War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [515]
Napoleon walked about in front of his tent, looked at the fires, listened to the tramping, and, passing by a tall guard in a shaggy hat who was standing watch by his tent and, like a black post, drew himself to attention when the emperor appeared, stopped in front of him.
“What year did you join the service?” he asked with that habitual affectation of gruff and affectionate soldierliness with which he always addressed his men. The soldier told him.
“Ah! un des vieux!*491 Did your regiment get rice?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
Napoleon nodded his head and left him.
At half past five Napoleon was riding on horseback to the village of Shevardino.
It was beginning to grow light, the sky cleared, only one cloud lay in the east. The abandoned campfires were going out in the faint light of morning.
To the right a dense, solitary cannon shot rang out, raced by, and died away amidst the general silence. Several minutes passed. A second, a third shot rang out; the air shook; a fourth, a fifth rang out nearby and solemnly somewhere to the right.
The sound of the first shots still hung in the air when others rang out, more and more, merging and interrupting each other.
Napoleon and his suite rode up to the Shevardino redoubt and dismounted. The game had begun.
XXX
On returning to Gorki from seeing Prince Andrei, Pierre, having told his groom to prepare the horses and awaken him early in the morning, fell asleep at once behind the partition, in a corner that Boris had given up to him.
By the time Pierre fully awoke the next morning, there was no one in the cottage. The panes were rattling in the little windows. The groom was standing there trying to rouse him.
“Your Excellency, Your Excellency, Your Excellency…” the groom muttered insistently, without looking at Pierre, shaking him by the shoulder, and clearly having lost all hope of waking him up.
“What? It’s begun? It’s time?” said Pierre, now awake.
“Listen to the shooting, if you please,” said the groom, a retired soldier. “All the gentlemen are gone, and his serenity rode by long ago.”
Pierre hurriedly dressed and ran out to the porch. Outside it was clear, fresh, dewy, and cheerful. The sun, having just burst from behind the cloud that had covered it, sprayed its rays, half broken by the cloud, across the roofs of the street opposite, over the dew-covered dust of the road, over the walls of the houses, the windows, the fences, and Pierre’s horses, which were standing by the cottage. The roar of cannon was clearly heard outside. An adjutant and a Cossack trotted down the road.
“It’s time, Count, it’s time,” the adjutant called out.
Ordering the horse to be led after him, Pierre went down the road to the barrow, from which he had looked over the battlefield the day before. There was a crowd of military on this barrow, the French talk of the staff officers could be heard, and Kutuzov’s gray head could be seen, in its white cap with the red band, and his gray nape sunk into his shoulders. Kutuzov was looking through a field glass down the high road in front of him.
Going up the steps to the barrow, Pierre looked ahead of him and froze in delight at the beauty of the spectacle. It was the same panorama he had admired from the barrow the day before; but now the whole terrain was covered with troops and the smoke of gunfire, and the slanting rays of the bright sun, rising behind and to the left of Pierre, cast over it, in the clear morning air, a piercing light of a pink and golden hue, and long, dark shadows. The distant woods, ending the panorama, as if carved from some precious yellow-green stone, displayed the curved line of its treetops on the horizon, and between them, beyond Valuevo, cut the Smolensk high road, all covered with troops. Golden fields and copses glistened closer by. Everywhere—ahead, to the right, to the left—troops could