War and Peace (144 page)

The soldier with the wounded cheek looked angrily at the singing horse soldiers.

“Oh, the smart fellows!” he murmured reproachfully.

“It’s not soldiers only, but peasants, too, I have seen to-day! Peasants, too, they are hunting up,” said the soldier standing by the cart, addressing himself to Pierre, with a melancholy smile. “They can’t pick and choose now.… They want to mass all the people together—it’s a matter of Moscow, you see. There is only one thing to do now.” In spite of the vagueness of the soldier’s words, Pierre fully grasped his meaning, and nodded his head approvingly.

The road was clear once more, and Pierre walked downhill, and drove on further.

Pierre drove on, looking on both sides of the road for familiar faces, and meeting none but unfamiliar, military faces, belonging to all sorts of regiments, and all staring with the same surprise at his white hat and green coat.

After driving four versts, for the first time he met an acquaintance, and greeted him joyfully. This was a doctor, one of the heads of the medical staff. He drove to meet Pierre in a covered gig, with a young doctor sitting beside him; and recognising Pierre, he called to the Cossack, who sat on the driver’s seat, and told him to stop.

“Count, your excellency, how do you come here?” asked the doctor.

“Oh, I wanted to have a look …”

“Oh well, there will be something to look at …” Pierre got out of his carriage, and stopped to have a talk with the doctor, explaining to him his plan for taking part in the battle.

The doctor advised Bezuhov to go straight to his highness.

“Why, you would be God knows where during the battle, out of sight,” he said, with a glance at his young companion; “and his highness knows you anyway, and will give you a gracious reception. That’s what I should do, my friend,” said the doctor.

The doctor seemed tired and hurried.

“So you think.… But one thing more I wanted to ask you, where is the position exactly?” said Pierre.

“The position?” said the doctor; “well, that’s not in my line. Drive on to Tatarinovo, there’s a great deal of digging going on there. There you’ll come out on a mound; from there you get a view,” said the doctor.

“A view from it?… If you would …”

But the doctor interrupted, and moved toward his gig.

“I would have shown you the way, but by God, you see” (the doctor made a significant gesture), “I’m racing to the commander of the corps. We’re in such a fix, you see … you know, count, there’s to be a battle tomorrow; with a hundred thousand troops, we must reckon on twenty thousand wounded at least; and we haven’t the stretchers, nor beds, nor attendants, nor doctors for six thousand. There are ten thousand carts; but we want other things; one must manage as one can.”

The strange idea that of those thousands of men, alive and well, young and old, who had been staring with such light-hearted amusement at his hat, twenty thousand were inevitably doomed to wounds and
death (perhaps the very men whom he had seen) made a great impression on Pierre.

“They will die, perhaps, to-morrow; how can they think of anything but death?” And suddenly, by some latent connection of ideas, he saw a vivid picture of the hillside of Mozhaisk, the carts of wounded men, the chimes, the slanting sunshine, and the singing of the cavalry regiment.

“They were going into battle, and meeting wounded soldiers, and never for a minute paused to think what was in store for them, but went by and winked at their wounded comrades. And of all those, twenty thousand are doomed to death, and they can wonder at my hat! Strange!” thought Pierre, as he went on towards Tatarinovo.

Carriages, waggons, and crowds of orderlies and sentinels were standing about a gentleman’s house on the left side of the road. The commander-in-chief was putting up there. But when Pierre arrived, he found his highness and almost all the staff were out. They had all gone to the church service. Pierre pushed on ahead to Gorky; and driving uphill into a little village street, Pierre saw for the first time the peasants of the militia in white shirts, with crosses on their caps. With loud talk and laughter, eager and perspiring, they were working on the right of the road at a huge mound overgrown with grass.

Some of them were digging out the earth, others were carrying the earth away in wheelbarrows, while a third lot stood doing nothing.

There were two officers on the knoll giving them instructions. Seeing these peasants, who were unmistakably enjoying the novelty of their position as soldiers, Pierre thought again of the wounded soldiers at Mozhaisk, and he understood what the soldier had tried to express by the words “they want to mass all the people together.” The sight of these bearded peasants toiling on the field of battle with their queer, clumsy boots, with their perspiring necks, and here and there with shirts unbuttoned showing their sun-burnt collar-bones, impressed Pierre more strongly than anything he had yet seen and heard with the solemnity and gravity of the moment.

