War and Peace
all been given and were now being executed.
“Have the biscuits and rice been served out to the regiments of the
Guards?” asked Napoleon sternly.
“Yes, sire.”
“The rice too?”
Rapp replied that he had given the Emperor’s order about the rice, but
Napoleon shook his head in dissatisfaction as if not believing that
his order had been executed. An attendant came in with punch. Napoleon
ordered another glass to be brought for Rapp, and silently sipped his
own.
“I have neither taste nor smell,” he remarked, sniffing at his glass.
“This cold is tiresome. They talk about medicine—what is the good of
medicine when it can’t cure a cold! Corvisart gave me these lozenges but
they don’t help at all. What can doctors cure? One can’t cure anything.
Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its
nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it
will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies.
Our body is like a perfect watch that should go for a certain time; the
watchmaker cannot open it, he can only adjust it by fumbling, and that
blindfold.... Yes, our body is just a machine for living, that is all.”
And having entered on the path of definition, of which he was fond,
Napoleon suddenly and unexpectedly gave a new one.
“Do you know, Rapp, what military art is?” asked he. “It is the art of
being stronger than the enemy at a given moment. That’s all.”
Rapp made no reply.
“Tomorrow we shall have to deal with Kutúzov!” said Napoleon. “We shall
see! Do you remember at Braunau he commanded an army for three weeks
and did not once mount a horse to inspect his entrenchments.... We shall
see!”
He looked at his watch. It was still only four o’clock. He did not feel
sleepy. The punch was finished and there was still nothing to do. He
rose, walked to and fro, put on a warm overcoat and a hat, and went
out of the tent. The night was dark and damp, a scarcely perceptible
moisture was descending from above. Near by, the campfires were dimly
burning among the French Guards, and in the distance those of the
Russian line shone through the smoke. The weather was calm, and the
rustle and tramp of the French troops already beginning to move to take
up their positions were clearly audible.
Napoleon walked about in front of his tent, looked at the fires and
listened to these sounds, and as he was passing a tall guardsman in
a shaggy cap, who was standing sentinel before his tent and had drawn
himself up like a black pillar at sight of the Emperor, Napoleon stopped
in front of him.
“What year did you enter the service?” he asked with that affectation
of military bluntness and geniality with which he always addressed the
soldiers.
The man answered the question.
“Ah! One of the old ones! Has your regiment had its rice?”
“It has, Your Majesty.”
Napoleon nodded and walked away.
At half-past five Napoleon rode to the village of Shevárdino.
It was growing light, the sky was clearing, only a single cloud lay in
the east. The abandoned campfires were burning themselves out in the
faint morning light.
On the right a single deep report of a cannon resounded and died away in
the prevailing silence. Some minutes passed. A second and a third report
shook the air, then a fourth and a fifth boomed solemnly near by on the
right.
The first shots had not yet ceased to reverberate before others rang out
and yet more were heard mingling with and overtaking one another.
Napoleon with his suite rode up to the Shevárdino Redoubt where he
dismounted. The game had begun.
CHAPTER XXX
On returning to Górki after having seen Prince Andrew, Pierre ordered
his groom to get the horses ready and to call him early in the morning,
and then immediately fell asleep behind a partition in a corner Borís
had given up to him.
Before he was thoroughly awake next morning everybody had already left
the hut. The panes were rattling in the little windows and his groom was
shaking him.
“Your excellency! Your excellency! Your excellency!” he kept repeating
pertinaciously while he shook Pierre by the shoulder without looking at
him, having apparently lost hope of getting him to wake up.
“What? Has it begun? Is it time?” Pierre asked, waking up.
“Hear the firing,” said the groom, a discharged soldier. “All the
gentlemen have gone out, and his Serene Highness himself rode past long
ago.”
Pierre dressed hastily and ran out to the porch. Outside all was bright,
fresh, dewy, and cheerful. The sun, just bursting forth from behind a
cloud that had concealed it, was shining, with rays still half broken
by the clouds, over the roofs of the street opposite, on the
dew-besprinkled dust of the road, on the walls of the houses, on the
windows, the fence, and on Pierre’s horses standing before the hut. The
roar of guns sounded more distinct outside. An adjutant accompanied by a
Cossack passed by at a sharp trot.
“It’s time, Count; it’s time!” cried the adjutant.
Telling the groom to follow him with the horses, Pierre went down the
street to the knoll from which he had looked at the field of battle the
day before. A crowd of military men was assembled there, members of the
staff could be heard conversing in French, and Kutúzov’s gray head in
a white cap with a red band was visible, his gray nape sunk between his
shoulders. He was looking through a field glass down the highroad before
him.
Mounting the steps to the knoll Pierre looked at the scene before him,
spellbound by beauty. It was the same panorama he had admired from that
spot the day before, but now the whole place was full of troops and
covered by smoke clouds from the guns, and the slanting rays of the
bright sun, rising slightly to the left behind Pierre, cast upon it
through the clear morning air penetrating streaks of rosy, golden-tinted
light and long dark shadows. The forest at the farthest extremity of
the panorama seemed carved in some precious stone of a yellowish-green
color; its undulating outline was silhouetted against the horizon and
was pierced beyond Valúevo by the Smolénsk highroad crowded with troops.
