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By Root 4060 0

to know whether this man thought and felt, and what he thought and felt, at that moment. “Is there anything there behind that immobile face?” Prince Andrei asked himself, looking at him. Prince Bagration inclined his head as a sign of assent to Prince Andrei’s words, and said “Very good” with such an expression as if everything that was taking place and that had been reported to him was precisely what he had already foreseen. Prince Andrei, breathless from fast riding, spoke quickly. Prince Bagration pronounced words especially slowly with his Oriental accent, as if to suggest that they were not hurrying anywhere. Nevertheless, he started his horse at a trot towards Tushin’s battery. Prince Andrei and the suite followed behind him. Behind Prince Bagration rode an officer of the suite, the prince’s personal adjutant, Zherkov, an orderly officer, the staff officer on duty, on a handsome bobtailed horse, and a state councillor, an auditor, who had asked to come to the battle out of curiosity. The auditor, a plump man with a plump face and a naïve smile of joy, looked around him, jolting along on his horse, and made a strange sight in his camlet coat, on a goverment issue saddle, among the hussars, Cossacks, and adjutants.

“See, he wants to have a look at a battle,” Zherkov said to Bolkonsky, pointing to the auditor, “but he’s got a knot in the pit of his stomach.”

“Well, enough from you,” the auditor said with a beaming smile, naïve and at the same time sly, as if he was flattered to be the butt of Zherkov’s jokes, and as if he was deliberately trying to seem stupider than he really was.

“Très drôle, mon monsieur prince,”*222 said the staff officer on duty. (He remembered that there was some special way of addressing a prince in French, but was unable to get it right.)

Just then they were all approaching Tushin’s battery, and a cannonball landed in front of them.

“What fell?” the auditor asked, smiling naïvely.

“French pancakes,” said Zherkov.

“So that’s what they hit you with?” asked the auditor. “How frightful!”

And he seemed to melt all over with satisfaction. He had barely finished speaking when there again came an unexpected, dreadful whistle, suddenly ending in a thud against something liquid, and f-f-flop—a Cossack, riding a little to the right and behind the auditor, crashed to the ground with his horse. Zherkov and the staff officer on duty crouched low to their saddles and turned their horses away. The auditor stopped in front of the Cossack, examining him with attentive curiosity. The Cossack was dead, the horse was still thrashing.

Prince Bagration, narrowing his eyes, turned to look and, seeing the cause of the confusion, looked away indifferently, as if saying: “Is it worth bothering with such stupidities?” He stopped his horse the way a good rider does, bent over a little, and straightened his sword, which had caught in his felt cloak. The sword was an old one, not the kind men wore now. Prince Andrei recalled the story of how Suvorov had made a gift of his sword to Bagration in Italy, and this recollection was especially pleasing to him at that moment. They rode up to the battery near which Bolkonsky had stood when he examined the battlefield.

“Whose company?” Prince Bagration asked a fireworker standing by the caissons.

He asked, “Whose company?” but essentially he was asking, “You’re not scared here, are you?” And the fireworker understood that.

“Captain Tushin’s, Your Excellency,” the red-haired, freckle-faced fireworker cried out in a merry voice, snapping to attention.

“So, so,” said Bagration, calculating something, and he rode past the limbers to the end cannon.

While he was on his way there, a shot rang out from that cannon, deafening him and his suite, and in the smoke that suddenly surrounded the cannon one could see the artillerists seize hold of it and, straining hurriedly, pull it back to its former place. The broad-shouldered, enormous soldier number one, with a swab in his hand, his legs spread wide, jumped over to the wheel. Number two was loading a charge into the muzzle with a