“Fifth cannon, roll away!” they were shouting on one side.
“Now then, a good pull, all together!” shouted the merry voices of the men charging the cannon.
“Ay, she almost snatched ‘our gentleman’s’ hat off,” the red-faced, jocose soldier laughed, showing his teeth. “Hey, awkward hussy!” he added reproachfully to a cannon ball that hit a wheel and a man’s leg. “Now, you foxes there!” laughed another, addressing the peasant militiamen, who were creeping in and out among the guns after the wounded. “Don’t you care for our porridge, hey? Ah, the crows! that pulls them up!” they shouted at the militiamen, who hesitated at the sight of the soldier whose leg had been torn off. “Oo … oo … lad,” they cried, mimicking the peasants, “we don’t like it at all, we don’t!”
Pierre noticed that after every ball that fell in their midst, after every loss, the general elation became more and more marked.
The closer the storm cloud swooped down upon them, the more bright and frequent were the gleams of latent fire that glowed like lightning flashes on those men’s faces, called up, as it were, to meet and resist their danger.
Pierre did not look in front at the field of battle; he took no more interest in what was going on there. He was entirely engrossed in the contemplation of that growing fire, which he felt was burning in his own soul too.
At ten o’clock the infantry, who had been in advance of the battery in the bushes and about the stream Kamenka, retreated. From the battery they could see them running back past them, bearing their wounded on their guns. A general with a suite came on to the redoubt, and after talking to the colonel and looking angrily at Pierre, went away again, ordering the infantry standing behind the battery guarding it to lie down, so as to be less exposed to fire. After that a drum was heard in the ranks of the infantry, more to the right of the battery, and shouts gave the word of command, and from the battery they could see the ranks of infantry moving forward.
Pierre looked over the earthwork. One figure particularly caught his eye. It was the officer, walking backwards with a pale, boyish face. He held his sword downwards and kept looking uneasily round.
The rows of infantry soldiers vanished into the smoke, but they could hear a prolonged shout from them and a rapid musketry fire. A few minutes later crowds of wounded men and a number of stretchers came back from that direction. Shells fell more and more often in the battery. Several men lay on the ground, not picked up. The soldiers bustled more busily and briskly than ever about the cannons. No one took any notice of Pierre now. Twice he was shouted at angrily for being in the way. The senior officers strode rapidly from one cannon to another with a frowning face. The officer-boy, his cheeks even more crimson, gave the soldiers their orders more scrupulously than ever. The soldiers served out the charges, turned round, loaded, and did all their work with exaggerated smartness. They moved as though worked by springs.
The storm cloud was swooping closer; and more brightly than ever glowed in every face that fire which Pierre was watching. He was standing near the senior officer. The little officer-boy ran up, his hand to his shako, saluting his superior officer.
“I have the honour to inform you, colonel, only eight charges are left; do you command to continue firing?” he asked.
“Grapeshot!” the senior officer shouted, looking away over the earthwork.
Suddenly something happened; the boy-officer groaned, and whirling round sat down on the ground, like a bird shot on the wing. All seemed strange, indistinct, and darkened before Pierre’s eyes.
One after another the cannon balls came whistling, striking the breastwork, the soldiers, the cannons. Pierre, who had scarcely heard those sounds before, now could hear nothing else. On the right side of the battery, soldiers, with shouts of “hurrah,” were running, not forward, it seemed to Pierre, but back.
A cannon ball struck the very edge of the earthwork, before which Pierre was sitting, and sent the earth flying; a dark, round mass flashed just before his eyes, and at the same instant flew with a thud into something. The militiamen, who had been coming into the battery, ran back.
“All with grapeshot!” shouted the officer.
The sergeant ran up to the officer, and in a frightened whisper (just as at a dinner the butler will sometimes tell the host that there is no more of some wine asked for) said that there were no more charges.
“The scoundrels, what are they about?” shouted the officer, turning to Pierre. The senior officer’s face was red and perspiring, his piercing eyes glittered. “Run to the reserves, bring the ammunition-boxes!” he shouted angrily, avoiding Pierre with his eyes, and addressing the soldier.
“I’ll go,” said Pierre. The officer, making no reply, strode across to the other side.
“Cease firing … Wait!” he shouted.
