War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [115]
But the guns remained loaded, the loopholes in the houses and fortifications looked out just as menacingly, and the unlimbered cannon remained turned against each other just as before.
XVI
Having ridden all along the line of troops from the right flank to the left, Prince Andrei went up to the battery, from which, according to the staff officer’s words, one could see the whole field. Here he got off his horse and stopped by the last of the four unlimbered cannon. In front of the cannon paced an artillery sentry, who snapped to attention before the officer, but at a sign from him renewed his measured, tedious pacing. Behind the cannon stood their limbers, further behind a hitching rail and the campfires of the artillerists. To the left, not far from the last cannon, there was a newly plaited lean-to from which came the animated voices of the officers.
Indeed, from the battery a view opened out of almost the entire disposition of the Russian troops and the greater part of the enemy’s. Directly facing the battery, on the crest of the knoll opposite, one could see the village of Schöngraben; to left and right it was possible to make out in three places amidst the smoke of their campfires the masses of the French troops, of whom the greater part were evidently in the village itself and behind the hill. To the left of the village, in the smoke, appeared something resembling a battery, but it was impossible to see it well with the naked eye. Our right flank was disposed on a rather steep elevation, which dominated the positions of the French. On it our infantry was disposed, and at the very end one could see the dragoons. In the center, where Tushin’s battery stood, from where Prince Andrei was surveying the position, there was a gently sloping and direct descent and ascent to the stream that separated us from Schöngraben. To the left our troops adjoined a woods, where smoked the campfires of our infantry, who were cutting firewood. The French line was wider than ours, and it was obvious that the French could easily encircle us from both sides. Behind our position was a steep and deep ravine, through which it would be hard for artillery and cavalry to retreat. Prince Andrei, leaning his elbow on the cannon and taking out his notebook, drew a plan of the disposition of the troops for himself. In two places he penciled some notes, intending to tell Bagration about them. He proposed, first, to concentrate all the artillery in the center; second, to transfer the cavalry back to the other side of the ravine. Prince Andrei had been constantly at the commander in chief’s side, had followed the movements of masses and the general orders, and had constantly been taken up with historical descriptions of battles, and in this forthcoming action involuntarily considered the future course of the military operations only in general terms. He pictured only major occurrences of the following kind: “If the enemy mounts an attack on the right flank,” he said to himself, “the Kievsky grenadiers and the Podolsky chasseurs will have to hold their positions until reserves from the center reach them. In that case, the dragoons can strike at the flank and overthrow them. In case of an attack on the center, we can deploy the central battery on this elevation, and under its cover pull back the left flank and retreat into the ravine by echelons,” he reasoned to himself…
All the while he was in the battery by the cannon, as often happens, he had never stopped hearing the sounds of the officers’ voices, talking in the lean-to, but had not understood a single word of what they were saying. Suddenly the sound of voices from the lean-to struck him with such soul-felt tones that he involuntarily began to listen.
“No, dear heart,” spoke a pleasant voice, which seemed familiar to Prince Andrei, “I say that if it were possible to know what there will