War and Peace—Pierre's still alive, although Andre died

I went to Lemongrass and bought myself lunch ("Table for one?" the waitress asked me—I was so grateful to her for not saying "just one," or "only one" or "all by yourself?") and sat and ate it while reading War and Peace. Pierre's in POW camp somewhere outside Moscow, except before he was there he'd been arrested for being an arsonist (although he isn't—he was just in the fire because he was rescuing a little girl, because Tolstoy is a goddamn sentimentalist). And he was being troublesome, wouldn't give his name, and the French soldiers in charge of him wanted to teach him a lesson, so they put him with these five other guys who were executed by firing squad for being arsonists (is this a joke that's available in Russian—fired on for starting fires?), and Pierre's supposed to be the last, and so he has to watch the five other guys being blindfolded and bound and shot and shoved into the pit in the kitchen garden of the estate that the French have occupied. It's absolutely horrifying. The fifth prisoner is a young guy—the narrator keeps emphasizing that he's only about 18, and a factory worker, and skinny—and the novel shows in excruciating detail how he adjusts the cords on his blindfold because it's too tight around the back of his head; how he shifts against the post where they've bound him to be shot at. The point is that he's still painfully human and ordinary, just a guy wanting to be a bit more comfortable a couple seconds before he's shot to death—and then the narrator tells you that the French soldiers running the firing squad are just as human as the prisoner. And because Pierre's the one watching it, Pierre with his stupid boring love of the Masons and the Emperor and second-rate crappy mysticism, you get this overwhelming sense of how horrible it is to watch one group of people kill another person because that's what they're supposed to do. How horrible it is that that's what they're doing. Pierre's waiting to be executed himself (the narrator tells you that Pierre doesn't know he's actually being let off—that he's just here to be frightened into behaving) and he thinks of how it's not a PERSON executing him, but this IMpersonal "system" that wants him dead. Except that the system doesn't know he's a specific person (because the system itself isn't interested in personhood), so it's not even that specific—he's just sort of being eliminated. It's a very, very nineteenth-century machine-phobic scene (the eighteenth-century LIKES machines and impersonal things; the nineteenth starts to think that machines hate humans), but it's also incredibly affecting. I was weeping into my curry, and I felt ridiculous, but I couldn't stop. Anyway, I'm glad Pierre is still alive. Now that he's in POW camp, he lives with a nice peasant who makes shoes and shirts and tells stories, and Pierre has lost a lot of weight (the narrator thinks this is good, because it's trying to get him married off to Natasha in a couple chapters, although Pierre doesn't know that yet), and given up his stupid love of the stupid Masons who were annoying to begin with, AND mysteriously he's not clinically depressed anymore. (Being almost executed as a form of therapy—this novel is extremely odd.) But he seems like he's doing better now. It's good to see.