War and Peace (31 page)

“
Voilà le cher
holy armament,” thought Bolkonsky, recalling Bilibin’s words.

He rode up to a convoy, intending to ask of some one of these men where he could find the commander-in-chief. Directly opposite to him came a strange vehicle, with one horse, obviously rigged up by soldiers with the resources at their disposal, and looking like something between a cart, a cabriolet, and a coach. A soldier was driving it, and under the
leathern tilt behind a cover sat a woman, muffled up in shawls. Prince Andrey rode up and was just addressing a question to the soldier, when his attention was taken off by the despairing shrieks of the woman in this conveyance. The officer, directing the traffic, aimed a blow at the soldier who sat in the coachman’s seat, for trying to push in ahead of others, and the lash fell on the cover of the equipage. The woman shrieked shrilly. On catching sight of Prince Andrey, she looked out from under the cover and putting her thin arms out from the shawls and waving them, she screamed:

“Adjutant! sir!… For God’s sake!… protect me.… What will happen to us?… I am the wife of the doctor of the Seventh Chasseurs … they won’t let us pass, we have dropped behind, lost our own people.…”

“I’ll thrash you into mincemeat! turn back!” shouted the exasperated officer to the soldier: “turn back with your hussy!”

“Sir, protect us. What does it mean?” screamed the doctor’s wife.

“Kindly let this cart get through. Don’t you see that it is a woman?” said Prince Andrey, riding up to the officer.

The officer glanced at him, and without making any reply turned again to the soldier. “I’ll teach you how to push in.… Back!…”

“Let it pass, I tell you,” repeated Prince Andrey, setting his lips tightly.

“And who are you?” cried the officer, turning upon him suddenly with drunken fury. “Who are you? Are
you
” (he put a peculiarly offensive intonation into the word) “in command, pray? I’m commanding officer here, not you. Back you go,” he repeated, “or I’ll lash you into mincemeat.” The expression evidently pleased the officer.

“A nice snub he gave the little adjutant,” said a voice in the background.

Prince Andrey saw that the officer was in that stage of drunken unreasoning fury, when men do not remember what they say. He saw that his championship of the doctor’s wife in the queer conveyance was exposing him to what he dreaded more than anything else in the world, what is called in French
ridicule
, but his instinct said something else. The officer had hardly uttered the last words when Prince Andrey rode up to him with a face distorted by frenzied anger, and raised his riding-whip: “Let—them—pass!”

The officer flourished his arm and hurriedly rode away.

“It’s all their doing, these staff-officers, all the disorder,” he grumbled. “Do as you like.”

Prince Andrey, without lifting his eyes, made haste to escape from the doctor’s wife, who called him her deliverer. And dwelling on the minutest detail of this humiliating scene with loathing, he galloped on towards the village, where he was told that the commander-in-chief was.

On reaching the village, he got off his horse, and went into the first house with the intention of resting for a moment at least, eating something, and getting all the mortifying impressions that were torturing him into some clear shape. “This is a mob of scoundrels, not an army,” he thought, going up to the window of the first house, when a familiar voice called him by his name.

He looked round. Out of a little window was thrust the handsome face of Nesvitsky. Nesvitsky, munching something in his moist mouth and beckoning to him, called him in.

“Bolkonsky! Bolkonsky! Don’t you hear, eh? Make haste,” he shouted.

Going into the house, Prince Andrey found Nesvitsky and another adjutant having a meal. They hastily turned to Bolkonsky with the inquiry, had he any news? On their familiar faces Prince Andrey read alarm and uneasiness. That expression was particularly noticeable in Nesvitsky’s face, usually so full of laughter.

“Where is the commander-in-chief?” asked Bolkonsky.

“Here in this house,” answered the adjutant.

“Well, is it true, about the peace and capitulation?” asked Nesvitsky.

“I ask you. I know nothing except that I have had great difficulty in getting through to you.”

“And the things that have been going on, my boy! Awful! I was wrong to laugh at Mack; there’s worse in store for us,” said Nesvitsky. “But sit down, have something to eat.”

“You won’t find your baggage or anything now, prince, and God knows what’s become of your Pyotr,” said the other adjutant.

“Where are the headquarters?”

“We shall spend the night in Znaim.”

“Well, I got everything I wanted packed up on two horses,” said Nesvitsky; “and capital packs they made for me, fit to scamper as far as the Bohemian mountains at least. Things are in a bad way, my boy. But, I say, you must be ill, shivering like that?” Nesvitsky queried, noticing how Prince Andrey shuddered, as though in contact with a galvanic battery.

