them all: would they cross it or not, and if yes, how they would cross it?
The colonel rode up to the front, gave some testy answers to questions posed by the officers and, like a man desperate to have his own way, rapped out an order. There had been no definite word, but a rumour had swept the squadron that they were going to attack. Now the order to fall in was followed by the slash of sabres coming out of scabbards. Still no one moved. The left-flank infantry and hussars sensed that their commanders had no idea what to do, and their uncertainty was soon transmitted to the soldiers.
'Come on, come on!' thought Rostov, feeling that at long last the moment had come to enjoy the thrill of a charge, which his regimental comrades had so often told him about.
'God be with you, men,' rang out Denisov's voice. 'Fow-ward! Quick-twot!'
In the front line the horses stirred their haunches. Little Rook pulled on the reins and set off on his own.
To his right Rostov could see the leading ranks of his own hussars. Up ahead he could make out a dark strip, not very clear but presumably the enemy. Shots could be heard, but they were some way off.
'Faster now!' came the word of command, and Rostov felt Little Rook's hindquarters dip as he surged into a gallop. Rostov knew the horse's every movement in advance, and he was getting more and more excited. He noticed a solitary tree just ahead. That tree had once been in front of him, right in the middle of the dividing line that had seemed so terrible. But now they had crossed that line and nothing terrible had happened - except that he felt even more elated and excited. 'God how I'll slash him!' thought Rostov, squeezing down on his sabre-hilt.
All voices roared a huge hurrah!
'Let 'em all come!' he thought, spurring Little Rook to go even faster, sweeping past the others and moving into a full gallop. Now the enemy could be seen ahead. And then suddenly something happened: it came like a great lash across the whole squadron as if it had been slapped by a big broom. Rostov had his sabre raised, ready to slash with it, but at that moment Nikitenko, who had just galloped past, suddenly disappeared and Rostov felt himself flying through the air at an amazing speed and yet at the same time not moving. Was he dreaming? One of his comrades, Bandarchuk, almost crashed into him and flashed him a furious glare. Bandarchuk's horse veered away and galloped on.
'What's happened? Why can't I move? I'm down. I'm dead.' For a moment Rostov questioned and answered himself. There he was on his own in the middle of a field. Instead of the galloping horses and the hussars' backs, all he could see around him was the earth and stubble, and no movement of any kind. There was warm blood under him.
'No, I'm only wounded. It's my horse that's dead.' Little Rook struggled to get up on to his forelegs, but sank back, pinning his rider's leg. Blood was flowing from the horse's head. He was thrashing about; he couldn't get up. Rostov tried to get up too, and fell back down. His sabretache had snagged in the saddle. Where were our men? Where were the French? He had no idea. There was no one in sight.
He managed to free his leg and stood up. 'Which way now? Where's that dividing line that separated us off so neatly?' he wondered, but this time there was no answer. 'Something's gone terribly wrong. Do things like this really happen? What do you do?' he kept wondering as he got to his feet. Then he suddenly felt there was something dangling on his numb left arm that shouldn't be there. The wrist seemed not to belong to his arm. He stared down at his hand, looking for blood. 'Oh, look, someone's coming,' he thought with great delight, seeing some men running towards him. 'They'll help me!' The first wore a strange shako and a blue coat; he had a swarthy sunburnt face and a hooked nose. He was followed by two others, and there were a lot more just behind him. One of them said something funny, not in Russian. Rostov could see a Russian hussar standing among the same sort of men wearing the same sort of hat. They were pinning him by the arms and holding his horse too, a bit further back.
