Horrible Bodies in War and Peace

I spent a lot of time today hiding out in Para and Bowers and wherever, reading War and Peace. Prince Andre is dying, and Natasha is taking care of him in some hut on an estate they've all retreated to outside Moscow; Andre shouldn't be there at all, and it was only an accident that he ended up at Natasha's family's place, but he thinks it makes perfect sense because he's hallucinating with fever from the gangrene that's killing him, and Natasha keeps nursing him out of guilt and because he says he loves her, even though he smells terrible because his body is rotting. The last book's been full of disgusting horrible things—after Kuragin's amputation and the bullet being taken out of Andre's leg, then a young rabble-rouser Vereschagin who was arrested in Moscow for some kind of political crime is ripped to pieces by a mob on Rostopshchin's orders; this also is gross. And a little girl is almost burned to death and rescued by Pierre, who picks her up and carries her away but she's so freaked out she tries to pull out his hair and keeps biting his face, and he has to force himself not to throw her to the ground. People keep being horrified by other people's bodies; Helene, Pierre's wife, also kills herself, perhaps by accident, with some kind of medicine that's supposed to get her to abort the baby she's carrying at the moment and needs not to be; this also is gross. Also Moscow is on fire, and until recently in the novel, Moscow was a big sleeping woman's body, and sometimes it's also Napoleon's mother. Horrible shit keeps happening to bodies, which I suppose is what a war is about—and the way the extreme description of physical horror evokes the emotional horror that it's really about.