The soldier who had been commanded to go for the ammunition ran against Pierre.
“Ah, sir, it’s no place for you here,” he said, as he ran away.
Pierre ran after the soldier, avoiding the spot where the boy-officer was sitting.
One cannon ball, a second and a third flew over him, hitting the ground in front, on each side, behind Pierre as he ran down. “Where am I going?” he suddenly wondered, just as he ran up to the green ammunition-boxes. He stopped short in uncertainty whether to go back or forward. Suddenly a fearful shock sent him flying backwards on to the ground. At the same instant a flash of flame dazed his eyes, and a roar, a hiss, and a crash set his ears ringing.
When he recovered his senses, Pierre found himself sitting on the ground leaning on his hands. The ammunition-box, near which he had been, had gone; there were a few charred green boards and rags lying scattered about on the scorched grass. A horse was galloping away with broken fragments of the shafts clattering after it; while another horse lay, like Pierre, on the ground, uttering a prolonged, piercing scream.
Chapter 32
PIERRE, beside himself with terror, jumped up and ran back to the battery as the one refuge from the horrors encompassing him.
Just as Pierre ran up to the redoubt, he noticed that there was no sound of firing from the battery, but that there were men there doing something or other. He had not time to make out what men they were. He caught sight of the senior officer lying with his back towards him on the earth wall, as though gazing intently at something below; and he noticed one soldier, who, tearing himself away from the men who were holding him, shouted “Mates!” and he saw something else that was strange.
But before he had time to grasp that the colonel had been killed, that the soldier shouting “Mates!” was a prisoner, another soldier was stabbed in the back by a bayonet before his eyes. He had hardly run up into the redoubt when a thin man with a yellow, perspiring face, in a blue uniform, ran up to him with a sword in his hand, shouting something. Pierre, instinctively defending himself, as they came full tilt against each other, put out his hands and clutched the man (it was a French officer) by the shoulder and the throat. The officer, dropping his sword, seized Pierre by the collar.
For several seconds both gazed with frightened eyes at each other’s unfamiliar-looking faces, and both were bewildered, not knowing what they were doing or what they were to do. “Am I taken prisoner or am I taking him prisoner?” each of them was wondering. But the French officer was undoubtedly more disposed to believe he was taken prisoner, because Pierre’s powerful hand, moved by instinctive terror, was tightening its grip on his throat. The Frenchman tried to speak, when suddenly a cannon ball flew with a fearful whiz close over their heads, and it seemed to Pierre that the Frenchman’s head had been carried off by it, so swiftly had he ducked it.
Pierre, too, ducked and let go with his hands. Giving no more thought to the question which was taken prisoner, the Frenchman ran back to the battery, while Pierre dashed downhill, stumbling over the dead and wounded, who seemed to him to be clutching at his feet.
But before he had reached the bottom he was met by dense crowds of Russian soldiers, who, stumbling against each other and tripping up, were running in wild merriment towards the battery. (This was the attack of which Yermolov claimed the credit, declaring that it was only his valour and good luck that made this feat of arms possible; it was the attack in which he is supposed to have strewn the redoubt with the St. George’s crosses that were in his pocket.)
The French, who had captured the battery, fled. Our soldiers pursued them so far beyond the battery that they were with difficulty stopped. They were bringing the prisoners down from the battery, among them a wounded French general, surrounded by officers. Crowds of wounded, both French and Russians—among them men Pierre recognised—walked, or crawled, or were borne on stretchers from the battery, their faces distorted by suffering.
Pierre went up into the battery, where he had spent over an hour; and found no one left of that little fraternal group that had accepted him as one of themselves. There were many dead there, whom he had not seen before. But several he recognised. The boy-officer was still sitting huddled up in a pool of blood at the edge of the earth wall. The red-faced, merry soldier was still twitching convulsively; but they did not carry him away.
Pierre ran down the slope.
“Oh, now they will stop it, now they will be horrified at what they have done!” thought Pierre, aimlessly following the crowds of stretchers moving off the battlefield.
But the sun still stood high behind the veil of smoke, and in front, and even more so to the left, about Semyonovskoye, there was still a turmoil seething in the smoke; and the roar of cannon and musketry, far from slackening, grew louder and more desperate, like a man putting all his force into one deafening outcry as a last despairing effort.
