War and Peace (145 page)

When the service was over, Kutuzov went up to the holy picture, dropped heavily down on his knees, bowing to the earth, and for a long
time he attempted to get up, and was unable from his weakness and heavy weight. His grey head twitched with the strain. At last he did get up, and putting out his lips in a naïve, childlike way kissed the holy picture, and again bowed down, with one hand touching the ground. The other generals followed his example; then the officers, and after them the soldiers and militiamen ran up with excited faces, pushing each other, and shoving breathlessly forward.

Staggering from the crush of the crowd that carried him along with it, Pierre looked about him.

“Count! Pyotr Kirillitch! How did you come here?” said a voice. Pierre looked round.

Boris Drubetskoy, brushing his knee with his hand (he had probably made it dusty in his devotions before the holy picture) came up to Pierre smiling. Boris was elegantly dressed, though his get-up was of a style appropriate to active service. He wore a long military coat and had a riding-whip slung across his shoulder, as Kutuzov had.

Kutuzov had meanwhile reached the village, and sat down in the shade of the nearest house, on a bench which one Cossack ran to fetch him, and another hastily covered with a rug. An immense retinue of magnificent officers surrounded him.

The procession was moving on further, accompanied by the crowd. Pierre stood still about thirty paces from Kutuzov, talking to Boris.

He explained to him his desire to take part in the battle and to inspect the position.

“I tell you what you had better do,” said Boris. “I will do the honours of the camp for you. You will see everything best of all from where Count Bennigsen is to be. I am in attendance on him. I will mention it to him. And if you like to go over the position, come along with us; we are just going to the left flank. And then when we come back, I beg you will stay the night with me, and we will make up a game of cards. You know Dmitry Sergeitch, of course. He is staying there.” He pointed to the third house in Gorky.

“But I should have liked to have seen the right flank. I’m told it is very strong,” said Pierre. “I should have liked to go from the river Moskva through the whole position.”

“Well, that you can do later, but the great thing is the left flank.”

“Yes, yes. And where is Prince Bolkonsky’s regiment? can you point it out to me?” asked Pierre.

“Andrey Nikolaevitch’s? We shall pass it. I will take you to him.”

“What about the left flank?” asked Pierre.

“To tell you the truth, between ourselves, there’s no making out how things stand with the left flank,” said Boris confidentially, dropping his voice. “Count Bennigsen had proposed something quite different. He proposed to fortify that knoll over there, not at all as it has … but …” Boris shrugged his shoulders. “His highness would not have it so, or he was talked over. You see …” Boris did not finish because Kaisarov, Kutuzov’s adjutant, at that moment came up to Pierre. “Ah, Paisy Sergeitch,” said Boris to him, with an unembarrassed smile, “I am trying, you see, to explain the position to the count. It’s amazing how his highness can gauge the enemy’s plans so accurately!”

“Do you mean about the left flank?” said Kaisarov.

“Yes, yes; just so. Our left flank is now extremely strong.”

Although Kutuzov had made a clearance of the superfluous persons on the staff, Boris had succeeded, after the change he had made, in retaining a post at headquarters. Boris was in attendance on Count Bennigsen. Count Bennigsen, like every one on whom Boris had been in attendance, looked on young Prince Drubetskoy as an invaluable man. Among the chief officers of the army there were two clearly defined parties: Kutuzov’s party and the party of Bennigsen, the chief of the staff. Boris belonged to the latter faction, and no one succeeded better than he did in paying the most servile adulation to Kutuzov, while managing to insinuate that the old fellow was not good for much, and that everything was really due to the initiative of Bennigsen. Now the decisive moment of battle had come, which must mean the downfall of Kutuzov and the transfer of the command to Bennigsen, or if Kutuzov should gain the battle, the credit of it must be skilfully put down to Bennigsen. In any case many promotions were bound to be made, and many new men were certain to be brought to the front after the morrow. And Boris was consequently in a state of nervous exhilaration all that day.

Others of Pierre’s acquaintances joined him; and he had not time to answer all the questions about Moscow that were showered upon him, nor to listen to all they had to tell him. Every face wore a look of excitement and agitation. But it seemed to Pierre that the cause of the excitement
that was betrayed by some of those faces was to be found in questions of personal success, and he could not forget that other look of excitement he had seen in the other faces, that suggested problems, not of personal success, but the universal questions of life and death.

Kutuzov noticed Pierre’s figure and the group gathered about him.

“Call him to me,” said Kutuzov.

