THE MEN rapidly picked out their horses in the semidarkness, tightened their saddle girths, and formed companies. Denisov stood by the watchman’s hut giving final orders. The infantry of the detachment passed along the road and quickly disappeared amid the trees in the mist of early dawn, hundreds of feet splashing through the mud. The esaul gave some orders to his men. Petya held his horse by the bridle, impatiently awaiting the order to mount. His face, having been bathed in cold water, was all aglow, and his eyes were particularly brilliant. Cold shivers ran down his spine and his whole body pulsed rhythmically.
“Well, is ev’wything weady?” asked Denisov. “Bwing the horses.”
The horses were brought. Denisov was angry with the Cossack because the saddle girths were too slack, reproved him, and mounted. Petya put his foot in the stirrup. His horse by habit made as if to nip his leg, but Petya leaped quickly into the saddle unconscious of his own weight and, turning to look at the hussars starting in the darkness behind him, rode up to Denisov.
“Vasili Dmitrich, entrust me with some commission! Please . . . for God’s sake . . . !” said he.
Denisov seemed to have forgotten Petya’s very existence. He turned to glance at him.
“I ask one thing of you,” he said sternly, “to obey me and not shove youself foward anywhere.”
He did not say another word to Petya but rode in silence all the way. When they had come to the edge of the forest it was noticeably growing light over the field. Denisov talked in whispers with the esaul and the Cossacks rode past Petya and Denisov. When they had all ridden by, Denisov touched his horse and rode down the hill. Slipping onto their haunches and sliding, the horses descended with their riders into the ravine. Petya rode beside Denisov, the pulsation of his body constantly increasing. It was getting lighter and lighter, but the mist still hid distant objects. Having reached the valley, Denisov looked back and nodded to a Cossack beside him.
“The signal!” said he.
The Cossack raised his arm and a shot rang out. In an instant the tramp of horses galloping forward was heard, shouts came from various sides, and then more shots.
At the first sound of trampling hoofs and shouting, Petya lashed his horse and loosening his rein galloped forward, not heeding Denisov who shouted at him. It seemed to Petya that at the moment the shot was fired it suddenly became as bright as noon. He galloped to the bridge. Cossacks were galloping along the road in front of him. On the bridge he collided with a Cossack who had fallen behind, but he galloped on. In front of him soldiers, probably Frenchmen, were running from right to left across the road. One of them fell in the mud under his horse’s feet.
Cossacks were crowding about a hut, busy with something. From the midst of that crowd terrible screams arose. Petya galloped up, and the first thing he saw was the pale face and trembling jaw of a Frenchman, clutching the handle of a lance that had been aimed at him.
“Hurrah! . . . Lads! . . . ours!” shouted Petya, and giving rein to his excited horse he galloped forward along the village street.
He could hear shooting ahead of him. Cossacks, hussars, and ragged Russian prisoners, who had come running from both sides of the road, were shouting something loudly and incoherently. A gallant-looking Frenchman, in a blue overcoat, capless, and with a frowning red face, had been defending himself against the hussars. When Petya galloped up the Frenchman had already fallen. “Too late again!” flashed through Petya’s mind and he galloped on to the place from which the rapid firing could be heard. The shots came from the yard of the landowner’s house he had visited the night before with Dolokhov. The French were making a stand there behind a wattle fence in a garden thickly overgrown with bushes and were firing at the Cossacks who crowded at the gateway. Through the smoke, as he approached the gate, Petya saw Dolokhov, whose face was of a pale-greenish tint, shouting to his men. “Go round! Wait for the infantry!” he exclaimed as Petya rode up to him.
“Wait? . . . Hurrah-ah-ah!” shouted Petya, and without pausing a moment galloped to the place whence came the sounds of firing and where the smoke was thickest.
A volley was heard, and some bullets whistled past, while others plashed against something. The Cossacks and Dolokhov galloped after Petya into the gateway of the courtyard. In the dense wavering smoke some of the French threw down their arms and ran out of the bushes to meet the Cossacks, while others ran down the hill toward the pond. Petya was galloping along the courtyard, but instead of holding the reins he waved both his arms about rapidly and strangely, slipping farther and farther to one side in his saddle. His horse, having galloped up to a campfire that was smoldering in the morning light, stopped suddenly, and Petya fell heavily on to the wet ground. The Cossacks saw that his arms and legs jerked rapidly though his head was quite motionless. A bullet had pierced his skull.
