War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [108]
“Voilà le cher Orthodox armed forces,”*215 thought Bolkonsky, recalling Bilibin’s words.
Wishing to ask someone among these people where the commander in chief was, he rode up to the baggage train. Directly in front of him rolled a strange one-horse vehicle, evidently constructed by soldiers using homegrown means, something between a cart, a cabriolet, and a carriage. The driver of the vehicle was a soldier, and in it, under a leather top and apron, sat a woman all wrapped in shawls. Prince Andrei rode up and was about to address the soldier with his question when his attention was attracted by the desperate cries of the woman sitting in the little kibitka. The officer in charge of the baggage train was beating the soldier who sat on the box of this little carriage for trying to get ahead of the others, and his lash struck the apron of the vehicle. The woman cried out piercingly. Seeing Prince Andrei, she thrust her head out from under the apron and, waving her thin arms freed from the ruglike shawl, cried:
“Adjutant! Mister Adjutant!…For God’s sake…protect us…What’s it all about?…I’m the wife of the doctor of the seventh chasseurs…they won’t let us pass; we couldn’t keep up, lost our people…”
“I’ll flatten you like a pancake—turn back!” the officer shouted angrily at the soldier. “Turn back with your trollop!”
“Mister Adjutant, protect us. What is it?” cried the doctor’s wife.
“Kindly let this wagon pass. Don’t you see it’s a woman?” said Prince Andrei, riding up to the officer.
The officer glanced at him and, without replying, turned back to the soldier:
“I’ll teach you to go ahead…Back!”
“Let them pass, I tell you,” Prince Andrei repeated, pressing his lips.
“And who do you think you are?” the officer addressed him with drunken rage. “Who do you think you are? Are you” (he especially emphasized the word you) “a superior officer, or what? I’m the superior here, not you. And you, back!” he repeated, “or I’ll flatten you like a pancake.”
The officer obviously liked the expression.
“He told that little adjutant off grandly,” a voice came from behind.
Prince Andrei could see that the officer was in the sort of drunken fit of senseless rage when people do not know what they are saying. He could see that his intercession for the doctor’s wife in the kibitka was replete with what he feared most in the world, with what is known as ridicule.*216 But his instinct told him otherwise. Before the officer had time to finish his last words, Prince Andrei, his face disfigured with rage, rode up to him and raised his whip:
“Kind-ly-let-them-pass!”
The officer waved his hand and hastily rode off.
“It’s all from them, these staff officers, all this disorder,” he grumbled. “Do it your way.”
Prince Andrei, without raising his eyes, hastily rode away from the doctor’s wife, who was calling him her savior, and, recalling with disgust the minutest details of this humiliating scene, rode on towards the village where he had been told the commander in chief was.
On entering the village, he got off his horse and went to the first house, intending to rest for at least a moment, eat something, and bring clarity to all these insulting, tormenting thoughts. “These are not troops, they’re a mob of ruffians,” he was thinking as he went to the window of the first house, when a familiar voice called his name.
He turned around. Nesvitsky’s handsome face was looking out of a small window. Nesvitsky, chewing something with his juicy mouth and waving his arms, was calling to him.
“Bolkonsky, Bolkonsky! Are you deaf, or what? Come quickly,