War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [158]
“Yes, very nice,” said Rostov, smiling.
But Boris, noticing that Rostov was preparing to make fun of Berg, artfully diverted the conversation. He asked Rostov to tell them how and where he had received his wound. This pleased Rostov, and he began telling the story, growing more and more animated as it went on. He told them about his Schöngraben action in just the way that those who take part in battles usually tell about them, that is, in the way they would like it to have been, the way they have heard others tell it, the way it could be told more beautifully, but not at all the way it had been. Rostov was a truthful young man, not for anything would he have deliberately told an untruth. He began telling the story with the intention of telling it exactly as it had been, but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably for himself, he went over into untruth. If he had told the truth to these listeners, who, like himself, had already heard accounts of attacks numerous times and had formed for themselves a definite notion of what an attack was, and were expecting exactly the same sort of account—they either would not have believed him or, worse still, would have thought it was Rostov’s own fault that what usually happens in stories of cavalry attacks had not happened with him. He could not simply tell them that they all set out at a trot, he fell off his horse, dislocated his arm, and ran to the woods as fast as he could to escape a Frenchman. Besides, in order to tell everything as it had been, one would have to make an effort with oneself so as to tell only what had been. To tell the truth is very difficult, and young men are rarely capable of it. They were expecting an account of how he got all fired up, forgetting himself, how he flew like a storm at the square; how he cut his way into it, hacking right and left; how his saber tasted flesh, how he fell exhausted, and so on. And he told them all that.
In the middle of his story, just as he was saying: “You can’t imagine what a strange feeling of fury one experiences during an attack,” Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, whom Boris was expecting, came in. Prince Andrei, who liked to patronize young men, who was flattered to be turned to for a favor, and was well-disposed towards Boris, who had managed to please him the day before, wished to fulfill the young man’s wish. Sent by Kutuzov with papers for the grand duke, he stopped to see the young man, hoping to find him alone. Coming into the room and seeing a frontline hussar telling about his military adventures (the sort of people Prince Andrei could not stand), he smiled affectionately to Boris, winced, narrowed his eyes at Rostov, and, bowing slightly, sat down wearily and lazily on the sofa. He was not pleased to have landed among bad company. Rostov blushed, understanding that. But it was all the same to him: the man was an outsider. But, glancing at Boris, he saw that he, too, seemed ashamed of the frontline hussar. In spite of Prince Andrei’s unpleasant, mocking tone, in spite of the general disdain which Rostov, from his fighting army point of view, had for all these staff adjutants, to whom the newcomer obviously belonged, Rostov felt embarrassed, turned red, and fell silent. Boris asked what was the news