After speaking to the senior French officer, who came out of the house with a white handkerchief tied to his sword and announced that they surrendered, Dolokhov dismounted and went up to Petya, who lay motionless with outstretched arms.
“Done for!” he said with a frown, and went to the gate to meet Denisov who was riding toward him.
“Killed?” cried Denisov, recognizing from a distance the unmistakably lifeless attitude—very familiar to him—in which Petya’s body was lying.
“Done for!” repeated Dolokhov as if the utterance of these words afforded him pleasure, and he went quickly up to the prisoners, who were surrounded by Cossacks who had hurried up. “We won’t take them!” he called out to Denisov.
Denisov did not reply; he rode up to Petya, dismounted, and with trembling hands turned toward himself the bloodstained, mud-bespattered face which had already gone white.
“I am used to something sweet. Raisins, fine ones . . . take them all!” he recalled Petya’s words. And the Cossacks looked round in surprise at the sound, like the yelp of a dog, with which Denisov turned away, walked to the wattle fence, and seized hold of it.
Among the Russian prisoners rescued by Denisov and Dolokhov was Pierre Bezukhov.
- Equivalent to: “I was not born yesterday”—A.M.
- Tolstoy borrowed this expedient, by which Denisov preserved his independent command, from an incident recorded in Davydov’s Diary of Guerrilla Operations.—A.M.
- What is here told was actual fact. After Davydov’s (in the novel Denisov’s) first successes, Kutozov gave him two Cossack regiments to strengthen his force. Lovayski is a familiar form of the well-known Don family name, Ilovayski. An esaul is a captain of Cossacks.—A.M.
- Plastun—an unmounted sharpshooter among the Black Sea Cossacks. Strictly speaking, the plastuns were special detachments of Black Sea Cossacks in the wars with the Caucasian hill tribes. Their speciality was to track down the enemy among the forests of the Kuban. In the present case Denisov uses the word to indicate a man who operates as the plastuns did in the Cauca-sus.—A.M.
- Karabakh is a district in the Southern Caucasus, famous for its breed of horses.—A.M.
- Pierre’s journey among the prisoners. Karatëev. His story of the merchant. His death. Pierre rescued
DURING THE WHOLE of their march from Moscow no fresh orders had been issued by the French authorities concerning the party of prisoners among whom was Pierre. On the twenty-second of October that party was no longer with the same troops and baggage trains with which it had left Moscow. Half the wagons laden with hardtack that had traveled the first stages with them had been captured by Cossacks, the other half had gone on ahead. Not one of those dismounted cavalrymen who had marched in front of the prisoners was left; they had all disappeared. The artillery the prisoners had seen in front of them during the first days was now replaced by Marshal Junot’s enormous baggage train, convoyed by Westphalians. Behind the prisoners came a cavalry baggage train.
From Vyazma onwards the French army, which had till then moved in three columns, went on as a single group. The symptoms of disorder that Pierre had noticed at their first halting place after leaving Moscow had now reached the utmost limit.
The road along which they moved was bordered on both sides by dead horses; ragged men who had fallen behind from various regiments continually changed about, now joining the moving column, now again lagging behind it.
Several times during the march false alarms had been given and the soldiers of the escort had raised their muskets, fired, and run headlong, crushing one another, but had afterwards reassembled and abused each other for their causeless panic.
These three groups traveling together—the cavalry stores, the convoy of prisoners, and Junot’s baggage train—still constituted a separate and united whole, though each of the groups was rapidly melting away.
Of the artillery baggage train which had consisted of a hundred and twenty wagons, not more than sixty now remained; the rest had been captured or left behind. Some of Junot’s wagons also had been captured or abandoned. Three wagons had been raided and robbed by stragglers from Davout’s corps. From the talk of the Germans Pierre learned that a larger guard had been allotted to that baggage train than to the prisoners, and that one of their comrades, a German soldier, had been shot by the marshal’s own order because
