War and Peace (37 page)

“No fear! you picked it up! that’s smart!” one shouted in a husky voice.

Then a thin, pale soldier approached, his neck bandaged with a bloodstained rag. With a voice of exasperation he asked the artillerymen for water.

“Why, is one to die like a dog?” he said.

Tushin told them to give him water. Next a good-humoured soldier ran up, to beg for some red-hot embers for the infantry.

“Some of your fire for the infantry! Glad to halt, lads. Thanks for the loan of the firing; we’ll pay it back with interest,” he said, carrying some glowing firebrands away into the darkness.

Next four soldiers passed by, carrying something heavy in an overcoat. One of them stumbled.

“Ay, the devils, they’ve left firewood in the road,” grumbled one.

“He’s dead; why carry him?” said one of them.

“Come on, you!” And they vanished into the darkness with their burden.

“Does it ache, eh?” Tushin asked Rostov in a whisper.

“Yes, it does ache.”

“Your honour’s sent for to the general. Here in a cottage he is,” said a gunner, coming up to Tushin.

“In a minute, my dear.” Tushin got up and walked away from the fire, buttoning up his coat and setting himself straight.

In a cottage that had been prepared for him not far from the artillerymen’s fire, Prince Bagration was sitting at dinner, talking with several commanding officers, who had gathered about him. The little old colonel with the half-shut eyes was there, greedily gnawing at a mutton-bone, and the general of twenty-two years’ irreproachable service, flushed with a glass of vodka and his dinner, and the staff-officer with the signet ring, and Zherkov, stealing uneasy glances at every one, and Prince Andrey, pale with set lips and feverishly glittering eyes.

In the corner of the cottage room stood a French flag, that had been captured, and the auditor with the naïve countenance was feeling the stuff of which the flag was made, and shaking his head with a puzzled air, possibly because looking at the flag really interested him, or possibly because he did not enjoy the sight of the dinner, as he was hungry and no place had been laid for him. In the next cottage there was the French colonel, who had been taken prisoner by the dragoons. Our officers were flocking in to look at him. Prince Bagration thanked the several commanding officers, and inquired into details of the battle and of the losses. The general, whose regiment had been inspected at Braunau, submitted to the prince that as soon as the engagement began, he had fallen back from the copse, mustered the men who were cutting wood, and letting them pass by him, had made a bayonet charge with two battalions and repulsed the French.

“As soon as I saw, your excellency, that the first battalion was thrown into confusion, I stood in the road and thought, ‘I’ll let them get through and then open fire on them’; and that’s what I did.”

The general had so longed to do this, he had so regretted not having succeeded in doing it, that it seemed to him now that this was just what had happened. Indeed might it not actually have been so? Who could make out in such confusion what did and what did not happen?

“And by the way I ought to note, your excellency,” he continued, recalling Dolohov’s conversation with Kutuzov and his own late interview with the degraded officer, “that the private Dolohov, degraded to the ranks, took a French officer prisoner before my eyes and particularly distinguished himself.”

“I saw here, your excellency, the attack of the Pavlograd hussars,” Zherkov put in, looking uneasily about him. He had not seen the hussars at all that day, but had only heard about them from an infantry officer. “They broke up two squares, your excellency.”

When Zherkov began to speak, several officers smiled, as they always did, expecting a joke from him. But as they perceived that what he was saying all redounded to the glory of our arms and of the day, they assumed a serious expression, although many were very well aware that what Zherkov was saying was a lie utterly without foundation. Prince Bagration turned to the old colonel.

“I thank you all, gentlemen; all branches of the service behaved heroically—infantry, cavalry, and artillery. How did two cannons come to be abandoned in the centre?” he inquired, looking about for some one.
(Prince Bagration did not ask about the cannons of the left flank; he knew that all of them had been abandoned at the very beginning of the action.) “I think it was you I sent,” he added, addressing the staff-officer.

“One had been disabled,” answered the staff-officer, “but the other, I can’t explain; I was there all the while myself, giving instructions, and I had scarcely left there.… It was pretty hot, it’s true,” he added modestly.

Some one said that Captain Tushin was close by here in the village, and that he had already been sent for.

“Oh, but you went there,” said Prince Bagration, addressing Prince Andrey.

“To be sure, we rode there almost together,” said the staff-officer, smiling affably to Bolkonsky.

“I had not the pleasure of seeing you,” said Prince Andrey, coldly and abruptly. Every one was silent.

Tushin appeared in the doorway, timidly edging in behind the generals’ backs. Making his way round the generals in the crowded hut, embarrassed as he always was before his superior officers, Tushin did not see the flag-staff and tumbled over it. Several of the officers laughed.

“How was it a cannon was abandoned?” asked Bagration, frowning, not so much at the captain as at the laughing officers, among whom Zherkov’s laugh was the loudest. Only now in the presence of the angry-looking commander, Tushin conceived in all its awfulness the crime and disgrace of his being still alive when he had lost two cannons. He had been so excited that till that instant he had not had time to think of that. The officers’ laughter had bewildered him still more. He stood before Bagration, his lower jaw quivering, and could scarcely articulate:

“I don’t know … your excellency … I hadn’t the men, your excellency.”

