War and Peace
which turned its head and laid its ears back, he shrank from the driving
rain and gazed anxiously before him. His thin face with its short, thick
black beard looked angry.
Beside Denísov rode an esaul, * Denísov’s fellow worker, also in felt
cloak and sheepskin cap, and riding a large sleek Don horse.
* A captain of Cossacks.
Esaul Lováyski the Third was a tall man as straight as an arrow,
pale-faced, fair-haired, with narrow light eyes and with calm
self-satisfaction in his face and bearing. Though it was impossible to
say in what the peculiarity of the horse and rider lay, yet at first
glance at the esaul and Denísov one saw that the latter was wet and
uncomfortable and was a man mounted on a horse, while looking at the
esaul one saw that he was as comfortable and as much at ease as always
and that he was not a man who had mounted a horse, but a man who was one
with his horse, a being consequently possessed of twofold strength.
A little ahead of them walked a peasant guide, wet to the skin and
wearing a gray peasant coat and a white knitted cap.
A little behind, on a poor, small, lean Kirghíz mount with an enormous
tail and mane and a bleeding mouth, rode a young officer in a blue
French overcoat.
Beside him rode an hussar, with a boy in a tattered French uniform and
blue cap behind him on the crupper of his horse. The boy held on to the
hussar with cold, red hands, and raising his eyebrows gazed about him
with surprise. This was the French drummer boy captured that morning.
Behind them along the narrow, sodden, cut up forest road came hussars in
threes and fours, and then Cossacks: some in felt cloaks, some in French
greatcoats, and some with horsecloths over their heads. The horses,
being drenched by the rain, all looked black whether chestnut or bay.
Their necks, with their wet, close-clinging manes, looked strangely
thin. Steam rose from them. Clothes, saddles, reins, were all wet,
slippery, and sodden, like the ground and the fallen leaves that strewed
the road. The men sat huddled up trying not to stir, so as to warm the
water that had trickled to their bodies and not admit the fresh cold
water that was leaking in under their seats, their knees, and at the
back of their necks. In the midst of the outspread line of Cossacks two
wagons, drawn by French horses and by saddled Cossack horses that had
been hitched on in front, rumbled over the tree stumps and branches and
splashed through the water that lay in the ruts.
Denísov’s horse swerved aside to avoid a pool in the track and bumped
his rider’s knee against a tree.
“Oh, the devil!” exclaimed Denísov angrily, and showing his teeth he
struck his horse three times with his whip, splashing himself and his
comrades with mud.
Denísov was out of sorts both because of the rain and also from hunger
(none of them had eaten anything since morning), and yet more because he
still had no news from Dólokhov and the man sent to capture a “tongue”
had not returned.
“There’ll hardly be another such chance to fall on a transport as today.
It’s too risky to attack them by oneself, and if we put it off till
another day one of the big guerrilla detachments will snatch the prey
from under our noses,” thought Denísov, continually peering forward,
hoping to see a messenger from Dólokhov.
On coming to a path in the forest along which he could see far to the
right, Denísov stopped.
“There’s someone coming,” said he.
The esaul looked in the direction Denísov indicated.
“There are two, an officer and a Cossack. But it is not presupposable
that it is the lieutenant colonel himself,” said the esaul, who was fond
of using words the Cossacks did not know.
The approaching riders having descended a decline were no longer
visible, but they reappeared a few minutes later. In front, at a weary
gallop and using his leather whip, rode an officer, disheveled and
drenched, whose trousers had worked up to above his knees. Behind him,
standing in the stirrups, trotted a Cossack. The officer, a very young
lad with a broad rosy face and keen merry eyes, galloped up to Denísov
and handed him a sodden envelope.
“From the general,” said the officer. “Please excuse its not being quite
dry.”
Denísov, frowning, took the envelope and opened it.
“There, they kept telling us: ‘It’s dangerous, it’s dangerous,’”
said the officer, addressing the esaul while Denísov was reading the
dispatch. “But Komaróv and I”—he pointed to the Cossack—“were prepared.
We have each of us two pistols.... But what’s this?” he asked, noticing
the French drummer boy. “A prisoner? You’ve already been in action? May
I speak to him?”
“Wostóv! Pétya!” exclaimed Denísov, having run through the dispatch.
“Why didn’t you say who you were?” and turning with a smile he held out
his hand to the lad.
The officer was Pétya Rostóv.
All the way Pétya had been preparing himself to behave with Denísov as
befitted a grown-up man and an officer—without hinting at their previous
acquaintance. But as soon as Denísov smiled at him Pétya brightened
up, blushed with pleasure, forgot the official manner he had been
rehearsing, and began telling him how he had already been in a battle
near Vyázma and how a certain hussar had distinguished himself there.
“Well, I am glad to see you,” Denísov interrupted him, and his face
again assumed its anxious expression.
“Michael Feoklítych,” said he to the esaul, “this is again fwom that
German, you know. He”—he indicated Pétya—“is serving under him.”
And Denísov told the esaul that the dispatch just delivered was a
repetition of the German general’s demand that he should join forces
with him for an attack on the transport.
“If we don’t take it tomowwow, he’ll snatch it fwom under our noses,” he
added.
