Pierre was mute because he was incapable of articulating a word. Davoust was not to Pierre simply a French general; to Pierre, Davoust was a man notorious for his cruelty. Looking at the cold face of Davoust, which, like a stern teacher, seemed to consent for a time to have patience and await a reply, Pierre felt that every second of delay might cost him his life. But he did not know what to say. To say the same as he had said at the first examination he did not dare; to disclose his name and his position would be both dangerous and shameful. Pierre stood mute. But before he had time to come to any decision, Davoust raised his head, thrust his spectacles up on his forehead, screwed up his eyes, and looked intently at Pierre.
“I know this man,” he said, in a frigid, measured tone, obviously reckoning on frightening Pierre. The chill that had been running down Pierre’s back seemed to clutch his head in a vice.
“General, you cannot know me, I have never seen you.”
“It is a Russian spy,” Davoust interrupted, addressing another general in the room, whom Pierre had not noticed. And Davoust turned away. With an unexpected thrill in his voice, Pierre began speaking with sudden rapidity.
“Non, monseigneur,” he said, suddenly recalling that Davoust was a duke, “you could not know me. I am a militia officer, and I have not quitted Moscow.”
“Your name？” repeated Davoust.
“Bezuhov.”
“What proof is there that you are not lying？”
“Monseigneur！” cried Pierre in a voice not of offence but of supplication.
Davoust lifted his eyes and looked intently at Pierre. For several seconds they looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre. In that glance, apart from all circumstances of warfare and of judgment, human relations arose between these two men. Both of them in that one instant were vaguely aware of an immense number of different things, and knew that they were both children of humanity, that they were brothers.
At the first glance when Davoust raised his head from his memorandum, where men’s lives and doings were marked off by numbers, Pierre was only a circumstance, and Davoust could have shot him with no sense of an evil deed on his conscience; but now he saw in him a man. He pondered an instant.
“How will you prove to me the truth of what you say？” said Davoust coldly.
Pierre thought of Ramballe, and mentioned his name and regiment and the street and house where he could be found.
“You are not what you say,” Davoust said again.
In a trembling, breaking voice, Pierre began to bring forward proofs of the truth of his testimony.
But at that moment an adjutant came in and said something to Davoust.
Davoust beamed at the news the adjutant brought him, and began buttoning up his uniform. Apparently he had completely forgotten about Pierre. When an adjutant reminded him of the prisoner, he nodded in Pierre’s direction with a frown, and told them to take him away. But where were they to take him—Pierre did not know： whether back to the shed or the place prepared for their execution which his companions had pointed out to him as they passed through the Virgin’s Meadow.
He turned his head and saw that the adjutant was repeating some question.
“Yes, of course！” said Davoust. But what that “yes” meant, Pierre could not tell.
Pierre did not remember how or where he went, and how long he was going. In a condition of complete stupefaction and bewilderment, seeing nothing around him, he moved his legs in company with the others till they all stopped, and he stopped.
There was one idea all this time in Pierre’s head. It was the question： Who, who was it really that was condemning him to death？ It was not the men who had questioned him at the first examination; of them not one would or obviously could do so. It was not Davoust, who had looked at him in such a human fashion. In another minute Davoust would have understood that they were doing wrong, but the adjutant who had come in at that moment had prevented it. And that adjutant had obviously had no evil intent, but he might have stayed away. Who was it, after all, who was punishing him, killing him, taking his life—his, Pierre’s, with all his memories, his strivings, his hopes, and his ideas？ Who was doing it？ And Pierre felt that it was no one’s doing. It was discipline, and the concatenation of circumstances. Some sort of discipline was killing him, Pierre, robbing him of life, of all, annihilating him.