As the horse guards rushed past him and vanished in the smoke, Rostov wondered whether to gallop after them or go on with his mission. This was one of those brilliant cavalry charges by our horse guards which even the French were said to admire. Rostov was appalled to learn later that the vast mass of these big, fine men, all those brilliant, rich young officers and cadets who had galloped past him on horses worth thousands, after the charge had been reduced to eighteen survivors.
‘I don’t need to envy them. My turn will come, and anyway I might see the Emperor!’ thought Rostov as he galloped off.
When he reached the foot guards he could tell that cannonballs were whizzing about everywhere not so much from the sound of them as from the soldiers’ worried faces and an unusually grave and aggressive look about the officers.
He was riding behind a line of foot guards when he heard someone call his name: ‘Rostov!’
‘Who’s that?’ he called back without seeing that it was Boris.
‘I say, we’ve just been in the front line! Our regiment’s been attacking!’ said Boris, grinning cheerfully like any young man who has just been under fire for the first time.
Rostov stopped.
‘You haven’t!’ he said. ‘What was it like?’
‘We beat them back!’ said Boris, excited and eager to talk. ‘Can you imagine? . . .’ And Boris began describing how the guards had got into position, seen some troops in front of them and assumed they were Austrians, only to discover from the cannonballs coming at them that they were in the very front line and had to go straight into battle. Rostov couldn’t stay for the end of the story – he urged his horse on.
‘Where are you off to?’ asked Boris.
‘Taking a message to his Majesty.’
‘But he’s here!’ said Boris, who had mistaken Rostov’s ‘his Majesty’ for ‘his Highness’. Thinking he wanted the grand duke, he pointed him out a hundred yards away, wearing a helmet and a horse guard’s jacket, distinctive with his high shoulders and dark scowl and busy shouting at a pale-faced Austrian officer in a white uniform.
‘No, that’s the grand duke. I need the commander-in-chief or the Emperor,’ said Rostov, on the point of galloping away.
‘Count! Count!’ shouted Berg, running up from the other side, just as excited as Boris. ‘I’ve been wounded in my right hand,’ (and he pointed to his bloodstained hand bandaged in a handkerchief) ‘but I stayed there at the front, Count, holding my sword in my left hand. All of us, Count, the Von Bergs, we’ve all been valiant knights.’ Berg rambled on, but Rostov rode away without listening to any more.
Leaving the guards behind and crossing some open land, Rostov rode along past the reserves to make sure he didn’t end up (like last time with the charging cavalrymen) back in the front line, and he made a big detour to avoid the area where the gunfire and cannonade were at their loudest. Then suddenly, right in front of him and behind our troops, in a place where it would be unthinkable to find the enemy, he heard several muskets going off quite close.
‘What can it be?’ thought Rostov. ‘The enemy at the rear of our troops? It can’t be,’ he thought as a sense of dread gripped him, fear for himself and for the outcome of the whole battle. ‘Oh well, whatever happens,’ he said to himself, ‘I can’t keep on making detours. I must find out whether the commander-in-chief is here, and if it’s all over my job is to die with the others.’
The dark forebodings that had descended on Rostov seemed to be more and more justified the farther he advanced into the region beyond the village of Pratzen, which was teeming with troops of every kind.
‘What does it mean? What’s it all about? Who are they firing at? Who’s firing?’ Rostov started asking the Austrian and Russian soldiers cutting across him in a confused, scurrying shambles.
‘God knows!’ ‘All of them killed!’ ‘We’ve had it!’ Answers emerged from the running hordes in Russian, German and Czech, but these people knew no more than he did.
‘Kill them Germans!’ shouted one voice.
‘To hell with ’em – can’t trust ’em!’
‘To hell with these Russians,’ growled someone in German.
There were wounded men walking along the road. Shouts, moans and curses came together in a noisy chorus. The firing had begun to subside, and Rostov was to discover later that the Russian and Austrian soldiers had been firing at each other.
‘My God! What’s it all about?’ thought Rostov. ‘To think that any minute now the Emperor could arrive and see them! No, no, there can’t be many of these cowardly swine. This will soon be over, it’s not the real thing, it can’t be,’ he thought. ‘I just wish they’d get a move on!’
Nikolay Rostov could not get his head around the idea of being defeated and running away. Even though he could see French cannons and French troops deployed on Pratzen hill, the very hill where he had been told to look for the commander-in-chief, he could not and would not believe it.
CHAPTER 18
