War and Peace
that direction. Projectiles began to fall still more frequently in the
battery. Several men were lying about who had not been removed. Around
the cannon the men moved still more briskly and busily. No one any
longer took notice of Pierre. Once or twice he was shouted at for being
in the way. The senior officer moved with big, rapid strides from one
gun to another with a frowning face. The young officer, with his face
still more flushed, commanded the men more scrupulously than ever. The
soldiers handed up the charges, turned, loaded, and did their business
with strained smartness. They gave little jumps as they walked, as
though they were on springs.
The stormcloud had come upon them, and in every face the fire which
Pierre had watched kindle burned up brightly. Pierre standing beside the
commanding officer. The young officer, his hand to his shako, ran up to
his superior.
“I have the honor to report, sir, that only eight rounds are left. Are
we to continue firing?” he asked.
“Grapeshot!” the senior shouted, without answering the question, looking
over the wall of the trench.
Suddenly something happened: the young officer gave a gasp and bending
double sat down on the ground like a bird shot on the wing. Everything
became strange, confused, and misty in Pierre’s eyes.
One cannon ball after another whistled by and struck the earthwork, a
soldier, or a gun. Pierre, who had not noticed these sounds before,
now heard nothing else. On the right of the battery soldiers shouting
“Hurrah!” were running not forwards but backwards, it seemed to Pierre.
A cannon ball struck the very end of the earth work by which he was
standing, crumbling down the earth; a black ball flashed before his eyes
and at the same instant plumped into something. Some militiamen who were
entering the battery ran back.
“All with grapeshot!” shouted the officer.
The sergeant ran up to the officer and in a frightened whisper informed
him (as a butler at dinner informs his master that there is no more of
some wine asked for) that there were no more charges.
“The scoundrels! What are they doing?” shouted the officer, turning to
Pierre.
The officer’s face was red and perspiring and his eyes glittered under
his frowning brow.
“Run to the reserves and bring up the ammunition boxes!” he yelled,
angrily avoiding Pierre with his eyes and speaking to his men.
“I’ll go,” said Pierre.
The officer, without answering him, strode across to the opposite side.
“Don’t fire.... Wait!” he shouted.
The man who had been ordered to go for ammunition stumbled against
Pierre.
“Eh, sir, this is no place for you,” said he, and ran down the slope.
Pierre ran after him, avoiding the spot where the young officer was
sitting.
One cannon ball, another, and a third flew over him, falling in front,
beside, and behind him. Pierre ran down the slope. “Where am I going?”
he suddenly asked himself when he was already near the green ammunition
wagons. He halted irresolutely, not knowing whether to return or go on.
Suddenly a terrible concussion threw him backwards to the ground. At the
same instant he was dazzled by a great flash of flame, and immediately a
deafening roar, crackling, and whistling made his ears tingle.
When he came to himself he was sitting on the ground leaning on his
hands; the ammunition wagons he had been approaching no longer existed,
only charred green boards and rags littered the scorched grass, and a
horse, dangling fragments of its shaft behind it, galloped past, while
another horse lay, like Pierre, on the ground, uttering prolonged and
piercing cries.
CHAPTER XXXII
Beside himself with terror Pierre jumped up and ran back to the battery,
as to the only refuge from the horrors that surrounded him.
On entering the earthwork he noticed that there were men doing something
there but that no shots were being fired from the battery. He had no
time to realize who these men were. He saw the senior officer lying on
the earth wall with his back turned as if he were examining something
down below and that one of the soldiers he had noticed before was
struggling forward shouting “Brothers!” and trying to free himself from
some men who were holding him by the arm. He also saw something else
that was strange.
But he had not time to realize that the colonel had been killed, that
the soldier shouting “Brothers!” was a prisoner, and that another man
had been bayoneted in the back before his eyes, for hardly had he run
into the redoubt before a thin, sallow-faced, perspiring man in a blue
uniform rushed on him sword in hand, shouting something. Instinctively
guarding against the shock—for they had been running together at full
speed before they saw one another—Pierre put out his hands and seized
the man (a French officer) by the shoulder with one hand and by the
throat with the other. The officer, dropping his sword, seized Pierre by
his collar.
For some seconds they gazed with frightened eyes at one another’s
unfamiliar faces and both were perplexed at what they had done and
what they were to do next. “Am I taken prisoner or have I taken him
prisoner?” each was thinking. But the French officer was evidently more
inclined to think he had been taken prisoner because Pierre’s strong
hand, impelled by instinctive fear, squeezed his throat ever tighter and
tighter. The Frenchman was about to say something, when just above their
heads, terrible and low, a cannon ball whistled, and it seemed to Pierre
that the French officer’s head had been torn off, so swiftly had he
ducked it.