“No; I’m all right,” answered Prince Andrey. He had recalled at that instant the incident with the doctor’s wife and the transport officer.

“What is the commander-in-chief doing here?” he asked.

“I can’t make out anything,” said Nesvitsky.

“I know one thing, that it’s all loathsome, loathsome, loathsome,” said Prince Andrey, and he went into the house where the commander-in-chief was stopping.

Passing by Kutuzov’s carriage, the exhausted saddle-horses of his suite, and the Cossacks talking loudly together, Prince Andrey went into the outer room. Kutuzov himself was, as Prince Andrey had been told, in the inner room of the hut with Prince Bagration and Weierother. The latter was the Austrian general, who had taken Schmidt’s place. In the outer room little Kozlovsky was squatting on his heels in front of a copying-clerk. The latter was sitting on a tub turned upside down, he was writing rapidly with the cuffs of his uniform tucked up. Kozlovsky’s face was careworn; he too looked as if he had not slept all night. He glanced at Prince Andrey, and did not even nod to him.

“The second line.… Ready?” he went on, dictating to the clerk: “the Kiev Grenadiers, the Podolsky …”

“Don’t be in such a hurry, your honour,” the clerk answered rudely and angrily, looking at Kozlovsky. Through the door he heard at that moment Kutuzov’s voice, eager and dissatisfied, and other unfamiliar voices interrupting him. The sound of those voices, the inattention with which Kozlovsky glanced at him, the churlishness of the harassed clerk, the fact that the clerk and Kozlovsky were sitting round a tub on the floor at so little distance from the commander-in-chief, and that the Cossacks holding the horses laughed so loudly at the window—all made Prince Andrey feel that some grave calamity was hanging over them.

Prince Andrey turned to Kozlovsky with urgent questions.

“In a minute, prince,” said Kozlovsky. “The disposition of Bagration’s troops …”

“What about capitulation?”

“Nothing of the sort; arrangements have been made for a battle!”

Prince Andrey went towards the door from which the sound of voices came. But at the moment when he was going to open the door, the voices in the room paused, the door opened of itself, and Kutuzov with his eagle nose and podgy face appeared in the doorway. Prince Andrey was standing exactly opposite Kutuzov; but from the expression of the
commander-in-chief’s one seeing eye it was evident that thought and anxiety so engrossed him as to veil, as it were, his vision. He looked straight into his adjutant’s face and did not recognise him.

“Well, have you finished?” he addressed Kozlovsky.

“In a second, your Excellency.”

Bagration, a short lean man, not yet elderly, with a resolute and impassive face of oriental type, came out after the commander-in-chief.

“I have the honour to report myself,” Prince Andrey said for the second time, rather loudly, as he handed Kutuzov an envelope.

“Ah, from Vienna? Very good! Later, later!” Kutuzov went out to the steps with Bagration.

“Well, prince, good-bye,” he said to Bagration. “Christ be with you! May my blessing bring you a great victory!” Kutuzov’s face suddenly softened, and there were tears in his eyes. With his left arm he drew Bagration to him, while with his right hand, on which he wore a ring, he crossed him with a gesture evidently habitual. He offered him his podgy cheek, but Bagration kissed him on the neck. “Christ be with you!” repeated Kutuzov, and he went towards his carriage. “Get in with me,” he said to Bolkonsky.

“Your Most High Excellency, I should have liked to be of use here. Allow me to remain in Prince Bagration’s detachment.”

“Get in,” said Kutuzov, and noticing that Bolkonsky still delayed: “I have need of good officers myself, myself.”

They took their seats in the carriage and drove for some minutes in silence.

“There is a great deal, a great deal of everything still before us,” he said, with an expression of old-age clairvoyance, as though he saw all that was passing in Bolkonsky’s heart. “If one-tenth part of his detachment comes in, I shall thank God,” added Kutuzov, as though talking to himself.

Prince Andrey glanced at Kutuzov, and unconsciously his eyes were caught by the carefully washed seams of the scar on his temple, where the bullet had gone through his head at Ismail, and the empty eyesocket, not a yard from him. “Yes, he has the right to speak so calmly of the destruction of these men,” thought Bolkonsky.

“That’s why I ask you to send me to that detachment,” he said.

