War And Peace: Book 10 - CHAPTER XXXVI

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• Author: Leo Tolstoy

PRINCE ANDREY'S REGIMENT was in the reserves, which were until two o'clock

stationed behind Semyonovskoye in complete inaction, under a hot artillery fire.

Before two o'clock the regiment, which had already lost over two hundred men,

was moved forward into the trampled oat-field, in that space between

Semyonovskoye and the battery redoubt, on which thousands of men were killed

that day, and on which, about two o'clock, there was directed the concentrated

fire of several hundreds of the enemy's cannons.

Not leaving that spot, nor discharging a single round of ammunition, the

regiment lost here another third of its men. In front, and especially on the

right side, the cannons kept booming in the smoke that never lifted, and from

the mysterious region of the smoke that hid all the country in front, there came

flying swiftly hissing cannon balls and slowly whizzing grenades. Sometimes, as

though to give them a breathing space, for a whole quarter of an hour all the

cannon balls and grenades flew over them, but at other times, in the course of a

single minute, several men out of the regiment would be swept off, and they were

busy the whole time dragging away the dead and carrying off the wounded.

With every fresh stroke the chances of life grew less and less for those who

were not yet killed. The regiment was divided into battalions three hundred

paces apart; but in spite of that, all the regiment was under the influence of

the same mood. All the men of the regiment were alike gloomy and silent. At rare

intervals there was the sound of talk in the ranks, but that sound was hushed

every time the falling thud and the cry of “stretchers!” was heard. For the

greater part of the time, by command of the officers, the men sat on the ground.

One, taking off his shako, carefully loosened and then drew up the folds of it;

another, crumbling the dry clay in his hands, rubbed up his bayonet with it;

another shifted and fastened the buckle of his shoulder straps; while another

carefully undid, and did up again, his leg bandages, and changed his boots. Some

built little houses of clods of the ploughed field, or plaited straws of

stubble. All of them appeared entirely engrossed in these pursuits. When men

were killed or wounded, when the stretchers trailed by, when our troops

retreated, when immense masses of the enemy came into view through the smoke, no

one took any notice of these circumstances. When our artillery or cavalry

advanced, when our infantry could be seen moving, approving observations could

be heard on all sides. But quite extraneous incidents that had nothing to do

with the battle were what attracted most notice; as though the attention of

these morally overstrained men found a rest in the commonplace incidents of

everyday life. Some batteries of artillery passed in front of their line. In one

of the ammunition carriages a horse had put its legs through the traces.

“Hey! look at the trace-horse!… Take her leg out! She'll fall!… Hey! they

don't see!…” Shouts rose from the ranks all through the regiment.

Another time the attention of all was attracted by a little brown dog, with

its tail in the air, who had come no one knew from where, and was running about

fussily in front of the ranks. All at once a cannon ball fell near it, and it

squealed and dashed away with its tail between its legs! Roars and shrieks of

laughter rang out from the whole regiment. But distractions of this kind did not

last more than a minute, and the men had been eight hours without food or

occupation, with the terror of death never relaxing for an instant, and their

pale and haggard faces grew paler and more haggard.

Prince Andrey, pale and haggard like every one else in the regiment, walked

to and fro in the meadow next to the oat-field from one boundary-line to the

other, with his hands clasped behind his back, and his eyes fixed on the ground.

There was no need for him to give orders, and nothing for him to do. Everything

was done of itself. The killed were dragged behind the line; the wounded were

removed, and the ranks closed up. If any soldiers ran away, they made haste to

return at once. At first Prince Andrey, thinking it his duty to keep up the

spirits of the men, and set them an example, had walked about among the ranks.

But soon he felt that there was nothing he could teach them. All his energies,

like those of every soldier, were unconsciously directed to restraining himself

from contemplating the horror of his position. He walked about the meadow,

dragging one leg after the other, making the grass rustle, and watching the

dust, which covered his boots. Then he strode along, trying to step on the

traces of the footsteps of the mowers on the meadow; or counting his steps,

calculated how many times he would have to walk from one boundary rut to another

to make a verst; or cut off the flowers of wormwood growing in the rut, and

crushing them in his hands, sniffed at the bitter-sweet, pungent odour. Of all

the thoughts of the previous day not a trace remained. He thought of nothing at

all. He listened wearily to the sounds that were ever the same, the whiz of the

shells above the booming of the cannon, looked at the faces of the men of the

first battalion, which he had gazed at to weariness already, and waited. “Here

it comes … this one's for us again!” he thought, listening to the whiz of

something flying out of the region of smoke. “One, another! More! Fallen” … He

stopped short and looked towards the ranks. “No; it has flown over. But that one

has fallen!” And he fell to pacing up and down again, trying to reach the next

boundary in sixteen steps.

A whiz and a thud! Five paces from him the dry soil was thrown up, as a

cannon ball sank into the earth. A chill ran down his back. He looked at the

ranks. Probably a number had been struck: the men had gathered in a crowd in the

second battalion.

“M. l'aide-de-camp,” he shouted, “tell the men not to crowd

together.”

The adjutant, having obeyed this instruction, was approaching Prince Andrey.

From the other side the major in command of the battalion came riding up.

