He was riding almost along the front line. A body of horsemen came galloping towards him. They were a troop of our Uhlans returning in disorder from the attack. Rostov, as he passed them, could not help noticing one of them covered with blood, but he galloped on.
“That’s no affair of mine!” he thought.
He had not ridden on many hundred paces further when there came into sight, on his left, across the whole extent of the field, an immense mass of cavalry on black horses, in dazzling white uniforms, trotting straight towards him, cutting off his advance. Rostov put his horse to his utmost speed to get out of the way of these cavalrymen, and he would have cleared them had they been advancing at the same rate, but they kept increasing their pace, so that several horses broke into a gallop. More and more loudly Rostov could hear the thud of their horses’ hoofs, and the jingle of their weapons, and more and more distinctly he could see their horses, their figures, and even their faces. These were our horse-guards, charging to attack the French cavalry, who were advancing to meet them.
The cavalry guards were galloping, though still holding in their horses. Rostov could see their faces now, and hear the word of command, “Charge!” uttered by an officer, as he let his thoroughbred go at full speed. Rostov, in danger of being trampled underfoot or carried away to attack the French, galloped along before their line as fast as his horse could go, and still he was not in time to escape them.
The last of the line of cavalry, a pock-marked man of immense stature, scowled viciously on seeing Rostov just in front of him, where he must inevitably come into collision with him. This horse-guard would infallibly have overturned Rostov and his Bedouin (Rostov felt himself so little and feeble beside these gigantic men and horses) if he had not bethought himself of striking the horse-guard’s horse in the face with his riding-whip. The heavy, black, high horse twitched its ears and reared, but its pock-marked rider brought it down with a violent thrust of the spurs into its huge sides, and the horse, lashing its tail and dragging its neck, flew on faster than ever. The horse-guard had hardly passed Rostov when he heard their shout, “Hurrah!” and looking round saw their foremost ranks mixed up with some strange cavalry, in red epaulettes, probably French. He could see nothing more, for immediately after cannons were fired from somewhere, and everything was lost in the smoke.
At the moment when the horse-guards passing him vanished into the smoke, Rostov hesitated whether to gallop after them or to go on where he had to go. This was the brilliant charge of the horse-guards of which the French themselves expressed their admiration. Rostov was appalled to hear afterwards that of all that mass of huge, fine men, of all those brilliant, rich young officers and ensigns who had galloped by him on horses worth thousands of roubles. only eighteen were left after the charge.
“I have no need to envy them, my share won’t be taken from me, and may be I shall see the Emperor in a minute!” thought Rostov, and he galloped on.
When he reached the infantry of the guards, he noticed that cannon balls were flying over and about them, not so much from the sound of the cannon balls, as from the uneasiness he saw in the faces of the soldiers and the unnatural, martial solemnity on the faces of the officers.
As he rode behind one of the lines of the regiments of footguards, he heard a voice calling him by name: “Rostov!”
“Eh?” he called back, not recognising Boris.
“I say, we’ve been in the front line! Our regiment marched to the attack!” said Boris, smiling that happy smile that is seen in young men who have been for the first time under fire. Rostov stopped.
“Really!” he said. “Well, how was it?”
“We beat them!” said Boris, growing talkative in his eagerness. “You can fancy …” And Boris began describing how the guards having taken up their position, and seeing troops in front of them had taken them for Austrians, and all at once had found out from the cannon balls aimed at them from those troops that they were in the front line, and had quite unexpectedly to advance to battle. Rostov set his horse moving without waiting to hear Boris to the end.
“Where are you off to?” asked Boris.
“To his majesty with a commission.”
“Here he is!” said Boris, who had not caught what Rostov said, and thinking it was the grand duke he wanted, he pointed him out, standing a hundred paces from them, wearing a helmet and a horse-guard’s white elk tunic, with his high shoulders and scowling brows, shouting something to a pale, white-uniformed Austrian officer.
“Why, that’s the grand duke, and I must see the commander-in-chief or the Emperor,” said Rostov, and he was about to start again.
“Count, count!” shouted Berg, running up on the other side, as eager as Boris. “I was wounded in my right hand” (he pointed to his blood-stained hand, bound up with a pocket-handkerchief), “and I kept my place in the front. Count, I held my sabre in my left hand. All my family, count, the Von Bergs, have been knights.” Berg would have said more, but Rostov rode on without listening.
