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By Root 3455 0

to the Enns bridge, but with the feeling of a hare escaping from hounds. One undivided feeling of fear for his young, happy life possessed his entire being. Quickly leaping over the hedges, with that swiftness with which he had run playing tag, he flew across the field, turning his pale, kind young face back from time to time, and a chill of terror ran down his spine. “No, it’s better not to look,” he thought, but, running up to the bushes, he turned once more. The Frenchmen lagged behind, and even as he looked back, the front one had just changed his trot to a walk and, turning around, shouted something loudly to his comrade behind him. Rostov stopped. “Something must be wrong,” he thought, “it’s impossible that they should want to kill me.” And meanwhile his left arm was as heavy as though a twenty-pound weight was hanging from it. He could not run any further. The Frenchman also stopped and took aim. Rostov closed his eyes and crouched down. One, two bullets flew whistling past him. He gathered his last strength, held on to his left arm with his right hand, and ran to the bushes. In the bushes there were Russian riflemen.

XX

The infantry regiments, caught unawares in the woods, ran out of the woods, and, companies mixing with other companies, retreated in disordered crowds. One soldier uttered in fear the words: “Cut off!”—senseless and terrible in time of war—and the words, together with the fear, communicated themselves to the whole mass.

“We’re surrounded! Cut off! Lost!” cried the voices of running men.

The regimental commander, the moment he heard shooting and cries behind him, knew that something terrible had happened to his regiment, and the thought that he, an exemplary officer, with many years of service, to blame for nothing, might be blamed before his superiors for negligence or inefficiency, struck him so much that, at that same moment, forgetting both the disobedient cavalry colonel and his own dignity as a general, and above all totally forgetting danger and the sense of self-preservation, he gripped the pommel, spurred his horse, and galloped off to his regiment under a hail of bullets that poured down on but luckily missed him. He wanted one thing: to find out what was going on, and help to rectify at all costs any error, if there was one, on his part, so that he, an exemplary officer, with twenty-two years of service, and never reprimanded for anything, would not be blamed for it.

Having galloped luckily through the French, he came to the field beyond the woods through which our men were running and, disobeying commands, heading down the hill. That moment of moral hesitation came which decides the fate of battles: would these disorderly crowds of soldiers heed the voice of their commander, or look at him and go on running? Despite the desperate shouts of the regimental commander, formerly so terrible for the soldiers, despite the furious, crimson face of the regimental commander, who no longer resembled himself, and the waving of his sword, the soldiers went on running, talking, firing into the air, and not listening to his commands. The moral hesitation that decides the fate of battles was obviously being resolved in favor of fear.

The general began to choke from shouting and powder smoke, and stopped in despair. All seemed lost, but at that moment the French, who had been advancing upon our men, suddenly, for no visible reason, ran back, disappeared from the edge of the woods, and in the woods Russian riflemen appeared. This was Timokhin’s company, which alone had kept its order in the woods and, having hidden in a ditch nearby, had unexpectedly attacked the French. Timokhin had fallen upon the French with such a desperate cry and such insane and drunken determination, running at the enemy with nothing but a little sword, that the French, having no time to recover, threw down their arms and fled. Dolokhov, who was running beside Timokhin, killed one Frenchman point-blank and was the first to take a surrendering officer by the collar. The fleeing men returned, the battalions formed up, and the