'It's one of our boys. He's been taken prisoner . . . Yes, he has . . . Are they going to take me? Who are these people?' Rostov was still wondering - he could hardly believe his eyes. 'Is it the French?' He looked at the Frenchmen running towards him, and although only a few seconds before he had been galloping along, dying to get at them and hack them to pieces, now that they were so near everything seemed so ghastly that again he couldn't believe his eyes. 'Who are they? Why are they running? They're not after me! They can't be after me! Why? They can't want to kill me! Me. Everybody loves me!' He remembered all the love he had had from his mother, from his family and his friends, and the idea of the enemy wanting to kill him seemed absurd. 'But they might want to!' He had been standing there rigid for more than ten seconds, not taking anything in. The hook-nosed Frenchman was getting near, so near you could see the look on his face. And the sight of this rampaging foreigner's face as he sprinted breathlessly towards him with fixed bayonet suddenly terrified Rostov. He grabbed his pistol, and instead of firing he hurled it at the Frenchman and dashed towards the bushes as fast as his legs would carry him. Gone were the feelings of doubt and conflict that had pursued him across the bridge at Enns - he was running now like a hare chased by dogs. His whole being was reduced to a single sensation - he was terrified and running for his young and happy life. He scorched the ground, flew across fields and soared over hedges like the lively child he had once been, chasing his friends, once or twice turning his kind, pale, youthful face to look back, only to feel a chill of horror run down his spine. 'No, don't look back,' he thought, but when he got to the bushes he did glance round once more. The Frenchmen had given up, and even as he looked round the first man was just slowing down from a gentle trot to a walk, and turning round to yell back to one of his pals. Rostov stopped.
'It can't be right,' he thought. 'They can't have been going to kill me.' Meanwhile his left arm felt heavy, as if a great weight had been hung on it. He could run no further. The Frenchman stopped too and aimed at him. Rostov squeezed his eyes shut and ducked. One bullet sang past his head, then another. He gathered what strength he had left, took his left hand in his right and ran into the bushes. There in the bushes were the Russian marksmen.
CHAPTER 20
The infantry regiments that had been caught napping in the wood were now rushing out with companies mixing together, and all of them retreating in a shambles. It only took one panicky soldier to call out, 'We're cut off!', meaningless words perhaps but terrifying on any battlefield, for them to affect the entire mass of men.
'Surrounded! Cut off! We've had it!' they shouted as they ran.
The moment their general heard musket-fire and shouting from the rear he realized something terrible had happened to his regiment, and the thought that he, an exemplary officer with a long and blameless service career, might now be accused by his superiors of negligence or dereliction of duty struck him so forcibly that he suddenly became oblivious of everything else - the insubordinate cavalry colonel, his own important role as a general and, what mattered most, any sense of danger or thought of self-preservation. Clutching the pommel of his saddle and spurring his horse, he galloped off to the regiment under a hail of bullets that sprayed everywhere but luckily didn't hit him. His sole purpose was to find out what was wrong and put it right if it had been his fault, anything to avoid being censured, now, after twenty-two years of exemplary, unblemished service.
He galloped unscathed through the French forces and emerged from the wood into a field where our men were ignoring orders and running away downhill. This was now one of those decisive moral points which turn a battle. Would this rabble of soldiers respond to their commander's voice, or would they just look at him and keep running? Despite all the desperate shouts from a commander who had once put the fear of God into every last soldier, despite his infuriated, purple face, contorted beyond all recognition, even despite the wild brandishing of his sabre, the soldiers kept running, yelling at each other, firing in the air and ignoring every word of command. That moral turning point on which a battle hinges was unmistakably the way of panic.
Coughing from the shouting and the smoke, the general stopped in despair. All seemed lost, when suddenly the French, who had been advancing on our men, ran back for no apparent reason, and disappeared from the outskirts of the wood. There among the trees were the Russian marksmen. It was Timokhin's company, the only one to have maintained order and discipline in the wood, which had hidden in a gully, ambushed the French and now mounted a swift attack. Timokhin rushed at the French with such a furious yell, assailing them with such wild and drunken zeal with nothing but a sword in his hand, that the French were taken by surprise - they dropped their guns and fled. Dolokhov, running beside Timokhin, killed one French soldier at close quarters, and was the first to grab the collar of an officer who wanted to give himself up. Our men who had been running away returned, the battalions re-formed and the French, who had been on the point of splitting the left-flank forces, were for the moment driven back. Our reserves had time to join the main forces, and everyone stopped running away. The general had halted alongside Major Ekonomov and was seeing the retreating companies over a bridge when a soldier ran up to him, grabbed hold of his stirrup and almost clung to him. He was wearing a bluish coat of fine cloth, he had no pack or shako, his head was bandaged and a French ammunition pouch was slung across his shoulders. He was clutching an officer's sword in both hands. The soldier had a very pale face, and his blue eyes looked defiantly into the general's face; there was a smile on his mouth. The general was busy giving instructions to Major Ekonomov, but he could hardly ignore this man.
