War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [129]
“What, is a man to die like a dog?” he said.
Tushin ordered them to give him water. Then a merry soldier ran up, asking for a little fire for the infantry.
“Some hot little fire for the infantry! Keep well, dear countrymen, thanks for the fire, we’ll pay it back with interest,” he said, carrying the burning brand somewhere into the darkness.
After this soldier, four soldiers carrying something heavy on a greatcoat passed by the campfire. One of them tripped.
“The devils left firewood on the road,” he growled.
“He’s dead, why carry him around?” asked one of them.
“Eh, you!”
And they disappeared into the darkness with their burden.
“What? it hurts?” Tushin asked Rostov in a whisper.
“Yes.”
“The general wants you, Your Honor. He’s staying in a cottage here,” said the fireworker, coming up to Tushin.
“At once, dear heart.”
Tushin got up and, buttoning his greatcoat and smoothing himself out, left the campfire…
Not far from the artillerists’ campfire, in a cottage prepared for him, Prince Bagration was sitting over dinner, talking with some commanders of branches who had gathered with him. There was the little old man with half-closed eyes, greedily gnawing on a lamb bone, and the twenty-two-year irreproachable general, flushed from a glass of vodka and dinner, and the staff officer with the signet ring, and Zherkov, looking around uneasily at them all, and Prince Andrei, pale, with compressed lips and feverishly shining eyes.
In the corner of the cottage stood a captured French standard, and the auditor with the naïve face fingered the fabric of the standard and shook his head in perplexity, perhaps because he was indeed interested in the look of the standard, or perhaps because it was hard for him, hungry as he was, to look at the table where there was no place set for him. In the cottage next door was a French colonel, taken prisoner by the dragoons. Our officers clustered around him, studying him. Prince Bagration thanked particular superiors and asked for details about the action and the losses. The regimental commander who had been reviewed at Braunau reported to the prince that, as soon as the action began, he withdrew from the woods, gathered the woodcutters and, letting them pass by him, started a bayonet attack with two battalions and overwhelmed the French.
“As soon as I saw that the first battalion was in disorder, Your Excellency, I stood there on the road and thought: ‘I’ll let them pass and then meet them with ranged fire,’ and that’s what I did.”
The regimental commander had so wanted to do that, he had been so sorry that he had had no time to do it, that it seemed to him that all this was exactly so. And perhaps it really was so? As if one could make out in that confusion what was and was not so?
“With that I must observe, Your Excellency,” he went on, remembering Dolokhov’s conversation with Kutuzov and his own last encounter with the demoted soldier, “that the demoted private Dolokhov, before my eyes, took a French officer prisoner and particularly distinguished himself.”
“And I also saw the attack of the Pavlogradsky hussars, Your Excellency,” interrupted Zherkov, looking around uneasily, though he had not seen any hussars that day, but had only heard about them from an infantry officer. “They broke two squares, Your Excellency.”
Some smiled at Zherkov’s words, expecting a joke from him as usual; but, noticing that what he said also contributed to the glory of our arms and of that day, they assumed serious expressions, though many knew very well that what Zherkov had said was a lie, with no foundation at all. Prince Bagration turned to the little old colonel.
“I thank you all, gentlemen, all the branches acted heroically: infantry, cavalry, and artillery. How is it that two guns in the center were abandoned?” he asked, seeking someone with his eyes. (Prince Bagration did not ask about the guns of the left flank; he already knew that all the cannon there had been abandoned at the very beginning.) “I asked you to go, I believe,” he turned to the staff officer on duty.
“One was knocked out,