War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [661]
“Filez, filez,”†706 the captain kept saying, frowning sternly and looking at the prisoners crowding past him. Pierre knew his attempt would be in vain, but he went up to him.
“Eh bien, qu’est-ce qu’il y a?”‡707 said the officer, looking at him coldly, as if not recognizing him. Pierre told him about the sick man.
“Il pourra marcher, que diable!”*708 said the captain. “Filez, filez,” he went on repeating without looking at Pierre.
“Mais non, il est à l’agonie…”†709 Pierre began.
“Voulez-vous bien?!”‡710 the captain cried, frowning angrily.
Tra-ta-ta-tam, tam, tam, beat the drums. And Pierre realized that the mysterious force now fully possessed these men and that to say anything more now was useless.
The captive officers were separated from the soldiers and told to march in front. There were about thirty officers, Pierre among them, and about three hundred soldiers.
The captive officers released from other sheds were all strangers, were much better dressed than Pierre, and looked at him, in his footgear, with mistrust and estrangement. Not far from Pierre walked a fat major with a puffy, yellow, angry face, in a Kazan dressing gown tied round with a towel, who was clearly held in general respect by his fellow prisoners. He kept one hand with a tobacco pouch in his bosom, the other he rested on his long-stemmed chibouk. The major, huffing and puffing, grumbled and was angry with everybody, because it seemed to him that everybody was pushing him and everybody was in a hurry, when there was nowhere to hurry to, that everybody was surprised at something, when there was nothing to be surprised at. Another, a small, thin officer, kept addressing everybody, making conjectures about where they were going now and how far they would manage to get that day. An official in felt boots and a commissariat uniform kept running off to different sides, looking at burnt-down Moscow, loudly reporting his observations on what had burned down and which was this or that part of Moscow that came into sight. A third officer, of Polish origin judging by his accent, argued with the commissariat official, proving to him that he was mistaken in identifying the neighborhoods of Moscow.
“What’s there to argue about?” the major said angrily. “St. Nicholas or St. Vlas, it’s all the same. You can see it’s all burned down, and that’s the end of it…Why are you pushing, as if there’s not road enough,” he turned gruffly to a man walking behind him, who had not pushed him at all.
“Ai, ai, ai, what have they done!” the voices of the prisoners were heard, nevertheless, now on one side, now on another, as they looked at the charred ruins. “Zamoskvorechye, and Zubovo, and in the Kremlin, look, half of it’s missing…I told you it was the whole of Zamoskvorechye, and so it is.”
“Well, you know it’s burned down, so what’s there to talk about!” said the major.
Going past the church in Khamovniki (one of the few unburnt neighborhoods of Moscow), the whole crowd of prisoners suddenly pressed to one side, and exclamations of horror and revulsion were heard.
“See, the scoundrels! Real heathens! Yes, dead, he’s dead…Smeared with something.”
Pierre also moved towards the church, where that which had caused such exclamations was, and vaguely saw something propped against the church fence. From the words of his comrades, who could see better than he, he learned that this something was the corpse of a man stood upright against the fence and his face smeared with soot.
“Marchez, sacré nom…Filez…trente mille diables!…”*711 cursed the convoy guards, and with renewed animosity the French soldiers used their swords to disperse the crowd of prisoners looking at the dead man.
XIV
Through the lanes of Khamovniki, the prisoners walked alone with their convoy, and the carts and wagons belonging to the convoy followed behind; but, coming out