Pierre got out of his carriage, and passing by the toiling peasants, clambered up the knoll from which the doctor had told him he could get a view of the field of battle.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning. The sun was a little on the left, and behind Pierre, and in the pure, clear air, the huge panorama that stretched in an amphitheatre before him from the rising ground lay bathed in brilliant sunshine.

The Smolensk high-road ran winding through that amphitheatre, intersecting it towards the left at the top, and passing through a village with a white church, which lay some five hundred paces before and below the knoll. This was Borodino. The road passed below the village, crossed a bridge, and ran winding uphill and downhill, mounting up and up to the hamlet of Valuev, visible six versts away, where Napoleon now was. Behind Valuev the road disappeared into a copse turning yellow on the horizon. In this copse of birch- and pine-trees, on the right of the road, could be seen far away the shining cross and belfry of the Kolotsky monastery. Here and there in the blue distance, to right and to left of the copse and the road, could be seen smoking camp-fires and indistinct masses of our troops and the enemy’s. On the right, along the course of the rivers Kolotcha and Moskva, the country was broken and hilly. Through the gaps between the hills could be seen the villages of Bezzubovo and Zaharino. On the left the ground was more level; there were fields of corn and a smoking village that had been set on fire—Semyonovskoye.

Everything Pierre saw was so indefinite, that in no part of the scene before him could he find anything fully corresponding to his preconceptions. There was nowhere a field of battle such as he had expected to see, nothing but fields, dells, troops, woods, camp-fires, villages, mounds, and streams. With all Pierre’s efforts, he could not discover in the living landscape a military position. He could not even distinguish between our troops and the enemy’s.

“I must ask some one who understands it,” he thought, and he addressed the officer, who was looking with curiosity at his huge, unmilitary figure.

“Allow me to ask,” Pierre said, “what village is that before us?”

“Burdino, isn’t it called?” said the officer, turning inquiringly to his comrade.

“Borodino,” the other corrected.

The officer, obviously pleased at an opportunity for conversation, went nearer to Pierre.

“Are these our men there?” asked Pierre.

“Yes, and away further, those are the French,” said the officer. “There they are, there you can see them.”

“Where? where?” asked Pierre.

“One can see them with the naked eye. Look!” The officer pointed to smoke rising on the left beyond the river, and the same stern and grave expression came into his face that Pierre had noticed in many of the faces he had met.

“Ah, that’s the French! And there?…” Pierre pointed to a knoll on the left about which troops could be seen.

“Those are our men.”

“Oh, indeed! And there?…” Pierre pointed to another mound in the distance, with a big tree on it, near a village that could be seen in a gap between the hills, where there was a dark patch and the smoke of camp-fires.

“Ah! that’s
he
again!” said the officer. (It was the redoubt of Shevardino.) “Yesterday that was ours, but now it’s
his
.”

“So what is our position, then?”

“Our position?” said the officer, with a smile of satisfaction. “I can describe it very clearly, because I have had to do with the making of almost all our fortifications. There, our centre, do you see, is here at Borodino.” He pointed to the village with the white church, in front of them. “There’s the ford across the Kolotcha. Here, do you see, where the rows of mown hay are still lying in the low ground, there’s the bridge. That’s our centre. Our right flank is away yonder” (he pointed to the right, far away to the hollows among the hills), “there is the river Moskva, and there we have thrown up three very strong redoubts. The left flank …” there the officer paused. “It’s hard to explain, you see.… Yesterday our left flank was over there, at Shevardino, do you see, where the oak is. But now we have drawn back our left wing, now it’s over there,—you see the village and the smoke—that’s Semyonovskoye, and here—look,” he pointed to Raevsky’s redoubt. “Only the battle won’t be there, most likely.
He
has moved his troops here, but that’s a blind;
he
will probably try to get round on the right. Well, but however it may be, there’ll be a lot of men missing at roll-call to-morrow!” said the officer.

