Bab Bab 210 · 第210章

On the morning of the twenty-fifth Pierre was leaving Mozháysk. At the

descent of the high steep hill, down which a winding road led out of the

town past the cathedral on the right, where a service was being held and

the bells were ringing, Pierre got out of his vehicle and proceeded on

foot. Behind him a cavalry regiment was coming down the hill preceded by

its singers. Coming up toward him was a train of carts carrying men who

had been wounded in the engagement the day before. The peasant drivers,

shouting and lashing their horses, kept crossing from side to side. The

carts, in each of which three or four wounded soldiers were lying

or sitting, jolted over the stones that had been thrown on the steep

incline to make it something like a road. The wounded, bandaged with

rags, with pale cheeks, compressed lips, and knitted brows, held on to

the sides of the carts as they were jolted against one another. Almost

all of them stared with naïve, childlike curiosity at Pierre’s white hat

and green swallow-tail coat.

Pierre’s coachman shouted angrily at the convoy of wounded to keep to

one side of the road. The cavalry regiment, as it descended the hill

with its singers, surrounded Pierre’s carriage and blocked the road.

Pierre stopped, being pressed against the side of the cutting in which

the road ran. The sunshine from behind the hill did not penetrate into

the cutting and there it was cold and damp, but above Pierre’s head was

the bright August sunshine and the bells sounded merrily. One of the

carts with wounded stopped by the side of the road close to Pierre. The

driver in his bast shoes ran panting up to it, placed a stone under one

of its tireless hind wheels, and began arranging the breech-band on his

little horse.

One of the wounded, an old soldier with a bandaged arm who was following

the cart on foot, caught hold of it with his sound hand and turned to

look at Pierre.

“I say, fellow countryman! Will they set us down here or take us on to

Moscow?” he asked.

Pierre was so deep in thought that he did not hear the question. He was

looking now at the cavalry regiment that had met the convoy of wounded,

now at the cart by which he was standing, in which two wounded men

were sitting and one was lying. One of those sitting up in the cart had

probably been wounded in the cheek. His whole head was wrapped in rags

and one cheek was swollen to the size of a baby’s head. His nose

and mouth were twisted to one side. This soldier was looking at the

cathedral and crossing himself. Another, a young lad, a fair-haired

recruit as white as though there was no blood in his thin face, looked

at Pierre kindly, with a fixed smile. The third lay prone so that his

face was not visible. The cavalry singers were passing close by:

Ah lost, quite lost... is my head so keen,

Living in a foreign land...

they sang their soldiers’ dance song.

As if responding to them but with a different sort of merriment, the

metallic sound of the bells reverberated high above and the hot rays of

the sun bathed the top of the opposite slope with yet another sort of

merriment. But beneath the slope, by the cart with the wounded near the

panting little nag where Pierre stood, it was damp, somber, and sad.

The soldier with the swollen cheek looked angrily at the cavalry

singers.

“Oh, the coxcombs!” he muttered reproachfully.

“It’s not the soldiers only, but I’ve seen peasants today, too....

The peasants—even they have to go,” said the soldier behind the cart,

addressing Pierre with a sad smile. “No distinctions made nowadays....

They want the whole nation to fall on them—in a word, it’s Moscow! They

want to make an end of it.”

In spite of the obscurity of the soldier’s words Pierre understood what

he wanted to say and nodded approval.

The road was clear again; Pierre descended the hill and drove on.

He kept looking to either side of the road for familiar faces, but only

saw everywhere the unfamiliar faces of various military men of different

branches of the service, who all looked with astonishment at his white

hat and green tail coat.

Having gone nearly three miles he at last met an acquaintance and

eagerly addressed him. This was one of the head army doctors. He was

driving toward Pierre in a covered gig, sitting beside a young surgeon,

and on recognizing Pierre he told the Cossack who occupied the driver’s

seat to pull up.

“Count! Your excellency, how come you to be here?” asked the doctor.

“Well, you know, I wanted to see...”

“Yes, yes, there will be something to see....”

Pierre got out and talked to the doctor, explaining his intention of

taking part in a battle.

The doctor advised him to apply direct to Kutúzov.

“Why should you be God knows where out of sight, during the battle?” he

said, exchanging glances with his young companion. “Anyhow his Serene

Highness knows you and will receive you graciously. That’s what you must

do.”

The doctor seemed tired and in a hurry.

“You think so?... Ah, I also wanted to ask you where our position is

exactly?” said Pierre.

“The position?” repeated the doctor. “Well, that’s not my line. Drive

past Tatárinova, a lot of digging is going on there. Go up the hillock

and you’ll see.”

“Can one see from there?... If you would...”

But the doctor interrupted him and moved toward his gig.

“I would go with you but on my honor I’m up to here”—and he pointed to

his throat. “I’m galloping to the commander of the corps. How do matters

stand?... You know, Count, there’ll be a battle tomorrow. Out of an army

of a hundred thousand we must expect at least twenty thousand wounded,

and we haven’t stretchers, or bunks, or dressers, or doctors enough for

six thousand. We have ten thousand carts, but we need other things as

well—we must manage as best we can!”

The strange thought that of the thousands of men, young and old, who

had stared with merry surprise at his hat (perhaps the very men he had

noticed), twenty thousand were inevitably doomed to wounds and death

amazed Pierre.

“They may die tomorrow; why are they thinking of anything but death?”

And by some latent sequence of thought the descent of the Mozháysk hill,

the carts with the wounded, the ringing bells, the slanting rays of the

sun, and the songs of the cavalrymen vividly recurred to his mind.

“The cavalry ride to battle and meet the wounded and do not for a moment

think of what awaits them, but pass by, winking at the wounded. Yet from

among these men twenty thousand are doomed to die, and they wonder at my

hat! Strange!” thought Pierre, continuing his way to Tatárinova.

In front of a landowner’s house to the left of the road stood carriages,

wagons, and crowds of orderlies and sentinels. The commander in chief

was putting up there, but just when Pierre arrived he was not in and

hardly any of the staff were there—they had gone to the church service.

Pierre drove on toward Górki.

When he had ascended the hill and reached the little village street, he

saw for the first time peasant militiamen in their white shirts and with

crosses on their caps, who, talking and laughing loudly, animated and

perspiring, were at work on a huge knoll overgrown with grass to the

right of the road.

Some of them were digging, others were wheeling barrowloads of earth

along planks, while others stood about doing nothing.

Two officers were standing on the knoll, directing the men. On seeing

these peasants, who were evidently still amused by the novelty of their

position as soldiers, Pierre once more thought of the wounded men at

Mozháysk and understood what the soldier had meant when he said: “They

want the whole nation to fall on them.” The sight of these bearded

peasants at work on the battlefield, with their queer, clumsy boots

and perspiring necks, and their shirts opening from the left toward

the middle, unfastened, exposing their sunburned collarbones, impressed

Pierre more strongly with the solemnity and importance of the moment

than anything he had yet seen or heard.