The night before his liberation, Pierre has a dream whose images are all of Platon Karataev. Life is God, his dream tells him, and"to love life is to love God. The hardest and the most blessed thing is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved suffering." That morning of Pierre's freedom is the funeral day for Petya Rostov.
With the onset of frost in late October, the French retreat begins to assume its tragic aspect. Men die from freezing, exhaustion, and starvation. Owing to the incredible rapidity of the desperate flight, the Russians can rarely catch their enemy. Neither army knows where the other is and they often meet by chance. The leaders flee even faster than their men. Still pretending they care for the army, the generals plan battles and give orders, although they mostly care for self-survival. The greatness of Napoleon, for his historians, is still undiminished even as he rides off in his closed carriage with furs wrapped around him. So is the greatness of General Ney, who runs off leaving nine-tenths of his men and all his artillery behind."And it never enters anyone's head," editorializes Tolstoy,"that to admit a greatness immeasurable by the rule of right and wrong is but to accept one's own nothingness and immeasurable littleness."
