War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [168]
“Hurrah!” rang out the enthusiastic voices of the officers.
And old Captain Kirsten shouted enthusiastically and no less sincerely than the twenty-year-old Rostov.
When the officers drank up and smashed their glasses, Kirsten filled others, and, in nothing but his shirt and breeches, with the glass in his hand, went up to the soldiers’ campfires, struck a majestic pose, with his long gray mustache, his white chest showing through his unbuttoned shirt, stood in the firelight, and swung his arm up.
“Lads, to the health of the sovereign emperor, to victory over our foes, hurrah!” he cried in his dashing old hussar’s baritone.
The hussars clustered around him and responded all together in a loud shout.
Late that night, when everyone had dispersed, Denisov, with his short hand, patted his favorite, Rostov, on the shoulder.
“There’s nobody to fall in love with on campaign, so he’s fallen in love with the tsar,” he said.
“Don’t joke about that, Denisov,” cried Rostov, “this is such a lofty, such a beautiful feeling, such a…”
“I believe it, my friend, I believe it, and I share it and approve…”
“No, you don’t understand!”
And Rostov got up and began wandering among the campfires, dreaming of what happiness it would be to die, not saving the life (he dared not even dream of that), but simply to die before the eyes of the sovereign. He was indeed in love with the tsar, and with the glory of Russian arms, and with the hope of the future triumph. And he was not the only one who experienced that feeling in those memorable days preceding the battle of Austerlitz: nine tenths of the men in the Russian army were then in love, though less rapturously, with their tsar and with the glory of Russian arms.
XI
The next day the sovereign stayed at Wischau. The court physician Villiers was summoned to him several times. In headquarters and among the nearby troops the news spread that the sovereign was unwell. He had eaten nothing and slept poorly that night, as people close to him said. The cause of it was the strong impression made on the sovereign’s sensitive soul by the sight of the wounded and dead.
At dawn on the seventeenth, a French officer was sent to Wischau from our outposts, who had come under a flag of truce, asking for a meeting with the Russian emperor. This officer was Savary. The sovereign had only just fallen asleep, and therefore Savary had to wait. At noon he was admitted to the sovereign, and an hour later he rode with Prince Dolgorukov to the outposts of the French army.
As rumor had it, the purpose of sending Savary was to propose peace and to propose a meeting between the emperor Alexander and Napoleon. A personal meeting, to the joy and pride of the whole army, was refused, and instead of the sovereign, Prince Dolgorukov, the victor at Wischau, was sent with Savary to negotiate with Napoleon, on the chance that these negotiations, contrary to expectation, had as their purpose a real desire for peace.
In the evening Dolgorukov came back, went straight to the sovereign, and spent a long time alone with him.
On the eighteenth and nineteenth of November, the troops made two more marches forward, and the enemy’s outposts retreated after brief exchanges of fire. In the highest spheres of the army, an intense, bustlingly agitated movement began from noon of the nineteenth, continuing until the morning of the next day, the twentieth of November, when the memorable battle of Austerlitz took place.
Until noon on the nineteenth, the movement, animated conversation, running, and sending of adjutants were limited to the emperors’ headquarters; after noon of the same day the movement spread to the headquarters of Kutuzov and the staffs of the leaders of columns. By evening this movement had spread through adjutants to all ends and parts of the army, and during the night of the nineteenth to the twentieth, rising up from its night camp, humming