trying to get ahead of others, and the strokes of his whip fell
on the apron of the equipage. The woman screamed piercingly. Seeing Prince Andrew she leaned out from behind the
apron and, waving her thin arms from under the woolen
shawl, cried:
‘Mr. Aide-de-camp! Mr. Aide-de-camp!… For heaven’s
sake… Protect me! What will become of us? I am the wife
of the doctor of the Seventh Chasseurs…. They won’t let us
pass, we are left behind and have lost our people..’
‘I’ll flatten you into a pancake!’ shouted the angry officer
to the soldier. ‘Turn back with your slut!’
‘Mr. Aide-de-camp! Help me!… What does it all mean?’
screamed the doctor’s wife.
‘Kindly let this cart pass. Don’t you see it’s a woman?’
said Prince Andrew riding up to the officer.
The officer glanced at him, and without replying turned
again to the soldier. ‘I’ll teach you to push on!… Back!’
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‘Let them pass, I tell you!’ repeated Prince Andrew, compressing his lips.
‘And who are you?’ cried the officer, turning on him
with tipsy rage, ‘who are you? Are you in command here?
Eh? I am commander here, not you! Go back or I’ll flatten
you into a pancake,’ repeated he. This expression evidently
pleased him.
‘That was a nice snub for the little aide-de-camp,’ came a
voice from behind.
Prince Andrew saw that the officer was in that state of
senseless, tipsy rage when a man does not know what he is
saying. He saw that his championship of the doctor’s wife in
her queer trap might expose him to what he dreaded more
than anything in the worldto ridicule; but his instinct urged
him on. Before the officer finished his sentence Prince Andrew, his face distorted with fury, rode up to him and raised
his riding whip.
‘Kind…ly letthempass!’
The officer flourished his arm and hastily rode away.
‘It’s all the fault of these fellows on the staff that there’s
this disorder,’ he muttered. ‘Do as you like.’
Prince Andrew without lifting his eyes rode hastily away
from the doctor’s wife, who was calling him her deliverer,
and recalling with a sense of disgust the minutest details of
this humiliating scene he galloped on to the village where
he was told that the commander in chief was.
On reaching the village he dismounted and went to the
nearest house, intending to rest if but for a moment, eat
something, and try to sort out the stinging and tormenting
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thoughts that confused his mind. ‘This is a mob of scoundrels and not an army,’ he was thinking as he went up to the
window of the first house, when a familiar voice called him
by name.
He turned round. Nesvitski’s handsome face looked out
of the little window. Nesvitski, moving his moist lips as he
chewed something, and flourishing his arm, called him to
enter.
‘Bolkonski! Bolkonski!… Don’t you hear? Eh? Come
quick…’ he shouted.
Entering the house, Prince Andrew saw Nesvitski and another adjutant having something to eat. They hastily turned
round to him asking if he had any news. On their familiar
faces he read agitation and alarm. This was particularly noticeable on Nesvitski’s usually laughing countenance.
‘Where is the commander in chief?’ asked Bolkonski.
‘Here, in that house,’ answered the adjutant.
‘Well, is it true that it’s peace and capitulation?’ asked
Nesvitski.
‘I was going to ask you. I know nothing except that it was
all I could do to get here.’
‘And we, my dear boy! It’s terrible! I was wrong to laugh
at Mack, we’re getting it still worse,’ said Nesvitski. ‘But sit
down and have something to eat.’
‘You won’t be able to find either your baggage or anything else now, Prince. And God only knows where your
man Peter is,’ said the other adjutant.
‘Where are headquarters?’
‘We are to spend the night in Znaim.’
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‘Well, I have got all I need into packs for two horses,’
said Nesvitski. ‘They’ve made up splendid packs for mefit
to cross the Bohemian mountains with. It’s a bad lookout,
old fellow! But what’s the matter with you? You must be ill
to shiver like that,’ he added, noticing that Prince Andrew
winced as at an electric shock.
‘It’s nothing,’ replied Prince Andrew.
He had just remembered his recent encounter with the
doctor’s wife and the convoy officer.
‘What is the commander in chief doing here?’ he asked.
‘I can’t make out at all,’ said Nesvitski.
‘Well, all I can make out is that everything is abominable,
abominable, quite abominable!’ said Prince Andrew, and he
went off to the house where the commander in chief was.
Passing by Kutuzov’s carriage and the exhausted saddle
horses of his suite, with their Cossacks who were talking
loudly together, Prince Andrew entered the passage. Kutuzov himself, he was told, was in the house with Prince
Bagration and Weyrother. Weyrother was the Austrian
general who had succeeded Schmidt. In the passage little
Kozlovski was squatting on his heels in front of a clerk.
The clerk, with cuffs turned up, was hastily writing at a tub
turned bottom upwards. Kozlovski’s face looked wornhe
too had evidently not slept all night. He glanced at Prince
Andrew and did not even nod to him.
