After being arrested, Pierre is detained with other suspected Russian incendiaries for some days and questioned while the French soldiers guarding the prison await a decision from a French Marshal.
After being arrested, Pierre is detained with other suspected Russian incendiaries for some days and questioned while the French soldiers guarding the prison await a decision from a French Marshal.
Book 12, Chapter 9
After being arrested, Pierre is detained with other suspected Russian incendiaries for some days and questioned while the French soldiers guarding the prison await a decision from a French Marshal.
Summary:
Pierre is held in custody for about ten days while they await a decision from a French Marshall. In the guardhouse, Pierre does not give his name, but he stands out as an upper class person who speaks French very well. The other prisoners are from the lower classes. The police suspect he and the other prisoners are incendiaries. When interviewing the prisoners, the police examiners seem interested in only finding incriminating evidence against them. Once, when after four days they were being moved to a different house, the prisoners see fires all around them but don’t understand the significance of these fires. The soldiers holding them prisoner are awaiting a decision which might come any day from the marshal. These first days in captivity, while the prisoners were awaiting a second examination, were the hardest of all for Pierre.
quote from the chapter:
And so, as they had the power and wish to inculpate him, this expedient of an inquiry and trial seemed unnecessary. It was evident that any answer would lead to conviction. When asked what he was doing when he was arrested, Pierre replied in a rather tragic manner that he was restoring to its parents a child he had saved from the flames. Why had he fought the marauder? Pierre answered that he was protecting a woman, and that to protect a woman who was being insulted was the duty of every man; that… They interrupted him, for this was not to the point. Why was he in the yard of a burning house where witnesses had seen him? He replied that he had gone out to see what was happening in Moscow. Again they interrupted him: they had not asked where he was going, but why he was found near the fire? Who was he? they asked, repeating their first question, which he had declined to answer. Again he replied that he could not answer it.
Put that down, that’s bad… very bad, sternly remarked the general with the white mustache and red flushed face.
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