Pierre too bent his head and let his hands fall. Without further thought
as to who had taken whom prisoner, the Frenchman ran back to the battery
and Pierre ran down the slope stumbling over the dead and wounded who,
it seemed to him, caught at his feet. But before he reached the foot
of the knoll he was met by a dense crowd of Russian soldiers who,
stumbling, tripping up, and shouting, ran merrily and wildly toward
the battery. (This was the attack for which Ermólov claimed the credit,
declaring that only his courage and good luck made such a feat possible:
it was the attack in which he was said to have thrown some St. George’s
Crosses he had in his pocket into the battery for the first soldiers to
take who got there.)
The French who had occupied the battery fled, and our troops shouting
“Hurrah!” pursued them so far beyond the battery that it was difficult
to call them back.
The prisoners were brought down from the battery and among them was
a wounded French general, whom the officers surrounded. Crowds of
wounded—some known to Pierre and some unknown—Russians and French,
with faces distorted by suffering, walked, crawled, and were carried on
stretchers from the battery. Pierre again went up onto the knoll where
he had spent over an hour, and of that family circle which had received
him as a member he did not find a single one. There were many dead whom
he did not know, but some he recognized. The young officer still sat in
the same way, bent double, in a pool of blood at the edge of the earth
wall. The red-faced man was still twitching, but they did not carry him
away.
Pierre ran down the slope once more.
“Now they will stop it, now they will be horrified at what they have
done!” he thought, aimlessly going toward a crowd of stretcher bearers
moving from the battlefield.
But behind the veil of smoke the sun was still high, and in front and
especially to the left, near Semënovsk, something seemed to be seething
in the smoke, and the roar of cannon and musketry did not diminish, but
even increased to desperation like a man who, straining himself, shrieks
with all his remaining strength.
CHAPTER XXXIII
The chief action of the battle of Borodinó was fought within the seven
thousand feet between Borodinó and Bagratión’s flèches. Beyond that
space there was, on the one side, a demonstration made by the Russians
with Uvárov’s cavalry at midday, and on the other side, beyond Utítsa,
Poniatowski’s collision with Túchkov; but these two were detached and
feeble actions in comparison with what took place in the center of the
battlefield. On the field between Borodinó and the flèches, beside the
wood, the chief action of the day took place on an open space visible
from both sides and was fought in the simplest and most artless way.
The battle began on both sides with a cannonade from several hundred
guns.
Then when the whole field was covered with smoke, two divisions,
Campan’s and Dessaix’s, advanced from the French right, while Murat’s
troops advanced on Borodinó from their left.
From the Shevárdino Redoubt where Napoleon was standing the flèches were
two thirds of a mile away, and it was more than a mile as the crow flies
to Borodinó, so that Napoleon could not see what was happening there,
especially as the smoke mingling with the mist hid the whole locality.
The soldiers of Dessaix’s division advancing against the flèches could
only be seen till they had entered the hollow that lay between them and
the flèches. As soon as they had descended into that hollow, the smoke
of the guns and musketry on the flèches grew so dense that it covered
the whole approach on that side of it. Through the smoke glimpses could
be caught of something black—probably men—and at times the glint of
bayonets. But whether they were moving or stationary, whether they were
French or Russian, could not be discovered from the Shevárdino Redoubt.
The sun had risen brightly and its slanting rays struck straight into
Napoleon’s face as, shading his eyes with his hand, he looked at the
flèches. The smoke spread out before them, and at times it looked as if
the smoke were moving, at times as if the troops moved. Sometimes shouts
were heard through the firing, but it was impossible to tell what was
being done there.
Napoleon, standing on the knoll, looked through a field glass, and in
its small circlet saw smoke and men, sometimes his own and sometimes
Russians, but when he looked again with the naked eye, he could not tell
where what he had seen was.
He descended the knoll and began walking up and down before it.
Occasionally he stopped, listened to the firing, and gazed intently at
the battlefield.
But not only was it impossible to make out what was happening from where
he was standing down below, or from the knoll above on which some of his
generals had taken their stand, but even from the flèches themselves—in
which by this time there were now Russian and now French soldiers,
alternately or together, dead, wounded, alive, frightened, or
maddened—even at those flèches themselves it was impossible to make out
what was taking place. There for several hours amid incessant cannon and
musketry fire, now Russians were seen alone, now Frenchmen alone, now
infantry, and now cavalry: they appeared, fired, fell, collided, not
knowing what to do with one another, screamed, and ran back again.
From the battlefield adjutants he had sent out, and orderlies from his
marshals, kept galloping up to Napoleon with reports of the progress
of the action, but all these reports were false, both because it was
impossible in the heat of battle to say what was happening at any given
moment and because many of the adjutants did not go to the actual place
of conflict but reported what they had heard from others; and also
because while an adjutant was riding more than a mile to Napoleon
circumstances changed and the news he brought was already becoming
false. Thus an adjutant galloped up from Murat with tidings that
Borodinó had been occupied and the bridge over the Kolochá was in the
hands of the French. The adjutant asked whether Napoleon wished the
troops to cross it? Napoleon gave orders that the troops should form up