“Look out!” rang out a frightened cry from a soldier, and like a bird, with

swift, whirring wings alighting on the earth, a grenade dropped with a dull thud

a couple of paces from Prince Andrey, near the major's horse. The horse, with no

question of whether it were right or wrong to show fear, snorted, reared, almost

throwing the major, and galloped away. The horse's terror infected the

men.

“Lie down!” shouted the adjutant, throwing himself on the ground. Prince

Andrey stood in uncertainty. The shell was smoking and rotating like a top

between him and the recumbent adjutant, near a bush of wormwood in the rut

between the meadow and the field.

“Can this be death?” Prince Andrey wondered, with an utterly new, wistful

feeling, looking at the grass, at the wormwood and at the thread of smoke

coiling from the rotating top. “I can't die, I don't want to die, I love life, I

love this grass and earth and air …”

He thought this, and yet at the same time he did not forget that people were

looking at him.

“For shame, M. l'aide-de-camp!” he said to the adjutant; “what sort of

…” He did not finish. Simultaneously there was a tearing, crashing sound, like

the smash of broken crockery, a puff of stifling fumes, and Prince Andrey was

sent spinning over, and flinging up one arm, fell on his face.

Several officers ran up to him. A great stain of blood was spreading over the

grass from the right side of his stomach.

The militiamen stood with the stretchers behind the officers. Prince Andrey

lay on his chest, with his face sunk in the grass; he was still breathing in

hard, hoarse gasps.

“Well, why are you waiting, come along!”

The peasants went up and took him by the shoulders and legs, but he moaned

piteously, and they looked at one another, and laid him down again.

“Pick him up, lay him on, it's all the same!” shouted some one. They lifted

him by the shoulders again and laid him on the stretcher.

“Ah, my God! my God! what is it?…The stomach! It's all over then! Ah, my

God!” could be heard among the officers. “It almost grazed my ear,” the adjutant

was saying. The peasants, with the stretcher across their shoulders, hurried

along the path they had trodden to the ambulance station.

“Keep step!…Aie!…these peasants!” cried an officer, seizing them by the

shoulders, as they jogged along, jolting the stretcher.

“Drop into it, Fyodor, eh?” said the foremost peasant.

“That's it, first-rate,” said the hindmost, falling into step.

“Your excellency? Eh, prince?” said the trembling voice of Timohin, as he ran

up and peeped over the stretcher.

Prince Andrey opened his eyes, and looked at the speaker from the stretcher,

through which his head had dropped, and closed his eyelids again.

The militiamen carried Prince Andrey to the copse, where there were vans and

an ambulance station. The ambulance station consisted of three tents, pitched at

the edge of a birch copse. In the wood stood the ambulance waggons and horses.

The horses in nose-bags were munching oats, and the sparrows flew up to them and

picked up the grains they dropped. Some crows, scenting blood, flitted to and

fro among the birches, cawing impatiently. For more than five acres round the

tents there were sitting or lying men stained with blood, and variously attired.

They were surrounded by crowds of dejected-looking and intently observant

soldiers, who had come with stretchers. Officers, trying to keep order, kept

driving them away from the place; but it was of no use. The soldiers, heedless

of the officers, stood leaning against the stretchers, gazing intently at what

was passing before their eyes, as though trying to solve some difficult problem

in this spectacle. From the tents came the sound of loud, angry wailing, and

piteous moans. At intervals a doctor's assistant ran out for water, or to point

out those who were to be taken in next. The wounded, awaiting their turn at the

tent, uttered hoarse groans and moans, wept, shouted, swore, or begged for

vodka. Several were raving in delirium. Prince Andrey, as a colonel, was carried

through the crowd of wounded not yet treated, and brought close up to one of the

tents, where his bearers halted awaiting instructions. Prince Andrey opened his

eyes, and for a long while could not understand what was passing around him. The

meadow, the wormwood, the black, whirling ball, and his passionate rush of love

for life came back to his mind. A couple of paces from him stood a tall,

handsome, dark-haired sergeant, with a bandaged head, leaning against a branch.

He had been wounded in the head and in the leg, and was talking loudly,

attracting general attention. A crowd of wounded men and stretcher-bearers had

gathered round him, greedily listening to his words.

“We regularly hammered him out, so he threw up everything; we took the king

himself,” the soldier was shouting, looking about him with feverishly glittering

black eyes. “If only the reserves had come up in the nick of time, my dear

fellow, there wouldn't have been a sign of him left, for I can tell you …”

Prince Andrey, like all the men standing round the speaker, gazed at him with

bright eyes, and felt a sense of comfort. “But isn't it all the same now?” he

thought. “What will be there, and what has been here? why was I so sorry to part

with life? There was something in this life that I didn't understand, and don't

understand.”

1. Ebooks list page : 84
2. War And Peace: Book 10 - CHAPTER XXXVI
3. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER I
4. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER II
5. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER III
6. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER IV
7. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER V
8. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER VI
9. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER VII
10. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER VIII
11. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER IX
12. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER X
13. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XI
14. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XII
15. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XIII
16. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XIV
17. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XV
18. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XVI
19. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XVII
20. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XVIII
21. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XIX

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