War and Peace (52 page)

“Good, good,” he said to Prince Andrey, and he turned to the general who, watch in hand, was saying that it was time they started, as all the columns of the left flank had gone down already.

“We have plenty of time yet, your excellency,” Kutuzov interpolated between his yawns. “Plenty of time!” he repeated.

At that moment in the distance behind Kutuzov there were sounds of regiments saluting; the shouts came rapidly nearer along the whole drawn-out line of the advancing Russian columns. Clearly he who was the object of these greetings was riding quickly. When the soldiers of the regiment, in front of which Kutuzov was standing, began to shout, he rode off a little on one side, and wrinkling up his face, looked round. Along the road from Pratzen, galloped what looked like a whole squadron of horsemen of different colours. Two of them galloped side by side ahead of the rest. One was in a black uniform with a white plume, on a chestnut English thoroughbred, the other in a white uniform on a black horse. These were the two Emperors and their suites. With a sort of affectation of the manner of an old soldier at the head of his regiment, Kutuzov gave the command, “Steady,” to the standing troops and rode up to the Emperors, saluting. His whole figure and manner were suddenly transformed. He assumed the air of a subordinate, a man who accepts without criticism. With an affectation of respectfulness which unmistakably made an unpleasant impression on Alexander, he rode up and saluted him.

The unpleasant impression, like the traces of fog in a clear sky, merely flitted across the young and happy face of the Emperor and vanished. He looked that day rather thinner after his illness than he had been at the review of Olmütz, where Bolkonsky had seen him for the first time abroad. But there was the same bewitching combination of majesty and mildness in his fine, grey eyes, and on his delicate lips the same possibility of varying expressions and the predominant expression of noble-hearted, guileless youth.

At the Olmütz review he had been more majestic, here he was livelier and more energetic. He was flushed a little from the rapid three-verst gallop, and as he pulled up his horse, he breathed a sigh of relief, and looked round at those among the faces of his suite that were as young and eager as his own. Behind the Tsar were Tchartorizhsky, and Novosiltsov, and Prince Bolkonsky, and Stroganov, and the rest, all richly dressed, gay young men on splendid, well-groomed, fresh horses, slightly heated from the gallop. The Emperor Francis, a rosy, long-faced young man, sat excessively erect on his handsome sable horse, casting deliberate and anxious looks around him. He beckoned one of his white
adjutants and asked him a question. “Most likely at what o’clock they started,” thought Prince Andrey, watching his old acquaintance with a smile, which he could not repress, as he remembered his audience with him. With the Emperors’ suite were a certain number of fashionable young aristocrats—Russians and Austrians selected from the regiments of the guards and the line. Among them were postillions leading extra horses, beautiful beasts from the Tsar’s stables, covered with embroidered horsecloths.

Like a breath of fresh country air rushing into a stuffy room through an open window was the youth, energy, and confidence of success that the cavalcade of brilliant young people brought with them into Kutuzov’s cheerless staff.

“Why aren’t you beginning, Mihail Larionovitch?” the Emperor Alexander said hurriedly, addressing Kutuzov, while he glanced courteously towards the Emperor Francis.

“I am waiting to see, your majesty,” Kutuzov answered, bowing reverentially.

The Emperor turned his ear towards him, with a slight frown and an air of not having caught his words.

“I’m waiting to see, your majesty,” repeated Kutuzov (Prince Andrey noticed that Kutuzov’s upper lip quivered unnaturally as he uttered that: “I’m waiting”). “Not all the columns are massed yet, your majesty.”

The Tsar heard him, but the answer apparently did not please him; he shrugged his sloping shoulders, and glanced at Novosiltsov, who stood near, with a look that seemed to complain of Kutuzov.

“We are not on the Tsaritsin field, you know, Mihail Larionovitch, where the parade is not begun till all the regiments are ready,” said the Tsar, glancing again at the Emperor Francis as though inviting him, if not to take part, at least to listen to what he was saying. But the Emperor Francis still gazed away and did not listen.

“That’s just why I’m not beginning, sire,” said Kutuzov in a resounding voice, as though foreseeing a possibility his words might be ignored, and once more there was a quiver in his face. “That’s why I am not beginning, sire; because we are not on parade and not on the Tsaritsin field,” he articulated clearly and distinctly.

All in the Tsar’s suite exchanged instantaneous glances with one another, and every face wore an expression of regret and reproach. “However old he may be, he ought not, he ought never to speak like that,” the faces expressed.

