War and Peace (51 page)

The fog had become so thick that though it was growing light, they could not see ten steps in front of them. Bushes looked like huge trees, level places looked like ravines and slopes. Anywhere, on any side, they
might stumble upon unseen enemies ten paces from them. But for a long while the columns marched on in the same fog, going downhill and uphill, passing gardens and fences, in new and unknown country, without coming upon the enemy anywhere. On the contrary, the soldiers became aware that in front, behind, on all sides, were the Russian columns moving in the same direction. Every soldier felt cheered at heart by knowing that where he was going, to that unknown spot were going also many, many more of our men.

“I say, the Kurskies have gone on,” they were saying in the ranks.

“Stupendous, my lad, the forces of our men that are met together! Last night I looked at the fires burning, no end of them. A regular Moscow!”

Though not one of the officers in command of the columns rode up to the ranks nor talked to the soldiers (the commanding officers, as we have seen at the council of war, were out of humour, and displeased with the plans that had been adopted, and so they simply carried out their orders without exerting themselves to encourage the soldiers), yet the soldiers marched on in good spirits, as they always do when advancing into action, especially when on the offensive.

But after they had been marching on for about an hour in the thick fog, a great part of the troops had to halt, and an unpleasant impression of mismanagement and misunderstanding spread through the ranks. In what way that impression reached them it is very difficult to define. But there is no doubt that it did reach them, and with extraordinary correctness and rapidity, and spread imperceptibly and irresistibly, like water flowing over a valley. Had the Russian army been acting alone, without allies, possibly it would have taken a long time for this impression of mismanagement to become a general conviction. But as it was, it was so particularly pleasant and natural to ascribe the mismanagement to the senseless Germans, and all believed that there was some dangerous muddle due to a blunder on the part of the sausage-makers.

“What are they stopping for? Blocked up the way, eh? Or hit upon the French at last?”

“No, not heard so. There’d have been firing. After hurrying us to march off, and we’ve marched off—to stand in the middle of a field for no sense—all the damned Germans making a muddle of it. The senseless devils! I’d have sent them on in front. But no fear, they crowd to the rear. And now one’s to stand with nothing to eat.”

“I say, will they be quick there?”

“The cavalry is blocking up the road, they say,” said an officer.

“Ah, these damned Germans, they don’t know their own country,” said another.

“Which division are you?” shouted an adjutant, riding up.

“Eighteenth.”

“Then why are you here? You ought to have been in front long ago; you won’t get there now before evening.”

“The silly fools’ arrangements, they don’t know themselves what they’re about,” said the officer, and he galloped away. Then a general trotted up, and shouted something angrily in a foreign tongue.

“
Ta-fa-la-fa
, and no making out what he’s jabbering,” said a soldier, mimicking the retreating general. “I’d like to shoot the lot of them, the blackguards!”

“Our orders were to be on the spot before ten o’clock, and we’re not halfway there. That’s a nice way of managing things!” was repeated on different sides, and the feeling of energy with which the troops had started began to turn to vexation and anger against the muddled arrangements and the Germans.

The muddle originated in the fact that while the Austrian cavalry were in movement, going to the left flank, the chief authorities had come to the conclusion that our centre was too far from the right flank, and all the cavalry had received orders to cross over to the right. Several thousands of mounted troops had to cross in front of the infantry, and the infantry had to wait till they had gone by.

Ahead of the troops a dispute had arisen between the Austrian officer and the Russian general. The Russian general shouted a request that the cavalry should stop. The Austrian tried to explain that he was not responsible, but the higher authorities. The troops meanwhile stood, growing listless and dispirited. After an hour’s delay the troops moved on at last, and began going downhill. The fog, that overspread the hill, lay even more densely on the low ground to which the troops were descending. Ahead in the fog they heard one shot, and another, at first at random, at irregular intervals; tratta-tat, then growing more regular and frequent, and the skirmish of the little stream, the Holdbach, began.

Not having reckoned on meeting the enemy at the stream, and coming upon them unexpectedly in the fog, not hearing a word of encouragement from their commanding officers, with a general sense of being too late, and seeing nothing before or about them in the fog, the Russians fired slowly and languidly at the enemy, never receiving a command
in time from the officers and adjutants, who wandered about in the fog in an unknown country, unable to find their own divisions. This was how the battle began for the first, the second, and the third columns, who had gone down into the low-lying ground. The fourth column, with which Kutuzov was, was still on the plateau of Pratzen.

The thick fog still hung over the low ground where the action was beginning; higher up it was beginning to clear, but still nothing could be seen of what was going on in front. Whether all the enemy’s forces were, as we had assumed, ten versts away from us, or whether they were close by in that stretch of fog, no one knew till nine o’clock.

Nine o’clock came. The fog lay stretched in an unbroken sea over the plain, but at the village of Schlapanitz on the high ground where Napoleon was, surrounded by his marshals, it was now perfectly clear. There was bright blue sky over his head, and the vast orb of the sun, like a huge, hollow, purple float, quivered on the surface of the milky sea of fog. Not the French troops only, but Napoleon himself with his staff were not on the further side of the streams, and the villages of Sokolnitz and Schlapanitz, beyond which we had intended to take up our position and begin the attack, but were on the nearer side, so close indeed to our forces that Napoleon could distinguish a cavalry man from a foot soldier in our army with the naked eye. Napoleon was standing a little in front of his marshals, on a little grey Arab horse, wearing the same blue overcoat he had worn through the Italian campaign. He was looking intently and silently at the hills, which stood up out of the sea of mist, and the Russian troops moving across them in the distance, and he listened to the sounds of firing in the valley. His face—still thin in those days—did not stir a single muscle; his gleaming eyes were fixed intently on one spot. His forecasts were turning out correct. Part of the Russian forces were going down into the valley towards the ponds and lakes, while part were evacuating the heights of Pratzen, which he regarded as the key of the position, and had intended to take. He saw through the fog, in the dip between two hills near the village of Pratzen, Russian columns with glittering bayonets moving always in one direction towards the valleys, and vanishing one after another into the mist. From information he had received over night, from the sounds of wheels and footsteps he had heard in the night at the outposts, from the loose order of the march of the Russian columns, from all the evidence, he saw clearly that the allies believed him to be a long way in front of them, that the columns moving close to Pratzen constituted the centre of the Russian army, and that
the centre was by this time too much weakened to be able to attack him successfully. But still he delayed beginning the battle.

That day was for him a day of triumph—the anniversary of his coronation. He had slept for a few hours in the early morning, and feeling fresh, and in good health and spirits, in that happy frame of mind in which everything seems possible and everything succeeds, he got on his horse and rode out. He stood without stirring, looking at the heights that rose out of the fog, and his cold face wore that peculiar shade of confident, self-complacent happiness, seen on the face of a happy boy in love. The marshals stood behind him, and did not venture to distract his attention. He looked at the heights of Pratzen, then at the sun floating up out of the mist.

When the sun had completely emerged from the fog, and was glittering with dazzling brilliance over the fields and the mist (as though he had been waiting for that to begin the battle), he took his glove off his handsome white hand, made a signal with it to his marshals, and gave orders for the battle to begin. The marshals, accompanied by adjutants, galloped in various directions, and in a few minutes the chief forces of the French army were moving towards those heights of Pratzen, which were left more and more exposed by the Russian troops as the latter kept moving to the left towards the valley.

At eight o’clock Kutuzov rode out to Pratzen at the head of Miloradovitch’s fourth column, the one which was to occupy the place left vacant by the columns of Przhebyshevsky and Langeron, who had by this time gone down to the plain. He greeted the men of the foremost regiment, and gave them the command to march, showing thereby that he meant to lead that column himself. On reaching the village of Pratzen he halted. Prince Andrey was behind among the immense number of persons who made up the commander-in-chief’s suite. Prince Andrey was in a state of excitement, of irritation, and at the same time of repressed calm, as a man often is on attaining a long-desired moment. He was firmly convinced that to-day would be the day of his Toulon or his bridge of Arcola. How it would come to pass he knew not, but he was firmly convinced that it would be so. The locality and the position of our troops he had mastered to the minutest detail, so far as they could be
known to any one in our army. His own strategic plan, which obviously could not conceivably be carried out now, was forgotten by him. Throwing himself into Weierother’s plan, Prince Andrey was now deliberating over the contingencies that might arise, and inventing new combinations, in which his rapidity of resource and decision might be called for.

