War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [187]
Berg was still saying something, but Rostov did not listen any further and rode on.
Having gone past the guards and an empty space, Rostov, to avoid getting into the front line again, as he had during the attack of the horse guards, followed the line of the reserves, making a wide circle around the place where the hottest shooting and cannon fire were heard. Suddenly, ahead of him and behind our troops, in a place where he could never have supposed the enemy to be, he heard nearby musket fire.
“What can that be?” thought Rostov. “The enemy in the rear of our troops? It can’t be,” thought Rostov, and the terror of fear for himself and for the outcome of the whole battle suddenly came over him. “Whatever it may be, however,” he thought, “there’s no point now in going around. I must look for the commander in chief here, and if all is lost, then it’s my business to perish along with everybody.”
The bad presentiment that suddenly came over Rostov was confirmed more and more the further he rode into the space beyond the village of Pratz, occupied by crowds of different troops.
“What is this? What is this? Who’s being shot at? Who’s shooting?” asked Rostov, drawing even with Russian and Austrian soldiers running in mixed crowds across his path.
“Devil knows about them! He’s beaten everybody! Perish them all!” answers came in Russian, German, and Czech from the crowds of fleeing men who, like himself, did not understand what was going on there.
“Shoot the Germans!” cried one.
“Devil take them—the traitors!”
“Zum Henker diese Russen!…”*270 a German grumbled.
Several wounded soldiers were walking down the road. Oaths, shouts, groans merged into one general clamor. The shooting died down, and, as Rostov learned later, it had been Russian and Austrian soldiers shooting at each other.
“My God! What is it?” thought Rostov. “Here, where the sovereign may see them at any moment!…But no, it must be just a few scoundrels. It will pass, that’s not it, it can’t be,” he thought. “Just ride past them quickly, quickly!”
The thought of defeat and flight could not enter Rostov’s head. Though he saw French guns and troops precisely on the Pratzen heights, in the very place where he had been told to look for the commander in chief, he could not and would not believe it.
XVIII
Rostov had been told to look for Kutuzov and the sovereign near the village of Pratz. But not only were they not there, but there was not a single superior officer, there were only various crowds of disorderly troops. He urged on his already tired horse so as to get quickly past these crowds, but the further he went, the more disorderly the crowds became. The high road he came out on was crowded with carriages, vehicles of all kinds, Russian and Austrian soldiers of all arms, wounded and not wounded. All this droned and swarmed confusedly, under the grim sound of cannonballs flying from the French batteries set up on the Pratzen heights.
“Where is the sovereign? Where is Kutuzov?” Rostov asked everyone he could stop, and he got no answer from any of them.
At last, seizing a soldier by the collar, he made him answer.
“Eh, brother! They all ran off ahead there long ago!” the soldier said to Rostov, laughing at something and trying to free himself.
Abandoning that soldier, who was obviously drunk, Rostov stopped the horse of an orderly or groom of some important person and began questioning him. The orderly announced to Rostov that the sovereign had been driven away at top speed in a carriage an hour earlier and that he was dangerously wounded.
“It can’t be,” said Rostov, “it must have been somebody else.”
“I saw him myself,” said the orderly with a self-assured grin. “I ought to know the sovereign by now: seems I saw him lots of times in Petersburg this close. He was sitting in the carriage pale as can be. Four black horses, saints alive, how they went rattling past us: seems I ought to know the tsar’s horses and Ilya Ivanych by now; seems Ilya