‘Second line… have you written it?’ he continued dictating to the clerk. ‘The Kiev Grenadiers, Podolian..’
‘One can’t write so fast, your honor,’ said the clerk, glancing angrily and disrespectfully at Kozlovski.
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Through the door came the sounds of Kutuzov’s voice, excited and dissatisfied, interrupted by another, an unfamiliar
voice. From the sound of these voices, the inattentive way
Kozlovski looked at him, the disrespectful manner of the
exhausted clerk, the fact that the clerk and Kozlovski were
squatting on the floor by a tub so near to the commander in
chief, and from the noisy laughter of the Cossacks holding
the horses near the window, Prince Andrew felt that something important and disastrous was about to happen.
He turned to Kozlovski with urgent questions.
‘Immediately, Prince,’ said Kozlovski. ‘Dispositions for
Bagration.’
‘What about capitulation?’
‘Nothing of the sort. Orders are issued for a battle.’
Prince Andrew moved toward the door from whence
voices were heard. Just as he was going to open it the sounds
ceased, the door opened, and Kutuzov with his eagle nose
and puffy face appeared in the doorway. Prince Andrew
stood right in front of Kutuzov but the expression of the
commander in chief’s one sound eye showed him to be so
preoccupied with thoughts and anxieties as to be oblivious of his presence. He looked straight at his adjutant’s face
without recognizing him.
‘Well, have you finished?’ said he to Kozlovski.
‘One moment, your excellency.’
Bagration, a gaunt middle-aged man of medium height
with a firm, impassive face of Oriental type, came out after
the commander in chief.
‘I have the honor to present myself,’ repeated Prince An
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drew rather loudly, handing Kutuzov an envelope.
Ah, from Vienna? Very good. Later, later!’
Kutuzov went out into the porch with Bagration.
‘Well, good-by, Prince,’ said he to Bagration. ‘My blessing, and may Christ be with you in your great endeavor!’
His face suddenly softened and tears came into his eyes.
With his left hand he drew Bagration toward him, and with
his right, on which he wore a ring, he made the sign of the
cross over him with a gesture evidently habitual, offering
his puffy cheek, but Bagration kissed him on the neck instead.
‘Christ be with you!’ Kutuzov repeated and went toward
his carriage. ‘Get in with me,’ said he to Bolkonski.
‘Your excellency, I should like to be of use here. Allow me
to remain with Prince Bagration’s detachment.’
‘Get in,’ said Kutuzov, and noticing that Bolkonski still
delayed, he added: ‘I need good officers myself, need them
myself!’
They got into the carriage and drove for a few minutes
in silence.
‘There is still much, much before us,’ he said, as if with an
old man’s penetration he understood all that was passing in
Bolkonski’s mind. ‘If a tenth part of his detachment returns
I shall thank God,’ he added as if speaking to himself.
Prince Andrew glanced at Kutuzov’s face only a foot
distant from him and involuntarily noticed the carefully
washed seams of the scar near his temple, where an Ismail bullet had pierced his skull, and the empty eye socket.
‘Yes, he has a right to speak so calmly of those men’s death,’
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thought Bolkonski.
‘That is why I beg to be sent to that detachment,’ he said.
Kutuzov did not reply. He seemed to have forgotten what
he had been saying, and sat plunged in thought. Five minutes later, gently swaying on the soft springs of the carriage,
he turned to Prince Andrew. There was not a trace of agitation on his face. With delicate irony he questioned Prince
Andrew about the details of his interview with the Emperor, about the remarks he had heard at court concerning the
Krems affair, and about some ladies they both knew.
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Chapter XIV
On November 1 Kutuzov had received, through a spy, news
that the army he commanded was in an almost hopeless position. The spy reported that the French, after crossing the
bridge at Vienna, were advancing in immense force upon
Kutuzov’s line of communication with the troops that
were arriving from Russia. If Kutuzov decided to remain at
Krems, Napoleon’s army of one hundred and fifty thousand
men would cut him off completely and surround his exhausted army of forty thousand, and he would find himself
in the position of Mack at Ulm. If Kutuzov decided to abandon the road connecting him with the troops arriving from
Russia, he would have to march with no road into unknown
parts of the Bohemian mountains, defending himself against
superior forces of the enemy and abandoning all hope of
a junction with Buxhowden. If Kutuzov decided to retreat
along the road from Krems to Olmutz, to unite with the
troops arriving from Russia, he risked being forestalled on
that road by the French who had crossed the Vienna bridge,
and encumbered by his baggage and transport, having to
accept battle on the march against an enemy three times as
strong, who would hem him in from two sides.
Kutuzov chose this latter course.
The French, the spy reported, having crossed the Vienna
bridge, were advancing by forced marches toward Znaim,
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which lay sixty-six miles off on the line of Kutuzov’s retreat.
If he reached Znaim before the French, there would be great
hope of saving the army; to let the French forestall him at
Znaim meant
