‘Right, my friend.’ Tushin got up, buttoned his coat, straightened his clothes and strode away from the fire.
In a hut made ready for him not far away from the gunners’ fire, Prince Bagration was taking dinner with several section commanders who had gathered about him. The little old colonel with the droopy eyes was there, greedily gnawing at a mutton bone, and also the general with twenty-two years of unblemished service, red in the face from a glass of vodka and the food, along with the staff officer wearing the signet ring, and Zherkov, who kept glancing nervously from one person to another, and Prince Andrey, looking pallid with his tense lips and feverishly glittering eyes.
Leaning in the corner of the cottage was the captured French standard, and the naive-looking auditor kept feeling the material, shaking his head and looking puzzled, perhaps because he really was interested in the flag, or perhaps because it was not very nice for a hungry man to watch them all eating when no place had been laid for him. In the next cottage was the French colonel taken prisoner by the dragoons. Our officers were continually flocking in to have a look at him. Prince Bagration was thanking the various commanding officers, and inquiring about the details of the battle and the losses. The general whose regiment had been inspected at Braunau was reporting that as soon as the engagement began he had withdrawn from the wood, picked up the wood-cutting contingent, let the French through, and then gone at them with the bayonets of two battalions and destroyed them.
‘Your Excellency, as soon as I saw that the first battalion was in trouble, I stood there in the road and I says to myself, “Why don’t I let them through and then open fire on them?” – and that’s just what I did.’
This was so much what he wanted to have done, and so much regretted not doing, that he seemed to think it had really happened like that. Well, maybe it had. Who could tell in all that confusion what had happened and what hadn’t?
‘Oh, by the way, sir, I beg to report,’ he went on, remembering Dolokhov’s conversation with Kutuzov and his own recent encounter with the disgraced officer, ‘that Private Dolokhov, who was reduced to the ranks, took a French officer prisoner before my very eyes and fought with particular distinction.’
‘Sir, I watched the attack of the Pavlograd hussars, er . . . here,’ put in Zherkov glancing around uneasily. He hadn’t seen a single hussar all day, but he had heard something about them from an infantry officer. ‘They broke up two squares, sir.’
Several men smiled, as always when Zherkov held forth, expecting a joke. But realizing that his words redounded to the glory of our armed struggle on that momentous day, they all suddenly looked serious, though many of them knew full well that what he was saying was a complete fabrication. Prince Bagration turned to the old colonel.
‘Gentlemen, I thank you one and all. Every branch of the service has behaved heroically – infantry, cavalry and artillery. How did two cannons come to be abandoned in the centre?’ he inquired, looking for someone to respond. (Prince Bagration didn’t even ask about the guns on the left flank; he knew they had all been abandoned at the very outset.) ‘Didn’t I send you?’ he added, addressing the duty staff officer.
‘One was put out of action,’ answered the staff officer, ‘but the other . . . well, I can’t explain. I was there all the time myself, fully in control, and I’d just left there . . . Well, yes, it was pretty hot,’ he added modestly.
Someone said that Captain Tushin was at hand in the village and had been sent for.
‘Oh, but you went there,’ said Prince Bagration, turning to Prince Andrey.
‘Yes, I did. We must have just missed each other,’ said the staff officer, smiling affably at Bolkonsky.
‘I didn’t have the pleasure of seeing you,’ said Prince Andrey, coldly and sharply.
No one spoke. Tushin appeared in the doorway, timidly squeezing through at the back of the generals. Edging around behind them in the crowded hut, embarrassed as always before his superior officers, Tushin failed to see the flagstaff and tripped over it, to laughter from some of the officers.
‘How did the cannon come to be abandoned?’ asked Bagration, frowning not so much at the captain as at the highly amused officers, among whom Zherkov was laughing loudest of all. Only now, stared at so fiercely by his commander, did Tushin conceive the full horror of his crime and disgrace in losing two cannons and remaining alive. He had been so excited that until this very moment nothing like this had occurred to him. The officers’ laughter had confused him even more. He stood there in front of Bagration, his jaw quivering, scarcely able to get his words out.
‘Sir . . . I . . . I don’t know . . . I . . . er . . . didn’t have the men, sir.’
‘You could have got men from your cover!’
