At this point, on the outer edge of the left flank, Bennigsen had much to say and do, and he spoke with some passion; Pierre took this to be of signal importance from the military point of view. Just ahead of Tuchkov's troops there was a little hill, a little hill unoccupied by troops. This, according to the vociferous Bennigsen, was a bad mistake: it was madness to leave a commanding height unoccupied and station troops down below it. Several generals were of the same opinion. One in particular waxed eloquent, aggressively asserting that they would just get slaughtered. Bennigsen took personal responsibility for moving the troops uphill.
This adjustment on the left flank gave Pierre even more pause for thought on the subject of warfare. Listening to Bennigsen and the other generals as they castigated the disposition of the troops at the bottom of the hill, Pierre could see what they were getting at and he fully shared their view. But for this very reason he could not imagine how the man who had placed them there at the bottom of a hill could have made such a terrible and obvious mistake.
Pierre was not to know that these troops had been stationed where they were not to defend the position, as Bennigsen had assumed; they had been hidden away out of sight to catch the enemy unawares, to keep under cover and suddenly lash out at him as he moved forward. Bennigsen had no knowledge of this, and he moved the men up for his own reasons, without informing the commander-in-chief.
CHAPTER 24
It was bright that evening (the 25th of August), and Prince Andrey was lying propped up on one elbow in a dilapidated barn in the village of Knyazkovo, out at one end of his regiment's encampment. Through a gap in a broken-down wall he was looking out on a row of thirty-year-old pollarded birch-trees running along a hedge, a field with piles of oats all over it, and some bushes where he could see camp-fires smoking as the soldiers got down to their cooking.
For all his present consciousness of life as something oppressive, irrelevant and wearisome, Prince Andrey felt no less excited and edgy than he had done at Austerlitz seven years previously on the eve of battle.
He had done all that was necessary in the receiving and issuing of orders for tomorrow's battle. There was nothing more to be done. But he was haunted by certain thoughts, the simplest, clearest and therefore the most painful of thoughts, that refused to leave him in peace. He was well aware that tomorrow's engagement would be the most ghastly battle he had ever taken part in, and for the first time in his life the possibility of death presented itself, not in relation to the living world, or any effect it might have on other people, but purely in relation to himself and his own soul, and it seemed so vivid, almost a dependable certainty, stark and terrible. And from the heights of this vision everything that had once tormentingly preoccupied him seemed suddenly bathed in a cold, white light with no shadows, no perspective, no outline. His whole life seemed like a magic-lantern show that he had been staring at through glass by artificial light. Now suddenly the glass was gone, and he could see those awful daubings in the clear light of day. 'Yes, yes, here they are, these false images that I used to find so worrying, enthralling and agonizing,' he told himself, giving his imagination a free rein to run over the main pictures in the magic lantern of his life, looked at anew in the cold, white daylight brought on by a clear vision of death. 'Here they are, these crudely daubed figures that used to seem so magnificent and mysterious. Honour and glory, philanthropy, love of a woman, love of Fatherland - how grand these pictures used to seem, filled with such deep meanings! And now it all looks so simple, colourless and crude in the cold light of the morning I can feel coming upon me.' There were three main regrets in his life that had a special claim on his attention: his love for a woman, the death of his father, and the invasion of the French, who now held half of Russia. 'Love! . . . That little girl who seemed to be overflowing with mysterious energies. Oh, how I loved her! And I made all those romantic plans about love and happiness with her! Oh, what a nice little boy I was!' he spat out aloud. 'To think I believed in some ideal kind of love that would keep her faithful while I went away for a whole year! Like the gentle turtle-dove in the fable, she was supposed to pine away waiting for me! And now everything's so much simpler . . . it's all so horribly simple and ghastly!'
