War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [118]
“Add two more notches and it’ll be just right,” he shouted in a high-pitched voice, trying to give it a dashing sound, which did not go with his little figure. “Number two,” he squeaked. “Smash ’em, Medvedev!”
Bagration called to the officer, and Tushin went over to the general, putting three fingers to his visor in a timid and awkward movement, not as military men salute, but as priests bless. Though Tushin’s guns were meant to be shooting into the hollow, he was sending fireballs at the village of Schöngraben visible straight ahead, before which large masses of French were moving forward.
No one had given Tushin any orders about where to shoot or with what, and, having consulted his sergeant major Zakharchenko, for whom he had great respect, he had decided that it would be good to set fire to the village. “Very good!” Bagration said to the officer’s report, and he began to survey the whole battlefield opened out before him, as if calculating something. On the right side the French had come nearest of all. Below the elevation on which the Kievsky regiment stood, in the river hollow, the soul-wrenching roll and crackle of musketfire could be heard, and much further to the right, beyond the dragoons, the officer of the suite pointed out to the prince a column of the French turning our flank. To the left the horizon was limited by the neighboring woods. Prince Bagration ordered two battalions from the center to go as reinforcements to the right. The officer of the suite ventured to observe to the prince that, with those two battalions gone, the cannon would remain exposed. Prince Bagration turned to the officer of the suite and looked at him silently with his lackluster eyes. It seemed to Prince Andrei that the officer of the suite’s observation was correct and there was indeed nothing to say. But just then an adjutant came galloping from the regimental commander who was in the hollow with a report that huge masses of the French were coming from below, that the regiment was in disarray and was falling back towards the Kievsky grenadiers. Prince Bagration inclined his head as a sign of assent and approval. He rode to the right at a walk and sent an adjutant to the dragoons with an order to attack the French. But the adjutant sent there came back half an hour later with the report that the regimental commander of the dragoons had already pulled back beyond the ravine, because heavy fire had been directed at him and he had been losing men uselessly, and therefore he had dismounted his riflemen in the woods.
“Very good!” said Bagration.
As he was riding away from the battery, shots were also heard to the left, in the woods, and as it was too far from the left flank for him to get there in time himself, Prince Bagration sent Zherkov there to tell the senior general, the one who had presented the regiment to Kutuzov in Braunau, to pull back beyond the ravine as quickly as possible, because the right flank would probably be unable to hold the enemy for long. Tushin and the battalion covering him were forgotten. Prince Andrei listened carefully to Prince Bagration’s exchanges with the commanders and to the orders he gave, and noticed, to his surprise, that no orders were given, and that Prince Bagration only tried to pretend that all that was done by necessity, chance, or the will of a particular commander, that it was all done, if not on his orders, then in accord with his intentions. Owing to the tact shown by Prince Bagration, Prince Andrei noticed that, in spite of the chance character of events and their independence of the commander’s will, his presence accomplished a very great deal. Commanders who rode up to Prince Bagration with troubled faces became calm, soldiers and officers greeted him merrily and became more animated in his presence, and obviously showed off their courage before him.
XVIII
Prince Bagration, having ridden to the highest point on our