'Sir, I have two trophies for you,' said Dolokhov, pointing to the French sword and ammunition pouch. 'I took an officer prisoner. I stopped a company.' Dolokhov was gasping from exhaustion and he spoke haltingly. 'The whole company is my witness. Please remember this, sir!'
'Very good, very good,' said the general, and he turned away to Major Ekonomov. But Dolokhov wouldn't go; he undid his bandage, yanked it off and showed congealed blood on his head.
'A bayonet wound. I stayed there at the front. Please remember this, your Excellency.'
Tushin's battery had been forgotten, and it was only at the very end of the action that Prince Bagration, hearing the bombardment still coming from the centre, sent the duty staff officer and then Prince Andrey to order the battery to retreat with all speed. Any support for Tushin's cannons had been ordered away in mid-battle, but the battery had kept on firing and was not taken by the French simply because the enemy didn't believe that four guns could have the effrontery to go on firing without any protection. Quite the reverse, from the sustained action of this battery the French came to believe that the main Russian forces were concentrated here in the centre, and mounted two attacks on that point; both times they were driven back by grapeshot from the four cannons standing in solitude at the top of the hill.
It was not long after Prince Bagration's departure that Tushin had succeeded in setting fire to Schongrabern.
'That's got 'em moving! It's on fire! Look at the smoke! Good shot! Well done! Look at the smoke! Look at the smoke!' cried the gunners, taking heart.
In the absence of any instructions the four guns had been pointed towards the conflagration. The soldiers seemed to be urging the cannonballs on their way; every shot was hailed with a roar: 'Good shot! There she goes! Look at that! . . . Nice one!' Fanned by the wind, the fire was spreading quickly. French columns that had marched out of the village came straight back, but evidently in revenge for this nasty turn of events, the enemy positioned ten guns outside the village to the right, and began firing back at Tushin.
In their childlike glee at setting fire to the village, and the excitement of their lucky firing on the French, our gunners failed to spot this battery until two cannonballs and then four more fell among their guns, one killing two horses and another blowing a wagon driver's leg off. Their blood was up, though, and their energies, far from flagging, simply found another outlet. The horses were replaced by others from a stand-by gun-carriage; the wounded were carried away and their four guns were ranged against a ten-strong enemy battery. One of Tushin's fellow officers had been killed at the outset, and after an hour's firing seventeen of the battery's forty gunners were out of action, but the rest were as bright and eager as ever. Twice they had seen the French encroach on them from below; twice they had sprayed them with grapeshot.
The diminutive Tushin with his clumsy little gestures kept asking his orderly to 'refill my pipe for this one', as he put it, and he was forever running about scattering sparks all over and peering across at the French from under his tiny little hand.
'Come on, men, let 'em 'ave it!' he never stopped saying, and he was not averse to heaving at the cannon wheels and working the screws himself. In all the smoke, deafened by the incessant banging of the cannons that made him jump at every shot, Tushin ran from one cannon to the next, his stubby pipe never out of his mouth, taking aim, checking the charges, arranging for killed and wounded horses to be unharnessed and replaced, and shouting to everyone in his unimpressive shrill little voice. His face became more and more animated, although when someone got killed or wounded he would frown, turn away from him and shout angrily at the men who were always dilatory in picking up a wounded soldier or a dead body. Every one of the soldiers, for the most part handsome, strapping boys, head and shoulders taller than their officer and twice as broad in the chest (inevitable in the artillery), looked at their commanding officer as do children in trouble, and whatever expression they found on his face was invariably reflected on their own.
