War and Peace (149 page)

The adjutant on duty came into the tent.

“Well, Rapp, do you think we shall do good business to-day?” he said to him.

“Without doubt, sire!” answered Rapp.

Napoleon looked at him.

“Do you remember what you did me the honour to say at Smolensk?” said Rapp: “the wine is drawn, it must be drunk.”

Napoleon frowned, and sat for a long while in silence, his head in his hand.

“This poor army, it has greatly diminished since Smolensk.
La fortune est une franche courtisane
, Rapp. I have always said so, and I begin to feel it; but the Guard, Rapp, the Guard is intact?” he said inquiringly.

“Yes, sire,” replied Rapp.

Napoleon took a lozenge, put it in his mouth, and looked at his watch. He was not sleepy, and morning was still far off; and there were no instructions to be drawn up to get through the time, for all had been already given, and were even now being put into execution.

“Have the biscuits and the rice been distributed to the regiments of the Guard?” Napoleon asked severely.

“Yes, sire.”

“The rice, too?”

Rapp answered that he had given the Emperor’s orders about the rice; but Napoleon shook his head with a dissatisfied air, as though he doubted whether his command had been carried out. A servant came in with punch. Napoleon ordered another glass for Rapp, and took a few sips from his own in silence. “I have neither taste nor smell,” he said, sniffing at the glass. “I am sick of this cold. They talk about medicine. What is medicine, when they can’t cure a cold? Corvisart gave me these
lozenges, but they do no good. What can they cure? They can’t cure anything. Our body is a machine for living. It is organised for that, it is its nature; leave life to it unhindered, let life defend itself in it; it will do more than if you paralyse it, encumbering it with remedies. Our body is a perfect watch, meant to go for a certain time; the watchmaker has not the power of opening it, he can only handle it in fumbling fashion, blindfold. Our body is a machine for living, that’s all.” And apparently because he had dropped into making definitions, which he had a weakness for doing, he suddenly hazarded one on a fresh subject. “Do you know, Rapp, what the military art consists in?” he asked. “It is the art of being stronger than the enemy at a given moment. That is all.”

Rapp made no reply.

“To-morrow we shall have to do with Kutuzov,” said Napoleon. “We shall see! Do you remember, he was in command at Braunau, and never once in three weeks mounted a horse to inspect his entrenchments. We shall see!”

He looked at his watch. It was still only four o’clock. He was not sleepy; the punch was finished, and there was still nothing to do. He got up, walked up and down, put on a warm coat and hat and went out of the tent. The night was dark and damp; a slight drizzle was falling almost inaudibly. Close by in the French Guard, the camp-fires burned dimly, and far away they were blazing brightly through the smoke along the Russian line. The air was still, and a faint stir and tramp could be distinctly heard from the French troops beginning to move to occupy the position.

Napoleon walked to and fro before the tent, looked at the fires, listened to the tramp, and passed by a tall guardsman in a fur cap, a sentinel at his tent, who drew himself up like a black post on seeing the Emperor. The latter stood still, facing him.

“Since what year have you served?” he asked, with that affectation of military bluntness and geniality with which he always addressed the soldiers. The soldier answered.

“Ah! one of the veterans! Have you all had rice in the regiment?”

“Yes, your majesty.”

Napoleon nodded and walked away.

At half-past five Napoleon rode to the village of Shevardino.

It began to get light; the sky cleared, only a single storm cloud lay on the eastern horizon. The deserted camp-fires burned down in the pale light of morning.

A solitary, deep cannon shot boomed out on the right, hovered in the air, and died away in the stillness. Several minutes passed. A second, and a third shot was heard, the air was full of vibration; a fourth and a fifth boomed out majestically, closely on the right.

The first shots had not died away, when others rang out, and more and more, their notes blending and overtaking one another.

Napoleon rode with his suite to the Shevardino redoubt, and dismounted there. The game had begun.

Pierre, on returning to Gorky from seeing Prince Andrey, gave directions to his postillion to have horses ready and to call him early next morning, and promptly fell fast asleep in the corner behind a screen which Boris had put at his disposal.

