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Through the cross streets of the Khamovniki quarter the prisoners
marched, followed only by their escort and the vehicles and wagons
belonging to that escort, but when they reached the supply stores
they came among a huge and closely packed train of artillery mingled
with private vehicles.
At the bridge they all halted, waiting for those in front
to get across. From the bridge they had a view of endless lines
of moving baggage trains before and behind them. To the right,
where the Kaluga road turns near Neskuchny, endless rows of troops
and carts stretched away into the distance. These were troops
of Beauharnais' corps which had started before any of the others.
Behind, along the riverside and across the Stone Bridge, were
Ney's troops and transport.
Davout's troops, in whose charge were the prisoners, were
crossing the Crimean bridge and some were already debouching into
the Kaluga road. But the baggage trains stretched out so that
the last of Beauharnais' train had not yet got out of Moscow and
reached the Kaluga road when the vanguard of Ney's army was already
emerging from the Great Ordynka Street.
When they had crossed the Crimean bridge the prisoners moved
a few steps forward, halted, and again moved on, and from all
sides vehicles and men crowded closer and closer together. They
advanced the few hundred paces that separated the bridge from
the Kaluga road, taking more than an hour to do so, and came out
upon the square where the streets of the Transmoskva ward and
the Kaluga road converge, and the prisoners jammed close together
had to stand for some hours at that crossway. From all sides,
like the roar of the sea, were heard the rattle of wheels, the
tramp of feet, and incessant shouts of anger and abuse. Pierre
stood pressed against the wall of a charred house, listening to
that noise which mingled in his imagination with the roll of the
drums.
To get a better view, several officer prisoners climbed onto
the wall of the half-burned house against which Pierre was leaning.
"What crowds! Just look at the crowds!... They've loaded
goods even on the cannon! Look there, those are furs!" they
exclaimed. "Just see what the blackguards have looted....
There! See what that one has behind in the cart.... Why, those
are settings taken from some icons, by heaven!... Oh, the rascals!...
See how that fellow has loaded himself up, he can hardly walk!
Good lord, they've even grabbed those chaises!... See that fellow
there sitting on the trunks.... Heavens! They're fighting."
"That's right, hit him on the snout- on his snout! Like
this, we shan't get away before evening. Look, look there....
Why, that must be Napoleon's own. See what horses! And the monograms
with a crown! It's like a portable house.... That fellow's dropped
his sack and doesn't see it. Fighting again... A woman with a
baby, and not bad-looking either! Yes, I dare say, that's the
way they'll let you pass... Just look, there's no end to it. Russian
wenches, by heaven, so they are! In carriages- see how comfortably
they've settled themselves!"
Again, as at the church in Khamovniki, a wave of general curiosity
bore all the prisoners forward onto the road, and Pierre, thanks
to his stature, saw over the heads of the others what so attracted
their curiosity. In three carriages involved among the munition
carts, closely squeezed together, sat women with rouged faces,
dressed in glaring colors, who were shouting something in shrill
voices.
From the moment Pierre had recognized the appearance of the
mysterious force nothing had seemed to him strange or dreadful:
neither the corpse smeared with soot for fun nor these women hurrying
away nor the burned ruins of Moscow. All that he now witnessed
scarcely made an impression on him- as if his soul, making ready
for a hard struggle, refused to receive impressions that might
weaken it.
The women's vehicles drove by. Behind them came more carts,
soldiers, wagons, soldiers, gun carriages, carriages, soldiers,
ammunition carts, more soldiers, and now and then women.
Pierre did not see the people as individuals but saw their
movement.
All these people and horses seemed driven forward by some
invisible power. During the hour Pierre watched them they all
came flowing from the different streets with one and the same
desire to get on quickly; they all jostled one another, began
to grow angry and to fight, white teeth gleamed, brows frowned,
ever the same words of abuse flew from side to side, and all the
faces bore the same swaggeringly resolute and coldly cruel expression
that had struck Pierre that morning on the corporal's face when
the drums were beating.
It was not till nearly evening that the officer commanding
the escort collected his men and with shouts and quarrels forced
his way in among the baggage trains, and the prisoners, hemmed
in on all sides, emerged onto the Kaluga road.
