War and Peace (196 page)

“Instructions?…” said Denisov absently. “Well, can you stay till tomorrow?”

“Oh, please … May I stay with you?” cried Petya.

“Well, what were your instructions from your general—to go back at once?” asked Denisov.

Petya blushed.

“Oh, he gave me no instructions. I think I may?” he said interrogatively.

“All right, then,” said Denisov. And turning to his followers, he directed a party of them to go to the hut in the wood, which they had fixed on as a resting-place, and the officer on the Kirghiz horse (this officer performed the duties of an adjutant) to go and look for Dolohov, to find out where he was, and whether he were coming in the evening.

Denisov himself, with the esaul and Petya, intended to ride to the edge of the wood near Shamshevo to have a look at the position of the French, where their attack next day was to take place.

“Come, my man,” he said to their peasant guide, “take us to Shamshevo.”

Denisov, Petya, and the esaul, accompanied by a few Cossacks and
the hussar with the prisoner, turned to the left and crossed a ravine towards the edge of the wood.

The rain was over, but a mist was falling and drops of water dripped from the branches of the trees. Denisov, the esaul, and Petya, in silence, followed the peasant in the pointed cap, who, stepping lightly and noiselessly in his bast shoes over roots and wet leaves, led them to the edge of the wood.

Coming out on the road, the peasant paused, looked about him, and turned toward a thin screen of trees. He stood still at a big oak, still covered with leaves, and beckoned mysteriously to them.

Denisov and Petya rode up to him. From the place where the peasant was standing the French could be seen. Just beyond the wood a field of spring corn ran sharply downhill. On the right, across a steep ravine, could be seen a little village and a manor-house with the roofs broken down. In that village and in the house and all over the high ground in the garden, by the wells and the pond, and all along the road uphill from the bridge to the village, not more than five hundred yards away, crowds of men could be seen in the shifting mist. They could distinctly hear their foreign cries at the horses pulling the baggage uphill and their calls to one another.

“Give me the prisoner here,” said Denisov, in a low voice, never taking his eyes off the French.

A Cossack got off his horse, lifted the boy down, and came with him to Denisov. Denisov, pointing to the French, asked the boy what troops they were. The boy, thrusting his chilled hands into his pockets and raising his eyebrows, looked in dismay at Denisov, and in spite of his unmistakable desire to tell all he knew, he was confused in his answers, and merely repeated Denisov’s questions. Denisov, frowning, turned away from him, and addressing the esaul, told him his own views on the matter.

Petya, turning his head rapidly, looked from the drummer to Denisov, and from the esaul to the French in the village and on the road, trying not to miss anything of importance.

“Whether Dolohov comes or not, we must take them.… Eh?” said Denisov, his eyes sparkling merrily.

“It is a convenient spot,” said the esaul.

“We will send the infantry down below, by the marshes,” Denisov went on. “They will creep up to the garden; you dash down with the Cossacks from there”—Denisov pointed to the wood beyond the village—“and I from here with my hussars. And at a shot …”

“It won’t do to go by the hollow; it’s a bog,” said the esaul. “The horses will sink in, you must skirt round more to the left.…”

While they were talking in undertones, there was the crack of a shot and a puff of white smoke in the hollow below near the pond, and the voices of hundreds of Frenchmen halfway up the hill rose in a ringing shout, as though in merry chorus. At the first minute both Denisov and the esaul darted back. They were so near that they fancied they were the cause of that shot and those shouts. But they had nothing to do with them. A man in something red was running through the marshes below. The French were evidently firing and shouting at him.

“Why, it’s our Tihon,” said the esaul.

“It’s he! it’s he!”

“The rogue,” said Denisov.

“He’ll get away!” said the esaul, screwing up his eyes.

The man they called Tihon, running up to the little river, splashed into it, so that the water spurted up round him, and disappearing for an instant, scrambled out on all fours, looking dark from the water, and ran on. The French, who had been pursuing him, stopped.

“Well, he’s a smart fellow,” said the esaul.

“The beast,” said Denisov, with the same expression of vexation. “And what has he been about all this time?”

“Who is he?” asked Petya.

“It’s our scout. I sent him to catch a ‘tongue’ for us.”

“Ah, to be sure,” said Petya, nodding at Denisov’s first word, as though he knew all about it, though he did not understand a word.

