afraid of it. That’s so, friend.’
Another, a younger voice, interrupted him: ‘Afraid or
not, you can’t escape it anyhow.’
‘All the same, one is afraid! Oh, you clever people,’ said
a third manly voice interrupting them both. ‘Of course you
artillery men are very wise, because you can take everything along with youvodka and snacks.’
And the owner of the manly voice, evidently an infantry
officer, laughed.
‘Yes, one is afraid,’ continued the first speaker, he of the
familiar voice. ‘One is afraid of the unknown, that’s what it
is. Whatever we may say about the soul going to the sky… we
know there is no sky but only an atmosphere.’
The manly voice again interrupted the artillery officer.
‘Well, stand us some of your herb vodka, Tushin,’ it
said.
‘Why,’ thought Prince Andrew, ‘that’s the captain who
stood up in the sutler’s hut without his boots.’ He recognized the agreeable, philosophizing voice with pleasure.
‘Some herb vodka? Certainly!’ said Tushin. ‘But still, to
conceive a future life..’
He did not finish. Just then there was a whistle in the
air; nearer and nearer, faster and louder, louder and fast320
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er, a cannon ball, as if it had not finished saying what was
necessary, thudded into the ground near the shed with super human force, throwing up a mass of earth. The ground
seemed to groan at the terrible impact.
And immediately Tushin, with a short pipe in the corner of his mouth and his kind, intelligent face rather pale,
rushed out of the shed followed by the owner of the manly
voice, a dashing infantry officer who hurried off to his company, buttoning up his coat as he ran.
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Chapter XVII
Mounting his horse again Prince Andrew lingered with
the battery, looking at the puff from the gun that had sent
the ball. His eyes ran rapidly over the wide space, but he only
saw that the hitherto motionless masses of the French now
swayed and that there really was a battery to their left. The
smoke above it had not yet dispersed. Two mounted Frenchmen, probably adjutants, were galloping up the hill. A small
but distinctly visible enemy column was moving down the
hill, probably to strengthen the front line. The smoke of
the first shot had not yet dispersed before another puff appeared, followed by a report. The battle had begun! Prince
Andrew turned his horse and galloped back to Grunth to
find Prince Bagration. He heard the cannonade behind him
growing louder and more frequent. Evidently our guns had
begun to reply. From the bottom of the slope, where the parleys had taken place, came the report of musketry.
Lemarrois had just arrived at a gallop with Bonaparte’s
stern letter, and Murat, humiliated and anxious to expiate
his fault, had at once moved his forces to attack the center
and outflank both the Russian wings, hoping before evening and before the arrival of the Emperor to crush the
contemptible detachment that stood before him.
‘It has begun. Here it is!’ thought Prince Andrew, feeling the blood rush to his heart. ‘But where and how will my
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Toulon present itself?’
Passing between the companies that had been eating
porridge and drinking vodka a quarter of an hour before,
he saw everywhere the same rapid movement of soldiers
forming ranks and getting their muskets ready, and on all
their faces he recognized the same eagerness that filled his
heart. ‘It has begun! Here it is, dreadful but enjoyable!’ was
what the face of each soldier and each officer seemed to say.
Before he had reached the embankments that were being
thrown up, he saw, in the light of the dull autumn evening,
mounted men coming toward him. The foremost, wearing
a Cossack cloak and lambskin cap and riding a white horse,
was Prince Bagration. Prince Andrew stopped, waiting for
him to come up; Prince Bagration reined in his horse and
recognizing Prince Andrew nodded to him. He still looked
ahead while Prince Andrew told him what he had seen.
The feeling, ‘It has begun! Here it is!’ was seen even on
Prince Bagration’s hard brown face with its half-closed, dull,
sleepy eyes. Prince Andrew gazed with anxious curiosity at
that impassive face and wished he could tell what, if anything, this man was thinking and feeling at that moment.
‘Is there anything at all behind that impassive face?’ Prince
Andrew asked himself as he looked. Prince Bagration bent
his head in sign of agreement with what Prince Andrew told
him, and said, ‘Very good!’ in a tone that seemed to imply
that everything that took place and was reported to him
was exactly what he had foreseen. Prince Andrew, out of
breath with his rapid ride, spoke quickly. Prince Bagration,
uttering his words with an Oriental accent, spoke particu
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larly slowly, as if to impress the fact that there was no need
to hurry. However, he put his horse to a trot in the direction of Tushin’s battery. Prince Andrew followed with the
suite. Behind Prince Bagration rode an officer of the suite,
the prince’s personal adjutant, Zherkov, an orderly officer,
the staff officer on duty, riding a fine bobtailed horse, and a
civilianan accountant who had asked permission to be present at the battle out of curiosity. The accountant, a stout,
full-faced man, looked around him with a naive smile of
satisfaction and presented a strange appearance among the
hussars, Cossacks, and adjutants, in his camlet coat, as he
jolted on his horse with a convoy officer’s saddle.
