War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [396]
On the thirteenth of June Napoleon was brought a small, purebred Arabian horse, and he mounted up and rode at a gallop to one of the bridges across the Niemen, constantly deafened by rapturous cries, which he evidently put up with only because it was impossible to forbid them to express their love for him by these cries; but these cries that accompanied him everywhere oppressed him and distracted him from the military concerns that had consumed him since the time he joined the army. He rode across one of the bridges rocking on pontoons to the other side, turned sharply to the left, and galloped off in the direction of Kovno, preceded by the horse guard chasseurs, thrilled with happiness, enraptured, who galloped ahead of him, clearing the way through the troops. Having come to the wide river Vilia, he stopped beside a regiment of Polish uhlans that stood on the bank.
“Vivat!” the Poles cried just as rapturously, breaking their lines and crushing each other in order to see him. Napoleon surveyed the river, dismounted, and sat on a log that lay on the bank. At a wordless sign he was handed a field glass, placed it on the back of a happy page who ran over, and began to look at the other side. Then he immersed himself in examining a map laid out among the logs. Without raising his head, he said something, and two of his adjutants rode over to the Polish uhlans.
“What? What did he say?” came from the lines of the Polish uhlans as one adjutant rode up to them.
The order was to find a ford and cross to the other side. The colonel of the Polish uhlans, a handsome old man, turned red, and, stumbling over his words from excitement, asked the adjutant whether he would be allowed to swim across the river with his uhlans, without looking for a ford. Obviously fearing a refusal, like a boy who asks permission to get on a horse, he begged to be allowed to swim across the river before the emperor’s eyes. The adjutant said that the emperor would probably not be displeased by this excessive zeal.
As soon as the adjutant said it, the mustached old officer, with a happy face and flashing eyes, raising his saber, shouted “Vivat!” and, commanding the uhlans to follow him, spurred his horse and rode to the river. He angrily spurred his horse, which hesitated under him, and threw himself into the water, heading for the depths where the current was swift. Hundreds of uhlans followed him. It was cold and scary in the middle and in the swift current. The uhlans grasped at each other, fell off their horses, some horses drowned, men drowned as well, others tried to swim for it, some in the saddle, others holding on to their horses’ manes. They tried to swim forward to the other side, and, though there was a ford a quarter of a mile away, they were proud to swim and drown in this river before the eyes of the man who sat on a log and was not even looking at what they were doing. When the adjutant returned and, choosing the right moment, allowed himself to draw the emperor’s attention to the devotion of the Poles to his person, the little man in the gray frock coat stood up and, summoning Berthier to him, began pacing up and down the bank with him, giving him orders and occasionally glancing with displeasure at the drowning uhlans, who distracted his attention.
For him it was no new conviction that his presence at all ends of the world, from Africa to the steppes of Muscovy, struck people in the same way and threw them into the madness of self-oblivion. He ordered his horse brought and rode to his camp.
Some forty uhlans drowned in the river, despite the boats that were sent to help. Most of the men were washed back to this side. The colonel and several other men crossed the river and barely managed to climb out on the bank. But as soon as they climbed out, their streaming wet clothes sticking to them, they shouted “Vivat!”—gazing rapturously at the spot where Napoleon had stood, but where he no longer was, and at that moment they considered