side the traces.
'Hey! Watch that trace-horse! . . . Get her leg out! She'll go down! . . . Look! They haven't seen it!' A great cry rose from all the ranks.
Another time everybody homed in on a small brown dog with a stiff little tail, which had sprung out of nowhere and was fussing around, trotting up and down in front of the ranks. Suddenly a cannonball fell near by, and it yelped and ran off with its tail between its legs. The whole regiment came alive with yells and shrieks of laughter. But these distractions lasted no more than a minute, and the men had been eight hours with no food and nothing to do, in constant fear of death, and their pale and haggard faces grew paler and more haggard.
Prince Andrey, haggard and pale like everybody else in the regiment, paced the meadow next to the field of oats from one boundary-ditch to the next with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the ground. He had no orders to give and nothing to do. Everything took care of itself. The dead were dragged back behind the line, the wounded were carried away, and the ranks closed up. If any soldiers ran away they soon doubled back. At first Prince Andrey had felt duty-bound to keep his men's spirits up and set an example, so he walked the ranks, but it wasn't long before he realized he had nothing to teach them. All his energy, like every soldier's, was instinctively concentrated on distracting himself from the horror of his situation. He paced the meadow, dragging his feet and rustling through the grass, and he watched the dust thickening on his boots. First he would lengthen his stride and try to follow in the footsteps left behind by the mowers, then he would count his steps and work out how many times he would have to walk from one ditch to another to cover half a mile; or he would strip the flowers from some wormwood growing in the ditch, rub them in his palms and sniff the acrid, bitter-sweet scent. Of yesterday's thoughts not a trace remained. His mind was blank. Wearily he listened to the all too familiar sounds, the whine of the shells so different from the booming of the guns, he glanced at the faces of the men of the first battalion that he had seen a thousand times before, and waited. 'Here she comes. This one's for us!' he thought, listening closely as something whistled over from the hidden region of the smoke. 'One! Two! Here come some more! That one's down . . .' He stopped short and glanced down the ranks. 'No, it must have gone over. Oh, that one is down!' And he set off for another walk, lengthening his pace to try and get to the ditch in sixteen strides.
A whistling sound followed by a thud! Five paces away a cannonball smacked into the dry soil and buried itself. A chill ran down his back. Again he glanced down the ranks. That one could have got quite a few of them; there was a bunch of men along by the second battalion.
'Mr Adjutant!' he shouted. 'Tell them not to stand too close together!'
The adjutant did as instructed and started to walk over towards Prince Andrey. From the other side a battalion commander came riding up.
'Look out!' yelled a terrified soldier as a grenade came over like a little bird zooming down with whirring wings on the look-out for a landing place, and plopped down with a dull thud next to the major's horse a couple of paces away from Prince Andrey. The horse was the first to move. Unconcerned about the rights and wrongs of showing fear, it gave a snort, reared up, almost throwing the major and galloped away. The men latched on to the horse's terror.
'Get down!' yelled the adjutant, flinging himself to the ground. Prince Andrey hesitated. The smoking shell was spinning like a top between him and the prostrate adjutant, near a clump of wormwood growing in the ditch between meadow and field.
'Is this death then?' Prince Andrey wondered, and he was swept by a new sense of longing as he gazed down at the grass, the wormwood and the spiral of smoke swirling up from the spinning ball. 'I can't die. I don't want to die. I love life. I love this grass, the earth, the air . . .'
These thoughts flashed through his mind, though he was still aware that eyes were on him.
'Shame on you, Mr Adjutant!' he called to the officer. 'What kind of . . .' But he didn't finish. In one terrific bang shrapnel flew like matchwood with an overwhelming smell of gunpowder and Prince Andrey was sent flying to one side with one arm in the air, and he fell to the ground face-down.
Several officers ran up. He was bleeding from the stomach on the righthand side, and a great stain was oozing out all over the grass.
The militiamen were called over and they stood there behind the officers holding a stretcher. Prince Andrey lay on his chest with his face buried in the grass, gasping as he struggled for air.
