where he had been told that the common prisoners were camping. He wanted to talk to them. On the road a French sentinel stopped him and bade him go back.

Pierre did go back, but not to the camp-fire where his companions were, but to an unharnessed waggon where there was nobody. Tucking his legs up under him, and dropping his head, he sat down on the cold ground against the waggon wheel, and sat there a long while motionless, thinking. More than an hour passed by. No one disturbed Pierre. Suddenly he burst into such a loud roar of his fat, good-humoured laughter, that men looked round on every side in astonishment at this strange and obviously solitary laughter. “Ha, ha, ha!” laughed Pierre. And he talked aloud to himself. “The soldier did not let me pass. They have taken me—shut me up. They keep me prisoner. Who is ‘me’? Me? Me—my immortal soul! ha, ha, ha! … Ha, ha, ha! …” he laughed, with the tears starting into his eyes.

A man got up and came to see what this strange, big man was laughing at all by himself. Pierre left off laughing, got up, walked away from the inquisitive intruder, and looked about him.

The immense, endless bivouac, which had been full of the sound of crackling fires and men talking, had sunk to rest; the red camp-fires burnt low and dim. High overhead in the lucid sky stood the full moon. Forests and fields, that before could not be seen beyond the camp, came into view now in the distance. And beyond those fields and forests could be seen the bright, shifting, alluring, boundless distance. Pierre glanced at the sky, at the far-away, twinkling stars. “And all that is mine, and all that is in me, and all that is I!” thought Pierre. “And all this they caught and shut up in a shed closed in with boards!” He smiled and went to lie down to sleep beside his companions.