After riding by the guards, and on through an empty space, Rostov rode along the line of the reserves for fear of getting in the way of the front line, as he had done in the charge of the horse-guards, and made a wide circuit round the place where he heard the hottest musket-fire and cannonade. All of a sudden, in front of him and behind our troops, in a place where he could never have expected the enemy to be, he heard the sound of musket-fire quite close
“What can it be?” thought Rostov. “The enemy in the rear of our troops? It can’t be,” thought Rostov, but a panic of fear for himself and for the issue of the whole battle came over him all at once. “Whatever happens, though,” he reflected, “it’s useless to try and escape now. It’s my duty to seek the commander-in-chief here, and if everything’s lost, it’s my duty to perish with all the rest.”
The foreboding of evil that had suddenly come upon Rostov grew stronger and stronger the further he advanced into the region behind the village of Pratzen, which was full of crowds of troops of all sorts.
“What does it mean? What is it? Whom are they firing at? Who is firing?” Rostov kept asking, as he met Austrian and Russian soldiers running in confused crowds across his path.
“Devil knows! Killed them all! Damn it all,” he was answered in Russian, in German, and in Czech, by the hurrying rabble, who knew no more than he what was being done.
“Kill the Germans!” shouted one.
“To hell with them—the traitors.”
“Zum Henker diese Russen,” muttered a German.
Several wounded were among the crowds on the road. Shouts, oaths, moans were mingled in the general hubbub. The firing began to subside, and, as Rostov found out later, the Russian and Austrian soldiers had been firing at one another.
“My God! how can this be?” thought Rostov. “And here, where any minute the Emperor may see them.… No, these can only be a few wretches. It will soon be over, it’s not the real thing, it can’t be,” he thought. “Only to make haste, make haste, and get by them.”
The idea of defeat and flight could not force its way into Rostov’s head. Though he saw the French cannons and troops precisely on Pratzen hill, the very spot where he had been told to look for the commander-in-chief, he could not and would not believe in it.
Chapter 18
NEAR THE VILLAGE of Pratzen Rostov had been told to look for Kutuzov and the Emperor. But there they were not, nor was there a single officer to be found in command, nothing but disorderly crowds of troops of different sorts. He urged on his weary horse to hasten through this rabble, but the further he went the more disorderly the crowds became. The high road along which he rode, was thronged with carriages, with vehicles of all sorts, and Austrian and Russian soldiers of every kind, wounded and unwounded. It was all uproar and confused bustle under the sinister whiz of the flying cannon balls from the French batteries stationed on the heights of Pratzen.
“Where’s the Emperor? Where’s Kutuzov?” Rostov kept asking of every one he could stop, and from no one could he get an answer.
At last clutching a soldier by the collar, he forced him to answer him.
“Aye! brother! they’ve all bolted long ago!” the soldier said to Rostov, laughing for some reason as he pulled himself away. Letting go that soldier, who must, he thought, be drunk, Rostov stopped the horse of a groom or postillion of some personage of consequence, and began to cross-question him. The groom informed Rostov that an hour before the Tsar had been driven at full speed in a carriage along this very road, and that the Tsar was dangerously wounded.
“It can’t be,” said Rostov; “probably some one else.”
“I saw him myself,” said the groom with a self-satisfied smirk; “it’s high time I should know the Emperor, I should think, after the many times I’ve seen him in Petersburg; I saw him as it might be here. Pale, deadly pale, sitting in the carriage. The way they drove the four raven horses! my goodness, didn’t they dash by us! It would be strange, I should think, if I didn’t know the Tsar’s horses and Ilya Ivanitch; why, Ilya never drives any one else but the Tsar.”
Rostov let go of the horse and would have gone on. A wounded officer passing by addressed him. “Why, who is it you want?” asked the officer, “the commander-in-chief? Oh, he was killed by a cannon ball, struck in the breast before our regiment.”
“Not killed—wounded,” another officer corrected him.
“Who? Kutuzov?” asked Rostov.
“Not Kutuzov, but what’s his name—well, it’s all the same, there are not many left alive. Go that way, over there to that village, all the commanding officers are there,” said the officer, pointing to the village of Gostieradeck, and he walked on.
Rostov rode on at a walking pace, not knowing to whom and with what object he was going now. The Tsar was wounded, the battle was lost. There was no refusing to believe in it now. Rostov rode in the direction which had been pointed out to him, and saw in the distance turrets and a church. What had he to hasten for now? What was he to say now to the Tsar or to Kutuzov, even if they were alive and not wounded?
“Go along this road, your honour, that way you will be killed in a trice!” a soldier shouted to him. “You’ll be killed that way!”
“Oh! what nonsense!” said another. “Where is he to go? That way’s nearest.” Rostov pondered, and rode off precisely in the direction in which he had been told he would be killed.
