Rather, I remember a scene from Tolstoy’s War and Peace , one I had not thought of in years. It is a scene wherein a character, Prince Andrei, suffers what is perhaps a mortal wound in the historical “Battle of the Three Emperors” in 1805 while fighting on the side of the Russians against his idol Napoleon:

"What is it? Am I falling? Are my legs

... See more

The foul smell was still in his nostrils. The stench of death stuck with him. In the other war, as the bodies of friend and foe alike rotted in no man’s land, he had breathed it in for months. Sometimes, the corpses ended up becoming part of the trenches. But what the baron had seen in the woods was different. It was not war. It was something

... See more

the view that anyone who gave him a hard time would probably be dead today or tomorrow, or by next month at the latest. Not that this was a particularly pleasant notion, but it was an accurate one, and each citizen had to live under the shadow of this understanding. The inhabitants of the city regarded everyone they saw as not so much “alive” as

... See more