Rostov had been told to look for Kutuzov and the Emperor somewhere near the village of Pratzen. But they were not there, nor was there a single officer to be found in command, nothing but motley crowds of shambling troops. He urged on his weary horse to get through this rabble as fast as he could, but the further he went the more ragged the crowds became. When he reached the high road he found it teeming with carriages and every kind of vehicle, and all sorts of Austrian and Russian soldiers, some wounded, some not. There was a dull roar of people and traffic swarming along to the sinister sound of the cannonballs whizzing over from the French batteries now deployed on the heights of Pratzen.
‘Where’s the Emperor? Where’s Kutuzov?’ Rostov asked anyone prepared to stop. He got no answers.
At last, grabbing a soldier by the collar, he forced him to respond.
‘Listen, mate – that lot went off ages ago!’ the soldier said to Rostov, laughing for no good reason as he wrenched himself free. Letting him go – he must surely have been drunk – Rostov stopped the horse of a batman or groom serving someone of rank and started to interrogate him. He informed Rostov that only an hour before the Tsar had been driven down this very road in a carriage going at full speed, and the Tsar was seriously wounded.
‘It can’t be him,’ said Rostov. ‘It must be someone else.’
‘Saw it with my own eyes,’ said the groom with a complacent smirk, ‘I’m one as ought to know the Emperor – seen him lots of times in Petersburg. Sat in his carriage white as a sheet. You should’ve seen them driving those four black horses! Went past like thunder! You’d have to know the Tsar’s horses and Ilya Ivanych. Old Ilya, never drives nobody but the Tsar.’
Rostov let go of his horse and was about to move on when a wounded officer who happened to be passing spoke to him. ‘Who is it you’re looking for?’ he asked. ‘The commander-in-chief? Oh, he was killed by a cannonball. Got him in the chest right in front of our regiment.’
But another officer corrected him. ‘No, he was wounded, not killed.’
‘Who? Kutuzov?’ asked Rostov.
‘No, not Kutuzov, that other one, what’s his name? Same difference – not many left alive. That’s the way. Go to that village. They’re all there, the commanding officers,’ said the officer, pointing to the village of Gostieradeck, and he walked away.
Rostov kept his horse at walking pace, not knowing why he should go on or who to look for. The Tsar was wounded, the battle lost. He had to believe it now. He was heading where he had been directed, and in the distance he could see a church with a tower. Why hurry? What would he say now to the Tsar or Kutuzov, even if they were still alive and not wounded?
‘Go down this road, sir, and you’ll get killed!’ a soldier shouted to him. ‘You’ll get killed down there!’
‘Stupid nonsense!’ said another. ‘There’s no other way. That’s nearest.’ Rostov wondered for a moment but then rode off towards the place where they had said he would get killed.
‘It makes no difference now! If the Emperor’s wounded why should I save my skin?’ he thought. He rode into a patch of land where more men had been killed running away from Pratzen than anywhere else. The French had yet to take that ground, though the Russians – those who were unscathed or only lightly wounded – had long abandoned it. The dead and wounded lay about everywhere like heaps of manure on good plough-land, half a dozen bodies to an acre. The wounded crawled together in little groups of two or three with pitiful shouts and groans, though some of them struck Rostov as rather forced. He put his horse to a trot to avoid seeing all those suffering people, and now he felt scared, scared that he might lose not his life but the courage that he needed so much, and he knew it would not survive the sight of those wretched creatures.
The French had stopped firing at this field strewn with dead and wounded, because there was no one left to fire at, but once they spotted an adjutant trotting across they aimed a cannon at him and loosed off a few cannonballs. The impression made on him by these terrible whizzing noises and the dead bodies all round him blurred into a single sensation – he felt horrified and sorry for himself. He thought of his mother’s last letter. ‘What would she think,’ he wondered, ‘if she could see me now on this field with cannons aiming at me?’