'Don't just stand there! Come on!'
The peasants came up and got hold of him by the shoulders and feet, but he gave such a terrible cry they looked at each other and put him down again.
'Pick him up! Get him on the stretcher. You can't do any harm!' yelled a voice. They lifted him by the shoulders again and put him on the stretcher.
'Oh, my God! My God! What's happened to him? . . . Stomach! . . . He's had it! Oh, my God!' came the officers' voices.
'Went right past my ear,' the adjutant was saying.
The peasants settled the stretcher across their shoulders and hurried off to the dressing station down the path that they had trampled flat.
'Get in step! . . . Blast these peasants!' cried an officer, grabbing them by the shoulders as they bumbled along, jolting the stretcher.
'Get it right, Fyodor. 'Ow be 'e?' said the leading peasant.
'Got 'e now!' said the one at the back, delighted with himself as he fell into step.
'Your Excellency! Prince! Are you all right, sir?' came the trembling voice of Timokhin as he ran up and peeped over the stretcher.
Prince Andrey opened his eyes and looked up at the speaker from deep in the stretcher where his head had sunk down, but his eyelids soon closed again.
The militiamen carried Prince Andrey to the dressing station at the edge of a wood, where there were wagons waiting. The station - three tents with their flaps turned back - stood under a few birch-trees. Just inside the wood were the wagons and horses. The horses were munching oats in their nose-bags and sparrows kept swooping down to pick up any dropped grains. One or two crows, scenting blood, cawed impatiently as they flitted about among the birch-trees. Tents were spread out over four or five acres, with bloodstained men outside them, lying on the grass, standing up or sitting around, dressed in all kinds of clothing. They were surrounded by hordes of long-faced stretcher-bearers who were watching carefully. In the interests of good order the officers kept shooing them away, but it was no good. The soldiers ignored them and stood there leaning on their stretchers with a close eye on what was happening under their noses, as if it might help them fathom the difficult meaning of this spectacle. From inside the tents came a variety of sounds, from wild and angry screaming to heart-rending moans and groans. Now and then dressers would come rushing out to get water and say who was next. The wounded men stood in line by the tent, gasping for breath, moaning, weeping, yelling and cursing, or asking for vodka. Some were delirious. Prince Andrey, a colonel no less, was whisked through the crowd waiting for treatment and taken straight to one of the tents, where his bearers stopped, awaiting instructions. Prince Andrey opened his eyes and for some time could not make out what was happening around him. The meadow, the wormwood, the whirling black ball, and that deep surge of love for life all flashed again through his mind. A couple of paces away stood a tall, handsome, dark-haired sergeant with a bandage round his head, leaning against a branch. He had bullet-wounds to the head and leg, and his loud voice made him the centre of attention. Quite a crowd of wounded men and stretcher-bearers had gathered round him, hanging on his words.
'Give 'im a right thumpin', we did. 'E soon packed it in. Got the king 'imself, we did,' the soldier was shouting, glaring round with a feverish glint in his black eyes. 'If only them preserves had got there in time, old boy, there wouldn't have been nothin' left of 'im. God's truth, I'm telling you . . .'
Prince Andrey was no different from all the other bystanders; he gazed across at him with shining eyes, and felt some relief. 'But it doesn't make any difference now, does it?' he thought. 'What will it be like over there - and what's it been like down here? Why did I feel so sorry to let go of life? There's been something in this life I never understood, and still don't.'
CHAPTER 37
A doctor in a bloodstained apron came out of the tent, holding a cigar between the thumb and little finger of one of his bloodstained hands to keep the blood off it. He threw his head back and had a good look round over the heads of the wounded men. He obviously wanted a short break. He spent a few minutes turning his head right and left, after which he gave a sigh and looked down again.
'Come on, then,' he said to a dresser who was pointing to Prince Andrey, and told the bearers to bring him into the tent.
A murmur ran through the waiting wounded.
'Oh yes, posh people first. Just the same up in heaven,' said one.
