What if there were a war and nobody came? Bumper stickers in college towns all over the United States in the 1960s broadcast this slogan, but today, fifty years later, no end to war is in sight. Count Lev (Leo) Nikolaevich Tolstoy, advocate of conscientious war resistance and author of the greatest war fiction in modern times, hated war but understood its role in human life. He fought in two conflicts, the long-running battle against mountain tribes in the Caucasus, and the Crimean War. Born into a family of warrior aristocrats, with his oldest brother Nikolai already in the army, his decision to take up arms came naturally, and so, presumably, did his celebration of Russian martial spirit at the siege of Sevastopol. Yet the seeds of his later pacifism are evident in his earliest war stories. A draft of his first one, “The Raid” (1853), defines war as “murder,” while the patriotic “Sevastopol in December” (1855) calls it “blood, suffering, and death.” War seemed evil to him for religious reasons, and in the final chapter of “Sevastopol in May” (1855) he asks how “all those [Christians] who profess the same great law of love and self-sacrifice” could fight one other. In his old age, by then a world-famous pacifist, Tolstoy returned in Hadji Murat (published posthumously, 1911) to the Caucasian wars of his youth to depict them as an imperialist adventure by Russia. Yet this anti-war masterpiece contains his most sympathetic portrait of a warrior.