'My father, too, did all that building at Bald Hills, and he thought it was his place, his land, his air, his peasants. But then along came Napoleon, and without even knowing of his existence he swept him away like a wood-chip on the path, and left Bald Hills and all his life in ruins. Princess Marya says it's a trial sent from above. What's the trial for when he's gone and will never return? Never again! He's gone for ever! So who's the trial for? Our country lost and Moscow destroyed! Anyway, tomorrow I'll get killed, and probably not by a Frenchman, maybe by one of our own men, like that soldier who let his gun go off right next to my ear yesterday, and the French will come along and pick me up by the head and feet and chuck me into a pit so I don't stink them out, and a whole new way of living will come about, everybody will get used to it, and I shan't know anything about it because I shall have gone.'
He glanced at the row of birch-trees impassive in their yellows and greens, with their white bark gleaming in the sunshine. 'To die . . . let me get killed tomorrow and have done with it . . . let everything else carry on, but with me gone.' He had a clear vision of his own non-existence in this life. And suddenly those birch-trees, with their light and shade, the wispy clouds and the smoke-plumes rising from the fires, everything around him seemed to have been transformed into something terribly ominous. A cold shiver ran down his back. He got quickly to his feet, strode out of the barn and went for a walk.
Back in the barn he heard voices outside.
'Who's that?' called Prince Andrey.
The red-nosed Captain Timokhin, once in charge of Dolokhov's company but now promoted to battalion-commander because of a shortage of officer material, came in diffidently. He was followed by an adjutant and the regimental paymaster.
Prince Andrey got rapidly to his feet, listened to what the officers had come to talk about, issued one or two instructions, and was just about to send them on their way when he heard a voice outside the barn and its sibilant tones seemed familiar.
'What the devil was that?' said the voice of someone in mid-stumble.
Prince Andrey looked out just in time to see Pierre reeling; he had tripped over a stake lying on the ground, and almost lost his feet. Prince Andrey had a great distaste for seeing people from his own circle, and Pierre was particularly unwelcome as a reminder of the moments of anguish he had gone through on his last visit to Moscow.
'Well I never!' he cried. 'What quirk of fate brings you here? You're the last person I expected.'
As he was saying this his eyes and his whole expression displayed more than coldness, they displayed outright hostility, and it was not lost on Pierre. He had approached the barn in a state of high excitement, but now after one look at Prince Andrey's face he felt crushed and embarrassed.
'Well, I've come . . . er, you know . . . just . . . come along . . . I think it's interesting,' said Pierre, parroting the meaningless word 'interesting' for the umpteenth time that day. 'I wanted to watch the battle.'
'Oh yes? What about your masonic brethren? What do they say about the war? What would they do to stop it?' said Prince Andrey sardonically. 'Oh well, tell me about Moscow. Do you know anything about my people? Did they get to Moscow all right?' he asked in all seriousness.
'Yes. Julie Drubetskoy told me they did. I went to see them, but they weren't there. They'd gone out to your Moscow estate.'
CHAPTER 25
The officers would have been happy to leave, but Prince Andrey seemed reluctant to be left alone with his friend, and he invited them to stay on and have a drink of tea. Benches were brought in, and tea was provided. The officers stared in bemusement at Pierre's big bulky figure, and listened as he talked first about Moscow and then the disposition of our troops, which he had been lucky enough to see round. Prince Andrey said nothing, and there was su
ch an intimidating look on his face that Pierre found himself talking to the good-hearted Timokhin rather than Bolkonsky.
'So, you now understand the whole disposition of our troops?' said Prince Andrey, cutting him short.
'Yes . . . Well, it depends what you mean,' said Pierre. 'I'm not a military man, so I can't say I've got the last detail, but, yes, I do understand the general arrangement.'
'In which case you know more than anybody else does,' said Prince Andrey.
'Oh!' said Pierre, taken aback, looking over his spectacles at Prince Andrey. 'Well, anyway, how do you feel about Kutuzov's appointment?'
'I was very pleased about it, and that's all I know,' said Prince Andrey.
'Well, what's your opinion of Barclay de Tolly? All sorts of things were being said about him in Moscow. What do you make of him?'
'Ask them,' said Prince Andrey, indicating the officers.