With all the fearful clamour and banging, and the need to concentrate and keep busy, Tushin never felt the slightest nasty touch of fear, and the idea that he might be killed or badly wounded never entered his head. Quite the reverse, he felt more and more buoyant. The moment he had first seen the enemy and fired his first shot now seemed a long, long time ago - yesterday maybe - and that little plot of earth where he now stood was a familiar place and he felt at home in it. He missed nothing, thought of every last detail and did everything as well as the finest officer could have done in his situation, but nevertheless he was always in a state of mind not far from feverish delirium or the abandonment of a drunk.
The devastating sound of his own guns around him, the whoosh and bang of enemy shells, the sight of his gunners, red-faced and sweating as they rushed around the cannons, the sight of blood from men and horses, and the puffs of smoke from the enemy across the hillside, inevitably followed by a cannonball soaring across and hitting the earth, a man, a horse or a gun - all of this created for him a fantastic world of his own, which for the moment gave him immense pleasure. He imagined the enemy guns not as guns but pipes from which an invisible smoker blew puffs of smoke every so often.
'There he goes, puffing away again,' Tushin would murmur to himself as another smoke cloud rose from the hillside to be wafted away by the wind to the left in a single streak. 'Here comes the ball - we've got to hit it back.'
'What was that, sir?' asked a gunner standing near by who had heard him muttering.
'Never mind, it's just a grenade . . .' came the answer. 'Right, Matthew's girl,' he would sometimes say to himself. 'Matthew's girl' was the name his fancy gave to the huge cannon, an old-fashioned casting, that stood at one end. The French swarming around their big guns he saw as ants. Also in his dream-world that handsome soldier who liked a drink or two, his number one gunner on the second cannon, was known as 'Uncle'; Tushin looked at him more than anyone else and revelled in his every movement. The sound of musket-fire at the bottom of the hill dying away and building up again seemed to him like somebody breathing. He listened for the rise and fall of these sounds.
'There she goes, another breath,' he would say to himself. He imagined himself as a great Herculean figure lobbing cannonballs at the French with both hands.
'Come on, Matthew's girl. Come on, old lady, don't let us down!' he was saying, moving away from the cannon, when a strange unknown voice called over his head, 'Captain Tushin! Captain!'
Tushin whipped round in some panic. There stood the same staff officer who had sent him out of the tent at Grunth. Getting his breath back, he shouted to him, 'What's all this? You must be mad. Twice ordered to retreat, and here you are . . .'
'Why are they getting at me?' Tushin wondered, looking in alarm at his superior officer.
'I . . . er . . . can't . . .' he began, raising two fingers to his cap. 'I . . .' But the staff officer didn't get any more out. A cannonball zoomed over near by and made him duck down on his horse. He paused, and just as he was about to say something else, another cannonball stopped him. He turned his horse and galloped away.
'Retreat, everybody! Retreat!' he shouted from a long way off.
The soldiers laughed at him. Then, a minute later an adjutant arrived with the same order. It was Prince Andrey. The first thing he saw when he got to where Tushin's cannons were stationed was an unharnessed horse with a broken leg, neighing piteously beside the harnessed horses. Blood gushed from its leg like water down a brook. Among the gun carriers lay several dead men. One cannonball after another flew past him as he rode up, and he felt a nervous shudder run down his back. But the very idea that he was afraid was enough to rouse him again. 'I cannot be frightened,' he thought, and he took his time dismounting between the guns. When he had transmitted the order he did not leave the battery. He decided to stay on and watch the guns dismounted and taken away. Stepping over corpses and under terrible fire from the French, he helped Tushin move his big guns.
'One of them staff officers came up just now. Didn't stay long,' said one of the gunners to Prince Andrey. 'Not like you, sir.'
Prince Andrey and Tushin didn't talk. They were both so busy that they hardly seemed to be aware of each other. When they had got the two surviving guns on to their carriages and were moving off downhill (a smashed cannon and a howitzer were left behind), Prince Andrey went up to Tushin.
'Well, goodbye for now,' said Prince Andrey, holding out his han