‘And it could have been me not him!’ Rostov thought, and hardly able to hold back his tears of sympathy for the Tsar, he rode away in the depths of despair, not knowing where to go or why. Worst of all, he knew that his despair was all his own fault – his weakness had caused all this misery. He could have gone up to the Emperor . . . he should have done. This had been his one chance to demonstrate his devotion to the Emperor. And he had missed it . . . ‘What have I done?’ he thought. He turned his horse and galloped back to the place where he had seen the Emperor, but there was no one there across the ditch. Nothing but wagons and carriages going by. He learnt from one of the drivers that Kutuzov’s staff were not far away; they were in the village where the wagons were going. Rostov followed them.
In front of him Kutuzov’s groom was leading horses covered with their cloths. A wagon followed the groom, and after the wagon came a bow-legged old servant, hobbling along in cap and jacket.
‘Hey, Titus!’ said the groom.
‘What?’ answered the old man absent-mindedly.
‘Titus a drum!’
‘Stupid idiot!’ said the old man, spitting angrily. For a few minutes they all moved on in silence, and then the same silly joke was repeated.
It was coming up to five o’clock and the battle had been lost at every point. More than a hundred cannons were in French hands. Przebyszewski and his corps had surrendered. The other columns, having lost half their men, were retreating in complete disarray. The surviving forces of Langeron and Dokhturov mingled together in crowds on the banks of dams and ponds near the village of Augest.
By six o’clock the Augest dam was the only place where heavy gunfire could still be heard, and it came only from the French side, where several batteries newly deployed on the hillside outside Pratzen continued to fire down on our troops as they retreated.
In the rearguard Dokhturov and the others had re-formed their battalions and were firing back at the pursuing French cavalry. It was now getting dark. On the bank of the narrow Augest dam, where year after year the old miller in his cap had sat fishing while his grandson rolled up his sleeves and ran his fingers through the silvery fish thrashing about in the bucket; on the same dam where year after year the Moravians in their shaggy caps and blue jackets had peacefully driven their two-horse wagons of wheat up to the mill, and trundled back, dusty with flour that whitened their carts – on this narrow dam hideous men with hideous expressions running for their lives now scrambled together, jostling with wagons and cannons, falling under horses’ hooves and carriage-wheels, all squashed up close, falling down dead, stepping over dying men and killing each other, only to stagger a few steps and get killed in the same way.
Every ten seconds a cannonball would blast the air and come whizzing down, or a grenade would burst in the thick of the crowd, dealing out death and splashing the bystanders with blood. The newly promoted Dolokhov, who had been wounded in the hand, walked along with a dozen soldiers of his company and his general on horseback, the sole survivors from an entire regiment. Borne along by the crowd, they all squeezed together in the approach to the dam and stood there, squashed in from every side because a horse pulling a cannon had fallen down and the crowd were dragging it away. A cannonball killed somebody behind them, another one crashed down just ahead and Dolokhov was spattered with blood. The crowd surged forward desperately, squeezed up, moved on a step or two and stopped again. Everyone had the same thought: ‘If I can just get through the next hundred yards I’m sure I’ll be all right. Two minutes here and I’m a dead man.’
Dolokhov scrambled through from the centre of the crowd to the edge of the dam, shoved two soldiers aside and ran down on to the slippery ice that covered the millpond.
‘Come on down here!’ he shouted, bounding over the ice as it cracked under him. ‘Come on down here!’ he kept shouting to the cannon crew. ‘The ice is good! . . .’
The ice was good, but it sank and cracked, and it was obviously going to give way under his weight alone, never mind a cannon or a crowd of people. They all stared down at him and flooded to the brink, too scared to venture out on to the ice. His regimental commander, waiting on horseback at the end of the dam, raised one hand and opened his mouth wide to speak to Dolokhov. Suddenly a stray cannonball whizzed across so low over the heads of the crowd that everybody ducked. There was a terrible splashing sound and the general fell from his horse in a pool of blood. No one even looked at him, let alone thought of picking him up.
‘On to the ice! Get on the ice! Come down here! This way! Can’t you hear? Come on!’ Voices rang out on all sides after the ball had hit the general, though nobody knew what he was shouting or why.