Pierre looked across at Timokhin with the condescendingly quizzical smile that everyone adopted towards him.
'It was a moment of serendipity, sir, when his Serene Highness took over,' said Timokhin diffidently, hardly able to take his eyes of his colonel.
'Why do you say that?' asked Pierre.
'Well, take firewood or fodder . . . I tell you what . . . All the way back from Swienciany you daren't lay hands on a twig, or a wisp of hay, or anything at all. We were in retreat, you see, so he was going to get the lot. Isn't that right, sir?' he said, turning to his prince. 'But no, for us it was hands off. In our regiment two officers were court-martialled for things like that. Well, ever since his Serene Highness has been in charge, it's all been dead simple. Serendipity I call it.'
'But why had he been forbidding it?'
Timokhin looked round in embarrassment, not knowing how to respond to a question like that. Pierre turned to Prince Andrey and asked him the same thing.
'Why, so as not to ravage the country we were leaving behind for the enemy,' said Prince Andrey, a bitter and sardonic man. 'It's a matter of principle: never allow pillage or let your men get used to looting. Oh yes, Barclay was right about Smolensk as well, in his judgement that the French might outflank us - they were so much stronger. But what he could not see was this,' yelled Prince Andrey in a voice grown suddenly strident as if he had lost control, 'he just could not see that for the first time ever we were fighting for Russian soil, and there was a kind of spirit in the men that I'd never seen before, and we had held them off for two whole days, and the success of it had made us ten times stronger. But he ordered a retreat, and all our efforts and all our losses went for nothing. He had no thought of treachery. He was trying to do everything in the best possible way and he did think things through. But that's precisely why he was no good. He's no good now precisely because he thinks things through very carefully as a matter of principle, as befits a German. How can I put it? . . . Let's say your father has a German valet, and he's a first-rate valet who fulfils all his needs better than you could. Let him carry on the good work. But if your father falls ill and takes to his death-bed, you'll send the valet packing and look after your father yourself with your own clumsy hands that are not used to doing things, and you'll bring him more comfort than any stranger, however skilled. That's what we've done with Barclay. While ever Russia was doing well she could be served by a stranger, and an excellent minister he was too, but the moment she's in danger she needs her own flesh and blood. So, your people at the club have him down as a traitor! The fact that they are calling him a traitor now makes it all the more likely that later on they'll feel ashamed of their false charges and then they'll promote him from treachery to glory, honour and genius, and that would be an even greater injustice. He's just an honest German, a stickler . . .'
'They say he's a clever general, though,' said Pierre.
'I don't know what you mean by a clever general,' said Prince Andrey, flashing a smile.
'A clever general . . .' said Pierre, 'well, it's somebody who foresees every contingency . . . who can read the enemy's mind.'
'Oh, that's impossible,' said Prince Andrey, as if this were a long-established certainty. Pierre looked at him in surprise.
'Hang on,' he said. 'They do say war is a bit like playing chess.'
'Yes, it is,' said Prince Andrey, 'but there's one little difference. In chess you can take as long as you want over every move. You're beyond the limits of time. Oh, there is one other difference: a knight is always stronger than a pawn and two pawns are always stronger than one, whereas in war a battalion can sometimes be stronger than a division, and sometimes weaker than a company. You can never be sure of the relative strengths of different forces. Believe me,' he went on, 'if anything really depended on what gets done at headquarters, I'd be up there with them, doing things, but no, I have the honour of serving here in this regiment along with these gentlemen, and I'm convinced that tomorrow's outcome depends on us, not on them . . . Success never has depended, never will depend, on dispositions or armaments, not even numbers, and position least of all.'
'Well, what does it depend on?'
'On the gut feeling inside me and him,' he indicated Timokhin, 'and every soldier.'
Prince Andrey glanced across at Timokhin, who was staring at his commanding officer in alarm and bemusement. In contrast to his former silence and reserve, Prince Andrey now seemed to be all worked up. He seemed unable to stop himself blurting out every thought that came into his head.