Tihon Shtcherbatov was one of the most useful men among Denisov’s followers. He was a peasant of the village of Pokrovskoe, near Gzhat. Denisov had come to Pokrovskoe early in his operations as a guerilla leader, and sending, as he always did, for the village elder, asked him what he knew about the French.

The village elder had answered, as all village elders always did answer, that he knew nothing about them, and had seen nothing of them. But when Denisov explained to him that his object was to kill the French, and inquired whether no French had strayed into his village, the village
elder replied that there had been some
miroders
certainly, but that the only person who took any heed of such things was Tishka Shtcherbatov. Denisov ordered Tihon to be brought before him, and praising his activity, said in the presence of the elder a few words about the devotion to the Tsar and the Fatherland and the hatred of the French that all sons of the Fatherland must cherish in their hearts.

“We don’t do any harm to the French,” said Tihon, evidently scared at Denisov’s words. “It’s only, you know, just a bit of fun for the lads and me. The
miroders
now—we have killed a dozen or so of them, but we have done no harm else …”

Next day, when Denisov was leaving Pokrovskoe, having forgotten all about this peasant, he was told that Tihon was with his followers, and asked to be allowed to remain with them. Denisov bade them let him stay.

At first Tihon undertook the rough work of making fires, fetching water, skinning horses, and so on, but he soon showed great zeal and capacity for guerilla warfare. He would go after booty at night, and never failed to bring back French clothes and weapons, and when he was bidden, he would bring back prisoners too. Denisov took Tihon from his menial work, and began to employ him on expeditions, and to reckon him among the Cossacks.

Tihon did not like riding, and always went on foot, yet never lagged behind the cavalry. His weapons were a musket, which he carried rather as a joke, a pike, and an axe, which he used as skilfully as a wolf does its teeth—catching fleas in its coat and crunching thick bones with them equally easily. With equal precision Tihon swinging his axe split logs, or, taking it by the head, cut thin skewers or carved spoons. Among Denisov’s followers, Tihon was on a special footing of his own. When anything particularly disagreeable or revolting had to be done—to put one’s shoulder to a waggon stuck in the mud, to drag a horse out of a bog by the tail, to flay a horse, to creep into the midst of the French, to walk fifty versts in a day—every one laughed, and looked to Tihon to do it.

“No harm will come to him; the devil; he’s a stalwart beast,” they used to say of him.

One day a Frenchman he had captured wounded Tihon with a pistol-shot in the fleshy part of the back. This wound, which Tihon treated only by applications of vodka—internal and external—was the subject of the liveliest jokes through the whole party, and Tihon lent himself readily to their jests.

“Well, old chap, you won’t do that again! Are you crook-backed!” laughed the Cossacks; and Tihon, assuming a doleful face, and grimacing to pretend he was angry, would abuse the French with the most comical oaths. The effect of the incident on Tihon was that he rarely afterwards brought prisoners in.

Tihon was the bravest and most useful man of the lot. No one discovered so many opportunities of attack, no one captured or killed so many Frenchmen. And consequently he was the favourite subject of all the gibes of the Cossacks and the hussars, and readily fell in with the position.

Tihon had been sent overnight by Denisov to Shamshevo to capture a “tongue.” But either because he was not satisfied with one French prisoner, or because he had been asleep all night, he had crept by day into the bushes in the very middle of the French, and, as Denisov had seen from the hill, had been discovered by them.

After talking a little while longer with the esaul about the next day’s attack, which Denisov seemed to have finally decided upon after seeing how near the French were, he turned his horse’s head and rode back.

“Now, my boy, we will go and dry ourselves,” he said to Petya.

As he came near the forester’s hut, Denisov stopped, looking into the wood before him. A man in a short jacket, bast shoes, and a Kazan hat, with a gun across his shoulder, and an axe in his belt, was striding lightly through the forest with long legs and long arms swinging at his side. Catching sight of Denisov, he hastily flung something into the bushes, and taking off his sopped hat, the brim of which drooped limply, he walked up to his commanding officer.

This was Tihon. His pock-marked and wrinkled face, with little slits of eyes, beamed with self-satisfaction and merriment. He held his head high, and looked straight at Denisov as though he were suppressing a laugh.

“Well, where have you been?” said Denisov.