“You could have got them from the battalions that were covering your position!” That there were no battalions there was what Tushin did not say, though it was the fact. He was afraid of getting another officer into trouble by saying that, and without uttering a word he gazed straight into Bagration’s face, as a confused schoolboy gazes at the face of an examiner.

The silence was rather a lengthy one. Prince Bagration, though he had no wish to be severe, apparently found nothing to say; the others did not venture to intervene. Prince Andrey was looking from under his brows at Tushin and his fingers moved nervously.

“Your excellency,” Prince Andrey broke the silence with his abrupt
voice, “you sent me to Captain Tushin’s battery. I went there and found two-thirds of the men and horses killed, two cannons disabled and no forces near to defend them.”

Prince Bagration and Tushin looked now with equal intensity at Bolkonsky, as he went on speaking with suppressed emotion.

“And if your excellency will permit me to express my opinion,” he went on, “we owe the success of the day more to the action of that battery and the heroic steadiness of Captain Tushin and his men than to anything else,” said Prince Andrey, and he got up at once and walked away from the table, without waiting for a reply.

Prince Bagration looked at Tushin and, apparently loath to express his disbelief in Bolkonsky’s off-handed judgment, yet unable to put complete faith in it, he bent his head and said to Tushin that he could go. Prince Andrey walked out after him.

“Thanks, my dear fellow, you got me out of a scrape,” Tushin said to him.

Prince Andrey looked at Tushin, and walked away without uttering a word. Prince Andrey felt bitter and melancholy. It was all so strange, so unlike what he had been hoping for.

“Who are they? Why are they here? What do they want? And when will it all end?” thought Rostov, looking at the shadowy figures that kept flitting before his eyes. The pain in his arm became even more agonising. He was heavy with sleep, crimson circles danced before his eyes, and the impression of these voices and these faces and the sense of his loneliness all blended with the misery of the pain. It was they, these soldiers, wounded and unhurt alike, it was they crushing and weighing upon him, and twisting his veins and burning the flesh in his sprained arm and shoulder. To get rid of them he closed his eyes.

He dozed off for a minute, but in that brief interval he dreamed of innumerable things. He saw his mother and her large, white hand; he saw Sonya’s thin shoulders, Natasha’s eyes and her laugh, and Denisov with his voice and his whiskers, and Telyanin, and all the affair with Telyanin and Bogdanitch. All that affair was inextricably mixed up with this soldier with the harsh voice, and that affair and this soldier here were so agonisingly, so ruthlessly pulling, crushing, and twisting his arm always in the same direction. He was trying to get away from them, but they would not let go of his shoulder for a second. It would not ache, it would be all right if they wouldn’t drag at it; but there was no getting rid of them.

He opened his eyes and looked upwards. The black pall of darkness hung only a few feet above the light of the fire. In the light fluttered tiny flakes of falling snow. Tushin had not returned, the doctor had not come. He was alone, only a soldier was sitting now naked on the other side of the fire, warming his thin, yellow body.

“Nobody cares for me!” thought Rostov. “No one to help me, no one to feel sorry for me. And I too was once at home, and strong, and happy and loved,” he sighed, and with the sigh unconsciously he moaned.

“In pain, eh?” asked the soldier, shaking his shirt out before the fire, and without waiting for an answer, he added huskily: “Ah, what a lot of fellows done for to-day—awful!”

Rostov did not hear the soldier. He gazed at the snowflakes whirling over the fire and thought of the Russian winter with his warm, brightly lighted home, his cosy fur cloak, his swift sledge, his good health, and all the love and tenderness of his family. “And what did I come here for!” he wondered.

On the next day, the French did not renew the attack and the remnant of Bagration’s detachment joined Kutuzov’s army.

PART THREE

P
rince Vassily used not to think over his plans. Still less did he think of doing harm to others for the sake of his own interest. He was simply a man of the world, who had been successful in the world, and had formed a habit of being so. Various plans and calculations were continually forming in his mind, arising from circumstances and the persons he met, but he never deliberately considered them, though they constituted the whole interest of his life. Of such plans and calculations he had not one or two, but dozens in train at once, some of them only beginning to occur to him, others attaining their aim, others again coming to nothing. He never said to himself, for instance: “That man is now in power, I must secure his friendship and confidence, and through him obtain a grant from the Single-Assistance Fund”; nor, “Now Pierre is a wealthy man, I must entice him to marry my daughter and borrow the forty thousand I need.” But the man in power met him, and at the instant his instinct told him that that man might be of use, and Prince Vassily made friends with him, and at the first opportunity by instinct, without previous consideration, flattered him, became intimate with him, and told him of what he wanted.

Pierre was ready at hand in Moscow, and Prince Vassily secured an appointment as gentleman of the bedchamber for him, a position at that time reckoned equal in status to that of a councillor of state, and insisted on the young man’s travelling with him to Petersburg, and staying at his house. Without apparent design, but yet with unhesitating conviction that it was the right thing, Prince Vassily did everything to ensure Pierre’s marrying his daughter. If Prince Vassily had definitely reflected upon his plans beforehand, he could not have been so natural in his behaviour and so straightforward and familiar in his relations with every one, of higher and of lower rank than himself. Something drew him infallibly towards men richer or more powerful than himself, and he was endowed with a rare instinct for hitting on precisely the moment when he should and could make use of such persons.