'A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win. Why did we lose the battle of Austerlitz? Our casualties were about the same as those of the French, but we had told ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost. And we said that because then we had nothing to fight for. We wanted to get off the battlefield as fast as we could. "All is lost! Let's run away!" And run we did. If we had waited till evening before saying that, God knows what might have happened.
'But we shan't be saying that tomorrow. You talk about our position. The left flank's weak, and the right flank's too spread out,' he went on. 'It's all nonsense. Irrelevant. So what is in store for us tomorrow? A hundred million contingent factors, and they'll all be determined by what happens on the day - who's run away and who's going to run away, us or them, who gets killed, one man or another. But what's going on right now is just fooling about. The point is this: those people who took you round the positions don't help things along, they actually get in the way. They're completely absorbed in their own petty interests.'
'At a time like this?' said Pierre, full of reproach.
'Yes. At a time like this,' repeated Prince Andrey. 'They think this is a good time to get one over on a rival and win themselves another cross or ribbon. The way I see it, tomorrow looks like this: a hundred thousand Russians and a hundred thousand Frenchmen have come together to fight, and the fact is these two hundred thousand men will fight, and the side that fights hardest and spares itself least will come out on top. And if you like, I'll tell you something else: whatever happens, however much the top brass mess things up, we shall win tomorrow. Tomorrow, whatever happens, we are going to win!'
'Yes sir, it's true what you say, absolutely true,' put in Timokhin. 'Who would spare himself now? The soldiers in my battalion, believe it or not, have refused their vodka. Not the right day for it, they say.'
Nobody spoke.
The officers got to their feet. Prince Andrey went to see them out, giving one or two last instructions to the adjutant. When the officers had gone, Pierre moved up closer to Prince Andrey, and was just about to start talking when they heard hoofbeats coming from three horses not far down the road, and glancing in that direction Prince Andrey recognized Wolzogen and Clausewitz, with a Cossack in attendance. They were talking as they rode past, and Pierre and Prince Andrey could not help overhearing the following snatches of conversation in German:
'The war must to be conducted over a very wide area. This is a policy I cannot endorse highly enough,' came one voice.
'Yes indeed,' said the othe
r, 'and since the aim is to weaken the enemy the loss of private individuals must be ignored.'
'Quite so,' confirmed the first voice.
'Conducted over a very wide area!' Prince Andrey snorted furiously when they had gone. 'It was in that "very wide area" that I had a father, a son and a sister at Bald Hills. He's not bothered about that. It's just what I was saying: these German gentlemen won't win tomorrow, they'll only mess things up as much as they can, because a German head like that man's contains nothing but calculations no more useful than a sucked egg, and his heart lacks the one thing that's needed for tomorrow, the thing that Timokhin has. They've given him the whole of Europe, and they come over here to give us lessons - wonderful teachers!' he added, his voice rising again to screaming pitch.
'So you do think we're going to win tomorrow?' said Pierre.
'Oh yes,' said Prince Andrey distractedly. 'One thing I would do if I was in power,' he began again. 'Stop taking prisoners. What's the sense in taking prisoners? It's just medieval chivalry. The French have destroyed my home and they're on their way to destroy Moscow. They've injured me and they're still doing it with every second that passes. They're my enemies, they're all criminals - that's the way I see it. It's also what Timokhin thinks, and all the army with him. They must be put to death. If they're my enemies they can't be my friends, whatever might have been said at Tilsit.'
'Yes, yes,' said Pierre, his eyes shining as he looked at Prince Andrey. 'Oh yes, I'm with you all the way!'
The one question that had been haunting Pierre all day, ever since Mozhaysk in fact, now struck him as quite clear and settled once and for all. Now he could sense the full significance of the war and the impending battle. Everything he had seen during the day, all the sober and serious faces he had caught glimpses of, came back to him now in a new light. He had observed what the physicists call latent heat in the patriotic spirit of the men that he had seen, and this explained why they were all preparing for death with such composure and what passed for light-heartedness.