War and Peace (205 page)

It had been a clear, frosty day. Kutuzov, mounted on his fat, white little horse, was riding towards Dobroe, followed by an immense suite of generals, whispering their dissatisfaction behind his back. Seven thousand French prisoners had been taken that day, and all along the road they met parties of them, crowding to warm themselves round the camp-fires. Not far from Dobroe they heard a loud hum of talk from an immense crowd of tattered prisoners, bandaged and wrapped up in rags of all sorts, standing in the road near a long row of unharnessed French cannons. At the approach of the commander-in-chief the buzz of talk died away, and all eyes were fixed upon Kutuzov, who moved slowly along the road, wearing a white cap with a red band, and a wadded overcoat, that set in a hunch on his round shoulders. One of the generals began explaining to Kutuzov where the prisoners and the guns had been taken.

Kutuzov seemed absorbed in anxious thought, and did not hear the general’s words. He screwed up his eyes with an air of displeasure, and gazed intently at the figures of the prisoners, who presented a particularly pitiable appearance. The majority of the French soldiers were disfigured by frost-bitten cheeks and noses, and almost all of them had red, swollen, and streaming eyes.

One group of Frenchmen was standing close by the road, and two soldiers, one with his face covered with sores, were tearing at a piece of raw meat with their hands. There was something bestial and horrible in the cursory glance they cast on the approaching generals, and the frenzied expression with which the soldier with the sore face, after a glance at Kutuzov, turned away and went on with what he was doing.

Kutuzov looked a long while intently at these two soldiers; frowning more than before, he half-closed his eyelids, and shook his head thoughtfully. Further on, he noticed a Russian soldier, who was saying something friendly to a French prisoner, laughing and clapping him on the shoulder. Kutuzov shook his head again with the same expression.

“What do you say?” he asked the general, who was trying to draw the commander-in-chief’s attention to the French flags, that were set up in front of the Preobrazhensky regiment.

“Ah, the flags!” said Kutuzov, rousing himself with evident difficulty from the subject absorbing his thoughts. He looked about him absently. Thousands of eyes were gazing at him from all sides, waiting for his words.

He came to a standstill before the Preobrazhensky regiment, sighed
heavily and closed his eyes. One of the suite beckoned to the soldiers holding the flags to come up and set up the flagstaffs around the commander-in-chief. Kutuzov was silent for a few seconds. Then with obvious reluctance, yielding to the obligations of his position, he raised his head and began to speak. Crowds of officers gathered round him. He scanned the circle of officers with an attentive eye, recognising some of them.

“I thank you all!” he said, addressing the soldiers, and then again turning to the officers. In the deep stillness that prevailed all round him, his slowly articulated words were distinctly audible: “I thank you all for your hard and faithful service. The victory is complete, and Russia will not forget you. Your glory will be for ever!” He paused, looking about him.

“Lower; bow his head lower,” he said to the soldier, who was holding the French eagle, and had accidentally lowered it before the Preobrazhensky standard.

“Lower, lower, that’s it. Hurrah, lads!” he said, his chin moving quickly as he turned to the soldiers.

“Hurrah-rah-rah!” thousands of voices roared.

While the soldiers were shouting, Kutuzov, bending forward in his saddle, bowed his head, and his eyes gleamed with a mild and, as it were, ironical light.

“And now, brothers …” he said, when the shouts had died away.

And all at once his face and expression changed: it was not the commander-in-chief speaking now, but a simple, aged man, who plainly wanted to say something most important now to his comrades.

“And now, brothers. I know it’s hard for you, but there’s no help for it! Have a little patience; it won’t last much longer. We will see our visitors off, and then we will rest. The Tsar won’t forget your services. It’s hard for you, but still you are at home; while they—you see what they have come to,” he said, pointing to the prisoners. “Worse than the lowest beggars. While they were strong, we did not spare ourselves, but now we can even spare them. They too are men. Eh, lads?”

He looked about him. And in the unflinching, respectfully wondering eyes staring persistently at him, he read sympathy with his words. His face grew brighter and brighter with the gentle smile of old age, that brought clusters of wrinkles at the corners of his mouth and his eyes. He paused and dropped his head, as though in doubt.

