War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [521]
XXXII
Forgetting himself from fear, Pierre jumped up and ran back to the battery as the sole refuge from all the horrors that surrounded him.
Just as Pierre was entering the earthworks, he noticed that there was no shooting to be heard on the battery, but some people were doing something there. Pierre had no time to realize who these people were. He saw the senior colonel lying back to him on the rampart, as if studying something below, and saw one soldier he had noticed before, who, tearing away from the people who were holding him by the arm, was shouting “Brothers!”—and he saw something else strange.
But he had no time to realize that the colonel had been killed, that the one shouting “Brothers!” was a prisoner, that before his eyes another soldier was being bayoneted in the back. He had only just run into the earthworks, when a gaunt, yellow man with a sweaty face, in a blue uniform, with a sword in his hand, came charging at him, shouting something. Pierre, instinctively defending himself against the shock, because they were running into each other without seeing it, put his hands out and seized the man (it was a French officer) by the shoulder with one hand and by the throat with the other. The officer, letting go of his sword, seized Pierre by the collar.
For a few seconds the two men looked with frightened eyes into their mutually alien faces, and both were perplexed about what they had done and what they were to do. “Am I taken prisoner, or have I taken him prisoner?” each of them thought. But evidently the French officer was more inclined to the thought that he had been taken prisoner, because Pierre’s strong hand, moved by involuntary fear, squeezed his throat more and more tightly. The Frenchman wanted to say something, but suddenly a cannonball came whistling, low and terrible, just over their heads, and Pierre fancied that the French officer’s head had been torn off, he ducked so quickly.
Pierre also ducked his head and released his grip. No longer thinking of who had captured whom, the Frenchman ran back to the battery, and Pierre ran down the hill, stumbling over the dead and wounded, who, it seemed to him, tried to catch him by the legs. But before he got all the way down, dense crowds of Russian soldiers appeared before him, who, falling, stumbling, and shouting, ran merrily and stormily up to the battery. (This was the attack which Ermolov took credit for, saying that only his courage and good luck had made possible this exploit, during which he supposedly threw up onto the barrow some St. George Crosses that he had in his pocket.)
The French who had taken the battery fled. Our troops, with shouts of “Hurrah!” chased the French so far beyond the battery that it was hard to stop them.
The prisoners were brought down from the battery, among them a wounded French general, who was surrounded by officers. Crowds of wounded, familiar and unfamiliar to Pierre, Russian and French, with faces disfigured by suffering, walked, crawled, and were carried on stretchers from the battery. Pierre went up on the barrow, where he had spent more than an hour, and of that family circle which had taken him to itself, he found not a single one. There were many dead whom he did not know. But some he recognized. The young little officer sat in the same curled-up way, by the edge of the rampart, in a pool of blood. The red-mugged soldier was still twitching, but they did not take him away.
Pierre ran down.
“No, now they’ll stop it, now they’ll be horrified at what they’ve done!” he thought, aimlessly following behind the crowds of stretchers moving off the battlefield.
But the sun, veiled in smoke, was still high, and ahead, and especially to the left near Semyonovskoe, something seethed in the smoke, and the roar of gunfire, musketry, and cannonades not only did not abate, but intensified to the point of despair, like a straining man crying out with his last strength.
XXXIII