It is time for the hurricane of war to burst once more upon these vitiated minds. The fatherland, Russia, is invaded. Then comes the day of Borodino, with its solemn majesty. Enmities are effaced. Dologhov embraces his enemy Pierre. Andrei, wounded, weeps for pity and compassion over the misery of the man whom he most hated, Anatol Kuraguin, his neighbour in the ambulance. The unity of hearts is accomplished; unity in passionate sacrifice to the country and submission to the divine laws. "To accept the frightful necessity of war, seriously and austerely.... To human liberty, war is the most painful act of submission to the divine laws. Simplicity of heart consists in submission to the will of God." The soul of the Russian people and its submission to Destiny are incarnated in the person of the commander-in-chief, Kutuzov. "This old man, who has no passions left, but only experience, the result of the passions, and in whom intelligence, which is intended to group together facts and to draw from them conclusions, is replaced by a philosophical contemplation of events, devises nothing and undertakes nothing; but he listens to and remembers everything; he knows how to profit by it at the right moment; he will hinder nothing that is of use, he will permit nothing harmful. He sees on the faces of his troops that inexpressible force which is known as the will to conquer; it is latent victory. He admits something more powerful than his own will: the inevitable march of the facts which pass before his eyes; he sees them, he follows them, and he is able mentally to stand aloof." In short, he has the heart of a Russian. This fatalism of the Russian people, calmly heroic, is personified also in the poor moujik, Platon Karatayev, simple, pious, and resigned, with his kindly patient smile in suffering and in death. Through suffering and experience, above the ruins of their country, after the horrors of its agony, Pierre and Andrei, the two heroes of the book, attain, through love and faith, to the moral deliverance and the mystic joy by which they behold God living. Tolstoy does not stop here. The epilogue, of which the action passes in 1820, deals with the transition from one age to another: from one Napoleonic era to the era of the Decembrists. It produces an impression of continuity, and of the resumption of life. Instead of commencing and ending in the midst of a crisis, Tolstoy finishes, as he began, at the moment when a great wave has spent itself, while that following it is gathering itself together. Already we obtain a glimpse of the heroes to be, of the conflicts which will ensue between them, and of the dead who are born again in the living.[11]