THE GENERAL after whom Pierre galloped trotted downhill, turned off sharply to the left, and Pierre, losing sight of him, galloped into the middle of a battalion of infantry marching ahead of him. He tried to get away from them, turning to left and to right; but there were soldiers everywhere, all with the same anxious faces, preoccupied with some unseen, but evidently serious, business. They all looked with the same expression of annoyed inquiry at the stout man in the white hat, who was, for some unknown reason, trampling them under his horse's feet.
“What does he want to ride into the middle of a battalion for?” one man shouted at him. Another gave his horse a shove with the butt-end of his gun; and Pierre, leaning over on the saddle-bow, and scarcely able to hold in his rearing horse, galloped out to where there was open space in front of the soldiers.
Ahead of him he saw a bridge, and at the bridge stood the soldiers firing. Pierre rode towards them. Though he did not know it, he rode up to the bridge over the Kolotcha, between Gorky and Borodino, which was attacked by the French in one of the first actions. Pierre saw there was a bridge in front of him, and that the soldiers were doing something in the smoke on both sides of the bridge, and in the meadow among the new-mown hay he had noticed the day before. But in spite of the unceasing fire going on there, he had no notion that this was the very centre of the battle. He did not notice the bullets whizzing on all sides, and the shells flying over him; he did not see the enemy on the other side of the river, and it was a long time before he saw the killed and wounded, though many fell close to him. He gazed about him with a smile still on his face.
“What's that fellow doing in front of the line?” some one shouted at him again.
“To the left,” “to the right,” men shouted to him. Pierre turned to the right, and unwittingly rode up to an adjutant of General Raevsky's, with whom he was acquainted. The adjutant glanced wrathfully at Pierre; and he, too, was apparently about to shout at him, but recognising him, he nodded.
“How did you come here?” he said, and galloped on. Pierre, feeling out of place and of no use, and afraid of getting in some one's way again, galloped after him.
“What is it, here? Can I go with you?” he asked.
“In a minute, in a minute,” answered the adjutant, and galloping up to a stout colonel in the meadow, he gave him some message, and then addressed Pierre. “What has brought you here, count?” he said to him, with a smile. “Are you still curious?”
“Yes, yes,” said Pierre. But the adjutant, turning his horse's head, rode on further.
“Here it's all right,” said the adjutant; “but on the left flank, in Bagration's division, it's fearfully hot.”
“Really?” said Pierre. “Where's that?”
“Why, come along with me to the mound; we can get a view from there. But it's still bearable at our battery,” said the adjutant. “Are you coming?”
“Yes, yes, I'll go with you,” said Pierre, looking about him, trying to see his groom. It was only then for the first time that Pierre saw wounded men, staggering along and some borne on stretchers. In the meadow with the rows of sweet-scented hay, through which he had ridden the day before, there lay motionless across the rows one soldier with his shako off, and his head thrown awkwardly back. “And why haven't they taken that one?” Pierre was beginning, but seeing the adjutant's set face looking in the same direction, he was silent.
Pierre did not succeed in finding his groom, and rode along the hollow with the adjutant towards Raevsky's redoubt. His horse dropped behind the adjutant's, and jolted him at regular intervals.
“You are not used to riding, count, I fancy?” asked the adjutant.
“Oh no, it's all right; but it does seem to be hopping along somehow,” said Pierre, with a puzzled look.
“Ay! … but he's wounded,” said the adjutant, “the right fore-leg above the knee. A bullet, it must have been. I congratulate you, count,” he said, “you have had your baptism of fire now.”
After passing in the smoke through the sixth corps behind the artillery, which had been moved forward and was keeping up a deafening cannonade, they rode into a small copse. There it was cool and still and full of the scents of autumn. Pierre and the adjutant got off their horses and walked on foot up the hill.
“Is the general here?” asked the adjutant on reaching the redoubt.
“He was here just now; he went this way,” some one answered, pointing to the right.
The adjutant looked round at Pierre, as though he did not know what to do with him.
“Don't trouble about me,” said Pierre. “I'll go up on to the mound; may I?”
“Yes, do; you can see everything from there, and it's not so dangerous, and I will come to fetch you.”
Pierre went up to the battery, and the adjutant rode away. They did not see each other again, and only much later Pierre learned that that adjutant had lost an arm on that day.
The mound—afterwards known among the Russians as the battery mound, or Raevsky's battery, and among the French as “the great redoubt,” “fatal redoubt,” and “central redoubt”—was the celebrated spot at which tens of thousands of men were killed, and upon which the French looked as the key of the position.
The redoubt consisted of a mound, with trenches dug out on three sides of it. In the entrenchments stood ten cannons, firing through the gaps left in the earthworks.
In a line with the redoubt on both sides stood cannons, and these too kept up an incessant fire. A little behind the line of cannons were troops of infantry. When Pierre ascended this mound, he had no notion that this place, encircled by small trenches and protected by a few cannons, was the most important spot in the field.
He fancied, indeed (simply because he happened to be there), that it was a place of no importance whatever.
Pierre sat down on the end of the earthwork surrounding the battery and gazed at what was passing around him with an unconscious smile of pleasure. At intervals Pierre got up, and with the same smile on his face walked about the battery, trying not to get in the way of the soldiers, who were loading and discharging the cannons and were continually running by him with bags and ammunition. The cannons were firing continually, one after another, with deafening uproar, enveloping all the country round in clouds of smoke.
In contrast to the painful look of dread in the infantry soldiers who were guarding the battery, here in the battery itself, where a limited number of men were busily engaged in their work, and shut off from the rest of the trench, there was a general feeling of eager excitement, a sort of family feeling shared by all alike.
The appearance of Pierre's unmartial figure and his white hat at first impressed this little group unfavourably. The soldiers cast sidelong glances of surprise and even alarm at him, as they ran by. The senior artillery officer, a tall, long-legged, pock-marked man, approached Pierre, as though he wanted to examine the action of the cannon at the end, and stared inquisitively at him.
A boyish, round-faced, little officer, quite a child, evidently only just out of the cadets' school, and very conscientious in looking after the two cannons put in his charge, addressed Pierre severely.
“Permit me to ask you to move out of the way, sir,” he said. “You can't stay here.”
The soldiers shook their heads disapprovingly as they looked at Pierre. But as the conviction gained ground among them that the man in the white hat was doing no harm, and either sat quietly on the slope of the earthwork, or, making way with a shy and courteous smile for the soldiers to pass, walked about the battery under fire as calmly as though he were strolling on a boulevard, their feeling of suspicious ill-will began to give way to a playful and kindly cordiality akin to the feeling soldiers always have for the dogs, cocks, goats, and other animals who share the fortunes of the regiment. The soldiers soon accepted Pierre in their own minds as one of their little circle, made him one of themselves, and gave him a name: “our gentleman” they called him, and laughed good-humouredly about him among themselves.
A cannon ball tore up the earth a couple of paces from Pierre. Brushing the earth off his clothes, he looked about him with a smile.
“And how is it you're not afraid, sir, upon my word?” said a broad, red-faced soldier, showing his strong, white teeth in a grin.
“Why, are you afraid then?” asked Pierre.
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