War And Peace полностью

‘It’s one of our boys. He’s been taken prisoner . . . Yes, he has . . . Are they going to take me? Who are these people?’ Rostov was still wondering – he could hardly believe his eyes. ‘Is it the French?’ He looked at the Frenchmen running towards him, and although only a few seconds before he had been galloping along, dying to get at them and hack them to pieces, now that they were so near everything seemed so ghastly that again he couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘Who are they? Why are they running? They’re not after me! They can’t be after me! Why? They can’t want to kill me! Me. Everybody loves me!’ He remembered all the love he had had from his mother, from his family and his friends, and the idea of the enemy wanting to kill him seemed absurd. ‘But they might want to!’ He had been standing there rigid for more than ten seconds, not taking anything in. The hook-nosed Frenchman was getting near, so near you could see the look on his face. And the sight of this rampaging foreigner’s face as he sprinted breathlessly towards him with fixed bayonet suddenly terrified Rostov. He grabbed his pistol, and instead of firing he hurled it at the Frenchman and dashed towards the bushes as fast as his legs would carry him. Gone were the feelings of doubt and conflict that had pursued him across the bridge at Enns – he was running now like a hare chased by dogs. His whole being was reduced to a single sensation – he was terrified and running for his young and happy life. He scorched the ground, flew across fields and soared over hedges like the lively child he had once been, chasing his friends, once or twice turning his kind, pale, youthful face to look back, only to feel a chill of horror run down his spine. ‘No, don’t look back,’ he thought, but when he got to the bushes he did glance round once more. The Frenchmen had given up, and even as he looked round the first man was just slowing down from a gentle trot to a walk, and turning round to yell back to one of his pals. Rostov stopped.

‘It can’t be right,’ he thought. ‘They can’t have been going to kill me.’ Meanwhile his left arm felt heavy, as if a great weight had been hung on it. He could run no further. The Frenchman stopped too and aimed at him. Rostov squeezed his eyes shut and ducked. One bullet sang past his head, then another. He gathered what strength he had left, took his left hand in his right and ran into the bushes. There in the bushes were the Russian marksmen.

CHAPTER 20

The infantry regiments that had been caught napping in the wood were now rushing out with companies mixing together, and all of them retreating in a shambles. It only took one panicky soldier to call out, ‘We’re cut off!’, meaningless words perhaps but terrifying on any battlefield, for them to affect the entire mass of men.

‘Surrounded! Cut off! We’ve had it!’ they shouted as they ran.

The moment their general heard musket-fire and shouting from the rear he realized something terrible had happened to his regiment, and the thought that he, an exemplary officer with a long and blameless service career, might now be accused by his superiors of negligence or dereliction of duty struck him so forcibly that he suddenly became oblivious of everything else – the insubordinate cavalry colonel, his own important role as a general and, what mattered most, any sense of danger or thought of self-preservation. Clutching the pommel of his saddle and spurring his horse, he galloped off to the regiment under a hail of bullets that sprayed everywhere but luckily didn’t hit him. His sole purpose was to find out what was wrong and put it right if it had been his fault, anything to avoid being censured, now, after twenty-two years of exemplary, unblemished service.

He galloped unscathed through the French forces and emerged from the wood into a field where our men were ignoring orders and running away downhill. This was now one of those decisive moral points which turn a battle. Would this rabble of soldiers respond to their commander’s voice, or would they just look at him and keep running? Despite all the desperate shouts from a commander who had once put the fear of God into every last soldier, despite his infuriated, purple face, contorted beyond all recognition, even despite the wild brandishing of his sabre, the soldiers kept running, yelling at each other, firing in the air and ignoring every word of command. That moral turning point on which a battle hinges was unmistakably the way of panic.