and mysticism, a practical religion, not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth.’18
