War and Peace

“Alley! Alley!” said the Cossack, touching the prisoner’s arm to make him go on.

“The emperor! The emperor!” was suddenly heard among the hussars.

All began to run and bustle, and Rostóv saw coming up the road behind him several riders with white plumes in their hats. In a moment everyone was in his place, waiting.

Rostóv did not know or remember how he ran to his place and mounted. Instantly his regret at not having been in action and his dejected mood amid people of whom he was weary had gone, instantly every thought of himself had vanished. He was filled with happiness at his nearness to the emperor. He felt that this nearness by itself made up to him for the day he had lost. He was happy as a lover when the longed-for moment of meeting arrives. Not daring to look round and without looking round, he was ecstatically conscious of his approach. He felt it not only from the sound of the hoofs of the approaching cavalcade, but because as he drew near everything grew brighter, more joyful, more significant, and more festive around him. Nearer and nearer to Rostóv came that sun shedding beams of mild and majestic light around, and already he felt himself enveloped in those beams, he heard his voice, that kindly, calm, and majestic voice that was yet so simple! And as if in accord with Rostóv’s feeling, there was a deathly stillness amid which was heard the emperor’s voice.

“The Pávlograd hussars?” he inquired.

“The reserves, sire!” replied a voice, a very human one compared to that which had said: “The Pávlograd hussars?”

The emperor drew level with Rostóv and halted. Alexander’s face was even more beautiful than it had been three days before at the review. It shone with such gaiety and youth, such innocent youth, that it suggested the liveliness of a fourteen-year-old boy, and yet it was the face of the majestic emperor. Casually, while surveying the squadron, the emperor’s eyes met Rostóv’s and rested on them for not more than two seconds. Whether or no the emperor understood what was going on in Rostóv’s soul (it seemed to Rostóv that he understood everything), at any rate his light-blue eyes gazed for about two seconds into Rostóv’s face. A gentle, mild light poured from them. Then all at once he raised his eyebrows, abruptly touched his horse with his left foot, and galloped on.

The younger emperor could not restrain his wish to be present at the battle and, in spite of the remonstrances of his courtiers, at twelve o’clock left the third column with which he had been and galloped toward the vanguard. Before he came up with the hussars, several adjutants met him with news of the successful result of the action.

This battle, which consisted in the capture of a French squadron, was represented as a brilliant victory over the French, and so the emperor and the whole army, especially while the smoke hung over the battlefield, believed that the French had been defeated and were retreating against their will. A few minutes after the emperor had passed, the Pávlograd division was ordered to advance. In Wischau itself, a petty German town, Rostóv saw the emperor again. In the market place, where there had been some rather heavy firing before the emperor’s arrival, lay several killed and wounded soldiers whom there had not been time to move. The emperor, surrounded by his suite of officers and courtiers, was riding a bobtailed chestnut mare, a different one from that which he had ridden at the review, and bending to one side he gracefully held a gold lorgnette to his eyes and looked at a soldier who lay prone, with blood on his uncovered head. The wounded soldier was so dirty, coarse, and revolting that his proximity to the emperor shocked Rostóv. Rostóv saw how the emperor’s rather round shoulders shuddered as if a cold shiver had run down them, how his left foot began convulsively tapping the horse’s side with the spur, and how the well-trained horse looked round unconcerned and did not stir. An adjutant, dismounting, lifted the soldier under the arms to place him on a stretcher that had been brought. The soldier groaned.

“Gently, gently! Can’t you do it more gently?” said the emperor apparently suffering more than the dying soldier, and he rode away.

Rostóv saw tears filling the emperor’s eyes and heard him, as he was riding away, say to Czartorýski: “What a terrible thing war is: what a terrible thing! Quelle terrible chose que la guerre!”

The troops of the vanguard were stationed before Wischau, within sight of the enemy’s lines, which all day long had yielded ground to us at the least firing. The emperor’s gratitude was announced to the vanguard, rewards were promised, and the men received a double ration of vodka. The campfires crackled and the soldiers’ songs resounded even more merrily than on the previous night. Denísov celebrated his promotion to the rank of major, and Rostóv, who had already drunk enough, at the end of the feast proposed the emperor’s health. “Not ‘our sovereign, the emperor,’ as they say at official dinners,” said he, “but the health of our sovereign, that good, enchanting, and great man! Let us drink to his health and to the certain defeat of the French!”