Prince Andrey was carried in and laid on a recently vacated table that had just been washed down by an assistant. He could not see anything very clearly inside the tent, distracted as he was by pathetic groans coming from every side and the excruciating pain in his thigh, his stomach, and his back. Everything he saw blended into a single overall impression of naked, bloodstained human flesh, which seemed to fill the low tent in the way that naked human flesh had filled that dirty pond on the Smolensk road a few weeks before on a hot day in August. Yes, it was the same flesh, the same cannon-fodder, the sight of which had horrified him then, perhaps as a portent of things to come.
There were three tables in the tent. Two were occupied; Prince Andrey was laid on the third. For some time he was left alone with no choice but to watch what was happening on the other two tables. On the nearest one sat a Tatar, most likely a Cossack, going by the uniform thrown down at his side. Four soldiers were holding him down while a doctor in spectacles cut into his muscular brown back.
'Ugh! Ow! Ouch!' the Tatar grunted, and then with a sudden upward jerk of his broad, swarthy, sunburnt face he bared his white teeth and started writhing convulsively, his cries building up into one long ringing, piercing scream. On the other table, which had a lot of people standing round it, a big, well-built man lay supine with his head flung back. There was something about the colour of the curls and the shape of the head that seemed strangely familiar to Prince Andrey. Several of the dressers were holding him tight and bearing down on his chest. One of his big chubby white legs was constantly on the move, jerking convulsively all over the place. This man was a shuddering mass, sobbing and choking. Two doctors, one of them pale and trembling, were working silently on the other, gory leg. The doctor in spectacles finished dealing with the Tatar, who soon had a coat thrown round him, and came over to Prince Andrey, wiping his hands.
He took one glance at his face and quickly turned away.
'Don't just stand there. Get him undressed!' he roared at the dresser. His earliest, remotest recollections of childhood came back to Prince Andrey as the dresser, with his sleeves rolled-up, moved quickly to undo his buttons and take off his clothes. The doctor bent down over the wound, probed it, and gave a deep sigh. Then he signalled to somebody. And the terrible agony in his stomach made Prince Andrey lose consciousness. When he came round, the broken splinters of his thigh-bone had been removed, the bits of torn flesh cut away, and the wound bandaged. Water was sprinkled on his face. Just as Prince Andrey opened his eyes the doctor bent over him, kissed him on the lips without saying anything, and hurried away.
After all the pain he had endured Prince Andrey now felt blissfully at peace; he had not felt like this for a very long time. The nicest and happiest moments of his life, especially his earliest childhood, when he had been undressed and put to bed, and his nurse had sung lullabies over him, and he had burrowed down under the pillows feeling happy just to be alive, floated through his imagination, and instead of seeming like past events they seemed like the here and now.
The other doctors were still working on the wounded man whose head had struck Prince Andrey as somehow familiar; they were lifting him now and trying to calm him down.
'Show me . . . Oh! Ooh! . . . Oooh!' The man was scared stiff, moaning in agony and racked with sobs. These moaning sounds made Prince Andrey feel like crying too. Whether it was because he was dying an inglorious death, or because he was sorry to let go of life, or because of the memories of his lost childhood, or because he was in pain, and many others were too, and this man was moaning so pathetically, he wanted to cry, to break down like a child in tears of innocence and something near to happiness.
They showed the wounded man his amputated leg, still wearing its boot and covered with coagulated blood.
'Oh! Oo-ooh!' He was sobbing like a woman. The doctor who had been standing beside him, blocking the view, now moved away.
'My God! What's all this? What's he doing here?' Prince Andrey wondered.
