War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [502]
Pierre paid no particular attention to this redoubt. He did not know that for him it would be the most memorable place on the field of Borodino. Then they crossed the ravine to Semyonovskoe, where soldiers were pulling down the last logs of the cottages and barns. Then downhill and uphill they rode on through broken rye, beaten down as if by hail, along a road newly made by the artillery across the furrows of a plowed field to the flèches,*464 which were still being dug.
Bennigsen stopped at the flèches and began looking ahead at the Shevardino redoubt (still ours yesterday), on which several horsemen could be seen. The officers said that Napoleon or Murat was there. And everybody looked eagerly at this bunch of horsemen. Pierre also looked, trying to guess which of those barely visible men was Napoleon. Finally the horsemen rode down off the barrow and disappeared from sight.
Bennigsen turned to a general who came up to him and started explaining the disposition of our troops. Pierre listened to Bennigsen’s words, straining all his mental forces in order to understand the essence of the forthcoming battle, but felt with chagrin that his mental ability was insufficient for that. He understood nothing. Bennigsen stopped talking and, noticing the figure of the listening Pierre, suddenly said, turning to him:
“I suppose you find this uninteresting?”
“Oh, on the contrary, very interesting,” Pierre said not quite truthfully.
From the flèches they rode still further to the left, on a road winding through a dense, not very tall birch woods. In the middle of this woods a brown hare with white legs jumped out onto the road in front of them and, frightened by the hoofbeats of the large number of horses, became so confused that it leaped along the road in front of them for a long time, arousing general attention and laughter, and only when several voices shouted at it did it dash to the side and disappear into the thicket. Having gone a mile and a half through the woods, they came out into a clearing where the troops of Tuchkov’s corps were stationed, who were supposed to defend the left flank.
Here, at the extreme left flank, Bennigsen spoke a great deal and vehemently, and, as it seemed to Pierre, gave instructions that were important in a military respect. In front of the disposition of Tuchkov’s troops, there was an elevation. This elevation was not occupied by troops. Bennigsen loudly criticized this error, saying that it was mad to leave a height that commanded the terrain unoccupied and place troops at the foot of it. Some generals expressed the same opinion. One in particular said with military vehemence that they had been put there to be slaughtered. Bennigsen ordered in his own name that the troops be moved to the height.
This instruction to the left flank made Pierre doubt still more his ability to understand military matters. Listening to Bennigsen and the generals discussing the position of the troops at the foot of the hill, Pierre fully understood them and shared their opinion; but, precisely for that reason, he could not understand how the one who had placed them there at the foot of the hill could have made such an obvious and crude mistake.
Pierre did not know that these troops had been placed there not to defend the position, as Bennigsen thought, but had been put in a concealed spot for an ambush, that is, so as to remain unobserved and suddenly strike at the advancing enemy. Bennigsen did not know that and moved the troops forward for his own reasons, saying nothing about it to the commander in chief.
XXIV
On that clear