All Nature seemed filled with peace-giving power and beauty.

Is there not room enough for men to live in peace in this magnificent world, under this infinite starry sky? How is it that wrath, vengeance, or the lust to kill their fellow men can persist in the soul of man in the midst of this entrancing Nature? Everything evil in the heart of man ought, one would think, to vanish in contact with Nature, in which beauty and goodness find their most direct expression.

War? What an incomprehensible phenomenon! When reason asks itself, is it just? is it necessary?, an internal voice always answers no. Only the permanence of this unnatural phenomenon makes it natural, and only the instinct for self-preservation makes it just.

Who would doubt that, in the war between the Russians and the mountain people, justice, stemming from the instinct for self-preservation, is on our side? If not for this war, what would protect all our neighboring rich and enlightened Russian territories from robbery, murder, and raids by savage and warlike peoples? But let us consider two particular people.

Who has the instinct for self-preservation and, consequently, justice on his side? Is it on the side of some pauper named Jemi who, hearing of the approach of the Russians, swears, takes his old rifle from the wall, and, with three or four rounds that he doesn’t intend to waste, runs to meet the giaours? Of Jemi, who has seen how the Russians keep advancing toward his planted field, which they will trample, toward his hut, which they will burn down, and toward the ravine where his mother, wife, and family, trembling with fear, are hiding? Who thinks that they will take everything from him—everything that gives him happiness? Who, full of impotent rage, utters a cry of despair, tears off his tattered homespun coat, flings his rifle to the ground, pulls his cap down over his brows and, singing his death song, hurls himself headlong against the bayonets of the Russians with only his dagger in his hand?

Is justice on his side, or on the side of the officer from the general’s staff who sings French songs so well just as he passes us? Back in Russia he has a family, relatives, friends, serfs, and responsibilities to them, he has no cause or desire to fight with the mountain people, but he has come to the Caucasus . . . to show how brave he is! Or is it on the side of an aide-de-camp I know, who wants only to attain the rank of captain and a cushy job, and has therefore become an enemy of the mountain people?

 

—From an early draft of “The Raid: A Volunteer’s Story,” written 150 years ago, in 1852, by the twenty-four-year-old army officer Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy