THE REALITIES OF WAR.

Woodville Examiner, Volume VII, Issue 659, 30 January 1891, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE REALITIES OF WAR.

(macmillan’s magazine.)

Count Tolstoi lays it down almost as an axiom that courage is in a great measure due to self-respect, and ho does so regretfully. His meaning apparently is that the self-constraint which a sensitive young man exercises with infinite difficulty, when ho is almost drawn out of himself by strange terrors, is due to the feeling that, even if the eyes of others are not on him, those of his second self are at least on the watch. The lower and grosser nature in each aud every one will strive for the mastery and must he battled down. At moments the youug soldier gives way, hursts into tears, looks yearningly for shelter, and accuses himself of cowardice ; but even as he does so he is conscious that the epithet is undeserved, and that he would let no one else so much as breathe it. When he finds himself actually in front of the enemy, he feel as Nicholas Rostow did, “ that great aud unspeakable joy in the imminence of theattack of which his comradeshadso oftentold him, * Ah! if it could but come more quickly, morequickly,’he murmurs. (“ PeaceandWar,” Vol, 1.) Such a man soon ceases to bow to every shell as if it were an old acquaintance ; but he is none the less afraid of them, for they represent to him the possible extinction of what is pleasant to him above all things —life. Few there are, who, like “ junker Viang” (Sebastopol, August, 1855), are so unstrung that they can make no effort of self-restraint; and even he, if ho had a womanly horror of physical ills, had a love like that of a woman for the young Volodia Kozeltzoff, which at the last steeled his heart and gave a more than natural strengh to his arm. Perhaps the most complete study, as it is certainly the most pathetic, is thatof theyoung Kozeltzoff himself. He is a mere boy, fresh from a military school, eager for_ glory and advancement, and full of patriotic enthusiasm. We are introduced to him at a wayside inn some few hours out of Sebastopol, where he is found by his elder brother who has been absent, wounded, and is on his way to rejoin his own regiment. Michel, the elder, is for going at once. “ ‘ Well, you had better get your things together,’ he says, ‘ and we wifi, start.’ The younger brother reddened and looked confused. ‘ For Sebastopol at once ?’ he asked at length. . . . ‘To go straight there,’ he thinks, ‘to expose myself to bombs ; it is terrible. After all, does it matter whether I go to-day or later? at any rate, I have my brother.’” (Sebastopol, August, 1865.) The idea of danger hid not so much as occurred to him before. Arrived in Sebastopol he is buoyed up by a sense of his importance as one of the defenders of a town on which the eyes of the world are fixed. He and his brother have to go their different ways, and he puts himself under the guidance of a soldier-servant. They arrive at the open ground between the town and the fortifications, and the servant having pointed out the position of the battery to him, goes back. Kozeltzoff, alone for the first time, with the shells whistling over his head in the chilly dusk, feels his heart sinking. “ The sensation of being abandoned in the faceof danger, in the face of death, as he believed, weighed on his heart with the icy coldness of stone ; he looked about him to see if he was observed, and taking his head between his hands, murmured in a voice which was broken by fright, ‘ My God ! is it true that I am a despicable coward ! a craven! and but a little while since I dreamed of dying for my country, for the Czar, and gloried in it.’” That night he had little sleep; the whizzing of the shells overheard waa incessant, every moment he expected the house would bo struck by one of them, or that the enemy would break into it; the measured tread of the colonel as ha paced to and fro in the room above comforted him but little. He welcomes the morning with rapture. The day is spent with his brother officers, whose kindness is reassuring, and in the evening it devolves upon him to go with a small company of soldiers to serve some mortars in a redoubt on the Malakoff, The acute stage of fright has passed ; the consciousness that others are nervous serves to make him the more firm. Every hour of a long night »f inaction finds him more at his ease. The next morning he and his men ate summoned to the battery. Once at work all trace of terror is gone. A hot cannonade is kept up on both sides.| In his excitement he mounts gaily on the rampart as he gives his orders. The captain, who has been eight months on the bastion, and has little enthusiam left in him, ( smiles in spite ef himself, at the bright and fearless boy. A review of Count Tolstoi’s work in the field of Realism would be incomplete without a reference to his treatment of the soldier's death, and the effect on a man of the conviction of its near approach. His view on this part of the subject, so far as can he gathered—and the death of the elder Kozeltzoff is much to the point—is that the consciousness of duty done, of death braved in a good cause, lifts an apparently mean character out of itself, and givee it a nobility and unselfishness before unknown to it. So it waa with Kozeltzoff, a man at whose hands one would not have looked for self-sacrifice, but who, when it was exacted of him, was happy that it should be so. The most striking death scene, however artistically indefensible the rude grasp which the novelist lays on so airy and fleeting a gossamer as a man’s reflections ill the instant of dissolution— Aid fmt, aut veniet, nihil eslpresentis in ilia , quotes Montaigne—is that of Praskoukin. Mikhailoff and Proskoukin are together when the bomb is seen coming directly at them. “Down!” cries someone, aud they fall to the eaith as the bomb strikes the ground somewhere near them. It is from this pomt that Praskoukin’s reflections are given us—the fruit of the brief moment between the falling and the bursting of the messenger of death. The strange medley of thoughts and fancies, forgotten memories of trivial incidents recurring and mixed up with the awful dread of the moment, and with calculations as to the chance of his being hit, and of the expediency of having chloroform if an operation becomes necessary—all this is told in a masterly way. The bomb explodes, a red glare burns in his eyes, and he is conscious of receiving a terrible blow in his chest. Ho rises to his feet, staggerc, and falls. “ God he praised, I am onlybruised,” he thinks. He seems to sea soldiers coming and fears that they will trample on him ; his hands and feet are as though bound; he tries to say, “ Lift me,” but instead of the words comes a groan so terrible that it strikes him with horror; a moment, and he is deadkilled almost on the instant by a shell received full in the chest. Such is war, in the words of one who has fought, and the impression left by the novelist is at one with the effect of the painter’s handiwork. If it is sombre, it is because war in its essence is sombre, however brilliant the interludes. If the narrative does not deal in heroics, it is because it has to do with flesh and blood, with humanity, and with the creatures of fancy.