‘He wants to see a battle,’ said Zherkov to Bolkonski,
pointing to the accountant, ‘but he feels a pain in the pit of
his stomach already.’
‘Oh, leave off!’ said the accountant with a beaming but
rather cunning smile, as if flattered at being made the
subject of Zherkov’s joke, and purposely trying to appear
stupider than he really was.
‘It is very strange, mon Monsieur Prince,’ said the staff
officer. (He remembered that in French there is some peculiar way of addressing a prince, but could not get it quite
right.)
By this time they were all approaching Tushin’s battery,
and a ball struck the ground in front of them.
‘What’s that that has fallen?’ asked the accountant with
a naive smile.
‘A French pancake,’ answered Zherkov.
‘So that’s what they hit with?’ asked the accountant.
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‘How awful!’
He seemed to swell with satisfaction. He had hardly finished speaking when they again heard an unexpectedly
violent whistling which suddenly ended with a thud into
something soft… f-f-flop! and a Cossack, riding a little to
their right and behind the accountant, crashed to earth with
his horse. Zherkov and the staff officer bent over their saddles and turned their horses away. The accountant stopped,
facing the Cossack, and examined him with attentive curiosity. The Cossack was dead, but the horse still struggled.
Prince Bagration screwed up his eyes, looked round,
and, seeing the cause of the confusion, turned away with
indifference, as if to say, ‘Is it worth while noticing trifles?’ He reined in his horse with the case of a skillful rider
and, slightly bending over, disengaged his saber which had
caught in his cloak. It was an old-fashioned saber of a kind
no longer in general use. Prince Andrew remembered the
story of Suvorov giving his saber to Bagration in Italy, and
the recollection was particularly pleasant at that moment.
They had reached the battery at which Prince Andrew had
been when he examined the battlefield.
‘Whose company?’ asked Prince Bagration of an artilleryman standing by the ammunition wagon.
He asked, ‘Whose company?’ but he really meant, ‘Are
you frightened here?’ and the artilleryman understood
him.
‘Captain Tushin’s, your excellency!’ shouted the redhaired, freckled gunner in a merry voice, standing to
attention.
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‘Yes, yes,’ muttered Bagration as if considering something, and he rode past the limbers to the farthest cannon.
As he approached, a ringing shot issued from it deafening him and his suite, and in the smoke that suddenly
surrounded the gun they could see the gunners who had
seized it straining to roll it quickly back to its former position. A huge, broad-shouldered gunner, Number One,
holding a mop, his legs far apart, sprang to the wheel; while
Number Two with a trembling hand placed a charge in the
cannon’s mouth. The short, round-shouldered Captain
Tushin, stumbling over the tail of the gun carriage, moved
forward and, not noticing the general, looked out shading
his eyes with his small hand.
‘Lift it two lines more and it will be just right,’ cried he in
a feeble voice to which he tried to impart a dashing note, ill
suited to his weak figure. ‘Number Two!’ he squeaked. ‘Fire,
Medvedev!’
Bagration called to him, and Tushin, raising three fingers
to his cap with a bashful and awkward gesture not at all like
a military salute but like a priest’s benediction, approached
the general. Though Tushin’s guns had been intended to
cannonade the valley, he was firing incendiary balls at the
village of Schon Grabern visible just opposite, in front of
which large masses of French were advancing.
No one had given Tushin orders where and at what to
fire, but after consulting his sergeant major, Zakharchenko, for whom he had great respect, he had decided that it
would be a good thing to set fire to the village. ‘Very good!’
said Bagration in reply to the officer’s report, and began de326
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liberately to examine the whole battlefield extended before
him. The French had advanced nearest on our right. Below
the height on which the Kiev regiment was stationed, in the
hollow where the rivulet flowed, the soul-stirring rolling
and crackling of musketry was heard, and much farther to
the right beyond the dragoons, the officer of the suite pointed out to Bagration a French column that was outflanking
us. To the left the horizon bounded by the adjacent wood.
Prince Bagration ordered two battalions from the center to be sent to reinforce the right flank. The officer of the
suite ventured to remark to the prince that if these battalions went away, the guns would remain without support.
Prince Bagration turned to the officer and with his dull eyes
looked at him in silence. It seemed to Prince Andrew that
the officer’s remark was just and that really no answer could
be made to it. But at that moment an adjutant galloped up
with a message from the commander of the regiment in the
hollow and news that immense masses of
