War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [97]
Rostov, preoccupied by his relations with Bogdanych, stopped on the bridge, not knowing what to do with himself. There was no one to cut down (as he had always pictured battle to himself), nor could he help set fire to the bridge, because, unlike the other soldiers, he had not brought a plait of straw with him. He was standing and looking about, when suddenly there was a rattling on the bridge, as if someone had spilled nuts, and one of the hussars, the one nearest him, fell on the railing with a groan. Rostov ran to him with the others. Again someone cried: “Stretcher!” Four men took hold of the hussar and began to lift him up.
“Oooh! Leave me alone, for Christ’s sake,” the wounded man cried; but all the same they lifted him up and laid him on the stretcher.
Nikolai Rostov turned away, and, as if searching for something, began looking at the distance, at the waters of the Danube, at the sky, at the sun! How good the sky seemed, how blue, calm, and deep! How bright and solemn the setting sun! How tenderly and lustrously glistened the waters of the distant Danube! And better still were the distant blue hills beyond the Danube, the convent, the mysterious gorges, the pine forests bathed in mist to their tops…there was peace, happiness…“There’s nothing, nothing I would wish for, there’s nothing I would wish for, if only I were there,” thought Rostov. “In me alone and in this sun there is so much happiness, but here…groans, suffering, fear, and this obscurity, this hurry…Again they’re shouting something, and again everybody’s run back somewhere, and I’m running with them, and here it is, here it is, death, above me, around me…An instant, and I’ll never again see this sun, this water, this gorge…”
Just then the sun began to hide itself behind the clouds. Ahead of Rostov, another stretcher appeared. And his fear of death and the stretcher, and his love of the sun and life—all merged into one painfully disturbing impression.
“Lord God! the one there in this sky, save, forgive, and protect me!” Rostov whispered to himself.
The hussars ran up to the handlers, the voices became louder and calmer, the stretchers disappeared from sight.
“What, brother, got a whiff of powder?” Denisov’s voice shouted by his ear.
“It’s all over, but I’m a coward, yes, I’m a coward,” thought Rostov and, sighing deeply, he took his lame Little Rook from the handler and began to mount.
“What was it, canister shot?” he asked Denisov.
“And then some!” shouted Denisov. “Good work, lads! And it was a rotten job! Attacking’s a lovely thing, cut ’em to pieces, but here, devil knows, it’s more like target practice.”
And Denisov rode off to a group that had stopped not far from Rostov: the regimental commander, Nesvitsky, Zherkov, and the officer of the suite.
“However, it seems nobody noticed,” Rostov thought to himself. And indeed no one had noticed anything, because they were all familiar with the feeling a junker experiences when he is under fire for the first time.
“There’ll be a report in it for you,” said Zherkov. “Just see if I don’t get promoted sublieutenant.”
“Inform the prince that I haf set feuer to the bridge,” the colonel said triumphantly and cheerfully.
“And what if he asks about the losses?”
“Trifles!” the colonel boomed. “Two hussars wounded and one killed on the spot,” he said with obvious joy, unable to hold back a happy smile, sonorously rapping out the beautiful phrase killed on the spot.
IX
Pursued by the hundred-thousand-man French army under the leadership of Bonaparte, encountering a hostile local populace, no longer trusting their allies, suffering from a shortness of supplies, and forced to act outside all foreseeable conditions of war, the thirty-five-thousand-man Russian army, under the leadership of Kutuzov, hastily retreated down the Danube, stopping whenever the enemy caught up with it and fighting rear-guard actions, only insofar as it was necessary in order to retreat without loss