The Kingdom of God is Within You, What is Art by Leo Tolstoy

Author:Leo Tolstoy [ Leo Tolstoy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-63209-180-2
Publisher: Trajectory, Inc.
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile the crowd of fathers, mothers, and wives, hustled by policemen, presses around the gates, trying to find out who has been taken and who rejected. A man who has been rejected comes out and tells them that Piotr has been admitted; then is heard the cry of Piotr's young wife, for whom this word means a four or five years' separation, and the dissolute life such as a soldier's wife in domestic service is.

But here comes a man with flowing hair and dressed differently from the others, who has just arrived; he descends from his droschky and goes toward the house of the Zemskaya Uprava, while the policemen clear a way for him through the crowd.

"The Father has arrived to swear them in." And this "Father," who has always been accustomed to believe himself a special and privileged servant of Christ, and who is usually quite unconscious of his false position, enters the room where the recruits who have been admitted are waiting for him; he puts on, as a vestment, a sort of brocade curtain, disengages from it his flowing hair, opens the Bible wherein an oath is forbidden, lifts the cross, that cross on which Christ was crucified for refusing to do what this person, his supposed servant, commands men to do, and all these defenseless and deluded young men repeat after him the lie so familiar to his lips, which he utters with such assurance. He reads while they repeat: "I promise and swear to the Lord Almighty, upon His holy Bible," etc. ... to defend (that is, to murder all those whom I shall be ordered to murder) and to do whatever those men, strangers to me, who regard me only as a necessary tool to be used in perpetrating the outrages by which they oppress my brethren and preserve their own positions, command me to do. All the recruits having stupidly repeated the words, the so-called Father departs, quite sure that he has performed his duty in the most accurate and conscientious manner, while the young men deluded by him really believe that by the absurd, and to them almost unintelligible, words which they have just uttered, they are released during their term of service from all obligations to their fellow-men, and are bound by new and more imperative ties to the duties of a soldier.

And this is done publicly, but not a man comes forward to say to the deceived and the deceivers, "Come to your senses and go your way; this is all a base and treacherous lie; it imperils not only your bodies, but your souls."

No one does this. On the contrary, as if in derision, after they have all been enrolled and are about to depart, the colonel enters the hall where these poor, drunken, and deluded creatures are locked in, and with a solemn air, calls out to them in military fashion: "Good day, men! I congratulate you upon entering the Czar's service." And they, poor fellows, mumble in

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