[15] While you are fancying me exposed to all the dangers of war, I have not yet smelt Turkish powder, but am very quietly at Bucharest, strolling about, making music, and eating ices. In fact, all this time, except for two weeks I spent at Oltenitza, where I was attached to a battery, and one week I passed making excursions in Moldavia Wallachia and Bessarabia by order of General Serzhpoutóvsky, on whose staff I now am by special appointment, I have been at Bucharest; and to speak frankly, the rather dissipated, quite idle and very expensive kind of life that I lead here, displeases me very much. Formerly it was the service that kept me here; but now for three weeks I have been kept here by a fever caught during my journey, but from which, thank God, I have for the present recovered sufficiently to be able in two or three days' time to rejoin my General, who is in camp near Silistria. Apropos of my General, he appears to be a very fine fellow, and though we know each other very slightly, seems well disposed toward me. What is also agreeable is that his staff consists for the most part of gentlemen. We shall find Tolstoy modifying this opinion, a little later on; but it is worth noting that at this time he was fully alive to the superiority of '_gens comme il faut_,' and that his depreciation of them in later years may have been partly a reaction from a previous over-valuation. By June 1854 the military and political situation was as follows. The Russians had advanced through Moldavia and Wallachia to the Danube, had crossed that river, and were besieging Silistria. Austria, supporting the other great powers, had massed a powerful army on the Turkish frontier, and a glance at the map of Europe will show that the Russian army, far removed from its base, was in imminent danger of being cut off by the Austrians, who peremptorily summoned Russia to evacuate the Principalities, and on 14th June concluded a formal alliance with the Porte. These circumstances explain the sudden abandonment of the siege of Silistria mentioned in the following letter, addressed by Leo Tolstoy to his Aunt Tatiána and to his brother Nicholas conjointly; though when he wrote it, the causes which produced the result he described were a mystery to him.