War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [675]
Six Cossacks were left behind, a mile and a half from Mikulino, where the forest came right down to the road, who were to inform them at once as soon as new French columns appeared.
On the other side of Shamshevo, Dolokhov was to keep an eye on the road in the same way, to find out how far away the other French troops were. There were supposed to be fifteen hundred men with the transport. Denisov had two hundred men, Dolokhov might rally the same number. But the superiority of numbers did not stop Denisov. There was only one thing he still needed to know, which was precisely what sort these troops were. For that purpose, Denisov needed to capture a “tongue” (that is, a soldier from the enemy column). In the morning attack on the wagons, the business had been done with such haste that all the French with the wagons had been killed, and the only one taken alive was a drummer boy, who was half-witted and could say nothing positive about what sort of troops were with the column.
Denisov considered it dangerous to attack another time, for fear of disturbing the whole column, and therefore he sent ahead to Shamshevo the muzhik Tikhon Shcherbaty, who was in his party, to capture at least one of the French vanguard, who were taking up quarters there.
IV
It was a warm, rainy autumn day. The sky and the horizon were both the color of muddy water. Now the fog seemed to descend, now a slanting rain would suddenly come down in big drops.
Denisov, in a felt cloak and a papakha streaming with water, rode on a lean, purebred horse with drawn-in flanks. Like his horse, who kept moving its head sideways and laying its ears flat, he winced from the slanting rain and peered ahead worriedly. His emaciated face, overgrown with a thick, short, black beard, looked angry.
Beside Denisov, also in a felt cloak and papakha, on a big, well-nourished Don stallion, rode a Cossack esaul*714 —Denisov’s associate.
The esaul Lovaisky was a tall, white-faced, fair-haired man, flat as a board, with narrow, pale eyes and a calmly smug expression in his face and bearing. Though it was impossible to say what made for the peculiarity of the horse and rider, from a first glance at the esaul and at Denisov, one could see that Denisov felt wet and awkward—that he was a man sitting on a horse; while, looking at the esaul, one could see that he felt as comfortable and at ease as ever, and that he was not a man sitting on a horse, but a man who was one with a horse, a being of twice-increased strength.
A little ahead of them walked a soaking wet little peasant—their guide—in a gray kaftan and a white cap.
A little behind them, on a skinny, slender Kirghiz nag, with an enormous mane and tail and lips so torn that they bled, rode a young officer in a dark blue French greatcoat.
Beside him rode a hussar, with a boy in a tattered French uniform and blue cap sitting behind him on his horse’s croup. The boy held on to the hussar with hands red from the cold, moved his bare feet in an effort to warm them, and, raising his eyebrows, looked around in surprise. This was the French drummer boy captured in the morning.
Behind, by threes, by fours, along the narrow, sodden, and much-traveled forest road, stretched hussars, then Cossacks, some in felt cloaks, some in French greatcoats, some with horse blankets pulled over their heads. The horses, bay and sorrel, all looked black from the rain streaming off them. The horses’ necks seemed strangely thin because of their drenched manes. Steam rose from the horses. Clothes, saddles, reins—everything was wet, slippery, and soggy, like the ground and the fallen leaves that covered the road. The men sat looking ruffled up, trying not to stir, so as to keep the water warm that had seeped through to the body and not let in the new, cold water that flowed under their seats, knees, and behind their necks. Between the strung-out Cossacks, the two wagons, hitched to French and saddled Cossack horses, rumbled over stumps and branches and gurgled through the water-filled ruts of