“Now, nothing matters; if the Emperor is wounded, can I try and save myself?” he thought. He rode into the region where more men had been killed than anywhere, in fleeing from Pratzen. The French had not yet taken that region, though the Russians—those who were slightly wounded or unhurt—had long abandoned it. All over the field, like ridges of dung on well-kept plough-land, lay the heaps of dead and wounded, a dozen or fifteen bodies to every three acres. The wounded were crawling two or three together, and their shrieks and groans had a painful and sometimes affected sound, it seemed to Rostov. Rostov put his horse to a trot to avoid the sight of all those suffering people, and he felt afraid. He was afraid of losing not his life, but his pluck, which he needed so much, which he knew would not stand the sight of those luckless wretches. The French had ceased firing at this field that was dotted over with dead and wounded, because there seemed no one living upon it, but seeing an adjutant trotting across it, they turned a cannon upon him and shot off several cannon balls. The sense of those whizzing, fearful sounds, and of the dead bodies all round him melted into a single impression of horror and pity for himself in Rostov’s heart. He thought of his mother’s last letter. “What would she be feeling now,” he thought, “if she could see me here now on this field with cannons aimed at me?”
In the village of Gostieradeck there were Russian troops, in some confusion indeed, but in far better discipline, who had come from the field of battle. Here they were out of range of the French cannons, and the sounds of firing seemed far away. Here every one saw clearly that the battle was lost, and all were talking of it. No one to whom Rostov applied could tell him where was the Tsar, or where was Kutuzov. Some said that the rumour of the Tsar’s wound was correct, others said not, and explained this widely spread false report by the fact that the Ober-Hofmarschall Tolstoy, who had come out with others of the Emperor’s suite to the field of battle, had been seen pale and terrified driving back at full gallop in the Tsar’s carriage. One officer told Rostov that, behind the village to the left, he had seen some one from headquarters, and Rostov rode off in that direction, with no hope now of finding any one, but simply to satisfy his conscience. After going about two miles and passing the last of the Russian troops, Rostov saw, near a kitchen-garden enclosed by a ditch, two horsemen standing facing the ditch. One with a white plume in his hat seemed somehow a familiar figure to Rostov, the other, a stranger on a splendid chestnut horse (the horse Rostov fancied he had seen before) rode up to the ditch, put spurs to his horse, and lightly leaped over the ditch into the garden. A little earth from the bank crumbled off under his horse’s hind hoofs. Turning the horse sharply, he leaped the ditch again and deferentially addressed the horseman in the white plume, apparently urging him to do the same. The rider, whose figure seemed familiar to Rostov had somehow riveted his attention, made a gesture of refusal with his head and his hand, and in that gesture Rostov instantly recognised his lamented, his idolised sovereign.
“But it can’t be he, alone, in the middle of this empty field,” thought Rostov. At that moment Alexander turned his head and Rostov saw the beloved features so vividly imprinted on his memory. The Tsar was pale, his cheeks looked sunken, and his eyes hollow, but the charm, the mildness of his face was only the more striking. Rostov felt happy in the certainty that the report of the Emperor’s wound was false. He was happy that he was seeing him. He knew that he might, that he ought, indeed, to go straight to him and to give him the message he had been commanded to give by Dolgorukov.
But, as a youth in love trembles and turns faint and dares not utter what he has spent nights in dreaming of, and looks about in terror, seeking aid or a chance of delay or flight, when the moment he has longed for comes and he stands alone at her side, so Rostov, now when he was attaining what he had longed for beyond everything in the world, did not know how to approach the Emperor, and thousands of reasons why it was unsuitable, unseemly, and impossible came into his mind.
“What! it’s as though I were glad to take advantage of his being alone and despondent. It may be disagreeable and painful to him, perhaps, to see an unknown face at such a moment of sadness; besides, what can I say to him now, when at the mere sight of him my heart is throbbing and leaping into my mouth?” Not one of the innumerable speeches he had addressed to the Tsar in his imagination recurred to his mind now. These speeches for the most part were appropriate to quite other circumstances; they had been uttered for the most part at moments of victory and triumph, and principally on his deathbed when, as he lay dying of his wounds, the Emperor thanked him for his heroic exploits, and he gave expression as he died to the love he had proved in deeds. “And then, how am I to ask the Emperor for his instructions to the right flank when it’s four o’clock in the afternoon and the battle is lost? No, certainly I ought not to ride up to him, I ought not to break in on his sorrow. Better die a thousand deaths than that he should give me a glance, a thought of disapproval,” Rostov decided, and with grief and despair in his heart he rode away, continually looking back at the Tsar, who still stood in the attitude of indecision.
