Sometimes the disparate parts of one’s life come into conjunction in startling ways. I have been rereading “War and Peace,” and the night before I went to see “The Sacrifice,” an exhibition of photographs by James Nachtwey at 401 Projects, I was up to the Battle of Borodino. It was fought on September 7, 1812, the largest and bloodiest single-day battle of the Napoleonic Wars, involving more than a quarter of a million French and Russian soldiers. Tolstoy describes in meticulous detail how the two armies pounded each other from sunrise to sunset with canons and rifles, how ineffectual the officers on both sides were at comprehending or directing the slaughter, and how vast the suffering was.

Mr. Nachtwey’s pictures could illustrate Chapter 37 of Book Ten of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, “The operating tent”: “Prince Andrew could not make out distinctly what was in that tent. The pitiful groans and the torturing pain in his thigh, stomach, and back distracted him. All he saw about him merged into a general impression of naked, bleeding human bodies that seemed to fill the whole of the low tent.” The wounded in “The Sacrifice” were hit in Iraq, and the medical technology is 21st-century state of the art, but blood and pain are blood and pain, and Mr. Nachtwey’s blackand-white photographs have merged in my mind with Tolstoy’s excruciating prose.

James Nachtwey (born 1948) has a special place in the pantheon of contemporary photojournalists as the most respected of living combat photographers. His passport must look like a checklist of the world’s most bitter conflicts over the last three decades. From various hells, Mr. Nachtwey files images of startling elegance. It takes not just artistic talent, but enormous sangfroid to compose pictures of such searing beauty under battlefield conditions. As to why he would want to create beautiful pictures of horrible things, it is because beauty is what makes one mind. It is as hard to turn away from Mr. Nachtwey’s photographs as it is to stop reading “War and Peace.”

Last year, Mr. Nachtwey went to Iraq to do a story on the treatment of combat casualties. It was a story in which he felt personally involved because he himself had been injured in Iraq by an exploding grenade in 2003 while covering the early phases of the war there. The series of 21 40-inchby-26-inch pictures at 401 Projects begins with a wounded soldier being carried on a stretcher to a helicopter. The narrative continues through battlefield medical facilities, to hospitals, to physical rehabilitation centers in America, to efforts of soldiers with limbs missing to engage in sports. The negatives are printed full frame with bits of the 35 mm transport sprockets showing, testimony to Mr. Nachtwey’s ability to think with his eyes even in chaotic circumstances.

The individual pictures have neither names nor numbers so I will refer to them by their order in the sequence. In the foreground of no. 2, a hand is holding a respiratory mask to the face of a wounded man, the plastic hose and much else blurred. Behind the injured man, in sharp focus, is one of the medical personnel. He has an American face, that is, one of indeterminate ethnicity — he could be Asian or Latino. His look is intelligent, and his expression one of urgent resolve. The set of his teeth and the ferocious concentration of his stare are signs of his involvement with his patient.

The sharpest focus in no. 5 is reserved for the back of a large man in dark scrubs to the left of the frame. His head is bowed out of sight, so all we see is his broad shoulders and the right hand he holds behind him: The hand is in a white rubber surgical glove covered with blood. To the right of the frame a woman in a T-shirt holds up a bag of intravenous fluid. The unavoidable sight of the bloody glove sums up the contingent nature of the battlefield medicine: The glove is visual poetry. The same for the one bright eye of a blond woman — a nurse or doctor — we see peering over a very blurred face in an oxygen mask in no. 8.

The pictures of the men doing physical therapy, nos. 14 to 17, are affecting for the drama between them and their watching families. In “The operating tent,” Prince Andrew recognizes Anatole Kurágin as the miserable man who has just had his leg amputated, and so, too, most of Mr. Nachtwey’s Iraq casualties have lost legs. In no. 18, a man in running shorts with a high-tech prosthetic leg does stretches on a cinder track, a bottle of Gatorade in reach. In no. 19, two prosthetic legs project from a golf cart waiting for the man ahead to make his tee shot.

No. 20 shows Mr. Nachtwey’s genius. A man in a black bodysuit holds a surfboard upright on the beach. The ocean and a few bathers are behind him. He is bent over adjusting a cord attached to his prosthetic left leg, the one toward the camera, and his head is completely hidden by the surfboard. It is comic that he is headless, and poignant that he is missing a leg: We don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Few photographers would have the wit and courage to take this picture, but James Nachtwey risks the appearance of making fun of this handicapped man because he knows the man’s determination to ride the waves makes it impossible for him to be ridiculous. The picture’s visual simplicity underscores its emotional complexity; any questions of taste are overborne by a broad, empathetic humanity.

Until April 8 (401 West St., between West 10th and Charles streets, 212-633-6202).