Coughing from the shouting and the smoke, the general stopped in despair. All seemed lost, when suddenly the French, who had been advancing on our men, ran back for no apparent reason, and disappeared from the outskirts of the wood. There among the trees were the Russian marksmen. It was Timokhin’s company, the only one to have maintained order and discipline in the wood, which had hidden in a gully, ambushed the French and now mounted a swift attack. Timokhin rushed at the French with such a furious yell, assailing them with such wild and drunken zeal with nothing but a sword in his hand, that the French were taken by surprise – they dropped their guns and fled. Dolokhov, running beside Timokhin, killed one French soldier at close quarters, and was the first to grab the collar of an officer who wanted to give himself up. Our men who had been running away returned, the battalions re-formed and the French, who had been on the point of splitting the left-flank forces, were for the moment driven back. Our reserves had time to join the main forces, and everyone stopped running away. The general had halted alongside Major Ekonomov and was seeing the retreating companies over a bridge when a soldier ran up to him, grabbed hold of his stirrup and almost clung to him. He was wearing a bluish coat of fine cloth, he had no pack or shako, his head was bandaged and a French ammunition pouch was slung across his shoulders. He was clutching an officer’s sword in both hands. The soldier had a very pale face, and his blue eyes looked defiantly into the general’s face; there was a smile on his mouth. The general was busy giving instructions to Major Ekonomov, but he could hardly ignore this man.
‘Sir, I have two trophies for you,’ said Dolokhov, pointing to the French sword and ammunition pouch. ‘I took an officer prisoner. I stopped a company.’ Dolokhov was gasping from exhaustion and he spoke haltingly. ‘The whole company is my witness. Please remember this, sir!’
‘Very good, very good,’ said the general, and he turned away to Major Ekonomov. But Dolokhov wouldn’t go; he undid his bandage, yanked it off and showed congealed blood on his head.
‘A bayonet wound. I stayed there at the front. Please remember this, your Excellency.’
Tushin’s battery had been forgotten, and it was only at the very end of the action that Prince Bagration, hearing the bombardment still coming from the centre, sent the duty staff officer and then Prince Andrey to order the battery to retreat with all speed. Any support for Tushin’s cannons had been ordered away in mid-battle, but the battery had kept on firing and was not taken by the French simply because the enemy didn’t believe that four guns could have the effrontery to go on firing without any protection. Quite the reverse, from the sustained action of this battery the French came to believe that the main Russian forces were concentrated here in the centre, and mounted two attacks on that point; both times they were driven back by grapeshot from the four cannons standing in solitude at the top of the hill.
It was not long after Prince Bagration’s departure that Tushin had succeeded in setting fire to Schöngrabern.
‘That’s got ’em moving! It’s on fire! Look at the smoke! Good shot! Well done! Look at the smoke! Look at the smoke!’ cried the gunners, taking heart.
In the absence of any instructions the four guns had been pointed towards the conflagration. The soldiers seemed to be urging the cannonballs on their way; every shot was hailed with a roar: ‘Good shot! There she goes! Look at that! . . . Nice one!’ Fanned by the wind, the fire was spreading quickly. French columns that had marched out of the village came straight back, but evidently in revenge for this nasty turn of events, the enemy positioned ten guns outside the village to the right, and began firing back at Tushin.
In their childlike glee at setting fire to the village, and the excitement of their lucky firing on the French, our gunners failed to spot this battery until two cannonballs and then four more fell among their guns, one killing two horses and another blowing a wagon driver’s leg off. Their blood was up, though, and their energies, far from flagging, simply found another outlet. The horses were replaced by others from a stand-by gun-carriage; the wounded were carried away and their four guns were ranged against a ten-strong enemy battery. One of Tushin’s fellow officers had been killed at the outset, and after an hour’s firing seventeen of the battery’s forty gunners were out of action, but the rest were as bright and eager as ever. Twice they had seen the French encroach on them from below; twice they had sprayed them with grapeshot.
The diminutive Tushin with his clumsy little gestures kept asking his orderly to ‘refill my pipe for this one’, as he put it, and he was forever running about scattering sparks all over and peering across at the French from under his tiny little hand.