“But after all is said and done, who asked them to come here? It serves them right, the b—– b—–” he said suddenly, lifting his head.
And swinging his riding-whip, he rode off at a gallop, accompanied for the first time during the whole campaign by gleeful guffaws and roars of hurrah from the men as they moved out of rank.

The words uttered by Kutuzov were hardly understood by the soldiers. No one could have repeated the field-marshal’s speech at first of such solemnity, and towards the end of such homely simplicity. But the meaning at the bottom of his words, they understood very well, and the same feeling of solemn triumph in their victory, together with pity for the enemy and the sense of the justice of their cause—expressed, too, with precisely the same homely coarseness—lay at the bottom of every soldier’s heart, and found a vent in delighted shouts, that did not cease for a long while. When one of the generals addressed the commander-in-chief after this, asking whether he desired his carriage, Kutuzov broke into a sudden sob in replying. He was evidently deeply moved.

It was getting dusk on the 8th of November, the last day of the battle of Krasnoe, when the soldiers reached their halting-place for the night. The whole day had been still and frosty, with now and then a few light flakes of snow. Towards evening the sky began to grow clearer. Through the snowflakes could be seen a dark, purplish, starlit sky, and the frost was growing more intense.

A regiment of musketeers, which had left Tarutino three thousand strong, but had now dwindled to nine hundred, was among the first to reach the halting-place, a village on the high road. The quartermasters, on meeting the regiment, reported that all the cottages were full of sick and dead Frenchmen, cavalrymen, and staff-officers. There was only one cottage left for the colonel of the regiment.

The colonel went on to his cottage. The regiment passed through the village, and stacked their guns up at the furthest cottages along the road.

Like a huge, many-legged monster, the regiment set to work preparing its food and lodging for the night. One party of soldiers trudged off, knee-deep in the snow, into the birch copse, on the right of the village, and the ring of axes and cutlasses, the crash of breaking branches, and the sounds of merry voices were immediately heard coming thence. Another group were busily at work all round the regimental baggage-waggons, which were drawn up all together. Some fed the horses, while
others got out cooking-pots and biscuits. A third section dispersed about the village, getting the cottages ready for the staff-officers, carrying out the dead bodies of the French lying in the huts, and dragging away boards, dry wood, and straw from the thatch roofs, to furnish fuel for their fires and materials for the shelters they rigged up.

Behind the huts at the end of the village fifteen soldiers were trying with merry shouts to pull down the high wattle wall of a barn from which they had already removed the roof.

“Now then, a strong pull, all together!” shouted the voices; and in the dark the huge, snow-sprinkled boards of the wall began to give. The lower stakes of the wattle cracked more and more often, and at last the wattle wall heaved over, together with the soldiers, who were hanging onto it. A loud shout and the roar of coarse merriment followed.

“Work at it in twos! give us a lever here! that’s it. Where are you coming to?”

“Now, all together.… But wait, lads!… With a shout!” …

All were silent, and a low voice of velvety sweetness began singing a song. At the end of the third verse, as the last note died away, twenty voices roared out in chorus, “O-O-O-O-O! It’s coming! Pull away! Heave away, lads!…” but in spite of their united efforts the wall hardly moved, and in the silence that followed the men could be heard panting for breath.

“Hi, you there, of the sixth company! You devils, you! Lend us a hand … We’ll do you a good turn one day!”

Twenty men of the sixth company, who were passing, joined them, and the wattle wall, thirty-five feet in length, and seven feet in breadth, was dragged along the village street, falling over, and cutting the shoulders of the panting soldiers.

“Go on, do.… Heave away, you there.… What are you stopping for? Eh, there?” …

The merry shouts of unseemly abuse never ceased.

“What are you about?” cried a peremptory voice, as a sergeant ran up to the party. “There are gentry here; the general himself’s in the hut here, and you devils, you curs, you! I’ll teach you!” shouted the sergeant, and sent a swinging blow at the back of the first soldier he could come across. “Can’t you go quietly?”

