Anticipating the Attack

Better, scarier than the battle scenes is the set of chapters in which the characters anticipate the invasion of the French army. The idiotic and cruel Prince Volkonsky cannot comprehend the information he's receiving. He insists that the French will be stopped at the Polish border, when in fact that are well inside of Russia and about 40 miles from his estate. Part of it's his pride and ill temper, bossing everyone around, thinking he knows it all (just because he's wealthy, a prince). Part, we also learn, is his senility - he seems to be thinking of some previous war (not sure which, Franco-Prussian?) in which he served. With about a thousand contradictory and confusing orders, he sends a servant off to the nearest city to the west, Smolensk, where the servant (Apotokych?) finds a city in near-panic (except for innkeeper, who beats his wife when she wants to flee). You can hear the cannons and the gunfire off in the distance, and everyone's packing belongings onto carts and heading west, just ahead of the invading army. Hopeless, really. Some destruction and pillaging going on, so that the French will find fewer supplies - but the people are pretty much conceding the people to the French. Meanwhile, the generals wrote to the governor of the province that the Russian armies will defend the city to the last man. Already a lie, as the armies couldn't hold the French and maybe didn't even try to do so. It shows that the words of the leaders are meaningless, pointless - a facade, just like so much of their lives, the endless balls and operas and clubs and duels over points of honor, while the French are invading and people all around them, the serfs, are suffering and dying. This is the darkest part of the book.