The old sergeant, who came up during the officer’s speech, had
waited in silence for his superior officer to finish speaking. But at this point he interrupted him in undisguised annoyance at his last words.

“We have to send for gabions,” he said severely.

The officer seemed abashed, as though he were fully aware that though he might think how many men would be missing next day, he ought not to talk about it.

“Well, send the third company again,” he said hurriedly. “And who are you, not one of the doctors?”

“No, I am nothing in particular,” answered Pierre. And he went downhill again, passing the peasant militiamen.

“Ah, the damned beasts!” said the officer, pinching his nose, and hurrying by them with Pierre.

“Here they come!… They are bringing her, they are coming.… Here she is … they’ll be here in a minute,” cried voices suddenly, and officers, soldiers, and peasants ran forward along the road.

A church procession was coming up the hill from Borodino. In front of it a regiment of infantry marched smartly along the dusty road, with their shakoes off and their muskets lowered. Behind the infantry came the sounds of church singing.

Soldiers and peasants came running down bareheaded to meet it, overtaking Pierre.

“They are bringing the Holy Mother! Our defender … the Holy Mother of Iversky!…”

“The Holy Mother of Smolensk …” another corrected.

The militiamen who had been in the village and those who had been working at the battery, flinging down their spades, ran to meet the procession. The battalion marching along the dusty road was followed by priests in church robes, a little old man in a hood with attendant deacons and choristers. Behind them came soldiers and officers bearing a huge holy picture, with tarnished face in a setting of silver. This was the holy ikon that had been brought away from Smolensk, and had accompanied the army ever since. Behind, before, and all around it, walked or ran crowds of soldiers with bared heads, bowing to the earth.

On the top of the hill the procession stopped; the men bearing the holy picture on a linen cloth were relieved by others; the deacons relighted their censers, and the service began. The burning rays of the sun beat vertically down on the crowds; a faint, fresh breeze played with the hair of their bare heads, and fluttered the ribbons with which the holy picture was decked; the singing sounded subdued under the open
sky. An immense crowd—officers, soldiers, and militiamen—stood round, all with bare heads. In a space apart, behind the priests and deacons, stood the persons of higher rank. A bald general, with the order of St. George on his neck, stood directly behind the priest. He was unmistakably a German, for he stood, not crossing himself, patiently waiting for the end of the service, to which he thought it right to listen, probably as a means of arousing the patriotism of the Russian peasantry; another general stood in a martial pose and swung his arm before his chest, looking about him as he made the sign of the cross. Pierre, standing among the peasants, recognised in this group of higher rank several persons he knew. But he did not look at them; his whole attention was engrossed by the serious expression of the faces in the crowd, soldiers and peasants alike, all gazing with the same eagerness at the holy picture. As soon as the weary choristers (it was their twentieth service) began languidly singing their habitual chant, “O Mother of God, save Thy servants from calamity,” and priest and deacon chimed in, “For to Thee we all fly as our invincible Bulwark and Protectress,” there was a gleam on every face of that sense of the solemnity of the coming moment, which he had seen on the hill at Mozhaisk and by glimpses in so many of the faces meeting him that morning. And heads were bowed lower, while locks of hair fluttered in the breeze, and there was the sound of sighing and beating the breast as the soldiers crossed themselves.

The crowd suddenly parted and pressed upon Pierre. Some one, probably a very great person, judging by the promptitude with which they made way for him, was approaching the holy picture.

It was Kutuzov, who had been making the round of the position. On his way back to Tatarinovo, he joined the service. Pierre at once recognised him from his peculiar figure, which marked him out at once.

In a long military coat, with his enormously stout figure and bent back, with his white head uncovered, and his blind white eye, conspicuous in his puffy face, Kutuzov walked with his waddling swaying gait into the ring and stood behind the priest. He crossed himself with an habitual gesture, bent down, with his hand touching the earth, and, sighing heavily, bowed his grey head. Kutuzov was followed by Bennigsen and his suite. In spite of the presence of the commander-in-chief, which drew the attention of all persons of higher rank, the militiamen and soldiers went on praying without looking at him.