Rostov stared again into Boris’s face and sighed. Berg came back in, and over a bottle the conversation between the three officers grew animated. The guardsmen told Rostov about their march and how they had been celebrated in Russia, in Poland and abroad. They talked of the sayings and doings of their commander, the grand duke, and told stories about his kind-heartedness and his short temper. Berg held back, as usual, when the subject didn’t concern him personally, but when it came to the grand duke’s temper he enjoyed telling how he had once fallen foul of the grand duke in Galicia, when his Highness was doing the rounds of the regiments and had got himself worked up over some irregularity in the troop movements. With the same sweet smile on his face he described how the grand duke had ridden up to him in a towering rage, shouting ‘Arnauts!’ (this insult, normally reserved for Albanians serving in the Turkish army, being the Tsarevich’s favourite term of abuse when he lost his temper) . . . and how he had asked for the captain . . . ‘Believe it or not, Count, I wasn’t terribly bothered because I knew I was in the right. I don’t mean to boast, you understand, Count, but I think I can claim to know the regimental rule-book backwards, and the standing orders too. I know them as well as I know the Lord’s Prayer. So you see, Count, in my company nothing gets overlooked. And I had nothing on my conscience. So I stepped forward.’ (Berg stood up and rehearsed how he had come forward with his hand at the salute. You couldn’t have imagined anything more deferential on a man’s face – or anything more confident.) ‘Well, then he laid into me, on and on for dear life – dear death for me – yelling “Arnauts!”, “Damn and blast!”, “Siberia!” ’ said Berg, with a knowing smile. ‘I knew I was in the right so I kept quiet – wouldn’t you have done, Count? “Have you lost your tongue?” he roared at me. I just kept quiet and – you know what, Count? – next day there wasn’t a word about it in the orders of the day. It just shows – all you have to do is keep cool,’ said Berg, pulling at his pipe and sending up smoke rings.
‘Oh yes, well done,’ said Rostov with a smile, but Boris could see that Rostov was preparing to make fun of Berg so he shrewdly changed the subject by asking Rostov to tell them how and where he had been wounded. That pleased Rostov and he launched into his story, getting more and more excited as he told it. His version of the battle at Schöngrabern was the usual version of a man who has been in a battle: he tells it as he would have liked it to have been, or as described by someone else, or in a version that just sounds good, anything but the way it really happened. Rostov was an honest young man who would never tell a deliberate lie. He set out with every intention of describing exactly what had occurred, but imperceptibly, unconsciously and inevitably he drifted into falsehood. If he had told the truth to these two, who had heard as many descriptions of cavalry charges as he had, had their own clear idea of what a charge was like and were expecting something similar, either they wouldn’t have believed him, or worse still, they would have assumed it was Rostov’s fault for not managing to do what was normally done by narrators of cavalry charges. He couldn’t just tell them that they’d been trotting forward together when he fell off his horse, sprained his arm and then ran as hard as he could into a wood to get away from a Frenchman. Besides, to tell everything exactly as it happened would have demanded enough self-control to say only what happened and nothing else. To tell the truth is a very difficult thing, and young people are hardly ever capable of it. His listeners were expecting to hear him describe how he had felt himself burning with excitement, stormed the enemy’s square defences, oblivious to everything, hacked his way in, mown men down right, left and centre, tasted blood with his sabre before collapsing from exhaustion, and all the rest. And that’s what he did describe.
