《War And Peace》Book2 CHAPTER XIII

《War And Peace》　Book2 　CHAPTER XIII
　　　　by Leo Tolstoy

THE SAME NIGHT, after taking leave of the minister of war, Bolkonsky set off
to join the army, not knowing where he should find it, at the risk of being
caught by the French on the way to Krems.

At Bränn all the court and every one connected with it was packing up, and
the heavy baggage was already being despatched to Olmätz. Near Esselsdorf,
Prince Andrey came out on the road along which the Russian army was moving in
the utmost haste and in the GREatest disorder. The road was so obstructed with
baggage-waggons that it was impossible to get by in a carriage. Prince Andrey
procured a horse and a Cossack from the officer in command of the Cossacks, and
hungry and weary he threaded his way in and out between the waggons and rode in
search of the commander-in-chief and his own luggage. The most sinister rumours
as to the position of the army reached him on the road, and the appearance of
the army fleeing in disorder confirmed these rumours.

“As for that Russian army which English gold has brought from the ends of the
universe, we are going to inflict upon it the same fate (the fate of the army of
Ulm)”; he remembered the words of Bonaparte's address to his army at the
beginning of the campaign, and these words aroused in him simultaneously
admiration for the genius of his hero, a feeling of mortified pride, and the
hope of glory. “And if there's nothing left but to die?” he thought. “Well, if
it must be! I will do it no worse than others.”

Prince Andrey looked disdainfully at the endless, confused mass of companies,
of baggage-waggons, parks of artillery, and again store-waggons, carts, and
waggons of every possible form, pursuing one another and obstructing the muddy
road three and four abreast. On every side, behind and before, as far as the ear
could reach in every direction there was the rumble of wheels, the rattle of
carts, of waggons, and of gun-carriages, the tramp of horses, the crack of
whips, the shouts of drivers, the swearing of soldiers, of orderlies, and
officers. At the sides of the roads he saw fallen horses, and sometimes their
skinned carcases, broken-down waggons, with solitary soldiers sitting on them,
waiting for something, detached groups of soldiers strayed from their companies,
starting off to neighbouring villages, or dragging back from them fowls, sheep,
hay, or sacks of stores of some sort. Where the road went uphill or downhill the
crush became GREater, and there was an uninterrupted roar of shouts. The
soldiers floundering knee-deep in the mud clutched the guns and clung to the
waggons in the midst of cracking whips, slipping hoofs, breaking traces and
throat-splitting yells. The officers superintending their movements rode to and
fro in front and behind the convoys. Their voices were faintly audible in the
midst of the general uproar, their faces betrayed that they despaired of the
possibility of checking the disorder.

“Voilà le cher holy armament,” thought Bolkonsky, recalling Bilibin's
words.

He rode up to a convoy, intending to ask of some one of these men where he
could find the commander-in-chief. Directly opposite to him came a strange
vehicle, with one horse, obviously rigged up by soldiers with the resources at
their disposal, and looking like something between a cart, a cabriolet, and a
coach. A soldier was driving it, and under the leathern tilt behind a cover sat
a woman, muffled up in shawls. Prince Andrey rode up and was just addressing a
question to the soldier, when his attention was taken off by the despairing
shrieks of the woman in this conveyance. The officer, directing the traffic,
aimed a blow at the soldier who sat in the coachman's seat, for trying to push
in ahead of others, and the lash fell on the cover of the equipage. The woman
shrieked shrilly. On catching sight of Prince Andrey, she looked out from under
the cover and putting her thin arms out from the shawls and waving them, she
screamed:

“Adjutant! sir! … For God's sake! … protect me. … What will happen to us? … I
am the wife of the doctor of the Seventh Chasseurs … they won't let us pass, we
have dropped behind, lost our own people. …”

“I'll thrash you into mincemeat! turn back!” shouted the exasperated officer
to the soldier: “turn back with your hussy!”

“Sir, protect us. What does it mean?” screamed the doctor's wife.