When Pierre was fully awake next morning, there was no one in the hut. The panes were rattling in the little windows. The postillion was at his side, shaking him. “Your excellency, your excellency, your excellency …” the groom kept saying persistently, shaking him by the shoulder, without even looking at him, apparently having lost all hope of ever waking him up.

“Eh, has it begun? Is it time?” said Pierre, waking up.

“Listen to the firing, your excellency,” said the postillion, an old soldier; “all the gentlemen are gone already; his highness set off long ago.”

Pierre dressed in haste, and ran out into the porch. It was a bright, fresh, dewy, cheerful morning. The sun had just broken through the cloud that had screened it, and its rays filtered through the rent clouds, and over the roofs of the street opposite on to the dew-drenched dust of the road, on to the fences and the windows of the houses, and Pierre’s horses standing by the cottage. The roar of the cannon could be heard more distinctly in the open air. An adjutant galloped down the street, followed by a Cossack.

“It’s time, count, it’s time!” cried the adjutant. Pierre gave orders that he should be followed with a horse, and walked along the street to the knoll from which he had viewed the field of battle the day before. On this knoll was a crowd of officers, and Pierre heard the French chatter of the staff, and saw Kutuzov’s grey head sunk in his shoulders, and his
white cap, with red braiding on it. Kutuzov was looking through a field-glass along the high-road before him.

Mounting the steps of the approach to the mound, Pierre glanced before him, and felt a thrill of delight at the beauty of the spectacle. It was the same scene that he had admired from that mound the day before. But now the whole panorama was filled with troops and the smoke of the guns, and in the pure morning air the slanting rays of the sun, behind Pierre on the left, shed on it a brilliant light full of gold and pink tones, and broken up by long, dark shadows. The distant forests that bounded the scene lay in a crescent on the horizon, looking as though carved out of some precious yellow-green stone, and through their midst behind Valuev ran the great Smolensk road, all covered with troops. In the foreground lay golden fields and copses glittering in the sun. Everywhere, to right, to left, and in front were soldiers. The whole scene was inspiriting, impressive, and unexpected; but what struck Pierre most of all was the aspect of the field of battle itself, of Borodino, and the hollow on both sides of the Kolotcha.

About the Kolotcha, in Borodino, and both sides of it, especially to the left where the Voina runs through swampy ground into the Kolotcha, a mist still hung over the scene, melting, parting, shimmering with light in the bright sunshine, and giving fairy-like beauty to the shapes seen through it. The smoke of the guns mingled with this mist, and everywhere gleams of sunlight sparkled in it from the water, from the dew, from the bayonets of the soldiers crowding on the river banks and in Borodino. Through this mist could be seen a white church, here and there roofs of cottages in Borodino, and fitful glimpses came of compact masses of soldiers, and green ammunition-boxes and cannons. And the whole scene moved, or seemed to move, as the mist and smoke trailed over the wide plain. In this low ground about Borodino in the mist, and above it, and especially along the whole line to the left, in the copses, in the meadows below, and on the tops of the heights, clouds of smoke were incessantly springing out of nothing, now singly, now several at once, then at longer intervals, then in rapid succession. These clouds of smoke, puffing, rolling, melting into one another, and sundering apart, trailed all across the wide plain. These puffs of smoke, and the reports that followed them, were, strange to say, what gave the chief charm to the scene.

“Poooff!”
suddenly there flew up a round, compact ball of smoke, with
shades of purple, grey, and milk-white in it, and
“booom!”
followed the roar of the cannon a minute later.

“Pooff-pooff!”
two clouds of smoke rose, meeting and mingling into one; and
“boom-boom,”
the sound repeated what the eye had seen.

Pierre looked round at the first puff of smoke, which he had seen a second before a round, compact ball, and already in its place were wreaths of smoke trailing away to one side, and
“pooff”
 … (then a pause)
“pooff-pooff”
—three more flew up, and another four at once, and at the same intervals after each other
“boom … boom-boom-boom,”
rang out the sonorous, resolute, unfailing sounds. At one moment it seemed that those clouds of smoke were scudding across the plain, at the next, that they were stationary, and the copses, fields, and glittering bayonets were flying by them. From the left side these great clouds of smoke were incessantly flying over the fields and bushes, with the stately roar resounding after each of them. Still nearer, in the low meadows and copses, there darted up from the musket-fire tiny puffs that hardly formed into balls of smoke, and each of these, too, had its tiny report echoing after it.
Tra-ta-ta-ta
sounded the crack of the muskets at frequent intervals, but thin and irregular in comparison with the rhythmic roar of the cannon.