The soldiers were quiet. The soldier who had received the blow began grumbling, as he rubbed his bleeding face, which had been scratched by his being knocked forward against the wattle.

“Ay, the devil; how he does hit a fellow! Why, he has set all my face bleeding,” he said in a timid whisper, as the sergeant walked away. “And you don’t enjoy it, eh?” said a laughing voice; and the soldiers, moderating their voices, moved on. As they got out of the village, they began talking as loudly again, interspersing their talk with the same meaningless oaths.

In the hut by which the soldiers had passed there were assembled the chief officers in command, and an eager conversation was going on over their tea about that day’s doings and the manœuvres proposed for the night. The plan was to execute a flank movement to the left, cut off and capture the viceroy.

By the time the soldiers had dragged the fence to its place they found blazing fires, cooking supper on all sides. The firewood was crackling, the snow was melting, and the black shadows of soldiers were flitting to and fro all over the space between trampled down in the snow.

Axes and cutlasses were at work on all sides. Everything was done without a word of command being given. Wood was piled up for a supply of fuel through the night, shanties were being rigged up for the officers, pots were being boiled, and arms and accoutrements set to rights.

The wattle wall was set up in a semicircle to give shelter from the north, propped up by stakes, and before it was built a camp-fire. They beat the tattoo-call, counted over their number, had supper, and settled themselves round the fires—some repairing their foot-gear, some smoking pipes, others stripped naked trying to steam the lice out of their clothes.

One would naturally have expected that in the almost inconceivably wretched conditions in which the Russian soldiers were placed at that time—without thick boots, without fur coats, without a roof over their heads in the snow, with a frost of eighteen degrees, often without full rations—they must have presented a most melancholy and depressing spectacle.

It was quite the opposite. Never under the most favourable material conditions had the army worn a livelier and more cheerful aspect. This was due to the fact that every element that showed signs of depression or weakness was sifted every day out of the army. All the physically and
morally weak had long ago been left behind. What was left was the pick of the army—in strength of body and of spirit.

The camp-fire of the eighth company, screened by their wattle fence, attracted a greater crowd than any. Two sergeants were sitting by it, and the fire was blazing more brightly than any of them. They insisted on logs being brought in return for the right of sitting under the screen.

“Hi, Makyev, hullo … are you lost, or have the wolves eaten you? Fetch some wood,” shouted a red-faced, red-haired soldier, screwing up his eyes, and blinking from the smoke, but not moving back from the fire.

“You run, Crow, and fetch some wood,” he cried, addressing another soldier. The red-headed man was not a non-commissioned officer, nor a corporal, but he was a sturdy fellow, and so he gave orders to those who were weaker than himself. A thin, little soldier, with a sharp nose, who was called the “Crow,” got up submissively, and was about to obey; but at that moment there stepped into the light of the fire the slender, handsome figure of a young soldier, carrying a load of wood.

“Give it here. Well, that’s something like!”

They broke up the wood and threw it on, blew up the fire with their mouths, and fanned it with the skirts of their coats, and the flame began to hiss and crackle. The soldiers drew nearer the fire and lighted their pipes. The handsome young soldier who had brought in the wood put his arms akimbo, and began a smart and nimble shuffle with his frozen feet as he stood.

“Ah, mother dear, the dew is cold, but yet it is fine, and a musketeer!” … he began singing, with a sort of hiccup at each syllable of the song.

“Hey, his soles are flying off!” cried the red-haired man, noticing that the dancer’s soles were loose. “He’s a rare devil for dancing!”

The dancer stopped, tore off the loose leather, and flung it in the fire.

“You’re right there, brother,” said he, and sitting down he took out of his knapsack a strip of French blue cloth, and began binding it round his foot. “It’s the steam that warps them,” he added, stretching his feet out to the fire.

“They’ll soon serve us new ones. They say when we finish them off, we are all to have a double lot of stuff.”

“I say, that son of a bitch, Petrov, has sneaked off, it seems,” said a sergeant.

“It’s a long while since I’ve noticed him,” said the other.

“Oh, well, a poor sort of soldier …”

“And in the third company, they were saying, there were nine men missing at the roll-call yesterday.”