An adjutant communicated his highness’s desire, and Pierre went towards the bench. But a militiaman approached Kutuzov before him. It was Dolohov.

“How does that man come to be here?” asked Pierre.

“Oh, he’s such a sly dog, he pokes himself in everywhere!” was the answer he received. “He has been degraded to the ranks, you know. Now he wants to pop up again. He has made plans of some sort and spies in the enemy’s lines at night … but he’s a plucky fellow …”

Pierre took off his hat and bowed respectfully to Kutuzov.

“I decided that if I were to lay the matter before your highness, you might dismiss me or say that you were aware of the facts and then I shouldn’t lose anything,” Dolohov was saying.

“To be sure.”

“And if I were right, I should do a service for my fatherland, for which I am ready to die.”

“To be sure … to be sure …”

“And if your highness has need of a man who would not spare his skin graciously remember me … perhaps I might be of use to your highness …”

“To be sure … to be sure …” repeated Kutuzov, looking with laughing, half-closed eye at Pierre.

Meanwhile Boris, with his courtier-like tact, had moved close to the commander-in-chief with Pierre, and in the most natural manner, in a quiet voice, as though continuing his previous conversation, he said to Pierre:

“The peasant militiamen have simply put on clean, white shirts to be ready to die. What heroism, count!”

Boris said this to Pierre with the evident intention of being overheard by his excellency. He knew Kutuzov’s attention would be caught by those words, and his highness did in fact address him.

“What are you saying about the militia?” he said to Boris.

“They have put on white shirts, your highness, by way of preparing for to-morrow, to be ready for death.”

“Ah!… A marvellous, unique people,” said Kutuzov, and closing his eyes he shook his head. “A unique people!” he repeated, with a sigh.

“Do you want a sniff of powder?” he said to Pierre. “Yes; a pleasant smell. I have the honour to be one of your wife’s worshippers; is she quite well? My quarters are at your service.” And Kutuzov began, as old people often do, gazing abstractedly about him, as though forgetting all he had to say or do. Apparently recollecting the object of his search, he beckoned to Andrey Sergeitch Kaisarov, the brother of his adjutant.

“How was it, how do they go, those verses of Marin? How do they go? What he wrote on Gerakov: ‘You will be teacher in the corps …’ Tell me, tell me,” said Kutuzov, his countenance relaxing in readiness for a laugh. Kaisarov repeated the lines … Kutuzov, smiling, nodded his head to the rhythm of the verse.

When Pierre moved away from Kutuzov, Dolohov approached and took his hand.

“I am very glad to meet you here, count,” he said, aloud, disregarding the presence of outsiders, and speaking with a marked determination and gravity. “On the eve of a day which God knows who among us will be destined to survive I am glad to have the chance of telling you that I regret the misunderstandings there have been between us in the past; and I should be glad to think you had nothing against me. I beg you to forgive me.”

Pierre looked with a smile at Dolohov, not knowing what to say to him. With tears starting into his eyes, Dolohov embraced and kissed Pierre.

Boris had said a few words to his general, and Count Bennigsen addressed Pierre, proposing that he should accompany them along the line.

“You will find it interesting,” he said.

“Yes, very interesting,” said Pierre.

Half an hour later Kutuzov was on his way back to Tatarinovo, while Bennigsen and his suite, with Pierre among them, were inspecting the position.

From Gorky Bennigsen went down the high-road to the bridge, which the officer on the knoll had pointed out to Pierre as the centre of the
position, where by the riverside lay rows of sweet-scented, new-mown hay. They crossed the bridge to the village of Borodino, then turned to the left, and passing immense numbers of men and cannons, came out on to the high knoll on which militiamen were at work excavating. This was the redoubt, as yet unnamed, afterwards called Raevsky’s redoubt, or the battery on the mound.

Pierre did not take special notice of this redoubt. He did not dream that that spot would be more memorable for him than any other part of the plain of Borodino. Then they crossed a hollow to Semyonovskoye, where the soldiers were dragging away the last logs of the huts and barns. Then they rode on downhill and uphill again, across a field of rye, trampled and laid as though by hail, along the track newly made by the artillery, over the ridges of the ploughed field, to the earthworks, at which the men were still at work.

Bennigsen halted at the earthworks, and looked in front at the redoubt of Shevardino, which had been ours the day before. Several horsemen could be descried upon it. The officers said that Napoleon and Murat were there. And all gazed eagerly at the little group of horsemen. Pierre too stared at them, trying to guess which of the scarcely discernible figures was Napoleon. At last the group of horsemen descended the hill and passed out of sight.

