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Mounting his horse again Prince Andrew lingered with the battery,
looking at the puff from the gun that had sent the ball. His eyes
ran rapidly over the wide space, but he only saw that the hitherto
motionless masses of the French now swayed and that there really
was a battery to their left. The smoke above it had not yet dispersed.
Two mounted Frenchmen, probably adjutants, were galloping up the
hill. A small but distinctly visible enemy column was moving down
the hill, probably to strengthen the front line. The smoke of
the first shot had not yet dispersed before another puff appeared,
followed by a report. The battle had begun! Prince Andrew turned
his horse and galloped back to Grunth to find Prince Bagration.
He heard the cannonade behind him growing louder and more frequent.
Evidently our guns had begun to reply. From the bottom of the
slope, where the parleys had taken place, came the report of musketry.
Lemarrois had just arrived at a gallop with Bonaparte's stern
letter, and Murat, humiliated and anxious to expiate his fault,
had at once moved his forces to attack the center and outflank
both the Russian wings, hoping before evening and before the arrival
of the Emperor to crush the contemptible detachment that stood
before him.
"It has begun. Here it is!" thought Prince Andrew,
feeling the blood rush to his heart. "But where and how will
my Toulon present itself?"
Passing between the companies that had been eating porridge
and drinking vodka a quarter of an hour before, he saw everywhere
the same rapid movement of soldiers forming ranks and getting
their muskets ready, and on all their faces he recognized the
same eagerness that filled his heart. "It has begun! Here
it is, dreadful but enjoyable!" was what the face of each
soldier and each officer seemed to say.
Before he had reached the embankments that were being thrown
up, he saw, in the light of the dull autumn evening, mounted men
coming toward him. The foremost, wearing a Cossack cloak and lambskin
cap and riding a white horse, was Prince Bagration. Prince Andrew
stopped, waiting for him to come up; Prince Bagration reined in
his horse and recognizing Prince Andrew nodded to him. He still
looked ahead while Prince Andrew told him what he had seen.
The feeling, "It has begun! Here it is!" was seen
even on Prince Bagration's hard brown face with its half-closed,
dull, sleepy eyes. Prince Andrew gazed with anxious curiosity
at that impassive face and wished he could tell what, if anything,
this man was thinking and feeling at that moment. "Is there
anything at all behind that impassive face?" Prince Andrew
asked himself as he looked. Prince Bagration bent his head in
sign of agreement with what Prince Andrew told him, and said,
"Very good!" in a tone that seemed to imply that everything
that took place and was reported to him was exactly what he had
foreseen. Prince Andrew, out of breath with his rapid ride, spoke
quickly. Prince Bagration, uttering his words with an Oriental
accent, spoke particularly slowly, as if to impress the fact that
there was no need to hurry. However, he put his horse to a trot
in the direction of Tushin's battery. Prince Andrew followed with
the suite. Behind Prince Bagration rode an officer of the suite,
the prince's personal adjutant, Zherkov, an orderly officer, the
staff officer on duty, riding a fine bobtailed horse, and a civilian-
an accountant who had asked permission to be present at the battle
out of curiosity. The accountant, a stout, full-faced man, looked
around him with a naive smile of satisfaction and presented a
strange appearance among the hussars, Cossacks, and adjutants,
in his camlet coat, as he jolted on his horse with a convoy officer's
saddle.
"He wants to see a battle," said Zherkov to Bolkonski,
pointing to the accountant, "but he feels a pain in the pit
of his stomach already."
"Oh, leave off!" said the accountant with a beaming
but rather cunning smile, as if flattered at being made the subject
of Zherkov's joke, and purposely trying to appear stupider than
he really was.
"It is very strange, mon Monsieur Prince," said
the staff officer. (He remembered that in French there is some
peculiar way of addressing a prince, but could not get it quite
right.)
By this time they were all approaching Tushin's battery, and
a ball struck the ground in front of them.
"What's that that has fallen?" asked the accountant
with a naive smile.
"A French pancake," answered Zherkov.
"So that's what they hit with?" asked the accountant.
"How awful!"
He seemed to swell with satisfaction. He had hardly finished
speaking when they again heard an unexpectedly violent whistling
which suddenly ended with a thud into something soft... f-f-flop!
and a Cossack, riding a little to their right and behind the accountant,
crashed to earth with his horse. Zherkov and the staff officer
bent over their saddles and turned their horses away. The accountant
stopped, facing the Cossack, and examined him with attentive curiosity.
The Cossack was dead, but the horse still struggled.
