War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [519]
“How is it you’re not afraid, master, really!” a stocky, red-mugged soldier addressed Pierre, baring his strong white teeth.
“Are you afraid?” asked Pierre.
“What else!” answered the soldier. “She’s got no pity. She smacks down, and guts spill out. Impossible not to be afraid,” he said, laughing.
Several soldiers with cheerful and gentle faces stopped near Pierre. It was as if they did not expect him to talk like everybody else and were glad of this discovery.
“Ours is soldierly business. But for a master it’s amazing. Some master he is!”
“To your places!” cried the young officer to the soldiers gathered around Pierre. This young officer was clearly carrying out his duties for the first or second time, and therefore addressed both the soldiers and the superior with special precision and formality.
The rolling fire of cannon and muskets was growing more intense over the field, especially to the left, where Bagration’s flèches were, but due to the smoke of gunfire in the place where Pierre was, almost nothing could be seen. Besides, observing the family-like circle of men (separated from all the others) who were there on the battery absorbed all Pierre’s attention. His first unconsciously joyful excitement, produced by the sight and sounds of the battlefield, had now been replaced, especially after seeing the soldier lying solitarily on the field, by a different feeling. Sitting on the side of the trench now, he observed the faces around him.
By ten o’clock some twenty men had already been carried from the battery; two guns had been smashed, shells were hitting the battery more and more often, and bullets, buzzing and whistling, reached them from far away. But it was as if the men who were on the battery did not notice it; on all sides merry talk and joking were heard.
“A stuffed one!” a soldier cried at an approaching shell, whistling as it flew. “Not here! To the infantry!” another added with a laugh, noticing that the shell had flown over and hit the ranks of the covering troops.
“What, a friend of yours?” another soldier laughed at a muzhik who ducked under a flying cannonball.
Several soldiers gathered at the rampart, gazing at what was happening further ahead.
“They’ve drawn in the front line, you see, they’ve backed up,” they said, pointing over the rampart.
“Mind your own business,” an old sergeant shouted at them. “If they’ve backed up, it means they’ve got business back there.” And he took one of the soldiers by the shoulder and kicked him with his knee. There was laughter.
“Roll up the fifth gun!” a cry came from one side.
“All at once now, together, like boatmen,” merry cries were heard as they changed cannon.
“Aie, it almost knocked off our master’s little hat,” the red-mugged joker laughed at Pierre, showing his teeth. “Ah, clumsy girl,” he added reproachfully to a cannonball that struck a wheel and a man’s leg.
“Well, you foxes!” another laughed at the crouching militiamen who came to the battery to fetch the wounded.
“So you don’t like the porridge? Ah, you crows, you’re scared stiff!” they shouted at the militiamen, who faltered before a soldier with a shot-off leg.
“So it goes, lad,” they mimicked the muzhiks. “They really don’t like it!”
Pierre noticed how, after every cannonball that hit its mark, after every loss, the general animation flared up more.
As in an approaching storm cloud, there flashed more and more often, more and more brightly on the faces of all these men (as if in resistance to what was happening) the lightning of a hidden fire flaring up.
Pierre did not look ahead at the battlefield and was not interested in knowing what was going on there: he was entirely absorbed in contemplating this fire flaring up more and more, which (he felt it) was also flaring up in his soul.
At ten o’clock the infantrymen who had been in the bushes in front of the battery and along the Kamenka River retreated. From the battery they could be seen running back past it, carrying the wounded on muskets. Some general with his suite came up on the barrow and, having talked with the