Nearer at hand glittered golden cornfields interspersed with copses.
There were troops to be seen everywhere, in front and to the right and
left. All this was vivid, majestic, and unexpected; but what impressed
Pierre most of all was the view of the battlefield itself, of Borodinó
and the hollows on both sides of the Kolochá.
Above the Kolochá, in Borodinó and on both sides of it, especially to
the left where the Vóyna flowing between its marshy banks falls into
the Kolochá, a mist had spread which seemed to melt, to dissolve, and to
become translucent when the brilliant sun appeared and magically colored
and outlined everything. The smoke of the guns mingled with this mist,
and over the whole expanse and through that mist the rays of the morning
sun were reflected, flashing back like lightning from the water, from
the dew, and from the bayonets of the troops crowded together by the
riverbanks and in Borodinó. A white church could be seen through the
mist, and here and there the roofs of huts in Borodinó as well as dense
masses of soldiers, or green ammunition chests and ordnance. And all
this moved, or seemed to move, as the smoke and mist spread out over
the whole space. Just as in the mist-enveloped hollow near Borodinó, so
along the entire line outside and above it and especially in the woods
and fields to the left, in the valleys and on the summits of the high
ground, clouds of powder smoke seemed continually to spring up out of
nothing, now singly, now several at a time, some translucent, others
dense, which, swelling, growing, rolling, and blending, extended over
the whole expanse.
These puffs of smoke and (strange to say) the sound of the firing
produced the chief beauty of the spectacle.
“Puff!”—suddenly a round compact cloud of smoke was seen merging from
violet into gray and milky white, and “boom!” came the report a second
later.
“Puff! puff!”—and two clouds arose pushing one another and blending
together; and “boom, boom!” came the sounds confirming what the eye had
seen.
Pierre glanced round at the first cloud, which he had seen as a round
compact ball, and in its place already were balloons of smoke floating
to one side, and—“puff” (with a pause)—“puff, puff!” three and then four
more appeared and then from each, with the same interval—“boom—boom,
boom!” came the fine, firm, precise sounds in reply. It seemed as if
those smoke clouds sometimes ran and sometimes stood still while woods,
fields, and glittering bayonets ran past them. From the left, over
fields and bushes, those large balls of smoke were continually appearing
followed by their solemn reports, while nearer still, in the hollows and
woods, there burst from the muskets small cloudlets that had no time
to become balls, but had their little echoes in just the same way.
“Trakh-ta-ta-takh!” came the frequent crackle of musketry, but it was
irregular and feeble in comparison with the reports of the cannon.
Pierre wished to be there with that smoke, those shining bayonets, that
movement, and those sounds. He turned to look at Kutúzov and his suite,
to compare his impressions with those of others. They were all looking
at the field of battle as he was, and, as it seemed to him, with the
same feelings. All their faces were now shining with that latent warmth
of feeling Pierre had noticed the day before and had fully understood
after his talk with Prince Andrew.
“Go, my dear fellow, go... and Christ be with you!” Kutúzov was
saying to a general who stood beside him, not taking his eye from the
battlefield.
Having received this order the general passed by Pierre on his way down
the knoll.
“To the crossing!” said the general coldly and sternly in reply to one
of the staff who asked where he was going.
“I’ll go there too, I too!” thought Pierre, and followed the general.
The general mounted a horse a Cossack had brought him. Pierre went to
his groom who was holding his horses and, asking which was the quietest,
clambered onto it, seized it by the mane, and turning out his toes
pressed his heels against its sides and, feeling that his spectacles
were slipping off but unable to let go of the mane and reins, he
galloped after the general, causing the staff officers to smile as they
watched him from the knoll.
CHAPTER XXXI
Having descended the hill the general after whom Pierre was galloping
turned sharply to the left, and Pierre, losing sight of him, galloped
in among some ranks of infantry marching ahead of him. He tried to pass
either in front of them or to the right or left, but there were soldiers
everywhere, all with the same preoccupied expression and busy with
some unseen but evidently important task. They all gazed with the same
dissatisfied and inquiring expression at this stout man in a white hat,
who for some unknown reason threatened to trample them under his horse’s
hoofs.
“Why ride into the middle of the battalion?” one of them shouted at him.
Another prodded his horse with the butt end of a musket, and Pierre,
bending over his saddlebow and hardly able to control his shying horse,
galloped ahead of the soldiers where there was a free space.
There was a bridge ahead of him, where other soldiers stood firing.
Pierre rode up to them. Without being aware of it he had come to the
bridge across the Kolochá between Górki and Borodinó, which the French
(having occupied Borodinó) were attacking in the first phase of the
battle. Pierre saw that there was a bridge in front of him and that
soldiers were doing something on both sides of it and in the meadow,
among the rows of new-mown hay which he had taken no notice of amid the