They marched very quickly, without resting, and halted only
when the sun began to set. The baggage carts drew up close together
and the men began to prepare for their night's rest. They all
appeared angry and dissatisfied. For a long time, oaths, angry
shouts, and fighting could be heard from all sides. A carriage
that followed the escort ran into one of the carts and knocked
a hole in it with its pole. Several soldiers ran toward the cart
from different sides: some beat the carriage horses on their heads,
turning them aside, others fought among themselves, and Pierre
saw that one German was badly wounded on the head by a sword.
It seemed that all these men, now that they had stopped amid
fields in the chill dusk of the autumn evening, experienced one
and the same feeling of unpleasant awakening from the hurry and
eagerness to push on that had seized them at the start. Once at
a standstill they all seemed to understand that they did not yet
know where they were going, and that much that was painful and
difficult awaited them on this journey.
During this halt the escort treated the prisoners even worse
than they had done at the start. It was here that the prisoners
for the first time received horseflesh for their meat ration.
From the officer down to the lowest soldier they showed what
seemed like personal spite against each of the prisoners, in unexpected
contrast to their former friendly relations.
This spite increased still more when, on calling over the
roll of prisoners, it was found that in the bustle of leaving
Moscow one Russian soldier, who had pretended to suffer from colic,
had escaped. Pierre saw a Frenchman beat a Russian soldier cruelly
for straying too far from the road, and heard his friend the captain
reprimand and threaten to court-martial a noncommissioned officer
on account of the escape of the Russian. To the noncommissioned
officer's excuse that the prisoner was ill and could not walk,
the officer replied that the order was to shoot those who lagged
behind. Pierre felt that that fatal force which had crushed him
during the executions, but which be had not felt during his imprisonment,
now again controlled his existence. It was terrible, but he felt
that in proportion to the efforts of that fatal force to crush
him, there grew and strengthened in his soul a power of life independent
of it.
He ate his supper of buckwheat soup with horseflesh and chatted
with his comrades.
Neither Pierre nor any of the others spoke of what they had
seen in Moscow, or of the roughness of their treatment by the
French, or of the order to shoot them which had been announced
to them. As if in reaction against the worsening of their position
they were all particularly animated and gay. They spoke of personal
reminiscences, of amusing scenes they had witnessed during the
campaign, and avoided all talk of their present situation.
The sun had set long since. Bright stars shone out here and
there in the sky. A red glow as of a conflagration spread above
the horizon from the rising full moon, and that vast red ball
swayed strangely in the gray haze. It grew light. The evening
was ending, but the night had not yet come. Pierre got up and
left his new companions, crossing between the campfires to the
other side of the road where he had been told the common soldier
prisoners were stationed. He wanted to talk to them. On the road
he was stopped by a French sentinel who ordered him back.
Pierre turned back, not to his companions by the campfire,
but to an unharnessed cart where there was nobody. Tucking his
legs under him and dropping his head he sat down on the cold ground
by the wheel of the cart and remained motionless a long while
sunk in thought. Suddenly he burst out into a fit of his broad,
good-natured laughter, so loud that men from various sides turned
with surprise to see what this strange and evidently solitary
laughter could mean.
"Ha-ha-ha!" laughed Pierre. And he said aloud to
himself: "The soldier did not let me pass. They took me and
shut me up. They hold me captive. What, me? Me? My immortal soul?
Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!..." and he laughed till tears started
to his eyes.
A man got up and came to see what this queer big fellow was
laughing at all by himself. Pierre stopped laughing, got up, went
farther away from the inquisitive man, and looked around him.
The huge, endless bivouac that had previously resounded with
the crackling of campfires and the voices of many men had grown
quiet, the red campfires were growing paler and dying down. High
up in the light sky hung the full moon. Forests and fields beyond
the camp, unseen before, were now visible in the distance. And
farther still, beyond those forests and fields, the bright, oscillating,
limitless distance lured one to itself. Pierre glanced up at the
sky and the twinkling stars in its faraway depths. "And all
that is me, all that is within me, and it is all I!" thought
Pierre. "And they caught all that and put it into a shed
boarded up with planks!" He smiled, and went and lay down
to sleep beside his companions.
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