“If we fought before,” he said, “not letting the French pass, as at Schön Grabern, what shall we not do now when he is at the front? We will all die for him gladly! Is it not so, gentlemen? Perhaps I am not saying it right, I have drunk a good deal—but that is how I feel, and so do you too! To the health of Alexander the First! Hurrah!”

“Hurrah!” rang the enthusiastic voices of the officers.

And the old cavalry captain, Kirsten, shouted enthusiastically and no less sincerely than the twenty-year-old Rostóv.

When the officers had emptied and smashed their glasses, Kirsten filled others and, in shirtsleeves and breeches, went glass in hand to the soldiers’ bonfires and with his long gray mustache, his white chest showing under his open shirt, he stood in a majestic pose in the light of the campfire, waving his uplifted arm.

“Lads! here’s to our sovereign, the emperor, and victory over our enemies! Hurrah!” he exclaimed in his dashing, old, hussar’s baritone.

The hussars crowded round and responded heartily with loud shouts.

Late that night, when all had separated, Denísov with his short hand patted his favorite, Rostóv, on the shoulder.

“As there’s no one to fall in love with on campaign, he’s fallen in love with the tsar,” he said.

“Denísov, don’t make fun of it!” cried Rostóv. “It is such a lofty, beautiful feeling, such a …”

“I believe it, I believe it, fwiend, and I share and appwove …”

“No, you don’t understand!”

And Rostóv got up and went wandering among the campfires, dreaming of what happiness it would be to die—not in saving the emperor’s life (he did not even dare to dream of that), but simply to die before his eyes. He really was in love with the tsar and the glory of the Russian arms and the hope of future triumph. And he was not the only man to experience that feeling during those memorable days preceding the battle of Austerlitz: nine tenths of the men in the Russian army were then in love, though less ecstatically, with their tsar and the glory of the Russian arms.

Chapter XI (#ulink_38a4836e-79ae-5ff7-8b30-acd79a6177a7)

The next day the emperor stopped at Wischau, and Villier, his physician, was repeatedly summoned to see him. At headquarters and among the troops near by the news spread that the emperor was unwell. He ate nothing and had slept badly that night, those around him reported. The cause of this indisposition was the strong impression made on his sensitive mind by the sight of the killed and wounded.

At daybreak on the seventeenth, a French officer who had come with a flag of truce, demanding an audience with the Russian emperor, was brought into Wischau from our outposts. This officer was Savary. The emperor had only just fallen asleep and so Savary had to wait. At midday he was admitted to the emperor, and an hour later he rode off with Prince Dolgorúkov to the advanced post of the French army.

It was rumored that Savary had been sent to propose to Alexander a meeting with Napoleon. To the joy and pride of the whole army, a personal interview was refused, and instead of the sovereign, Prince Dolgorúkov, the victor at Wischau, was sent with Savary to negotiate with Napoleon if, contrary to expectations, these negotiations were actuated by a real desire for peace.

Toward evening Dolgorúkov came back, went straight to the tsar, and remained alone with him for a long time.

On the eighteenth and nineteenth of November, the army advanced two days’ march and the enemy’s outposts after a brief interchange of shots retreated. In the highest army circles from midday on the nineteenth, a great, excitedly bustling activity began which lasted till the morning of the twentieth, when the memorable battle of Austerlitz was fought.

Till midday on the nineteenth, the activity—the eager talk, running to and fro, and dispatching of adjutants—was confined to the emperor’s headquarters. But on the afternoon of that day, this activity reached Kutúzov’s headquarters and the staffs of the commanders of columns. By evening, the adjutants had spread it to all ends and parts of the army, and in the night from the nineteenth to the twentieth, the whole eighty thousand allied troops rose from their bivouacs to the hum of voices, and the army swayed and started in one enormous mass six miles long.