Pierre longed to be there in the midst of the smoke, the glittering bayonets, the movement, and the noise. He looked round at Kutuzov and his suite to compare his own impression with that of others. All like him were looking before them at the field, and, he fancied, with the same feeling. Every face now was lighted up by that
latent heat
of feeling that Pierre had noticed the day before, and understood perfectly after his talk with Prince Andrey.

“Go, my dear fellow, go, and Christ be with you!” said Kutuzov, never taking his eyes off the field of battle, to a general standing beside him. The general, who received this order, ran by Pierre down the descent from the mound.

“To ride across!…” the general said coldly and severely, in answer to a question from one of the staff.

“And I too, I too,” thought Pierre, and he went in the same direction.

The general mounted a horse, led up to him by a Cossack. Pierre went up to the groom, who was holding his horses. Asking him which was the quietest, Pierre got on it, clutched at the horse’s mane, pressed his heels into the beast’s stomach, and feeling that his spectacles were slipping off, and that he was incapable of letting go of the mane and the
reins, he galloped after the general, followed by smiles from the staff officers staring at him from the mound.

The general after whom Pierre galloped trotted downhill, turned off sharply to the left, and Pierre, losing sight of him, galloped into the middle of a battalion of infantry marching ahead of him. He tried to get away from them, turning to left and to right; but there were soldiers everywhere, all with the same anxious faces, preoccupied with some unseen, but evidently serious, business. They all looked with the same expression of annoyed inquiry at the stout man in the white hat, who was, for some unknown reason, trampling them under his horse’s feet.

“What does he want to ride into the middle of a battalion for?” one man shouted at him. Another gave his horse a shove with the butt-end of his gun; and Pierre, leaning over on the saddle-bow, and scarcely able to hold in his rearing horse, galloped out to where there was open space in front of the soldiers.

Ahead of him he saw a bridge, and at the bridge stood the soldiers firing. Pierre rode towards them. Though he did not know it, he rode up to the bridge over the Kolotcha, between Gorky and Borodino, which was attacked by the French in one of the first actions. Pierre saw there was a bridge in front of him, and that the soldiers were doing something in the smoke on both sides of the bridge, and in the meadow among the new-mown hay he had noticed the day before. But in spite of the unceasing fire going on there, he had no notion that this was the very centre of the battle. He did not notice the bullets whizzing on all sides, and the shells flying over him; he did not see the enemy on the other side of the river, and it was a long time before he saw the killed and wounded, though many fell close to him. He gazed about him with a smile still on his face.

“What’s that fellow doing in front of the line?” some one shouted at him again.

“To the left,” “to the right,” men shouted to him. Pierre turned to the right, and unwittingly rode up to an adjutant of General Raevsky’s, with whom he was acquainted. The adjutant glanced wrathfully at Pierre; and he, too, was apparently about to shout at him, but recognising him, he nodded.

“How did you come here?” he said, and galloped on. Pierre, feeling out of place and of no use, and afraid of getting in some one’s way again, galloped after him.

“What is it, here? Can I go with you?” he asked.

“In a minute, in a minute,” answered the adjutant, and galloping up to a stout colonel in the meadow, he gave him some message, and then addressed Pierre. “What has brought you here, count?” he said to him, with a smile. “Are you still curious?”

“Yes, yes,” said Pierre. But the adjutant, turning his horse’s head, rode on further.

“Here it’s all right,” said the adjutant; “but on the left flank, in Bagration’s division, it’s fearfully hot.”

“Really?” said Pierre. “Where’s that?”

“Why, come along with me to the mound; we can get a view from there. But it’s still bearable at our battery,” said the adjutant. “Are you coming?”