“Kindly let this cart get through. Don't you see that it is a woman?” said
Prince Andrey, riding up to the officer.

The officer glanced at him, and without making any reply turned again to the
soldier. “I'll teach you how to push in. … Back! …”

“Let it pass, I tell you,” repeated Prince Andrey, setting his lips
tightly.

“And who are you?” cried the officer, turning upon him suddenly with drunken
fury. “Who are you? Are you” (he put a peculiarly offensive intonation
into the word) “in command, pray? I'm commanding officer here, not you. Back you
go,” he repeated, “or I'll lash you into mincemeat.” The expression evidently
pleased the officer.

“A nice snub he gave the little adjutant,” said a voice in the
background.

Prince Andrey saw that the officer was in that stage of drunken unreasoning
fury, when men do not remember what they say. He saw that his championship of
the doctor's wife in the queer conveyance was exposing him to what he dreaded
more than anything else in the world, what is called in French ridicule,
but his instinct said something else. The officer had hardly uttered the last
words when Prince Andrey rode up to him with a face distorted by frenzied anger,
and raised his riding-whip: “Let—them—pass!”

The officer flourished his arm and hurriedly rode away.

“It's all their doing, these staff-officers, all the disorder,” he grumbled.
“Do as you like.”

Prince Andrey, without lifting his eyes, made haste to escape from the
doctor's wife, who called him her deliverer. And dwelling on the minutest detail
of this humiliating scene with loathing, he galloped on towards the village,
where he was told that the commander-in-chief was.

On reaching the village, he got off his horse, and went into the first house
with the intention of resting for a moment at least, eating something, and
getting all the mortifying impressions that were torturing him into some clear
shape. “This is a mob of scoundrels, not an army,” he thought, going up to the
window of the first house, when a familiar voice called him by his name.

He looked round. Out of a little window was thrust the handsome face of
Nesvitsky. Nesvitsky, munching something in his moist mouth and beckoning to
him, called him in.

“Bolkonsky! Bolkonsky! Don't you hear, eh? Make haste,” he shouted.

Going into the house, Prince Andrey found Nesvitsky and another adjutant
having a meal. They hastily turned to Bolkonsky with the inquiry, had he any
news? On their familiar faces Prince Andrey read alarm and uneasiness. That
expression was particularly noticeable in Nesvitsky's face, usually so full of
laughter.

“Where is the commander-in-chief?” asked Bolkonsky.

“Here in this house,” answered the adjutant.

“Well, is it true, about the peace and capitulation?” asked Nesvitsky.

“I ask you. I know nothing except that I have had GREat difficulty in getting
through to you.”

“And the things that have been going on, my boy! Awful! I was wrong to laugh
at Mack; there's worse in store for us,” said Nesvitsky. “But sit down, have
something to eat.”

“You won't find your baggage or anything now, prince, and God knows what's
become of your Pyotr,” said the other adjutant.

“Where are the headquarters?”

“We shall spend the night in Znaim.”

“Well, I got everything I wanted packed up on two horses,” said Nesvitsky;
“and capital packs they made for me, fit to scamper as far as the Bohemian
mountains at least. Things are in a bad way, my boy. But, I say, you must be
ill, shivering like that?” Nesvitsky queried, noticing how Prince Andrey
shuddered, as though in contact with a galvanic battery.

“No; I'm all right,” answered Prince Andrey. He had recalled at that instant
the incident with the doctor's wife and the transport officer.

“What is the commander-in-chief doing here?” he asked.

“I can't make out anything,” said Nesvitsky.

“I know one thing, that it's all loathsome, loathsome, loathsome,” said
Prince Andrey, and he went into the house where the commander-in-chief was
stopping.

Passing by Kutuzov's carriage, the exhausted saddle-horses of his suite, and
the Cossacks talking loudly together, Prince Andrey went into the outer room.
Kutuzov himself was, as Prince Andrey had been told, in the inner room of the
hut with Prince Bagration and Weierother. The latter was the Austrian general,
who had taken Schmidt's place. In the outer room little Kozlovsky was squatting
on his heels in front of a copying-clerk. The latter was sitting on a tub turned
upside down, he was writing rapidly with the cuffs of his uniform tucked up.
Kozlovsky's face was careworn; he too looked as if he had not slept all night.
He glanced at Prince Andrey, and did not even nod to him.

“The second line.… Ready?” he went on, dictating to the clerk: “the Kiev
GREnadiers, the Podolsky …”

“Don't be in such a hurry, your honour,” the clerk answered rudely and
angrily, looking at Kozlovsky. Through the door he heard at that moment
Kutuzov's voice, eager and dissatisfied, and other unfamiliar voices
interrupting him. The sound of those voices, the inattention with which
Kozlovsky glanced at him, the churlishness of the harassed clerk, the fact that
the clerk and Kozlovsky were sitting round a tub on the floor at so little
distance from the commander-in-chief, and that the Cossacks holding the horses
laughed so loudly at the window—all made Prince Andrey feel that some grave
calamity was hanging over them.

Prince Andrey turned to Kozlovsky with urgent questions.

“In a minute, prince,” said Kozlovsky. “The disposition of Bagration's
troops…”

“What about capitulation?”

“Nothing of the sort; arrangements have been made for a battle!”

Prince Andrey went towards the door from which the sound of voices came. But
at the moment when he was going to open the door, the voices in the room paused,
the door opened of itself, and Kutuzov with his eagle nose and podgy face
appeared in the doorway. Prince Andrey was standing exactly opposite Kutuzov;
but from the expression of the commander-in-chief's one seeing eye it was
evident that thought and anxiety so engrossed him as to veil, as it were, his
vision. He looked straight into his adjutant's face and did not recognise
him.

“Well, have you finished?” he addressed Kozlovsky.

“In a second, your Excellency.”

Bagration, a short lean man, not yet elderly, with a resolute and impassive
face of oriental type, came out after the commander-in-chief.

“I have the honour to report myself,” Prince Andrey said for the second time,
rather loudly, as he handed Kutuzov an envelope.

“Ah, from Vienna? Very good! Later, later!” Kutuzov went out to the steps
with Bagration.

“Well, prince, good-bye,” he said to Bagration. “Christ be with you! May my
blessing bring you a GREat victory!” Kutuzov's face suddenly softened, and there
were tears in his eyes. With his left arm he drew Bagration to him, while with
his right hand, on which he wore a ring, he crossed him with a gesture evidently
habitual. He offered him his podgy cheek, but Bagration kissed him on the neck.
“Christ be with you!” repeated Kutuzov, and he went towards his carriage. “Get
in with me,” he said to Bolkonsky.

“Your Most High Excellency, I should have liked to be of use here. Allow me
to remain in Prince Bagration's detachment.”

“Get in,” said Kutuzov, and noticing that Bolkonsky still delayed: “I have
need of good officers myself, myself.”

They took their seats in the carriage and drove for some minutes in
silence.

“There is a GREat deal, a great deal of everything still before us,” he said,
with an expression of old-age clairvoyance, as though he saw all that was
passing in Bolkonsky's heart. “If one-tenth part of his detachment comes in, I
shall thank God,” added Kutuzov, as though talking to himself.

Prince Andrey glanced at Kutuzov, and unconsciously his eyes were caught by
the carefully washed seams of the scar on his temple, where the bullet had gone
through his head at Ismail, and the empty eyesocket, not a yard from him. “Yes,
he has the right to speak so calmly of the destruction of these men,” thought
Bolkonsky.

“That's why I ask you to send me to that detachment,” he said.

Kutuzov made no reply. He seemed to have forgotten what was said to him, and
sat plunged in thought. Five minutes later, swaying easily in the soft carriage
springs, Kutuzov addressed Prince Andrey. There was no trace of emotion on his
face now. With delicate irony he questioned Prince Andrey about the details of
his interview with the Emperor, about the comments he had heard at Court on the
Krems engagement, and about ladies of their common acquaintance.