War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [663]
Towards evening the leader of the convoy gathered his crew and with shouts and quarrels squeezed into the train, and the prisoners, surrounded on all sides, came out onto the Kaluga road.
They marched very quickly, without resting, and stopped only when the sun began to go down. The carts all drew up close to each other, and people began to prepare for the night. Everyone seemed angry and displeased. For a long time, curses, spiteful cries, and the sounds of fighting came from all sides. A carriage that was driving behind the convoy pulled up close to a convoy wagon and punched its shaft through it. Several soldiers came running to the wagon from different sides; some beat the horses hitched to the carriage on their heads, trying to get them to turn away, others fought among themselves, and Pierre saw that one German was badly wounded on the head by a sword.
It seemed that these men, once they stopped in the middle of a field in the chill twilight of the autumn evening, all experienced the same feeling of unpleasant awakening from the haste and headlong movement somewhere that had come over them at the start. Having stopped, it was as if they all realized that they did not yet know where they were going, and that in this movement there would be much that was painful and difficult.
At this halt the convoy treated the prisoners still worse than at the start. For the first time, the prisoners received their ration of meat in horseflesh.
From the officers to the last soldier, there could be noticed in each of them a personal animosity, as it were, against each of the prisoners, which quite unexpectedly replaced the former friendly relations.
This animosity increased still more when, on taking count of the prisoners, it turned out that, during the bustle as they were leaving Moscow, one Russian soldier, pretending to have a stomach ache, had escaped. Pierre heard how a Frenchman had beaten a Russian soldier for straying too far from the road, and heard his friend the captain reprimand the sergeant for the Russian prisoner’s escape and threaten to court-martial him. To the sergeant’s excuse that the soldier was ill and could not walk, the captain said that the order was to shoot those who lagged behind. Pierre felt that the fatal force which had crushed him during the execution, and which had been imperceptible during his imprisonment, now once again took possession of his existence. It frightened him; but he felt how, as the fatal force made efforts to crush him, a force of life independent of it arose and grew stronger in his soul.
Pierre ate his supper of rye-meal soup with horsemeat and talked with his comrades.
Neither Pierre nor any of his comrades spoke of what they had seen in Moscow, or of the rough treatment of the French, or of the instructions to shoot that had been announced to them: as if to ward off the worsening situation, they were all especially animated and cheerful. People talked of personal memories, of funny scenes witnessed during the march, and changed the subject when it came to the present situation.
The sun had set long ago. Bright stars lit up here and there; red as fire, the glow of the rising full moon spread on the edge of the horizon, and the enormous red ball wavered astonishingly in the grayish haze. It was growing light. The evening was already over, but night had not yet begun. Pierre got up and walked away from his new comrades, between the campfires, to the other side of the road, where he was told the captive soldiers were camped. He wanted to talk with them. On the road a French sentry stopped him and told him to go back.
Pierre went back, but not to the campfire, to his comrades, but to an unhitched cart, where there was no one. Crossing his legs and lowering his head, he sat on the cold ground by the wheel of the cart and stayed there motionless for a long time, thinking. More than an hour went by. No one disturbed