here! For whom then is the trial intended? The Fatherland, the destruction of Moscow! And tomorrow I shall be killed, perhaps not even by a Frenchman but by one of our own men, by a soldier discharging a musket close to my ear as one of them did yesterday, and the French will come and take me by head and heels and fling me into a hole that I may not stink under their noses, and new conditions of life will arise, which will seem quite ordinary to others and about which I shall know nothing. I shall not exist. …”
He looked at the row of birches shining in the sunshine, with their motionless green and yellow foliage and white bark. > “To die … to be killed tomorrow … That I should not exist … That all this should still be,