He knew this wreck of a man who was moaning so pathetically, the poor devil who had just had his leg off: it was Anatole Kuragin. It was Anatole who was being propped up and encouraged to have a drink of water, though his trembling, swollen lips could not get a hold on the rim of the glass. Anatole took a deep breath, gagging and sobbing. 'Yes, it's him. Yes, and that man is somehow connected with me, closely and painfully connected,' thought Prince Andrey, with no clear grasp of what he was looking at. 'What kind of contact is there between that man and my childhood, my life?' he wondered, and could find no answer. And suddenly another unexpected memory from that childhood world of innocence and love flashed through his mind. He remembered Natasha as he had seen her for the first time at the ball in 1810, with her slender neck and slender arms, and her startled, happy face, so eager for ecstatic pleasure, and in his heart he felt a pang of love and tenderness stronger and deeper than ever before. Now he recalled the point of contact between him and this man who was peering vaguely across at him through tears welling up in his swollen eyes. Everything came back to him, and his heart filled with a blissful surge of passionate pity and love for this man.
It was all too much for Prince Andrey; he broke down in tears of love and tenderness for his fellow men, himself, his own silly misdoings and everybody else's. 'Sympathy and love, for our brothers, those who love us and those who hate us, for our enemies. Yes, the kind of that love God preached on earth, that Marie told me about and I could not understand - that's why I was so sorry to let go of life, that's what would have been left for me if I had lived. But now it's too late. I know it is.'
CHAPTER 38
The ghastly sight of a battlefield littered with corpses and wounded men, together with the feeling of heaviness in his head, the news that a score of generals known to him personally were among the dead or wounded, and the knowledge that his once mighty army has lost its power, all of this had a curious effect on Napoleon, who was usually not averse to surveying the dead and wounded, because (he imagined) it showed his dauntless spirit. This time the horror of the battlefield was too much for his dauntless spirit, which he had always looked on as a virtue and his greatest claim to fame. He was quick to leave the battlefield and head back to Shevardino. There, he sat down on a camp-stool with his heavy face all yellow and puffy, his eyes dim, his nose red, and his voice hoarse, looking down but forced to listen to the sounds of battle. Feeling sick at heart, he was waiting for the action to end, convinced he had started the whole thing off and now he could not stop it. For one brief moment personal, human feelings won out over the artificial apology for a life that he had been leading for such a long time. He gave himself up to the agony and death he had seen on the battlefield. The heaviness in his head and chest delivered a sharp reminder of his own vulnerability to agony and death. At that moment he didn't want Moscow, victory or glory. (Why would he need any more glory?) All he wanted was to be left alone in peace and quiet. But when he had been on the high ground above Semyonovsk the artillery commander had asked permission to take several batteries up there in order to increase fire on the masses of Russian troops just outside Knyazkovo. Napoleon had agreed, and told them to let him know whether these batteries had any effect. Now here was an adjutant reporting that the Emperor's orders had been carried out, two hundred guns had been directed at the Russians, and they were still standing their ground.
'Our fire is mowing them down in rows, but they won't budge,' said the adjutant.
'They want more!' said Napoleon in his husky voice.
'Sire?' repeated the adjutant, who had missed what he said.
'They want more!' Napoleon croaked hoarsely, with a scowl. 'Give them more.'
As things stood, without any orders from him, what he wanted done was being done, and he carried on issuing instructions simply because he thought it was expected of him. And back he went once again into his old world of artificiality with its fantasies of greatness, and once again (like a horse on a treadmill that thinks it's doing something for itself) he humbly resumed the cruel, unhappy, burdensome, inhuman role that was his destiny.
And this would not be the only hour or day of his life when darkness afflicted the mind and conscience of this man, who had assumed more responsibility for what was going on than any other participant, though he never, to the end of his days, had the slightest understanding of goodness, beauty, truth or the significance of his own deeds, which were too far removed from truth and goodness, too remote from anything human for him to be able to grasp their significance. Unable to renounce his own deeds, which were highly praised by half the world, he was forced to repudiate truth, goodness and everything human.
As he had ridden round the edge of the battlefield piled with corpses and mutilated men (the product of his will, as he saw things) he had taken a good look at all these men, and this would not be the only day of his life when he tried to work out how many Russians had fallen for every Frenchman; he took great pleasure in deceiving himself with the false belief that there were five Russians for every Frenchman. This would not be the only occasion in his life that he wrote a letter to Paris describing the battlefield