War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [664]
“Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Pierre. And he said aloud to himself: “The soldier wouldn’t let me go. They caught me, they locked me up. They’re holding me prisoner. Who, me? Me? Me—my immortal soul! Ha, ha, ha!…Ha, ha, ha!…” he laughed, with tears brimming his eyes.
Some man got up and came to see what the strange, big man was laughing about by himself. Pierre stopped laughing, got up, went further away from the curious fellow, and looked around.
The enormous, endless bivouac, noisy earlier with the crackling of campfires and the talking of men, was growing still; the red flames of the campfires were dying out and turning pale. The full moon stood high in the bright sky. Forests and fields, invisible earlier beyond the territory of the camp, now opened out in the distance. And further beyond these forests and fields could be seen the bright, wavering, endless distance calling one to itself. Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the retreating, twinkling stars. “And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me!” thought Pierre. “And all this they’ve caught and put in a shed and boarded it up!” He smiled and went to his comrades to lie down and sleep.
XV
In the first days of October, another envoy came to Kutuzov with a letter from Napoleon and an offer of peace, deceptively addressed from Moscow, while Napoleon was already not far ahead of Kutuzov on the old Kaluga road. Kutuzov’s reply to this letter was the same as to the first, sent with Lauriston: he said there could be no question of peace.
Soon after that, information was received from Dorokhov’s partisan detachment, moving about to the left of Tarutino, that troops had appeared in Fominskoe, that those troops consisted of Broussier’s division, and that that division, separated from the other troops, could easily be exterminated. Again the soldiers and officers called for action. The staff generals, stirred by the memory of the easy victory at Tarutino, insisted that Kutuzov act upon Dorokhov’s suggestion. Kutuzov did not consider any offensive necessary. What happened was between the two, as it was bound to be: a small detachment was sent to Fominskoe to attack Broussier.
By a strange chance, this assignment—the most difficult and important, as it turned out later—fell to Dokhturov, that same modest little Dokhturov, whom no one has ever described to us as drawing up plans of battle, flying at the head of regiments, throwing crosses on batteries, and so on, who was considered and called irresolute and imperceptive, that same Dokhturov whom, during all the wars between the Russians and the French, from Austerlitz to the year thirteen, we find in command wherever the situation is difficult. At Austerlitz, he is the last to remain at the dam of Augesd, gathering the regiments, saving whatever is possible, when all are fleeing and perishing and there is not one general left in the rear guard. Sick, in a fever, he goes to Smolensk with twenty thousand men to defend the city against the entire Napoleonic army. In Smolensk, he has just dozed off by the Molokhovsky gate in a paroxysm of fever, when he is awakened by a cannonade aimed at Smolensk, and Smolensk holds out for the whole day. In the battle of Borodino, when Bagration has been killed and the troops of our left flank have been wiped out in a proportion of nine to one, and the full force of the French artillery is directed there—none other than the irresolute and imperceptive Dokhturov is sent there, and Kutuzov, having first sent someone else, hastily corrects his mistake. And quiet little Dokhturov goes there, and Borodino is the best glory of the Russian army. And many heroes have been described for us in verse and prose, but there is hardly a word about Dokhturov.
Again Dokhturov is sent to Fominskoe, and from there to Maly Yaroslavets, to the place where the last battle with the French was fought, to the place