War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [130]
Someone said that Captain Tushin was there near the village and had already been sent for.
“You were there, too,” said Prince Bagration, turning to Prince Andrei.
“Of course, we nearly ran into each other,” said the staff officer on duty, smiling pleasantly at Bolkonsky.
“I did not have the pleasure of seeing you,” Prince Andrei said coldly and abruptly. They all fell silent.
Tushin appeared in the doorway, timidly making his way from behind the generals’ backs. Going around the generals in the crowded cottage, embarrassed as usual at the sight of his superiors, Tushin did not see the staff of the standard and stumbled over it. Several voices laughed.
“How is it that a gun was abandoned?” asked Bagration, frowning not so much at the captain as at those who laughed, among whom Zherkov’s voice sounded louder than the others.
Only now, at the sight of his dread superiors, did Tushin realize in all its horror his guilt and disgrace at having remained alive while losing two guns. He had been so agitated that until that moment he had not managed to think of it. The laughter of the officers threw him off still more. He stood before Bagration with a trembling lower jaw and was barely able to say:
“I don’t know…Your Excellency…I had no men, Your Excellency.”
“You could have taken some of the covering troops!”
Tushin did not tell him that there were no covering troops, though that was the plain truth. He was afraid to let down another officer that way and silently, with fixed eyes, looked straight into Bagration’s face, as a confused student looks into his examiner’s eyes.
The silence was rather prolonged. Prince Bagration, probably unwilling to be severe, could not find what to say; the rest did not dare mix into the conversation. Prince Andrei looked at Tushin from under his eyebrows, and his fingers twitched nervously.
“Your Excellency,” Prince Andrei broke the silence with his sharp voice, “you were pleased to send me to Captain Tushin’s battery. I was there and found two-thirds of the men and horses killed, two guns crippled, and no cover at all.”
Prince Bagration and Tushin now looked with the same intentness at Bolkonsky, who was speaking with restraint and agitation.
“And if Your Excellency will allow me to voice my opinion,” he went on, “we owe the success of the day most of all to the operation of this battery and the heroic endurance of Captain Tushin and his company,” said Prince Andrei and, without waiting for a reply, he got up at once and stepped away from the table.
Prince Bagration looked at Tushin and, obviously not wishing to show any mistrust of Bolkonsky’s sharp judgment, and at the same time feeling himself unable to believe him fully, inclined his head and told Tushin he could go. Prince Andrei went out after him.
“Thank you, dear heart, you rescued me,” Tushin said to him.
Prince Andrei looked at Tushin and, saying nothing, walked away. Prince Andrei felt sad and downhearted. All this was so strange, so unlike what he had hoped for.
“Who are they? Why are they here? What do they want? And when will it all end?” thought Rostov, looking at the shifting shadows before him. The pain in his arm was becoming more and more tormenting. Sleep drew him irresistibly, red circles danced before his eyes, and the impressions of those voices and those faces and a feeling of loneliness merged with the feeling of pain. It was they, these soldiers, wounded and not wounded—it was they who crushed and weighed down and twisted the sinews and burned the flesh of his racked arm and shoulder. To get rid of them, he closed his eyes.
He became oblivious for a moment, but in that brief interval of oblivion he saw a numberless multitude of things in a dream: he saw his mother and her large white hand, saw Sonya’s thin little shoulders, Natasha’s eyes and laughter, and Denisov with his voice and mustache, and Telyanin,