Tolstoy’s Pacifism By Colm McKeogh

—Tolstoy, July 7, 1854 ¹⁶

In 1854 he received his commission as an officer and, after leave at Yasnaya Polyana, was transferred in March to active duty in Moldavia and Wallachia (where the Russian Army of the Danube had been engaging Turkish forces since the previous autumn). Russia had used the Islamic threat to Christian holy places in Jerusalem as its pretext to attack Turkey, but the war was no more than one empire expanding its territory at the expense of a weaker one. Tolstoy saw little fighting there and returned to Russia in September. That same month British and French troops landed in Crimea, and he immediately applied to be posted there, reaching the city of Sevastopol in November just as the siege of the key fortress was beginning. Tolstoy remained in Crimea for a year, assuming command of a gun battery in 1855 during some of the heaviest fighting. An initial surge of patriotic enthusiasm gave way to a sense of the futility of war, no longer open-country skirmishes with tribesmen but now the mass slaughter of a modern siege. His three sketches about Sevastopol (Sevastopol in December, Sevastopol in May, and Sevastopol in August 1855), increased his standing in Russia, being brought to the attention even of the Tsar. On August 27, 1855, the allied forces made a determined attack on the Russian defenses. Tolstoy was in the fortress, commanding a battery of five artillery pieces, during the final struggle. Eleven successive allied assaults were beaten back, but the twelfth succeeded. The Russians evacuated the fortress and the city that same night, blowing up magazines as they withdrew and burning much of the city. The next day was Tolstoy's twenty-seventh birthday (“both a memorable and a sad day for me…I wept when I saw the town in flames and the French flags on our bastions” ¹⁷ ). Not long after the fall of Sevastopol, he resigned from the army. Before his resignation became effective the