War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [693]
“Ça lui est bien égal,” he growled, glancing quickly at the soldier, who was standing behind him, “…brigand. Va!”‡733
And, turning the ramrod, he glanced gloomily at Pierre. Pierre turned away, peering into the shadows. One captive Russian soldier, the one whom the Frenchman had shoved aside, was sitting by the fire and patting something with his hand. Looking more closely, Pierre recognized the purplish dog, who was sitting by the soldier, wagging its tail.
“Ah, it’s come?” said Pierre. “Ah, Pla…” he began, and did not finish. In his imagination suddenly, simultaneously, connecting among themselves, memories emerged of the gaze with which Platon had looked at him, sitting under the tree, of the shot he had heard from that spot, of the howling of a dog, of the criminal faces of the two Frenchmen who had run past him, of the smoking gun in the hand, of the absence of Karataev at this halt, and he was ready then to understand that Karataev had been killed, but at the same moment a memory emerged in his soul, coming from God knows where, of an evening he had spent with a beautiful Polish woman, in the summer, on the balcony of his house in Kiev. And still not connecting the memories of that day and not drawing any conclusions about them, Pierre closed his eyes, and the picture of summer nature mixed with the memory of bathing, of the liquid, wavering ball, and he sank somewhere into the water, so that the water closed over his head.
Before sunrise he was awakened by loud, rapid gunshots, and shouting French soldiers ran past him.
“Les cosaques!” one of them shouted, and a moment later Pierre was surrounded by a crowd of Russian faces.
For a long time Pierre could not understand what was happening to him. On all sides he heard his comrades’ shouts of joy.
“Brothers! My dear ones, my darlings!” the old soldiers cried out, weeping, embracing the Cossacks and hussars. The hussars and Cossacks surrounded the prisoners and hastened to offer them—one clothes, another boots, another bread. Pierre sobbed, sitting among them, and could not utter a word; he embraced the first soldier who came up to him and kissed him, weeping.
Dolokhov stood by the gates of a ruined house, letting a crowd of disarmed French soldiers go past him. The French, shaken by all that had happened, talked loudly among themselves; but as they went past Dolokhov, who tapped himself lightly on the boots with a whip and looked at them with his cold, glassy gaze, which promised nothing good, the talk ceased. Opposite him stood Dolokhov’s Cossack, counting the prisoners and marking the hundreds with a chalk line on the gate.
“How many?” Dolokhov asked the Cossack who was counting the captives.
“Going on the second hundred,” replied the Cossack.
“Filez, filez,” Dolokhov kept repeating, having learned this expression from the French, and, meeting the eyes of the passing prisoners, his gaze flashed with a cruel gleam.
Denisov, with a gloomy face, taking off his papakha, followed behind some Cossacks who were carrying to a pit dug in the garden the body of Petya Rostov.
XVI
From the twenty-eighth of October, when the frosts set in, the flight of the French only acquired a more tragic character of men freezing or roasting to death by campfires, and of the emperor, kings, and dukes in fur coats continuing to drive on in carriages filled with stolen goods; but in essence the process of the flight and decomposition of the French army had not changed in the least since the departure from Moscow.
Between Moscow and Vyazma, of the French army of seventy-three thousand men, not counting the guards (who did nothing but loot during the entire war), there remained thirty-six thousand (though no more than five thousand had been lost in battle). This is the first member of a progression, which determines the subsequent members with mathematical certainty.
The French army melted away and was annihilated in the same