War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [75]
The battalion commander understood the merry irony and laughed.
“Wouldn’t even be driven off the Tsaritsyn Field.”1
“What?”
Just then two horsemen appeared on the road from town along which signalmen had been posted. They were an adjutant with a Cossack riding behind him.
The adjutant had been sent from headquarters to confirm to the regimental commander what had been said unclearly in the previous day’s order, namely, that the commander in chief wished to see the regiment in exactly the same condition it had been in on the march—in greatcoats, in dustcovers, and without any preparations.
The day before, a member of the Hofkriegsrath from Vienna had come to Kutuzov with proposals and demands that he go as quickly as possible to join with the army of the archduke Ferdinand and Mack, and Kutuzov, who did not consider that juncture advantageous, intended, among other arguments in favor of his opinion, to show the Austrian general the sorry condition in which his troops arrived from Russia. It was with that purpose that he wanted to come and meet the regiment, so that the worse the condition of the regiment was, the more pleasing it would be to the commander in chief. Though the adjutant did not know these details, he conveyed to the regimental commander the absolute demand of the commander in chief that his people be in greatcoats and dustcovers, and that in the contrary case the commander in chief would be displeased.
Having listened to these words, the regimental commander hung his head, silently heaved his shoulders, and spread his arms in a sanguine gesture.
“Now we’ve done it!” he said. “See, I told you, Mikhailo Mitrich, if it’s on the march, then it’s greatcoats,” he turned reproachfully to the battalion commander. “Ah, my God!” he added and resolutely stepped forward. “Company commanders!” he cried in a voice accustomed to command. “Sergeant majors!…How soon will he come?” he turned to the adjutant with an expression of deferential politeness which evidently related to the person of whom he was speaking.
“In an hour, I think.”
“Do we have time to change?”
“I don’t know, General…”
The regimental commander approached the ranks himself and gave orders to change back into overcoats. The company commanders ran to their companies, the sergeant majors began bustling about (the overcoats were not in good order), and that same instant the previously orderly, silent rectangles heaved, stretched, and began humming with talk. Soldiers ran back and forth on all sides, tossed their packs off one shoulder and pulled them over their heads, took their overcoats out, and raised their arms high, putting them into the sleeves.
Half an hour later everything was back in its former order, only the rectangles had become gray instead of black. The regimental commander again stepped before the regiment with his bouncing gait and looked it over from a distance.
“What’s this now? what’s this?” he shouted, stopping. “Commander of the third company!…”
“Commander of the third company to the general! commander to the general, third company to the commander!…” voices were heard in the ranks, and an adjutant ran to look for the belated officer.
When the sounds of the zealous voices, distorting the message and now shouting “the general to the third company,” reached their destination, the summoned officer emerged from the back of the ranks and, though already an elderly man and not accustomed to running, cantered, clumsily tripping over his toes, towards the general. The captain’s face expressed the anxiety of a schoolboy who is asked to recite a lesson he had not learned. Blotches appeared on his red (evidently from intemperance) face, and his mouth would not stay put. The regimental commander looked the captain up and down as he approached, puffing, slackening his pace the nearer he came.
“Soon you’ll have your people dressed in sarafans! What is that?” shouted the regimental commander, thrusting his lower jaw out and pointing to a soldier in the ranks of the third