War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [498]
Everything Pierre saw to right and left was so indefinite that neither the left nor the right side of the field fully satisfied his notions. Everywhere there were fields, clearings, troops, woods, smoking campfires, villages, barrows, streams, but not the battlefield he had expected to see; and much as he tried to make it out, on this living terrain he could not find a position and could not even distinguish our troops from the enemy’s.
“I must ask someone who knows,” he thought and turned to an officer, who was looking with curiosity at his enormous, nonmilitary figure.
“Allow me to ask,” Pierre addressed the officer, “what village is that in front of us?”
“Burdino or something?” said the officer, turning to his comrade with the question.
“Borodino,” the other replied, correcting him.
The officer, clearly pleased at the chance to talk, moved closer to Pierre.
“Those are ours there?” asked Pierre.
“Yes, and those further away are the French,” said the officer. “Out there, out there you can see them.”
“Those are ours?” asked Pierre.
“You can see them with your naked eye. There, there!” The officer pointed to some smoke visible to the left across the river, and that stern and serious expression appeared on his face which Pierre had seen on many of the faces he had met.
“Ah, they’re the French! And there?…” Pierre pointed to a barrow on the left, near which troops could be seen.
“They’re ours.”
“Ah, ours! And there?…” Pierre pointed to another distant barrow with a big tree, near a village visible in a gully, where campfires were also smoking and something showed black.
“That’s him again,” said the officer. (This was the Shevardino redoubt.) “Yesterday it was ours, but now it’s his.”
“So what is our position?”
“Position?” said the officer with a smile of pleasure. “That I can tell you clearly, because I built nearly all our fortifications. There, you see, is our center in Borodino, just there.” He pointed to the village with the white church, straight ahead. “There’s the crossing over the Kolocha. Over there, see, where rows of cut hay are still lying in a hollow, the bridge is right there. This is our center. Our right flank is over there” (he pointed sharply to the right, far into the gully), “the Moskva River’s there, and there we built three redoubts, very strong ones. The left flank…” Here the officer paused. “You see, it’s hard to explain it to you…Yesterday our left flank was there, in Shevardino, see, where the oak tree is; but now we’ve moved the left wing back, now it’s down there, there—see the village and the smoke?—that’s Semyonovskoe, yes, it’s there.” He pointed to the Raevsky barrow. “Only it’s unlikely the battle will be there. He shifted troops there, but it’s a trick; he will probably go around to the right of the Moskva. Well, but wherever it is, we’ll have a lot of men missing tomorrow!” said the officer.
An old sergeant, who came up to the officer while he was talking, was waiting silently for his superior to finish; but at this point, obviously displeased with the officer’s words, he interrupted him.
“We have to go for gabions,” he said sternly.
The officer seemed embarrassed, as if he realized that one might think of how many would be missing the next day, but one ought not to speak of it.
“Ah, yes, send the third platoon again,” he said hastily. “And you are what—a doctor?”
“No, I’m just here,” answered Pierre. And he went down the hill again past the militiamen.
“Ah, curse them!” the officer, who was following Pierre, said, holding his nose and running past the laborers.
“There they are!…They’re carrying her, they’re coming…There they are…They’ll