“Where have I been? I have been after the French,” Tihon answered boldly and hastily, in a husky, but mellow bass.

“Why did you creep in in the daytime? Ass! Well, why didn’t you catch one?”

“Catch one I did,” said Tihon.

“Where is he, then?”

“I caught one at the very first at daybreak,” Tihon went on, setting his feet down wider apart, in their flat, turned-up bast shoes; “and I took him into the wood too. I see he’s no good. So, thinks I, better go and get another, rather more the proper article.”

“Ay, the rogue, so that’s how it is,” said Denisov to the esaul. “Why didn’t you bring that one?”

“Why, what was the use of bringing him in?” Tihon broke in, hurriedly and angrily. “A worthless fellow! Don’t I know what sort you want?”

“Ah, you brute!… Well?”

“I went to get another,” Tihon went on. “I crept up in this way in the wood, and I lay down.” With a sudden, supple movement, Tihon lay down on his stomach, to show how he had done this. “One turned up,” he went on, “I seized him like this,” Tihon jumped up swiftly and lightly. “ ‘Come along to the colonel,’ says I. He set up such a shouting, and then I saw four of them. And they rushed at me with their sabres. I went at them like this with my axe. ‘What are you about?’ says I. ‘Christ be with you,’ ” cried Tihon, waving his arms and squaring his chest with a menacing scowl.

“Oh yes, we saw from the hill how you gave them the slip, through the pools,” said the esaul, screwing up his sparkling eyes.

Petya had a great longing to laugh, but he saw that all the others refrained from laughing. He kept looking rapidly from Tihon’s face to the face of the esaul and Denisov, not knowing what to make of it all.

“Don’t play the fool,” said Denisov, coughing angrily. “Why didn’t you bring the first man?”

Tihon began scratching his back with one hand and his head with the other, and all at once his countenance expanded into a beaming, foolish grin, showing the loss of a tooth that had given him his name, Shtcherbatov (
i.e
. lacking a tooth). Denisov smiled, and Petya went off into a merry peal of laughter, in which Tihon himself joined.

“Why, he was no good at all,” said Tihon. “He was so badly dressed, how could I bring him? And a coarse fellow, your honour. Why, says he, ‘I’m a general’s son,’ says he, ‘I’m not going.’ ”

“Ugh, you brute!” said Denisov. “I wanted to question him …”

“Oh, I did question him,” said Tihon. “He said he didn’t know much. ‘There are a lot of our men,’ says he, ‘but they are all poor creatures;
that’s all you can say for them. Give a good shout,’ says he, ‘and you can take them all,’ ” Tihon concluded, with a merry and determined look at Denisov.

“Mind, I’ll give you a good hundred lashes that will teach you to play the fool,” said Denisov sternly.

“Why be angry,” said Tihon, “because I haven’t seen your sort of Frenchmen? As soon as it gets dark, I’ll catch whatever kind you like, three of them I’ll bring.”

“Well, come along,” said Denisov, and all the way to the forester’s hut he was silent, frowning angrily.

Tihon was walking behind, and Petya heard the Cossacks laughing with him and at him about a pair of boots that he had thrown into the bushes.

When the laughter roused by Tihon’s words and smile had passed, and Petya understood for a moment that Tihon had killed the man, he had an uneasy feeling. He looked round at the boy prisoner, and there was a sudden pang in his heart. But that uneasiness only lasted a moment. He felt it incumbent on him to hold his head high, and with a bold and important air to question the esaul about the next day’s expedition, that he might not be unworthy of the company in which he found himself.

The officer Denisov had sent to Dolohov met him on the way with the news that everything was going well with Dolohov, and that he was coming himself immediately.

Denisov at once became more cheerful, and beckoned Petya to him.

“Come, tell me about yourself,” he said.

On leaving Moscow, Petya had parted from his parents to join his regiment, and shortly afterwards had been appointed an orderly in attendance on a general who was in command of a large detachment. From the time of securing his commission, and even more since joining a regiment in active service, and taking part in the battle of Vyazma, Petya had been in a continual state of happy excitement at being grownup, and of intense anxiety not to miss any opportunity of real heroism. He was highly delighted with all he had seen and experienced in the army, but, at the same time, he was always fancying that wherever he was
not, there the most real and heroic exploits were at that very moment being performed. And he was in constant haste to be where he was not.