War And Peace

And the soldier, still turning the ramrod, glanced darkly at Pierre. Pierre turned away and stared into the shadows. A Russian soldier, the one who had been shoved aside, was sitting near the fire patting something. Pierre took a closer look and saw the lavender-grey dog sitting by the soldier, wagging her tail.

‘She’s come then . . .’ said Pierre. ‘Old Plat . . .’ He couldn’t finish what he was saying. All at once, a host of memories rose up in Pierre’s mind, all of them instantly interlinked – the look that Platon had given him as he sat there under the tree, the shot they had heard from that very spot, the dog howling, the soldiers’ guilty faces as they ran past, the smoking musket, Karatayev’s absence when they got to the halting-place – and it was just beginning to sink in that Karatayev had been killed when another memory rose up in his mind, coming out of nowhere, a summer evening spent with a beautiful Polish lady on the verandah of his house in Kiev. And without quite managing to connect today’s memories together or make anything of them, Pierre closed his eyes, and the picture of a summer evening in the country blended with the memory of going for a swim and that shimmering ball of liquid, and there he was plunging down, with the waters closing over his head.

Before sunrise he was woken up by loud and rapid firing and a lot of shouting. The French were rushing past.

‘The Cossacks!’ one of them shouted, and a minute later Pierre was surrounded by a crowd of Russians. It took some time for him to grasp what had happened to him. He could hear his comrades crying and sobbing with joy on every side.

‘Brothers! Our boys! You lovely boys!’ The old soldiers were shouting, weeping and hugging the Cossacks and hussars, hussars and Cossacks that crowded round the prisoners, offering them clothes, boots, bread. Pierre sat there sobbing in their midst. He couldn’t get a word out. He hugged the first soldier who came near, and wept as he kissed him.

Dolokhov was standing at the gate of the dilapidated manor house, watching as crowds of disarmed Frenchmen filed past. The French, excited by all that had happened, were talking in raised voices, but as they walked past Dolokhov, who stood there lashing his boots with his riding-crop, and watching them with a cold, glassy stare that boded nothing but ill, their chatter died away. One of Dolokhov’s Cossacks stood across from him, counting the prisoners, chalking them off in hundreds on the gate.

‘How many’s that?’ asked Dolokhov.

‘Getting on for two hundred,’ answered the Cossack.

‘Move along there,’ said Dolokhov, deliberately using an expression picked up from the French, and whenever his eyes met the eyes of the passing prisoners they had a cruel glint in them.

It was with a sombre look that Denisov, hat in hand, walked behind the Cossacks as they processed towards a hole that had been dug in the garden, carrying the body of Petya Rostov.

CHAPTER 16

From the 28th of October, when the frosts set in, the flight of the French took on a more tragic character, with men freezing to death or being roasted to death by the camp-fires, while the Emperor, the kings and the dukes continued on their way in fur coats and carriages, taking their stolen treasure with them, though, in essence, the French army’s process of flight and disintegration went on unchanged.

Between Moscow and Vyazma the French army of seventy-three thousand men (not including the guardsmen, who had spent the whole war doing nothing but pillage) had been reduced to a mere thirty-six thousand, even though only five thousand had been killed in battle. This is the first term in a progressive sequence; it can be used to calculate the remaining terms with mathematical exactitude.

The French army went on melting away and disappearing at the same rate from Moscow to Vyazma, Vyazma to Smolensk, Smolensk to the Berezina, from the Berezina to Vilna, regardless of variations in the degree of cold or pursuit, the extent to which they found the way blocked and any other conditions operating individually. After Vyazma the French troops went down from three columns to one great mass, and stayed like that to the end. Allowing for the fact that generals feel able to take liberties with the truth when describing the state of their army, we note that Berthier wrote as follows to the Emperor: