Rostov had been ordered to look for
Kutuzov and the Emperor near the village of Pratzen.
But neither they nor a single commanding officer were
there, only disorganized crowds of troops of various
kinds. He urged on his already weary horse to
get quickly past these crowds, but the farther he
went the more disorganized they were. The highroad
on which he had come out was thronged with calèches,
carriages of all sorts, and Russian and Austrian soldiers
of all arms, some wounded and some not. This
whole mass droned and jostled in confusion under the
dismal influence of cannon balls flying from the French
batteries stationed on the Pratzen Heights.
“Where is the Emperor?
Where is Kutuzov?” Rostov kept asking everyone
he could stop, but got no answer from anyone.
At last seizing a soldier by his collar
he forced him to answer.
“Eh, brother! They’ve
all bolted long ago!” said the soldier, laughing
for some reason and shaking himself free.
Having left that soldier who was evidently
drunk, Rostov stopped the horse of a batman or groom
of some important personage and began to question
him. The man announced that the Tsar had been
driven in a carriage at full speed about an hour before
along that very road and that he was dangerously wounded.
“It can’t be!” said
Rostov. “It must have been someone else.”
“I saw him myself,” replied
the man with a self-confident smile of derision.
“I ought to know the Emperor by now, after the
times I’ve seen him in Petersburg. I saw
him just as I see you.... There he sat in the
carriage as pale as anything. How they made the
four black horses fly! Gracious me, they did
rattle past! It’s time I knew the Imperial
horses and Ilya Ivanych. I don’t think
Ilya drives anyone except the Tsar!”
Rostov let go of the horse and was
about to ride on, when a wounded officer passing by
addressed him:
“Who is it you want?”
he asked. “The commander in chief?
He was killed by a cannon ball struck in
the breast before our regiment.”
“Not killed wounded!” another
officer corrected him.
“Who? Kutuzov?” asked Rostov.
“Not Kutuzov, but what’s
his name well, never mind... there are not
many left alive. Go that way, to that village,
all the commanders are there,” said the officer,
pointing to the village of Hosjeradek, and he walked
on.
Rostov rode on at a footpace not knowing
why or to whom he was now going. The Emperor
was wounded, the battle lost. It was impossible
to doubt it now. Rostov rode in the direction
pointed out to him, in which he saw turrets and a
church. What need to hurry? What was he now
to say to the Tsar or to Kutuzov, even if they were
alive and unwounded?
“Take this road, your honor,
that way you will be killed at once!” a soldier
shouted to him. “They’d kill you there!”
“Oh, what are you talking about?”
said another. “Where is he to go? That
way is nearer.”
Rostov considered, and then went in
the direction where they said he would be killed.
“It’s all the same now.
If the Emperor is wounded, am I to try to save myself?”
he thought. He rode on to the region where the
greatest number of men had perished in fleeing from
Pratzen. The French had not yet occupied that
region, and the Russians the uninjured and
slightly wounded had left it long ago.
All about the field, like heaps of manure on well-kept
plowland, lay from ten to fifteen dead and wounded
to each couple of acres. The wounded crept together
in twos and threes and one could hear their distressing
screams and groans, sometimes feigned or
so it seemed to Rostov. He put his horse to a
trot to avoid seeing all these suffering men, and
he felt afraid afraid not for his life,
but for the courage he needed and which he knew would
not stand the sight of these unfortunates.
The French, who had ceased firing
at this field strewn with dead and wounded where there
was no one left to fire at, on seeing an adjutant
riding over it trained a gun on him and fired several
shots. The sensation of those terrible whistling
sounds and of the corpses around him merged in Rostov’s
mind into a single feeling of terror and pity for
himself. He remembered his mother’s last
letter. “What would she feel,” thought
he, “if she saw me here now on this field with
the cannon aimed at me?”
In the village of Hosjeradek there
were Russian troops retiring from the field of battle,
who though still in some confusion were less disordered.
The French cannon did not reach there and the musketry
fire sounded far away. Here everyone clearly
saw and said that the battle was lost. No one
whom Rostov asked could tell him where the Emperor
or Kutuzov was. Some said the report that the
Emperor was wounded was correct, others that it was
not, and explained the false rumor that had spread
by the fact that the Emperor’s carriage had really
galloped from the field of battle with the pale and
terrified Ober-Hofmarschal Count Tolstoy, who had
ridden out to the battlefield with others in the Emperor’s
suite. One officer told Rostov that he had seen
someone from headquarters behind the village to the
left, and thither Rostov rode, not hoping to find
anyone but merely to ease his conscience. When
he had ridden about two miles and had passed the last
of the Russian troops, he saw, near a kitchen garden
with a ditch round it, two men on horseback facing
the ditch. One with a white plume in his hat seemed
familiar to Rostov; the other on a beautiful chestnut
horse (which Rostov fancied he had seen before) rode
up to the ditch, struck his horse with his spurs,
and giving it the rein leaped lightly over. Only
a little earth crumbled from the bank under the horse’s
hind hoofs. Turning the horse sharply, he again
jumped the ditch, and deferentially addressed the horseman
with the white plumes, evidently suggesting that he
should do the same. The rider, whose figure seemed
familiar to Rostov and involuntarily riveted his attention,
made a gesture of refusal with his head and hand and
by that gesture Rostov instantly recognized his lamented
and adored monarch.
“But it can’t be he, alone
in the midst of this empty field!” thought Rostov.
At that moment Alexander turned his head and Rostov
saw the beloved features that were so deeply engraved
on his memory. The Emperor was pale, his cheeks
sunken and his eyes hollow, but the charm, the mildness
of his features, was all the greater. Rostov was
happy in the assurance that the rumors about the Emperor
being wounded were false. He was happy to be
seeing him. He knew that he might and even ought
to go straight to him and give the message Dolgorukov
had ordered him to deliver.
But as a youth in love trembles, is
unnerved, and dares not utter the thoughts he has
dreamed of for nights, but looks around for help or
a chance of delay and flight when the longed-for moment
comes and he is alone with her, so Rostov, now that
he had attained what he had longed for more than anything
else in the world, did not know how to approach the
Emperor, and a thousand reasons occurred to him why
it would be inconvenient, unseemly, and impossible
to do so.
“What! It is as if I were
glad of a chance to take advantage of his being alone
and despondent! A strange face may seem unpleasant
or painful to him at this moment of sorrow; besides,
what can I say to him now, when my heart fails me
and my mouth feels dry at the mere sight of him?”
Not one of the innumerable speeches addressed to the
Emperor that he had composed in his imagination could
he now recall. Those speeches were intended for
quite other conditions, they were for the most part
to be spoken at a moment of victory and triumph, generally
when he was dying of wounds and the sovereign had
thanked him for heroic deeds, and while dying he expressed
the love his actions had proved.
“Besides how can I ask the Emperor
for his instructions for the right flank now that
it is nearly four o’clock and the battle is lost?
No, certainly I must not approach him, I must not intrude
on his reflections. Better die a thousand times
than risk receiving an unkind look or bad opinion
from him,” Rostov decided; and sorrowfully and
with a heart full despair he rode away, continually
looking back at the Tsar, who still remained in the
same attitude of indecision.
While Rostov was thus arguing with
himself and riding sadly away, Captain von Toll chanced
to ride to the same spot, and seeing the Emperor at
once rode up to him, offered his services, and assisted
him to cross the ditch on foot. The Emperor,
wishing to rest and feeling unwell, sat down under
an apple tree and von Toll remained beside him.
Rostov from a distance saw with envy and remorse how
von Toll spoke long and warmly to the Emperor and
how the Emperor, evidently weeping, covered his eyes
with his hand and pressed von Toll’s hand.
“And I might have been in his
place!” thought Rostov, and hardly restraining
his tears of pity for the Emperor, he rode on in utter
despair, not knowing where to or why he was now riding.
His despair was all the greater from
feeling that his own weakness was the cause of his
grief.
He might... not only might but should,
have gone up to the sovereign. It was a unique
chance to show his devotion to the Emperor and he had
not made use of it.... “What have I done?”
thought he. And he turned round and galloped
back to the place where he had seen the Emperor, but
there was no one beyond the ditch now. Only some
carts and carriages were passing by. From one
of the drivers he learned that Kutuzov’s staff
were not far off, in the village the vehicles were
going to. Rostov followed them. In front
of him walked Kutuzov’s groom leading horses
in horsecloths. Then came a cart, and behind that
walked an old, bandy-legged domestic serf in a peaked
cap and sheepskin coat.
“Tit! I say, Tit!” said the groom.
“What?” answered the old man absent-mindedly.
“Go, Tit! Thresh a bit!”
“Oh, you fool!” said the
old man, spitting angrily. Some time passed in
silence, and then the same joke was repeated.
Before five in the evening the battle
had been lost at all points. More than a hundred
cannon were already in the hands of the French.
Przebyszewski and his corps had laid
down their arms. Other columns after losing half
their men were retreating in disorderly confused masses.
The remains of Langeron’s and
Dokhturov’s mingled forces were crowding around
the dams and banks of the ponds near the village of
Augesd.
After five o’clock it was only
at the Augesd Dam that a hot cannonade (delivered
by the French alone) was still to be heard from numerous
batteries ranged on the slopes of the Pratzen Heights,
directed at our retreating forces.
In the rearguard, Dokhturov and others
rallying some battalions kept up a musketry fire at
the French cavalry that was pursuing our troops.
It was growing dusk. On the narrow Augesd Dam
where for so many years the old miller had been accustomed
to sit in his tasseled cap peacefully angling, while
his grandson, with shirt sleeves rolled up, handled
the floundering silvery fish in the watering can,
on that dam over which for so many years Moravians
in shaggy caps and blue jackets had peacefully driven
their two-horse carts loaded with wheat and had returned
dusty with flour whitening their carts on
that narrow dam amid the wagons and the cannon, under
the horses’ hoofs and between the wagon wheels,
men disfigured by fear of death now crowded together,
crushing one another, dying, stepping over the dying
and killing one another, only to move on a few steps
and be killed themselves in the same way.
Every ten seconds a cannon ball flew
compressing the air around, or a shell burst in the
midst of that dense throng, killing some and splashing
with blood those near them.
Dolokhov now an officer wounded
in the arm, and on foot, with the regimental commander
on horseback and some ten men of his company, represented
all that was left of that whole regiment. Impelled
by the crowd, they had got wedged in at the approach
to the dam and, jammed in on all sides, had stopped
because a horse in front had fallen under a cannon
and the crowd were dragging it out. A cannon ball
killed someone behind them, another fell in front
and splashed Dolokhov with blood. The crowd,
pushing forward desperately, squeezed together, moved
a few steps, and again stopped.
“Move on a hundred yards and
we are certainly saved, remain here another two minutes
and it is certain death,” thought each one.
Dolokhov who was in the midst of the
crowd forced his way to the edge of the dam, throwing
two soldiers off their feet, and ran onto the slippery
ice that covered the millpool.
“Turn this way!” he shouted,
jumping over the ice which creaked under him; “turn
this way!” he shouted to those with the gun.
“It bears!...”
The ice bore him but it swayed and
creaked, and it was plain that it would give way not
only under a cannon or a crowd, but very soon even
under his weight alone. The men looked at him
and pressed to the bank, hesitating to step onto the
ice. The general on horseback at the entrance
to the dam raised his hand and opened his mouth to
address Dolokhov. Suddenly a cannon ball hissed
so low above the crowd that everyone ducked.
It flopped into something moist, and the general fell
from his horse in a pool of blood. Nobody gave
him a look or thought of raising him.
“Get onto the ice, over the
ice! Go on! Turn! Don’t you hear?
Go on!” innumerable voices suddenly shouted
after the ball had struck the general, the men themselves
not knowing what, or why, they were shouting.
One of the hindmost guns that was
going onto the dam turned off onto the ice. Crowds
of soldiers from the dam began running onto the frozen
pond. The ice gave way under one of the foremost
soldiers, and one leg slipped into the water.
He tried to right himself but fell in up to his waist.
The nearest soldiers shrank back, the gun driver stopped
his horse, but from behind still came the shouts:
“Onto the ice, why do you stop? Go on!
Go on!” And cries of horror were heard in the
crowd. The soldiers near the gun waved their
arms and beat the horses to make them turn and move
on. The horses moved off the bank. The ice,
that had held under those on foot, collapsed in a
great mass, and some forty men who were on it dashed,
some forward and some back, drowning one another.
Still the cannon balls continued regularly
to whistle and flop onto the ice and into the water
and oftenest of all among the crowd that covered the
dam, the pond, and the bank.