Prince Bagration screwed up his eyes, looked round, and, seeing
the cause of the confusion, turned away with indifference, as
if to say, "Is it worth while noticing trifles?" He
reined in his horse with the case of a skillful rider and, slightly
bending over, disengaged his saber which had caught in his cloak.
It was an old-fashioned saber of a kind no longer in general use.
Prince Andrew remembered the story of Suvorov giving his saber
to Bagration in Italy, and the recollection was particularly pleasant
at that moment. They had reached the battery at which Prince Andrew
had been when he examined the battlefield.
"Whose company?" asked Prince Bagration of an artilleryman
standing by the ammunition wagon.
He asked, "Whose company?" but he really meant,
"Are you frightened here?" and the artilleryman understood
him.
"Captain Tushin's, your excellency!" shouted the
red-haired, freckled gunner in a merry voice, standing to attention.
"Yes, yes," muttered Bagration as if considering
something, and he rode past the limbers to the farthest cannon.
As he approached, a ringing shot issued from it deafening
him and his suite, and in the smoke that suddenly surrounded the
gun they could see the gunners who had seized it straining to
roll it quickly back to its former position. A huge, broad-shouldered
gunner, Number One, holding a mop, his legs far apart, sprang
to the wheel; while Number Two with a trembling hand placed a
charge in the cannon's mouth. The short, round-shouldered Captain
Tushin, stumbling over the tail of the gun carriage, moved forward
and, not noticing the general, looked out shading his eyes with
his small hand.
"Lift it two lines more and it will be just right,"
cried he in a feeble voice to which he tried to impart a dashing
note, ill suited to his weak figure. "Number Two!" he
squeaked. "Fire, Medvedev!"
Bagration called to him, and Tushin, raising three fingers
to his cap with a bashful and awkward gesture not at all like
a military salute but like a priest's benediction, approached
the general. Though Tushin's guns had been intended to cannonade
the valley, he was firing incendiary balls at the village of Schon
Grabern visible just opposite, in front of which large masses
of French were advancing.
No one had given Tushin orders where and at what to fire,
but after consulting his sergeant major, Zakharchenko, for whom
he had great respect, he had decided that it would be a good thing
to set fire to the village. "Very good!" said Bagration
in reply to the officer's report, and began deliberately to examine
the whole battlefield extended before him. The French had advanced
nearest on our right. Below the height on which the Kiev regiment
was stationed, in the hollow where the rivulet flowed, the soul-stirring
rolling and crackling of musketry was heard, and much farther
to the right beyond the dragoons, the officer of the suite pointed
out to Bagration a French column that was outflanking us. To the
left the horizon bounded by the adjacent wood. Prince Bagration
ordered two battalions from the center to be sent to reinforce
the right flank. The officer of the suite ventured to remark to
the prince that if these battalions went away, the guns would
remain without support. Prince Bagration turned to the officer
and with his dull eyes looked at him in silence. It seemed to
Prince Andrew that the officer's remark was just and that really
no answer could be made to it. But at that moment an adjutant
galloped up with a message from the commander of the regiment
in the hollow and news that immense masses of the French were
coming down upon them and that his regiment was in disorder and
was retreating upon the Kiev grenadiers. Prince Bagration bowed
his head in sign of assent and approval. He rode off at a walk
to the right and sent an adjutant to the dragoons with orders
to attack the French. But this adjutant returned half an hour
later with the news that the commander of the dragoons had already
retreated beyond the dip in the ground, as a heavy fire had been
opened on him and he was losing men uselessly, and so had hastened
to throw some sharpshooters into the wood.
"Very good!" said Bagration.
As he was leaving the battery, firing was heard on the left
also, and as it was too far to the left flank for him to have
time to go there himself, Prince Bagration sent Zherkov to tell
the general in command (the one who had paraded his regiment before
Kutuzov at Braunau) that he must retreat as quickly as possible
behind the hollow in the rear, as the right flank would probably
not be able to withstand the enemy's attack very long. About Tushin
and the battalion that had been in support of his battery all
was forgotten. Prince Andrew listened attentively to Bagration's
colloquies with the commanding officers and the orders he gave
them and, to his surprise, found that no orders were really given,
but that Prince Bagration tried to make it appear that everything
done by necessity, by accident, or by the will of subordinate
commanders was done, if not by his direct command, at least in
accord with his intentions. Prince Andrew noticed, however, that
though what happened was due to chance and was independent of
the commander's will, owing to the tact Bagration showed, his
presence was very valuable. Officers who approached him with disturbed
countenances became calm; soldiers and officers greeted him gaily,
grew more cheerful in his presence, and were evidently anxious
to display their courage before him.
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