While Denísov was talking to the esaul, Pétya—abashed by Denísov’s
cold tone and supposing that it was due to the condition of his
trousers—furtively tried to pull them down under his greatcoat so
that no one should notice it, while maintaining as martial an air as
possible.
“Will there be any orders, your honor?” he asked Denísov, holding his
hand at the salute and resuming the game of adjutant and general for
which he had prepared himself, “or shall I remain with your honor?”
“Orders?” Denísov repeated thoughtfully. “But can you stay till
tomowwow?”
“Oh, please... May I stay with you?” cried Pétya.
“But, just what did the genewal tell you? To weturn at once?” asked
Denísov.
Pétya blushed.
“He gave me no instructions. I think I could?” he returned, inquiringly.
“Well, all wight,” said Denísov.
And turning to his men he directed a party to go on to the halting place
arranged near the watchman’s hut in the forest, and told the officer on
the Kirghíz horse (who performed the duties of an adjutant) to go and
find out where Dólokhov was and whether he would come that evening.
Denísov himself intended going with the esaul and Pétya to the edge of
the forest where it reached out to Shámshevo, to have a look at the part
of the French bivouac they were to attack next day.
“Well, old fellow,” said he to the peasant guide, “lead us to
Shámshevo.”
Denísov, Pétya, and the esaul, accompanied by some Cossacks and the
hussar who had the prisoner, rode to the left across a ravine to the
edge of the forest.
CHAPTER V
The rain had stopped, and only the mist was falling and drops from
the trees. Denísov, the esaul, and Pétya rode silently, following the
peasant in the knitted cap who, stepping lightly with outturned toes
and moving noiselessly in his bast shoes over the roots and wet leaves,
silently led them to the edge of the forest.
He ascended an incline, stopped, looked about him, and advanced to where
the screen of trees was less dense. On reaching a large oak tree that
had not yet shed its leaves, he stopped and beckoned mysteriously to
them with his hand.
Denísov and Pétya rode up to him. From the spot where the peasant was
standing they could see the French. Immediately beyond the forest, on a
downward slope, lay a field of spring rye. To the right, beyond a steep
ravine, was a small village and a landowner’s house with a broken roof.
In the village, in the house, in the garden, by the well, by the pond,
over all the rising ground, and all along the road uphill from the
bridge leading to the village, not more than five hundred yards
away, crowds of men could be seen through the shimmering mist. Their
un-Russian shouting at their horses which were straining uphill with the
carts, and their calls to one another, could be clearly heard.
“Bwing the prisoner here,” said Denísov in a low voice, not taking his
eyes off the French.
A Cossack dismounted, lifted the boy down, and took him to Denísov.
Pointing to the French troops, Denísov asked him what these and those
of them were. The boy, thrusting his cold hands into his pockets and
lifting his eyebrows, looked at Denísov in affright, but in spite of
an evident desire to say all he knew gave confused answers, merely
assenting to everything Denísov asked him. Denísov turned away from him
frowning and addressed the esaul, conveying his own conjectures to him.
Pétya, rapidly turning his head, looked now at the drummer boy, now
at Denísov, now at the esaul, and now at the French in the village and
along the road, trying not to miss anything of importance.
“Whether Dólokhov comes or not, we must seize it, eh?” said Denísov with
a merry sparkle in his eyes.
“It is a very suitable spot,” said the esaul.
“We’ll send the infantwy down by the swamps,” Denísov continued.
“They’ll cweep up to the garden; you’ll wide up fwom there with the
Cossacks”—he pointed to a spot in the forest beyond the village—“and I
with my hussars fwom here. And at the signal shot...”
“The hollow is impassable—there’s a swamp there,” said the esaul. “The
horses would sink. We must ride round more to the left....”
While they were talking in undertones the crack of a shot sounded
from the low ground by the pond, a puff of white smoke appeared, then
another, and the sound of hundreds of seemingly merry French voices
shouting together came up from the slope. For a moment Denísov and the
esaul drew back. They were so near that they thought they were the cause
of the firing and shouting. But the firing and shouting did not relate
to them. Down below, a man wearing something red was running through the
marsh. The French were evidently firing and shouting at him.
“Why, that’s our Tíkhon,” said the esaul.
“So it is! It is!”
“The wascal!” said Denísov.
“He’ll get away!” said the esaul, screwing up his eyes.
The man whom they called Tíkhon, having run to the stream, plunged in
so that the water splashed in the air, and, having disappeared for an
instant, scrambled out on all fours, all black with the wet, and ran on.
The French who had been pursuing him stopped.
“Smart, that!” said the esaul.
“What a beast!” said Denísov with his former look of vexation. “What has
he been doing all this time?”
“Who is he?” asked Pétya.
“He’s our plastún. I sent him to capture a ‘tongue.’”
“Oh, yes,” said Pétya, nodding at the first words Denísov uttered as if
he understood it all, though he really did not understand anything of
it.
Tíkhon Shcherbáty was one of the most indispensable men in their band.
He was a peasant from Pokróvsk, near the river Gzhat. When Denísov had
come to Pokróvsk at the beginning of his operations and had as usual
summoned the village elder and asked him what he knew about the French,
the elder, as though shielding himself, had replied, as all village
elders did, that he had neither seen nor heard anything of them. But
when Denísov explained that his purpose was to kill the French, and
asked if no French had strayed that way, the elder replied that some