The Tsar looked steadily and attentively into Kutuzov’s face, waiting to see if he were not going to say more. But Kutuzov too on his side, bending his head respectfully, seemed to be waiting. The silence lasted about a minute.

“However, if it’s your majesty’s command,” said Kutuzov, lifting his head and relapsing into his former affectation of the tone of a stupid, uncritical general, who obeys orders. He moved away, and beckoning the commanding officer of the column, Miloradovitch, gave him the command to advance.

The troops began to move again, and two battalions of the Novgorod regiment and a battalion of the Apsheron regiment passed before the Tsar.

While the Apsheron battalion was marching by, Miloradovitch, a red-faced man, wearing a uniform and orders, with no overcoat, and a turned-up hat with huge plumes stuck on one side, galloped ahead of them, and saluting in gallant style, reined up his horse before the Tsar.

“With God’s aid, general,” said the Tsar.

“
Ma foi
, sire, we will do whatever is in our power to do,” he answered gaily, arousing none the less an ironical smile among the gentlemen of the Tsar’s suite by his bad French accent. Miloradovitch wheeled his horse round sharply, and halted a few steps behind the Tsar. The Apsheron men, roused by the presence of the Tsar, stepped out gallantly as they marched by the Emperors and their suites.

“Lads!” shouted Miloradovitch in his loud, self-confident, and cheery voice. He was apparently so excited by the sounds of the firing, the anticipation of battle, and the sight of the gallant Apsheron men, his old comrades with Suvorov, that he forgot the Tsar’s presence. “Lads! it’s not the first village you’ve had to take!” he shouted.

“Glad to do our best,” roared the soldiers. The Tsar’s horse reared at the unexpected sound. This horse, who had carried the Tsar at reviews in Russia, bore his rider here on the field of Austerlitz, patiently enduring the heedless blows of his left foot, and pricked up his ears at the sound of shots as he had done on the review ground with no comprehension of the significance of these sounds, nor of the nearness of the raven horse of Emperor Francis, nor of all that was said and thought and felt that day by the man who rode upon his back.

The Tsar turned with a smile to one of his courtiers, pointing to the gallant-looking Apsheron regiment, and said something to him.

Kutuzov, accompanied by his adjutants, followed the carabineers at a walking pace.

After going on for half a mile at the tail of the column, he stopped at a solitary, deserted house (probably once an inn), near the branching of two roads. Both roads led downhill, and troops were marching along both.

The fog was beginning to part, and a mile and a half away the enemy’s troops could be indistinctly seen on the opposite heights. On the left below, the firing became more distinct. Kutuzov stood still in conversation with an Austrian general. Prince Andrey standing a little behind watched them intently, and turned to an adjutant, meaning to ask him for a field-glass.

“Look, look!” this adjutant said, looking not at the troops in the distance, but down the hill before him. “It’s the French!”

The two generals and the adjutant began snatching at the field-glass, pulling it from one another. All their faces suddenly changed, and horror was apparent in them all. They had supposed the French to be over a mile and a half away, and here they were all of a sudden confronting us.

“Is it the enemy?… No.… But, look, it is … for certain.… What does it mean?” voices were heard saying.

With the naked eye Prince Andrey saw to the right, below them, a dense column of French soldiers coming up towards the Apsheron regiment, not over five hundred paces from where Kutuzov was standing.

“Here it is, it is coming, the decisive moment! My moment has come,” thought Prince Andrey, and slashing his horse, he rode up to Kutuzov.

“We must stop the Apsheron regiment,” he shouted, “your most high excellency.”

But at that instant everything was lost in a cloud of smoke, there was a sound of firing close by, and a voice in naive terror cried not two paces from Prince Andrey: “Hey, mates, it’s all up!” And this voice was like a command. At that voice there was a general rush, crowds, growing larger every moment, ran back in confusion to the spot where five minutes before they had marched by the Emperors. It was not simply difficult to check this rushing crowd, it was impossible not to be carried back with the stream oneself. Bolkonsky tried only not to be left behind by it, and looked about him in bewilderment, unable to grasp what was
taking place. Nesvitsky, with an exasperated, crimson face, utterly unlike himself, was shouting to Kutuzov that if he didn’t get away at once he’d be taken prisoner to a certainty. Kutuzov was standing in the same place: he was taking out his handkerchief, and did not answer. The blood was flowing from his cheek. Prince Andrey forced his way up to him.

