Nikolai Rostov turned away and, as if searching for something, gazed into the distance, at the waters of the Danube, at the sky, and at the sun. How beautiful the sky looked; how blue, how calm, and how deep! How bright and glorious was the setting sun! With what soft glitter the waters of the distant Danube shone. And fairer still were the far away blue mountains beyond the river, the nunnery, the mysterious gorges, and the pine forests veiled in mist to their summits … There was peace and happiness … ‘I would wish for nothing else, nothing, if only I were there,’ thought Rostov. ‘In myself alone and in that sunshine there is so much happiness; but here … groans, suffering, fear, and this uncertainty and hurry … There—they are shouting again, and again they are all running back somewhere, and I will run with them, and it, death, is here above me and around … Another instant and I will never again see the sun, this water, that gorge! …’
At that instant the sun began to hide behind the clouds, and other stretchers came in view before Rostov. And the fear of death and of the stretchers, and love of the sun and of life, all merged into one feeling of sickening agitation.
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