The concentrated activity which had begun at the emperor’s headquarters in the morning and had started the whole movement that followed was like the first movement of the main wheel of a large tower clock. One wheel slowly moved, another was set in motion, and a third, and wheels began to revolve faster and faster, levers and cogwheels to work, chimes to play, figures to pop out, and the hands to advance with regular motion as a result of all that activity.

Just as in the mechanism of a clock, so in the mechanism of the military machine, an impulse once given leads to the final result; and just as indifferently quiescent till the moment when motion is transmitted to them are the parts of the mechanism which the impulse has not yet reached. Wheels creak on their axles as the cogs engage one another and the revolving pulleys whirr with the rapidity of their movement, but a neighboring wheel is as quiet and motionless as though it were prepared to remain so for a hundred years; but the moment comes when the lever catches it and obeying the impulse that wheel begins to creak and joins in the common motion the result and aim of which are beyond its ken.

Just as in a clock, the result of the complicated motion of innumerable wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the hands which show the time, so the result of all the complicated human activities of one hundred and sixty thousand Russians and French—all their passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm—was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three emperors—that is to say, a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history.

Prince Andrew was on duty that day and in constant attendance on the commander-in-chief.

At six in the evening, Kutúzov went to the emperor’s headquarters and after staying but a short time with the tsar went to see the grand marshal of the court, Count Tolstoy.

Bolkónski took the opportunity to go in to get some details of the coming action from Dolgorúkov. He felt that Kutúzov was upset and dissatisfied about something and that at headquarters they were dissatisfied with him, and also that at the emperor’s headquarters everyone adopted toward him the tone of men who know something others do not know: he therefore wished to speak to Dolgorúkov.

“Well, how d’you do, my dear fellow?” said Dolgorúkov, who was sitting at tea with Bilíbin. “The fête is for tomorrow. How is your old fellow? Out of sorts?”

“I won’t say he is out of sorts, but I fancy he would like to be heard.”

“But they heard him at the council of war and will hear him when he talks sense, but to temporize and wait for something now when Bonaparte fears nothing so much as a general battle is impossible.”

“Yes, you have seen him?” said Prince Andrew. “Well, what is Bonaparte like? How did he impress you?”

“Yes, I saw him, and am convinced that he fears nothing so much as a general engagement,” repeated Dolgorúkov, evidently prizing this general conclusion which he had arrived at from his interview with Napoleon. “If he weren’t afraid of a battle why did he ask for that interview? Why negotiate, and above all why retreat, when to retreat is so contrary to his method of conducting war? Believe me, he is afraid, afraid of a general battle. His hour has come! Mark my words!”

“But tell me, what is he like, eh?” said Prince Andrew again.

“He is a man in a gray overcoat, very anxious that I should call him ‘Your Majesty,’ but who, to his chagrin, got no title from me! That’s the sort of man he is, and nothing more,” replied Dolgorúkov, looking round at Bilíbin with a smile.

“Despite my great respect for old Kutúzov,” he continued, “we should be a nice set of fellows if we were to wait about and so give him a chance to escape, or to trick us, now that we certainly have him in our hands! No, we mustn’t forget Suvórov and his rule—not to put yourself in a position to be attacked, but yourself to attack. Believe me in war the energy of young men often shows the way better than all the experience of old Cunctators.”

“But in what position are we going to attack him? I have been at the outposts today and it is impossible to say where his chief forces are situated,” said Prince Andrew.

He wished to explain to Dolgorúkov a plan of attack he had himself formed.

“Oh, that is all the same,” Dolgorúkov said quickly, and getting up he spread a map on the table. “All eventualities have been foreseen. If he is standing before Brünn …”

And Prince Dolgorúkov rapidly but indistinctly explained Weyrother’s plan of a flanking movement.

Prince Andrew began to reply and to state his own plan, which might have been as good as Weyrother’s, but for the disadvantage that Weyrother’s had already been approved. As soon as Prince Andrew began to demonstrate the defects of the latter and the merits of his own plan, Prince Dolgorúkov ceased to listen to him and gazed absent-mindedly not at the map, but at Prince Andrew’s face.