“You are wounded?” he asked, hardly able to control the quivering of his lower jaw.

“The wound’s not here, but there, see!” said Kutuzov, pressing the handkerchief to his wounded cheek, and pointing to the running soldiers.

“Stop them!” he shouted, and at the same time convinced that it was impossible to stop them, he lashed his horse and rode to the right. A fresh rush of flying crowds caught him up with it and carried him back.

The troops were running in such a dense multitude, that once getting into the midst of the crowd, it was a hard matter to get out of it. One was shouting: “Get on! what are you lagging for?” Another was turning round to fire in the air; another striking the very horse on which Kutuzov was mounted. Getting out with an immense effort from the stream on the left, Kutuzov, with his suite diminished to a half, rode towards the sounds of cannon close by. Prince Andrey, trying not to be left behind by Kutuzov, saw, as he got out of the racing multitude, a Russian battery still firing in the smoke on the hillside and the French running towards it. A little higher up stood Russian infantry, neither moving forward to the support of the battery, nor back in the same direction as the runaways. A general on horseback detached himself from the infantry and rode towards Kutuzov. Of Kutuzov’s suite only four men were left. They were all pale and looking at one another dumbly.

“Stop those wretches!” Kutuzov gasped to the officer in command of the regiment, pointing to the flying soldiers. But at the same instant, as though in revenge for the words, the bullets came whizzing over the regiment and Kutuzov’s suite like a flock of birds. The French were attacking the battery, and catching sight of Kutuzov, they were shooting at him. With this volley the general clutched at his leg; several soldiers fell, and the second lieutenant standing with the flag let it drop out of his hands. The flag tottered and was caught on the guns of the nearest soldiers. The soldiers had begun firing without orders.

“Ooogh!” Kutuzov growled with an expression of despair, and he looked round him. “Bolkonsky,” he whispered in a voice shaking with
the consciousness of his old age and helplessness. “Bolkonsky,” he whispered, pointing to the routed battalion and the enemy, “what’s this?”

But before he had uttered the words, Prince Andrey, feeling the tears of shame and mortification rising in his throat, was jumping off his horse and running to the flag.

“Lads, forward!” he shrieked in a voice of childish shrillness. “Here, it is come!” Prince Andrey thought, seizing the staff of the flag, and hearing with relief the whiz of bullets, unmistakably aimed at him. Several soldiers dropped.

“Hurrah!” shouted Prince Andrey, and hardly able to hold up the heavy flag in both his hands, he ran forward in the unhesitating conviction that the whole battalion would run after him. And in fact it was only for a few steps that he ran alone. One soldier started, then another, and then the whole battalion with a shout of “hurrah!” was running forward and overtaking him. An under-officer of the battalion ran up and took the flag which tottered from its weight in Prince Andrey’s hands, but he was at once killed. Prince Andrey snatched up the flag again, and waving it by the staff, ran on with the battalion. In front of him he saw our artillery men, of whom some were fighting, while others had abandoned their cannons and were running towards him. He saw French infantry soldiers, too, seizing the artillery horses and turning the cannons round. Prince Andrey and the battalion were within twenty paces of the cannons. He heard the bullets whizzing over him incessantly, and continually the soldiers moaned and fell to the right and left of him. But he did not look at them; his eyes were fixed on what was going on in front of him—at the battery. He could now see distinctly the figure of the red-haired artilleryman, with a shako crushed on one side, pulling a mop one way, while a French soldier was tugging it the other way. Prince Andrey could see distinctly now the distraught, and at the same time exasperated expression of the faces of the two men, who were obviously quite unconscious of what they were doing.

“What are they about?” wondered Prince Andrey, watching them; “why doesn’t the red-haired artilleryman run, since he has no weapon? Why doesn’t the Frenchman stab him? He won’t have time to run away before the Frenchman will think of his gun, and knock him on the head.” Another Frenchman did, indeed, run up to the combatants with his gun almost overbalancing him, and the fate of the red-haired artilleryman, who still had no conception of what was awaiting him, and was pulling the mop away in triumph, was probably sealed. But Prince
Andrey did not see how it ended. It seemed to him as though a hard stick was swung full at him by some soldier near, dealing him a violent blow on the head. It hurt a little, but the worst of it was that the pain distracted his attention, and prevented him from seeing what he was looking at.