War And Peace

He gazed round. And in the unflinching stare of those eyes trained on him with a mixture of respect and bemusement he could read sympathy for what he had said. His face grew brighter and brighter as a gentle smile of old age wrinkled out into starlike clusters at the corners of his mouth and his eyes. He paused and looked down uncertainly.

‘But when all’s said and done, who told them to come? They asked for it, the fucking bastards!’ he said suddenly, looking up at them. And with a flourish of his riding-whip he rode away, seen galloping for the first time in the entire campaign, with gleeful guffaws and roars of hurrah echoing through the breaking ranks of men.

Much of what Kutuzov had said went over the heads of the men. Not one of them could have summarized the field-marshal’s speech, which had begun with such solemnity and ended with an old man’s warmth and simplicity, but the heartfelt meaning underlying his words was something they did understand, along with a new feeling of solemn triumph in victory combined with pity for the enemy and also a sense of righteousness – a feeling conveyed even by the old man’s colourful language – and this feeling, lurking deep in the heart of every soldier, had expressed itself in the huge cheer that went on for so long. A little later, when one of the generals came to the commander-in-chief and asked if he wanted his carriage, a visibly moved Kutuzov surprised them by responding with a sob.

CHAPTER 7

The 8th of November saw the last of the skirmishes at Krasnoye. Darkness had fallen by the time the soldiers got to where they were halting for the night. All day it had been still and frosty, with the occasional sprinkling of snowflakes. By evening the clouds had gone, a purplish, starry sky could be seen through the last of the snowflakes, and the frost was hardening.

A regiment of musketeers, three thousand strong when it left Tarutino but now down to nine hundred, was among the first to reach its assigned halting-place, a village on the main road. The quartermasters who received the regiment reported that all the cottages were full of sick and dead Frenchmen, cavalrymen and staff-officers. There was only one hut left, and that was for the colonel.

The colonel rode on to his hut. The regiment went right through the village, and the soldiers stacked their arms near the last cottages along the road.

Like some huge, many-limbed beast the regiment got down to the business of preparing food and shelters to sleep in. One party of soldiers trudged off knee-deep in the snow and disappeared into a birch copse to the right of the village, which was soon ringing with the sounds of axes and long knives, the snap and crack of breaking branches and the loud voices of happy men. Another lot got down to work in among the regimental wagons and horses, which had been drawn up altogether, getting the cooking-pots and biscuits out, and foddering the horses. A third detachment scattered about the village, getting quarters ready for the staff-officers, carrying out the bodies of any dead Frenchmen left in the huts, and walking back with bits of board, dry wood and straw from the thatched roofs to feed their fires, and lengths of wattle for their shelters.

Behind the cottages at the end of the village more than a dozen soldiers were shouting away merrily as they worked at the high wattle wall of a barn that had already lost its roof and got it rocking.

‘Come on, boys, altogether – heave!’ came the voices, and in the darkness a huge section of snow-dusted wattle wall began to rock with a frosty creak. The bottom stakes creaked more and more until eventually the whole wall came crashing down, along with the soldiers who had been heaving against it, to a great roar of coarse laughter.

‘Pair off, boys! Give us that crowbar! That’s it. Where the hell are you going?’

‘No, we’ll have to work together . . . Hang on, boys! . . . Get them singing!’

They all kept quiet, and a soft, velvety voice started singing. At the end of the third verse, chiming in with the last note, twenty voices blending together roared out, ‘Oo-oo-oo-oo! It’s coming! All together! Come on, boys, one more heave!’ But despite their combined efforts the wall hardly moved, and in the silence that followed the men could be heard breathing heavily.

‘Hey, you boys in the Sixth! Come on you devils! Give us a hand . . . We’ll do the same for you.’

A couple of dozen men of the Sixth Company, who were on their way into the village, joined in with their struggling comrades, and soon the wattle wall, thirty-five feet long, seven feet wide and bending under its own weight, was being heaved along the village street, weighing them all down and cutting into the shoulders of the gasping soldiers.

‘Go on . . . Keep at it . . . Get on with you . . . Don’t stop now! . . . Hey! . . .’

The banter and the shouting and swearing went on and on.