《War And Peace》　Book15 　CHAPTER XII
　　　　by Leo Tolstoy

As is generally the case, Pierre only felt the full strain of the physical
hardships and privations he had suffered as a prisoner, when they were over.
After he had been rescued, he went to Orel, and two days after getting there, as
he was preparing to start for Kiev, he fell ill and spent three months laid up
at Orel. He was suffering, so the doctors said, from a bilious fever. Although
they treated him by letting blood and giving him drugs, he recovered.

Everything that had happened to Pierre from the time of his rescue up to his
illness had left hardly any impression on his mind. He had only a memory of dark
grey weather, sometimes rainy and sometimes sunshiny, of internal physical
aches, of pain in his feet and his side. He remembered a general impression of
the misery and suffering of men, remembered the worrying curiosity of officers
and generals, who questioned him about his imprisonment, the trouble he had to
get horses and a conveyance; and more than all he remembered his own dullness of
thought and of feeling all that time.

On the day of his rescue he saw the dead body of Petya Rostov. The same day
he learned that Prince Andrey had lived for more than a month after the battle
of Borodino, and had only a short time before died at Yaroslavl in the Rostovs'
house. The same day Denisov, who had told Pierre this piece of news, happened to
allude in conversation to the death of Ellen, supposing Pierre to have been long
aware of it. All this had at the time seemed to Pierre only strange. He felt
that he could not take in all the bearings of these facts. He was at the time
simply in haste to get away from these places where men were slaughtering each
other to some quiet refuge where he might rest and recover his faculties, and
think over all the new strange things he had learned.

But as soon as he reached Orel, he fell ill. On coming to himself after his
illness, Pierre saw waiting on him two of his servants, Terenty and Vaska, who
had come from Moscow, and the eldest of his cousins, who was staying at Pierre's
estate in Elets, and hearing of his rescue and his illness had come to nurse
him.

During his convalescence Pierre could only gradually recover from the
impressions of the last few months, which had become habitual. Only by degrees
could he become accustomed to the idea that there was no one to drive him on
to-morrow, that no one would take his warm bed from him, and that he was quite
sure of getting his dinner, and tea, and supper. But for a long while afterwards
he was always in his dreams surrounded by his conditions as a prisoner.

And only in the same gradual way did Pierre grasp the meaning of the news he
had heard since his escape: of the death of Prince Andrey, of the death of his
wife, and of the overthrow of the French.

The joyful sense of freedom-that full, inalienable freedom inherent in man,
of which he had first had a consciousness at the first halting-place outside
Moscow-filled Pierre's soul during his convalescence. He was surprised that this
inner freedom, independent as it was of all external circumstances, was now as
it were decked out in a luxury, a superfluity of external freedom. He was alone
in a strange town without acquaintances. No one made any demands on him; no one
sent him anywhere. He had all he wanted; the thought of his wife, that had in
old days been a continual torture to him, was no more, since she herself was no
more.

"Ah, how happy I am! how splendid it is!" he said to himself, when a cleanly
covered table was moved up to him, with savoury-smelling broth, or when he got
into his soft, clean bed at night, or when the thought struck him that his wife
and the French were no more. "Ah, how good it is! how splendid!" And from old
habit he asked himself the question, "Well, and what then? what am I going to
do?" And at once he answered himself: "I am going to live. Ah, how splendid it
is!"

What had worried him in old days, what he had always been seeking to solve,
the question of the object of life, did not exist for him now. That seeking for
an object in life was over for him now; and it was not fortuitously or
temporarily that it was over. He felt that there was no such object, and could
not be. And it was just the absence of an object that gave him that complete and
joyful sense of freedom that at this time made his happiness.

He could seek no object in life now, because now he had faith-not faith in
any sort of principles, or words, or ideas, but faith in a living, ever-palpable
God. In old days he had sought Him in the aims he set before himself. That
search for an object in life had been only a seeking after God; and all at once
in his captivity he had come to know, not through words or arguments, but by his
own immediate feeling, what his old nurse had told him long before; that God is
here, and everywhere. In his captivity he had come to see that the God in
Karataev was grander, more infinite, and more unfathomable than the Architect of
the Universe recognised by the masons. He felt like a man who finds what he has
sought at his feet, when he has been straining his eyes to seek it in the
distance. All his life he had been looking far away over the heads of all around
him, while he need not have strained his eyes, but had only to look in front of
him.

In old days he had been unable to see the great, the unfathomable, and the
infinite in anything. He had only felt that it must be somewhere, and had been
seeking it. In everything near and comprehensible, he had seen only what was
limited, petty, everyday, and meaningless. He had armed himself with the
telescope of intellect, and gazed far away into the distance, where that petty,
everyday world, hidden in the mists of distance, had seemed to him great and
infinite, simply because it was not clearly seen. Such had been European life,
politics, freemasonry, philosophy, and philanthropy in his eyes. But even then,
in moments which he had looked on as times of weakness, his thought had
penetrated even to these remote objects, and then he had seen in them the same
pettiness, the same ordinariness and meaninglessness.

Now he had learnt to see the great, the eternal, and the infinite in
everything; and naturally therefore, in order to see it, to revel in its
contemplation, he flung aside the telescope through which he had hitherto been
gazing over men's heads, and looked joyfully at the ever-changing, ever grand,
unfathomable, and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked at it, the
calmer and happier he was. The terrible question that had shattered all his
intellectual edifices in old days, the question: What for? had no existence for
him now. To that question, What for? he had now always ready in his soul the
simple answer: Because there is a God, that God without whom not one hair of a
man's head falls.