also from hunger (none of them had eaten anything since
morning), and yet more because he still had no news from
Dolokhov and the man sent to capture a ‘tongue’ had not
returned.
‘There’ll hardly be another such chance to fall on a transport as today. It’s too risky to attack them by oneself, and if
we put it off till another day one of the big guerrilla detachments will snatch the prey from under our noses,’ thought
Denisov, continually peering forward, hoping to see a messenger from Dolokhov.
On coming to a path in the forest along which he could
see far to the right, Denisov stopped.
‘There’s someone coming,’ said he.
The esaul looked in the direction Denisov indicated.
‘There are two, an officer and a Cossack. But it is not presupposable that it is the lieutenant colonel himself,’ said the
esaul, who was fond of using words the Cossacks did not
know.
The approaching riders having descended a decline were
no longer visible, but they reappeared a few minutes later. In front, at a weary gallop and using his leather whip,
rode an officer, disheveled and drenched, whose trousers
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had worked up to above his knees. Behind him, standing in
the stirrups, trotted a Cossack. The officer, a very young lad
with a broad rosy face and keen merry eyes, galloped up to
Denisov and handed him a sodden envelope.
‘From the general,’ said the officer. ‘Please excuse its not
being quite dry.’
Denisov, frowning, took the envelope and opened it.
‘There, they kept telling us: ‘It’s dangerous, it’s dangerous,’’ said the officer, addressing the esaul while Denisov
was reading the dispatch. ‘But Komarov and I’he pointed to the Cossack‘were prepared. We have each of us two
pistols…. But what’s this?’ he asked, noticing the French
drummer boy. ‘A prisoner? You’ve already been in action?
May I speak to him?’
‘Wostov! Petya!’ exclaimed Denisov, having run through
the dispatch. ‘Why didn’t you say who you were?’ and turning with a smile he held out his hand to the lad.
The officer was Petya Rostov.
All the way Petya had been preparing himself to behave
with Denisov as befitted a grownup man and an officerwithout hinting at their previous acquaintance. But as soon
as Denisov smiled at him Petya brightened up, blushed with
pleasure, forgot the official manner he had been rehearsing,
and began telling him how he had already been in a battle
near Vyazma and how a certain hussar had distinguished
himself there.
‘Well, I am glad to see you,’ Denisov interrupted him,
and his face again assumed its anxious expression.
‘Michael Feoklitych,’ said he to the esaul, ‘this is again
1955
fwom that German, you know. He’he indicated Petya‘is
serving under him.’
And Denisov told the esaul that the dispatch just delivered was a repetition of the German general’s demand that
he should join forces with him for an attack on the transport.
‘If we don’t take it tomowwow, he’ll snatch it fwom under
our noses,’ he added.
While Denisov was talking to the esaul, Petyaabashed
by Denisov’s cold tone and supposing that it was due to the
condition of his trousersfurtively tried to pull them down
under his greatcoat so that no one should notice it, while
maintaining as martial an air as possible.
‘Will there be any orders, your honor?’ he asked Denisov,
holding his hand at the salute and resuming the game of
adjutant and general for which he had prepared himself, ‘or
shall I remain with your honor?’
‘Orders?’ Denisov repeated thoughtfully. ‘But can you
stay till tomowwow?’
‘Oh, please… May I stay with you?’ cried Petya.
‘But, just what did the genewal tell you? To weturn at
once?’ asked Denisov.
Petya blushed.
‘He gave me no instructions. I think I could?’ he returned, inquiringly.
‘Well, all wight,’ said Denisov.
And turning to his men he directed a party to go on to
the halting place arranged near the watchman’s hut in the
forest, and told the officer on the Kirghiz horse (who per1956
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formed the duties of an adjutant) to go and find out where
Dolokhov was and whether he would come that evening.
Denisov himself intended going with the esaul and Petya
to the edge of the forest where it reached out to Shamshevo,
to have a look at the part of the French bivouac they were to
attack next day.
‘Well, old fellow,’ said he to the peasant guide, ‘lead us to
Shamshevo.’
Denisov, Petya, and the esaul, accompanied by some
Cossacks and the hussar who had the prisoner, rode to the
left across a ravine to the edge of the forest.
1957
Chapter V
The rain had stopped, and only the mist was falling and
drops from the trees. Denisov, the esaul, and Petya rode
silently, following the peasant in the knitted cap who, stepping lightly with outturned toes and moving noiselessly
in his bast shoes over the roots and wet leaves, silently led
them to the edge of the forest.