On the left, below in the fog, could be heard firing between unseen forces. There, it seemed to Prince Andrey, the battle would be concentrated, there “the difficulty would arise, and there I shall be sent,” he thought, “with a brigade or a division, and there, flag in hand, I shall march forward and shatter all before me.”

Prince Andrey could not look unmoved upon the flags of the passing battalions. Looking at the flag, he kept thinking: perhaps it is that very flag with which I shall have to lead the men. Towards morning nothing was left of the fog on the heights but a hoar frost passing into dew, but in the valleys the fog still lay in a milky-white sea. Nothing could be seen in the valley to the left into which our troops had vanished, and from which sounds of firing were coming. Above the heights stood a clear, dark blue sky, and on the right the vast orb of the sun. In the distance in front, on the coast of that sea of mist, rose up the wooded hills, on which the enemy’s army should have been, and something could be descried there. On the right there was the tramp of hoofs and rumble of wheels, with now and then the gleam of bayonets, as the guards plunged into the region of mist; on the left, behind the village, similar masses of cavalry were moving and disappearing into the sea of fog. In front and behind were the marching infantry. The commander-in-chief was standing at the end of the village, letting the troops pass before him. Kutuzov seemed exhausted and irritable that morning. The infantry marching by him halted without any command being given, apparently because something in front blocked up the way.

“Do tell the men to form in battalion columns and go round the village,” said Kutuzov angrily to a general who rode up. “How is it you don’t understand, my dear sir, that it’s out of the question to let them file through the defile of the village street, when we are advancing to meet the enemy.”

“I had proposed forming beyond the village, your most high excellency,” replied the general.

Kutuzov laughed bitterly.

“A nice position you’ll be in, deploying your front in sight of the enemy—very nice.”

“The enemy is a long way off yet, your most high excellency. According to the disposition.…”

“The disposition!” Kutuzov cried with bitter spleen; “but who told you so?… Kindly do as you are commanded.”

“Yes, sir.”

“My dear boy,” Nesvitsky whispered to Prince Andrey, “the old fellow is in a vile temper.”

An Austrian officer wearing a white uniform and green plumes in his hat, galloped up to Kutuzov and asked him in the Emperor’s name: Had the fourth column started?

Kutuzov turned away without answering, and his eye fell casually on Prince Andrey, who was standing near him. Seeing Bolkonsky, Kutuzov let his vindictive and bitter expression soften, as though recognising that his adjutant was not to blame for what was being done. And still not answering the Austrian adjutant, he addressed Bolkonsky.

“Go and see, my dear fellow, whether the third division has passed the village. Tell them to stop and wait for my orders.”

Prince Andrey had scarcely started when he stopped him.

“And ask whether the sharpshooters are posted,” he added. “What they are doing, what they are doing!” he murmured to himself, still making no reply to the Austrian.

Prince Andrey galloped off to do his bidding. Overtaking all the advancing battalions, he stopped the third division and ascertained that there actually was no line of sharpshooters in advance of our columns. The officer in command of the foremost regiment was greatly astounded on the order being brought him from the commander-in-chief to send a flying line of sharpshooters in advance. The officer had been resting in the full conviction that there were other troops in front of him, and that the enemy could not be less than ten versts away. In reality there was nothing in front of him but an empty stretch of ground, sloping downhill and covered with fog. Giving him the commander-in-chief’s order to rectify the omission, Prince Andrey galloped back. Kutuzov was still at the same spot; his bulky frame drooped in the saddle with the lassitude of old age, and he was yawning wearily with closed eyes. The troops had not yet moved on, but were standing at attention.