loc3735
strange to think of everyone celebrating the march into war. But nobody knew how terrible it was, and certainly not how terrible it would be.
loc3735
strange to think of everyone celebrating the march into war. But nobody knew how terrible it was, and certainly not how terrible it would be.
loc3666
“As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peacetime, that they belonged together.”
loc3634
“You can hang me to this lamp post if the Germans march into Belgium.”
loc3618
The Belgian Army, peculiar to just them, used dogs to draw carts carrying the machine guns.
“Why should we be concerned with these constant skirmishes with Serbia which, as we all knew, arose out of some commercial treaties concerned with the export of Hungarian pigs?” He really had no idea, did he.
loc3594
Interesting how the news of the death of Franz Ferdinand did not arouse much mourning since he was not well liked anyway.
loc3496
He was disturbed how quickly the film crowd turned to hate and booing at the one second sight of the Kaiser, and then they all went back to cheering for Chaplin.
loc3461
Alfred Redl sure was quite the spy. And for so long, too. 10 years.
loc3402
(On the tensions between nations) “The electric crackling of an invisible friction ran through the timbers.” (Telegraph lines, diplomatic communications, propaganda orders)
263of364
“this melancholy decision” is, I suppose, one way to word the abandonment of Moscow. The emperor is not really a man of any great action, is he. I suppose Tolstoy is showing us that the further up the privileged food-chain we climb, the more useless everyone becomes. While Pierre runs around saving children and beating up brigands, the rich ebb and flow to the whim of an impotent figurehead. Typical.
262of364
BOOK 12
Like chapter 1 of book 1, we’re back with Anna Pavlovna and her fake court of fake people, Vasili Kuragin chief among them while his daughter is having an abortion from her other husband. All this while real men await their death on the battlefield all those miles away near Moscow.
“I have a favorable presentiment!”, how out of touch they all are even though they act as if they really know.
261of364
In a broader context Pierre is the good of the Russian people, he represents the upper-class that actually fulfills it’s responsibility by saving the child and defending the beautiful Armenian girl’s honor. When he says the little girl is his daughter he is not speaking as Pierre, but as Russia herself. And unlike a “hero” in war (like petty Berg), he is a real hero, selfless, honorable,
260of364
You could say Pierre is always forced into taking some sort of action, but really it’s his nature that drives him, even if he is unaware how or why. He wakes up in the morning to kill Napoleon and instead saves a child from a burning building. He is not conscious of his actions, he’s not a deliberate man, he, like Natasha, just act on instinct (like the wolf or the fox).