Chapter 33
THE CHIEF ACTION of the battle of Borodino was fought on the space seven thousand feet in width between Borodino and Bagration’s flèches. Outside that region, on one side there was the action on the part of Uvarov’s cavalry in the middle of the day; on the other side, behind Utitsa, there was the skirmish between Poniatovsky and Tutchkov; but those two actions were detached and of little importance in comparison with what took place in the centre of the battlefield. The chief action of the day was fought in the simplest and the most artless fashion on the open space, visible from both sides, between Borodino and the flèches by the copse.
The battle began with a cannonade from several hundreds of guns on both sides. Then, when the whole plain was covered with smoke, on the French side the two divisions of Desaix and Compans advanced on the right upon the flèches, and on the left the viceroy’s regiments advanced upon Borodino. The flèches were a verst from the Shevardino redoubt, where Napoleon was standing; but Borodino was more than two versts further, in a straight line, and therefore Napoleon could not see what was passing there, especially as the smoke, mingling with the fog, completely hid the whole of that part of the plain. The soldiers of Desaix’s division, advancing upon the flèches, were in sight till they disappeared from view in the hollow that lay between them and the flèches. As soon as they dropped down into the hollow, the smoke of the cannon and muskets on the flèches became so thick that it concealed the whole slope of that side of the hollow. Through the smoke could be caught glimpses of something black, probably men, and sometimes the gleam of bayonets. But whether they were stationary or moving, whether they were French or Russian, could not be seen from Shevardino.
The sun had risen brightly, and its slanting rays shone straight in Napoleon’s face as he looked from under his hand towards the flèches. The smoke hung over the flèches, and at one moment it seemed as though it were the smoke that was moving, at the next, the troops moving in the smoke. Sometimes cries could be heard through the firing; but it was impossible to tell what was being done there.
Napoleon, standing on the redoubt, was looking through a field-glass, and in the tiny circle of the glass saw smoke and men, sometimes his own, sometimes Russians. But where what he had seen was, he could not tell when he looked again with the naked eye.
He came down from the redoubt, and began walking up and down before it.
At intervals he stood still, listening to the firing and looking intently at the battlefield.
It was not simply impossible from below, where he was standing, and from the redoubt above, where several of his generals were standing, to make out what was passing at the flèches; but on the flèches themselves, occupied now together, now alternately by French and Russians, living, dead, and wounded, the frightened and frantic soldiers had no idea what they were doing. For several hours together, in the midst of incessant cannon and musket fire, Russians and French, infantry and cavalry, had captured the place in turn; they rushed upon it, fell, fired, came into collision, did not know what to do with each other, screamed, and ran back again.
From the battlefield adjutants were continually galloping up to Napoleon with reports from his marshals of the progress of the action. But all those reports were deceptive; both because in the heat of battle it is impossible to say what is happening at any given moment, and because many of the adjutants never reached the actual battlefield, but simply repeated what they heard from others, and also because, while the adjutant was galloping the two or three versts to Napoleon, circumstances had changed, and the news he brought had already become untrue. Thus an adjutant came galloping from the viceroy with the news that Borodino had been taken and the bridge on the Kolotcha was in the hands of the French. The adjutant asked Napoleon should the troops cross the bridge. Napoleon’s command was to form on the further side and wait; but long before he gave that command, when the adjutant indeed had only just started from Borodino, the bridge had been broken down and burnt by the Russians in the very skirmish Pierre had taken part in at the beginning of the day.
An adjutant, galloping up from the flèches with a pale and frightened face, brought Napoleon word that the attack had been repulsed, and Compans wounded and Davoust killed; while meantime the flèches had been captured by another division of the troops, and Davoust was alive and well, except for a slight bruise. Upon such inevitably misleading reports Napoleon based his instructions, which had mostly been carried out before he made them, or else were never, and could never, be carried out at all.
The marshals and generals who were closer to the scene of action, but, like Napoleon, not actually taking part in it, and only at intervals riding within bullet range, made their plans without asking Napoleon, and gave their orders from where and in what direction to fire, and where the cavalry were to gallop and the infantry to run. But even their orders, like Napoleon’s, were but rarely, and to a slight extent, carried out.