Kutuzov made no reply. He seemed to have forgotten what was said to him, and sat plunged in thought. Five minutes later, swaying easily in the soft carriage springs, Kutuzov addressed Prince Andrey. There
was no trace of emotion on his face now. With delicate irony he questioned Prince Andrey about the details of his interview with the Emperor, about the comments he had heard at Court on the Krems engagement, and about ladies of their common acquaintance.

Kutuzov had, on the 1st of November, received from one of his spies information that showed the army he commanded to be in an almost hopeless position. The spy reported that the French, after crossing the bridge at Vienna, were moving in immense force on Kutuzov’s line of communications with the reinforcements marching from Russia. If Kutuzov were to determine to remain at Krems, Napoleon’s army of a hundred and fifty thousand men would cut him off from all communications, and would surround his exhausted army of forty thousand, and he would find himself in the position of Mack before Ulm. If Kutuzov decided to leave the road leading to a junction with the Russian reinforcements, he would have to make his way with no road through unknown country to the mountains of Bohemia, pursued by the cream of the enemy’s forces, and to give up all hope of effecting a junction with Buxhevden. If Kutuzov decided to march by the road from Krems to Olmütz to join the forces from Russia he ran the risk of finding the French, who had crossed the Vienna bridge, in advance of him on this road, and so being forced to give battle on the march, encumbered with all his stores and transport, with an enemy three times as numerous and hemming him in on both sides. Kutuzov chose the last course.

The French, after crossing the river, had, as the spy reported, set off at a quick march toward Znaim, which lay on Kutuzov’s line of routes more than a hundred versts in front of him. To reach Znaim before the French offered the best hopes of saving the army. To allow the French to get to Znaim before him would mean exposing the whole army to a disgrace like that of the Austrians at Ulm, or to complete destruction. But to arrive there before the French with the whole army was impossible. The road of the French army from Vienna to Znaim was shorter and better than the Russians’ road from Krems to Znaim.

On the night of receiving the news Kutuzov sent Bagration’s advance guard of four thousand soldiers to the right over the mountains from the
Krems-Znaim road to the Vienna and Znaim road. Bagration was to make a forced march, to halt facing towards Vienna and with his back to Znaim, and if he succeeded in getting on the road in advance of the French, he was to delay them as long as he could. Kutuzov himself with all the transport was making straight for Znaim.

Bagration marched forty-five versts, by night in stormy weather, through the mountains, with no road, and with hungry, barefoot soldiers. Leaving a third of his men straggling behind him, Bagration reached Hollabrunn, on the Vienna and Znaim road, a few hours before the French, who marched upon Hollabrunn from Vienna. Kutuzov needed fully another twenty-four hours to get to Znaim with all the transport, and so to save the army Bagration would have had, with his four thousand hungry and exhausted soldiers, to have kept at bay the whole army of the enemy confronting him at Hollabrunn for four-and-twenty hours, and this was obviously impossible. But a freak of fate made the impossible possible. The success of the trick that had given the Vienna bridge into the hands of the French encouraged Murat to try and take in Kutuzov too. Murat, on meeting Bagration’s weak detachment on the Znaim road, supposed it to be the whole army of Kutuzov. To give this army a final and crushing defeat he waited for the troops still on the road from Vienna, and to that end he proposed a truce for three days, on the condition that neither army should change its position nor stir from where it was. Murat averred that negotiations for peace were now proceeding, and that he proposed a truce therefore to avoid useless bloodshed. The Austrian general, Nostits, who was in charge of the advance posts, believed the statements of Murat’s messengers and retired, leaving Bagration’s detachment unprotected. The other messengers rode off to the Russian line to make the same announcement about peace negotiations, and to propose a truce of three days, to the Russian troops. Bagration replied that he was not authorised to accept or to decline a truce, and sent his adjutant to Kutuzov with a report of the proposition made to him.

A truce gave Kutuzov the only possibility of gaining time, of letting Bagration’s exhausted forces rest, and of getting the transport and heavy convoys (the movement of which was concealed from the French) a further stage on their journey. The offer of a truce gave the one—and totally unexpected—chance of saving the army. On receiving information of it, Kutuzov promptly despatched the general-adjutant,
Winzengerode, who was with him, to the enemy’s camp. Winzengerode was instructed not only to accept the truce, but to propose terms of capitulation, while Kutuzov meanwhile sent his adjutants back to hasten to the utmost the transport of the luggage of the whole army along the Krems and Znaim road. Bagration’s hungry and exhausted detachment alone was to cover the movements of the transport and of the whole army, by remaining stationary in face of an enemy eight times stronger numerically.