Prince Andrei enters military service; he becomes aide-de-camp to Kutuzof, and Tolstoy thus has an opportunity of showing us the whole course of the campaign from a really intimate point of view. The great passion of Prince Andrei's life is ambition--the desire for glory--and he considers war as being essentially a means to honour; he is present throughout the battle of Austerlitz, where his calm, cool courage wins him the highest commendations. But the experience changes all his views of life. In the first place he realises how seldom the rewards of courage go to the really deserving. During the engagement at the Enns the honours of the day really rest with an obscure artillery officer named Tushin, who keeps his battery firing upon the French, and at the critical moment covers the Russian retreat; Tushin's gunners are almost annihilated, but, with the most heroic courage, the battery stick to their {38} task and the army is saved. Tushin himself is a modest and unassuming man, and his superiors are so confused that they not only fail to recognise his achievement, but are about to reprimand him severely for losing some of his guns; Prince Andrei's indignant protest that this man has saved the army spares Tushin the reprimand, but his superiors are too hopelessly bewildered to recognise the truth. The real hero of the day is thus a man who gains nothing--not a single reward or honour--and is only too thankful to escape blame. At Austerlitz, when the Russian army are broken and in flight, Prince Andrei attempts to save the day; he stems the tide of the fugitives, seizes the flag as it falls from the hand of a dying officer, and leads the whole battalion against a French battery; he is shot down with the flag still in his hand; he believes himself fatally wounded and, as he sinks into unconsciousness, realises suddenly the emptiness of all he has striven for and the beauty of that sweet and profound peace which lies at the heart of the world, but which, until that moment of marvellous insight---the insight given by the near approach of death--he had never even seen. "He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle between the artilleryman and the Frenchman ended, and anxious to know whether or not the red-headed artillerist was killed, and the cannon saved or captured. But he could see nothing of it. Over him, he could see nothing except the sky, the lofty sky, no longer clear but still immeasurably lofty and with light grey clouds slowly wandering over it. "'How still, calm, and solemn! How entirely different from when I was running,' said Prince Andrei to himself. 'It was not so when we were all running and shouting and fighting.... How is it that I never saw before this lofty sky? And how glad I am that I have learned to know it at last. Yes! all is empty, all is deception, except these infinite heavens. Nothing, nothing at all, beside! And even that is nothing but silence and peace! And thank God!'" {39}