Bennigsen began explaining to a general who had ridden up to him the whole position of our troops. Pierre listened to his words, straining every faculty of his mind to grasp the essential points of the coming battle, but to his mortification he felt that his faculties were not equal to the task. He could make nothing of it. Bennigsen finished speaking, and noticing Pierre’s listening face, he said, turning suddenly to him:

“It’s not very interesting for you, I expect.”

“Oh, on the contrary, it’s very interesting,” Pierre repeated, not quite truthfully.

From the earthworks they turned still more to the left of the road that ran winding through a thick, low-growing, birch wood. In the middle of the wood a brown hare with white feet popped out on the road before them, and was so frightened by the tramp of so many horses, that in its terror it hopped along the road just in front of them for a long while, rousing general laughter, and only when several voices shouted at it, dashed to one side and was lost in the thicket. After a couple of versts of woodland, they came out on a clearing, where were the troops of Tutchkov’s corps, destined to protect the left flank.

At this point, at the extreme left flank, Bennigsen talked a great deal with much heat; and gave instructions, of great importance from a military point of view, as it seemed to Pierre. Just in front of the spot where Tutchkov’s troops were placed there rose a knoll, which was not occupied by troops. Bennigsen was loud in his criticism of this oversight, saying that it was insane to leave a height that commanded the country round unoccupied and place troops just below it. Several generals expressed the same opinion. One in particular, with martial warmth, declared that they were doomed there to certain destruction. Bennigsen, on his own responsibility, ordered the troops to be moved on to the high-road.

This change of position on the left flank made Pierre more than ever doubtful of his capacity for comprehending military matters. As he heard Bennigsen and the other generals criticising the position of the troops at the foot of the hill, Pierre fully grasped and shared their views. But that was why he could not imagine how the man who had placed them there could have made so gross and obvious a blunder.

Pierre did not know that the troops had not been placed there to defend their position, as Bennigsen supposed, but had been stationed in that concealed spot in ambush, in order unobserved to deal a sudden blow at the enemy unawares. Bennigsen, ignorant of this project, moved the troops into a prominent position without saying anything about this change to the commander-in-chief.

Prince Andrey was on that bright August evening lying propped on his elbow in a broken-down barn in the village of Knyazkovo, at the further end of the encampment of his regiment. Through a gap in the broken wall he was looking at the line of thirty-year-old pollard birches in the hedge, at the field with sheaves of oats lying about it, and at the bushes where he saw the smoke of camp-fires, at which the soldiers were doing their cooking.

Cramped and useless and burdensome as his life seemed now to Prince Andrey, he felt nervously excited and irritable on the eve of battle, just as he had felt seven years earlier before Austerlitz.

He had received and given all orders for the next day’s battle. He had nothing more to do. But thoughts—the simplest, most obvious, and
therefore most awful—would not leave him in peace. He knew that the battle next day would be the most awful of all he had taken part in, and death, for the first time, presented itself to him, not in relation to his actual manner of life, or to the effect of it on others, but simply in relation to himself, to his soul, and rose before him simply and awfully with a vividness that made it like a concrete reality. And from the height of this vision everything that had once occupied him seemed suddenly illumined by a cold, white light, without shade, without perspective or outline. His whole life seemed to him like a magic lantern, at which he had been looking through the glass and by artificial light. Now he saw suddenly, without the glass, in the clear light of day, those badly daubed pictures. “Yes, yes, there are they; there are the cheating forms that excited torments and ecstasies in me,” he said to himself, going over in imagination the chief pictures of the magic lantern of his life, looking at them now in the cold, white daylight of a clear view of death. “These are they, these coarsely sketched figures which seemed something splendid and mysterious. Glory, the good society, love for a woman, the fatherland—what grand pictures they used to seem to me, with what deep meaning they seemed to be filled! And it is all so simple, so colourless and coarse in the cold light of the day that I feel is dawning for me.” The three chief sorrows of his life held his attention especially. His love for a woman, his father’s death, and the invasion of the French—now in possession of half of Russia. “Love!… That little girl, who seemed to me brimming over with mysterious forces. How I loved her! I made romantic plans of love, of happiness with her! O simple-hearted youth!” he said aloud bitterly. “Why, I believed in some ideal love which was to keep her faithful to me for the whole year of my absence! Like the faithful dove in the fable, she was to pine away in my absence from her! And it was all so much simpler.… It is all so horribly simple and loathsome!