He ascended an incline, stopped, looked about him, and
advanced to where the screen of trees was less dense. On
reaching a large oak tree that had not yet shed its leaves, he
stopped and beckoned mysteriously to them with his hand.
Denisov and Petya rode up to him. From the spot where
the peasant was standing they could see the French. Immediately beyond the forest, on a downward slope, lay a field of
spring rye. To the right, beyond a steep ravine, was a small
village and a landowner’s house with a broken roof. In the
village, in the house, in the garden, by the well, by the pond,
over all the rising ground, and all along the road uphill
from the bridge leading to the village, not more than five
hundred yards away, crowds of men could be seen through
the shimmering mist. Their un-Russian shouting at their
horses which were straining uphill with the carts, and their
calls to one another, could be clearly heard.
‘Bwing the prisoner here,’ said Denisov in a low voice,
not taking his eyes off the French.
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War and Peace
A Cossack dismounted, lifted the boy down, and took
him to Denisov. Pointing to the French troops, Denisov
asked him what these and those of them were. The boy,
thrusting his cold hands into his pockets and lifting his
eyebrows, looked at Denisov in affright, but in spite of an
evident desire to say all he knew gave confused answers,
merely assenting to everything Denisov asked him. Denisov turned away from him frowning and addressed the
esaul, conveying his own conjectures to him.
Petya, rapidly turning his head, looked now at the drummer boy, now at Denisov, now at the esaul, and now at the
French in the village and along the road, trying not to miss
anything of importance.
‘Whether Dolokhov comes or not, we must seize it, eh?’
said Denisov with a merry sparkle in his eyes.
‘It is a very suitable spot,’ said the esaul.
‘We’ll send the infantwy down by the swamps,’ Denisov
continued. ‘They’ll cweep up to the garden; you’ll wide up
fwom there with the Cossacks’he pointed to a spot in the
forest beyond the village‘and I with my hussars fwom here.
And at the signal shot..’
‘The hollow is impassablethere’s a swamp there,’ said the
esaul. ‘The horses would sink. We must ride round more to
the left…’
While they were talking in undertones the crack of a
shot sounded from the low ground by the pond, a puff of
white smoke appeared, then another, and the sound of hundreds of seemingly merry French voices shouting together
came up from the slope. For a moment Denisov and the es
1959
aul drew back. They were so near that they thought they
were the cause of the firing and shouting. But the firing and
shouting did not relate to them. Down below, a man wearing something red was running through the marsh. The
French were evidently firing and shouting at him.
‘Why, that’s our Tikhon,’ said the esaul.
‘So it is! It is!’
‘The wascal!’ said Denisov.
‘He’ll get away!’ said the esaul, screwing up his eyes.
The man whom they called Tikhon, having run to the
stream, plunged in so that the water splashed in the air,
and, having disappeared for an instant, scrambled out on
all fours, all black with the wet, and ran on. The French who
had been pursuing him stopped.
‘Smart, that!’ said the esaul.
‘What a beast!’ said Denisov with his former look of vexation. ‘What has he been doing all this time?’
‘Who is he?’ asked Petya.
‘He’s our plastun. I sent him to capture a ‘tongue.’’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Petya, nodding at the first words Denisov
uttered as if he understood it all, though he really did not
understand anything of it.
Tikhon Shcherbaty was one of the most indispensable
men in their band. He was a peasant from Pokrovsk, near
the river Gzhat. When Denisov had come to Pokrovsk at the
beginning of his operations and had as usual summoned the
village elder and asked him what he knew about the French,
the elder, as though shielding himself, had replied, as all village elders did, that he had neither seen nor heard anything
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of them. But when Denisov explained that his purpose was
to kill the French, and asked if no French had strayed that
way, the elder replied that some ‘more-orderers’ had really
been at their village, but that Tikhon Shcherbaty was the
only man who dealt with such matters. Denisov had Tikhon
called and, having praised him for his activity, said a few
words in the elder’s presence about loyalty to the Tsar and
the country and the hatred of the French that all sons of the
fatherland should cherish.
‘We don’t do the French any harm,’ said Tikhon, evidently frightened by Denisov’s words. ‘We only fooled about
with the lads for fun, you know! We killed a score or so of
‘more-orderers,’ but we did no harm else..’
Next day when Denisov had left Pokrovsk, having quite
forgotten about this peasant, it was reported to him that
Tikhon had attached himself to their party and asked to be
allowed to remain with it. Denisov gave orders to let him
do so.
Tikhon, who at first did rough work, laying campfires,
fetching water, flaying dead horses, and so on, soon showed
a great liking and aptitude for partisan warfare. At night
he would go out for booty and always brought back French
clothing and weapons, and when told
