“Prince Andrei opened his eyes and for a long time could not understand what was happening around him. He remembered the meadow, the wormwood, the field, the black, spinning ball, and his passionate fit of love for life. Two steps away from him, talking loudly and attracting general attention to himself, stood a tall, handsome, black-haired sergeant, leaning on a branch, his head bandaged. He had bullet wounds in his head and leg. Around him, listen eagerly to his talk, gathered a crowd of wounded and stretcher bearers.
‘We just pounded him out of there, he dropped everything, we caught the king himself!’ the soldier shouted, looking around him, his black, inflamed eyes glittering. ‘if only the reservers had come just then, brothers, he wouldn’t even have left his name behind, it’s the truth I’m telling you…’
Prince Andrei, like everyone else around the narrator, looked at him with shining eyes and experienced a comforting feeling. ‘But does it make any difference now?’ he thought. ‘And what will be there, and what has there been here?' Why was I so sorry to part with life? There was something in this life that I didn’t and still don’t understand…’”
- Leo Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”