War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [497]
“Position?” said the doctor. “That’s not in my line. Go past Tatarinovo, where all the digging’s going on. Climb up on the barrow there: you can see from there,” said the doctor.
“You can see from there?…And if you’d…”
But the doctor interrupted him and moved towards his britzka.
“I’d take you there, but, by God—you see” (the doctor gestured at his throat) “I’m racing to the corps commander’s. How are things with us?…You know, Count, tomorrow’s the battle: for a hundred thousand troops we must figure on at least twenty thousand wounded; and we don’t have enough stretchers, or beds, or medics, or doctors for even six thousand. There are ten thousand carts, but we need other things as well. So do as you like.”
The strange notion that among those thousands of men, alive, healthy, young and old, who had stared with merry surprise at his hat, there were probably twenty thousand destined for wounds and death (maybe the same ones he had seen), struck Pierre.
“They may die tomorrow, how can they think of anything else but death?” And suddenly, by some mysterious linking of thoughts, he vividly pictured the descent of the hill in Mozhaisk, the carts with the wounded, the ringing bells, the slanting rays of the sun, and the songs of the cavalrymen.
“The cavalrymen go to battle and meet the wounded, and they don’t stop to reflect for a moment on what awaits them, but go past and wink at the wounded. And twenty thousand of them are doomed to die, yet they get surprised at my hat! Strange!” thought Pierre, heading on towards Tatarinovo.
By a landowner’s house on the left side of the road stood carriages, wagons, crowds of orderlies and sentries. His serenity was staying here. But at the time of Pierre’s arrival, he was not there, and there was almost no one from his staff. They were all at a prayer service. Pierre drove on to Gorki.
Driving up a hill and coming to a small village street, Pierre saw muzhik militiamen for the first time, with crosses on their hats and white shirts, who with loud talk and laughter, lively and sweaty, were doing some sort of work to the right of the road, on an enormous barrow overgrown with grass.
Some of them were digging at the hill with shovels, others were transporting dirt over planks in handcarts, still others stood around doing nothing.
Two officers were standing on the barrow, giving them orders. Seeing these muzhiks, who obviously still enjoyed their new military situation, Pierre again recalled the wounded soldiers in Mozhaisk, and understood what the soldier had meant to express, saying “they want the whole people to throw their weight into it.” The sight of these bearded muzhiks working on the battlefield, with their strange, clumsy boots, with their sweaty necks, and some with their side-buttoned shirts open, revealing their sunburned collarbones, impressed Pierre more strongly than anything he had seen or heard so far about the solemnity and significance of the present moment.
XXI
Pierre stepped out of the carriage and went past the laboring militiamen up the barrow from which, as the doctor had told him, the battlefield could be seen.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning. The sun was a little to the left and behind Pierre and, through the clear, rarefied air, shone brightly on the vast panorama that opened out before him like an amphitheater over the rising terrain.
Cutting through the upper left of this amphitheater, the Smolensk high road wound its way through a village with a white church that lay five hundred paces from the barrow and below it (this was Borodino). The road passed under the village, across a bridge and, ascending and descending, wound higher and higher up to the village of Valuevo (where Napoleon was now staying), visible some four miles away. Beyond Valuevo, the road disappeared into a forest that showed yellow on the horizon. In this birch and fir forest, to the right of the road, the distant cross and bell tower of the Kolotsky monastery shone in the sun. All over this blue distance, to right and left of the forest and the road,