3 - Zones
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
Summary
In his account of the Battle of Schön Graben, Tolstoy goes beyond his usual practice of supplying details of military topography. He establishes a gap – ‘unapproachable and intangible’ – of some seven hundred yards between the French and Russian armies and configures it as a field of uncertainty, as curiously inviting as it is forbidding:
‘One step beyond that line, which is like the bourne dividing the living from the dead, lies the Unknown of suffering and death. And what is there? Who is there? There beyond that field, beyond that tree, that roof gleaming in the sun? No one knows, but who does not long to know? You fear to cross that line, yet you long to cross it; and you know that sooner or later it will have to be crossed and you will find out what lies there on the other side of the line, just as you will inevitably have to learn what lies the other side of death. But you are strong, healthy, cheerful and excited, and surrounded by other men just as full of health and exuberant spirits.’ Such are the sensations, if not the actual thoughts of every man who finds himself confronted by the enemy, and these feelings lend a singular vividness and happy distinctness of impression to everything that takes place at such moments.
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- Authoring WarThe Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq, pp. 83 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011