War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [188]
Rostov let go of his horse and wanted to ride on. Passing by, a wounded officer addressed him.
“Who do you want?” asked the officer. “The commander in chief? He was killed by a cannonball, hit in the chest in front of our regiment.”
“Not killed, wounded,” another officer corrected.
“Who? Kutuzov?” asked Rostov.
“Not Kutuzov, but what’s his name—well, it makes no difference, there weren’t many left alive. Go over there, to that village, all the superiors are assembled there,” said this officer, pointing to the village of Hostieradek, and he passed by.
Rostov rode at a walk, not knowing why and to whom he was going now. The sovereign was wounded, the battle lost. It was impossible not to believe it now. Rostov rode in the direction indicated to him and in which he could see a tower and a church in the distance. Why should he hurry? What was he to say now to the sovereign or to Kutuzov, even if they were alive and not wounded?
“Go that way, Your Honor, here you’ll get killed straight off,” a soldier cried to him. “Killed straight off!”
“Ah! What are you saying!” said another. “Where are you sending him? This way’s closer.”
Rostov pondered and went precisely in the direction in which he was told he would be killed.
“It makes no difference now! If even the sovereign is wounded, why should I look out for myself?” he thought. He rode into that space in which the most men fleeing from Pratz had been killed. The French had not yet taken this space, but the Russians—those who were alive or wounded—had abandoned it long ago. Over the field, like sheaves on good wheatland, lay dead or wounded men, ten to fifteen to an acre. The wounded crept together by twos and threes, and one could hear their unpleasant cries and moans, sometimes feigned, as it seemed to Rostov. He sent his horse into a canter, so as not to see all these suffering men, and he felt frightened. He was afraid, not for his life, but for the courage he needed and which, he knew, could not bear the sight of these wretches.
The French, who had stopped firing on this field strewn with dead and wounded because there was nothing left alive on it, seeing an adjutant riding across it, aimed a cannon and fired several shots. The sensation of these whistling, fearsome sounds and the surrounding dead merged for Rostov into a single impression of terror and pity for himself. He recalled his mother’s last letter. “What would she feel,” he wondered, “if she saw me here now, on this field, with cannon aimed at me?”
In the village of Hostieradek, he found Russian troops, confused, but heading away from the battlefield in greater order. The French cannon fire did not carry that far, and the sounds of shooting seemed a long way off. Here everyone already clearly saw and said that the battle was lost. No matter who Rostov turned to, no one could tell him where the sovereign was, or where Kutuzov was. Some said that the rumor of the sovereign’s wound was correct, others said it was not and explained the spread of this false rumor by the fact that the grand marshal of the court, Count Tolstoy, who had ridden to the battlefield with others in the emperor’s suite, had indeed galloped away from the battlefield, pale and frightened, in the sovereign’s carriage. One officer told Rostov that he had seen someone from the high command to the left beyond the village, and Rostov went there, no longer hoping to find anyone, but only to keep his own conscience clear. Having ridden two miles and left behind the last of the Russian troops, Rostov saw two horsemen standing near a kitchen garden surrounded by a ditch. They were facing this ditch. One, with white plumes on his hat, seemed familiar to Rostov for some reason; the other, an unfamiliar horseman on a beautiful chestnut horse (the horse seemed familiar to Rostov), rode up to the ditch, spurred his horse and, releasing the reins, lightly jumped over the garden ditch. Only a little soil crumbled down the bank from the horse’s hind hoofs. Turning his horse sharply, he leaped back over the ditch