War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [460]
Prince Andrei turned away from them in frightened haste, afraid of letting them notice that he had seen them. He felt sorry for this pretty, frightened girl. He was afraid to look at her, but at the same time he had an irresistible desire to do so. A new, comforting, and reassuring feeling came over him when, looking at these girls, he realized the existence of other human interests, totally foreign to him and as legitimate as those that concerned him. These girls obviously had a passionate wish for one thing—to take and finish eating those green plums without being caught—and together with them Prince Andrei wished success to their undertaking. He could not help glancing at them one more time. Supposing themselves out of danger, they left their cover and, piping something in their high little voices, holding up their skirts, ran merrily and quickly with their bare, suntanned little feet over the grass of the meadow.
Prince Andrei had been somewhat refreshed, leaving the dusty area of the high road along which the troops were moving. But not far from Bald Hills, he came back to the road and caught up with his regiment at a stopping place by a dam on a small pond. It was past one in the afternoon. The sun, a red ball in the dust, scorched and burned his back unbearably through his black tunic. Dust, the same as ever, hung motionless over the halted troops buzzing with talk. There was no wind. As he rode across the dam, Prince Andrei smelled the slime and freshness of the pond. He wanted to go into the water—however dirty it was. He glanced around at the pond, from which came shouts and loud laughter. The small, muddy green pond had evidently risen some eight inches, overflowing the dam, because it was filled with the naked human bodies of soldiers flopping about in it, white with brick-red hands, faces, and necks. All that naked, white human flesh, with whoops and guffaws, was flopping about in the dirty puddle like carp in a bucket. This flopping about suggested merriment, and that made it particularly sad.
One fair-haired young soldier—Prince Andrei knew him—from the third company, with a leather band on his ankle, was crossing himself as he backed up to make his run and dive into the water; another, a black-haired, always disheveled noncommissioned officer, up to his waist in the water, his muscular torso twitching, grunted joyfully, raising his black, hairy arms and pouring water over his head. There were sounds of slapping, shrieking, and hooting.
On the banks, on the dam, in the pond, everywhere there was white, healthy, muscular flesh. The officer Timokhin, with a little red nose, was wiping himself on the dam and, seeing the prince, became embarrassed, yet ventured to address him:
“It’s nice, Your Excellency, if you’d be so pleased!” he said.
“It’s dirty,” said Prince Andrei, wincing.
“We’ll clear it for you right away.” And Timokhin, still undressed, ran to clear it.
“The prince wants to.”
“Which? Our prince?” voices said and everybody started hurrying, so that Prince Andrei barely managed to calm them down. He decided it would be better to have a shower in the shed.
“Flesh, the body, chair à canon!” he thought, looking at his naked body, and he shuddered, not so much from the cold as from revulsion and horror, incomprehensible to himself, at the sight of this enormous number of bodies splashing about in the dirty pond.
On the seventh of August, Prince Bagration, from his quarters in Mikhailovka on the Smolensk road, wrote the following letter to Arakcheev7 (but he knew that his letter would be read by the sovereign, and therefore considered every word, as far as he was capable of doing so):
Dear Count Alexei Andreevich,
I believe the minister has already reported that Smolensk has