his devotion helps her through the darkest hours of her life. It is only fitting that, in the end, Natasha should make him happy. Like Prince Andrei, Pierre finds his moral regeneration in war, but in a different way; he does not enter active service nor is he wounded, but he views other aspects of the great tragedy; he is present at the {42} burning of Moscow, he is captured by the French, and taken as prisoner on their terrible retreat. It is the heroism of the common man, the beauty and nobility of suffering finely borne, which redeem Pierre from the depression which has darkened his mind and which teach him the true meaning of life. He is especially influenced by one man--the peasant soldier Platon Karatayef--one of Tolstoy's greatest creations. Platon is not clever nor handsome, his whole life has been privation, but he is love itself, kind and sweet to all men. Most tragic is his fate! The French shoot those of the Russian prisoners who cannot keep up with the march, and Pierre, seeing his friend failing, cannot endure the thought of what must happen and keeps away. One morning he sees Platon, not attempting to walk, but sitting beneath a tree with a calm and radiantly happy expression; he gives a beseeching glance to Pierre, but Pierre turns his back and walks off. Shortly afterwards there is heard the sound of a gunshot, two French soldiers pass with guilty faces, and there is the melancholy howling of Karatayef's dog. Platon's fate is one of the means Tolstoy uses to drive home his lesson of the immense futility of war; it is to the last degree abominable that this most loving and beautiful nature, wholly guiltless, should be murdered in cold blood; even a dog has the sense to lament such a deed. But the moral of this wonderful nature is not lost upon Pierre; he finds in it "the meaning of life," the clue which he has all along been seeking. As Pierre's sufferings increase so does his heart grow lighter; he learns the joy of endurance and the pleasure even of anguish, and all things are less grievous than he would have thought.