War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [178]
“What’s the holdup? Is the way blocked? Or have we already run into the French?”
“No, doesn’t sound like it. Otherwise they’d have started shooting.”
“So they were in a hurry to get started, but once they got started—here we stand witless in the middle of a field—it’s all these cursed Germans confusing things. What muddleheaded devils!”
“So I’d have let them take the lead. But no, they huddle in the rear. And now we stand here on empty stomachs.”
“Well, how long will it be? They say the cavalry’s blocked the road,” said an officer.
“Eh, the cursed Germans, they don’t know their own country!” said another.
“What division are you?” an adjutant shouted, riding up.
“The eighteenth.”
“Then what are you doing here? You should have gone ahead long ago; now you won’t get through till evening. Such stupid orders; they don’t know what they’re doing themselves,” the officer said and rode off.
Then a general rode by and angrily shouted something not in Russian.
“Tafa-lafa, and there’s no telling what he’s mumbling,” a soldier said, mimicking the general as he rode off. “I’d shoot the scoundrels!”
“We were ordered to be in place before nine, but we’re not halfway there. What orders!” was repeated from different sides.
And the feeling of energy with which the troops had set out for action began to turn into vexation and anger at the muddleheaded orders and the Germans.
The reason for the confusion was that, while the Austrian cavalry was moving on the left flank, the superior officers decided that our center was too far from the right flank, and the entire cavalry was ordered to cross over to the right. Several thousand cavalry were advancing ahead of the infantry, and the infantry was forced to wait.
At the head, a confrontation took place between an Austrian column leader and a Russian general. The Russian general shouted, demanding that the cavalry be stopped; the Austrian insisted that the fault lay not with him but with the superior officers. The troops meanwhile stood there, bored and losing heart. After an hour’s delay, the troops finally moved on and began to descend the hill. The fog, which was lifting on the hilltop, only grew thicker in the bottom where the troops were descending. At the head, in the fog, a shot rang out, then another, at first irregularly, at various intervals: trata…tat, then more regularly and rapidly, and the action at the Goldbach stream began.
Not counting on meeting the enemy below, by the stream, and coming upon them by chance in the fog, hearing not a word of encouragement from the superior officers, with the awareness spread among the troops that they were late, and, above all, seeing nothing ahead or around them in the thick fog, the Russians lazily and slowly exchanged fire with the enemy, moved forward and again halted, not receiving timely orders from the officers and adjutants, who wandered through the fog over the unfamiliar terrain, unable to find their units. Thus the action began for the first, second, and third columns, which had descended the hill. The fourth column, with which Kutuzov himself was, occupied the Pratzen heights.
In the bottom, where the action began, the fog was still thick; up above it had cleared, but nothing of what was happening ahead could be seen. Whether all the enemy forces were six miles away from us, as we supposed, or were there in that fog, no one knew until past eight o’clock.
It was nine o’clock in the morning. An unbroken sea of fog spread below, but at the village of Schlapanitz, on the heights, where Napoleon stood, surrounded by his marshals, it was perfectly light. Over him was the clear blue sky, and the enormous ball of the sun, like an enormous, hollow, crimson float, bobbed