‘Hello, Count. I’m on my way back from headquarters. Have you heard about Rayevsky’s amazing feat?’ And the officer launched into a detailed account of the battle of Saltanov that he had picked up at headquarters.
Rostov went on smoking his pipe, wriggling his neck where the rainwater was trickling down, listening with half an ear and glancing from time to time at the young Ilyin who was squeezed up close by. Ilyin, a boy of sixteen new to the regiment, looked up to Nikolay just as Nikolay had looked up to Denisov seven years before. Ilyin tried to imitate everything Rostov did, and adored him like a girl.
The officer with mutton-chop whiskers, Zdrzhinsky, was going on about the dam at Saltanov, portentously described by him as the Russian Thermopylae,9 and the heroic deed performed there by General Rayevsky, a deed worthy of the ancients. Zdrzhinsky told how Rayevsky had gone out on to the dam with his two sons under a terrible hail of fire and charged forward with them at his side. Rostov listened but, far from encouraging Zdrzhinsky in his transports with a sympathetic word or two, he assumed the air of a man who was embarrassed by what he was hearing but had no intention of raising any objections. With Austerlitz and the campaign of 1807 behind him, Rostov knew from personal experience that everybody lies, as he had done, when it comes to describing deeds of war. Secondly, he was too experienced not to be aware that everything happens on a battlefield in a way that totally transcends our imagination and powers of description. For these reasons he didn’t like Zdrzhinsky’s story, and didn’t like Zdrzhinsky himself, with his way of bending right down and thrusting his moustaches straight in the face of the person he was talking to. It was a tight squeeze in the little shelter and he was squeezing them more. Rostov watched him and said not a word. ‘In the first place, the dam they were charging must have been so crowded and chaotic that if Rayevsky really had gone forward with his sons it couldn’t have had any effect on anybody beyond the ten or twelve men closest to him,’ thought Rostov. ‘Nobody else could have seen Rayevsky on the dam or who was with him. But even the ones who did see him couldn’t have got much of a boost from it – why should they bother about Rayevsky’s warm fatherly feelings when their own skins were at stake? Anyway, the fate of Mother Russia didn’t depend on the Saltanov dam being taken or not taken, as was the case at Thermopylae, so they say. So why make a sacrifice like that? What’s the point in getting your own children mixed up in a battle? I wouldn’t expose my brother, Petya, to any danger, or even Ilyin, and he’s nothing to me, though he’s a nice boy – I’d do what I could to keep them somewhere safe and sheltered.’ These were the thoughts that ran through Rostov’s mind as he listened to Zdrzhinsky. But he didn’t say a word about them, being too experienced even for that. He knew that stories like this redounded to the glory of our war effort, so it was best to pretend not to doubt them. This is what he did.
‘Well, that’s it. I’ve had enough,’ said Ilyin, noticing that Rostov didn’t like Zdrzhinsky’s talk. ‘Stockings, shirt, the lot – I’m soaked. I’m off to find somewhere else to shelter. I think the rain may have eased off.’
Ilyin walked out and Zdrzhinsky rode away.
Five minutes later Ilyin was back, splashing through the mud as he ran towards the shelter.
‘Hurrah! Rostov, let’s get going. Guess what I’ve found – an inn, a couple of hundred yards away, and our boys are there already. It’s a chance to dry out, and Marya Genrikhovna’s there too.’
Marya Genrikhovna was the regimental doctor’s wife, a pretty young German girl whom he had married in Poland. Being short of money or reluctant to part from his young wife in the early days of their marriage, the doctor took her with him everywhere; she was part of the regiment and his jealousy made him the butt of many a joke among the hussar officers.
Rostov flung a cape over his shoulders, yelled across to Lavrushka to follow on with their things, and set off with Ilyin, slipping in the mud and splashing straight through pools in the drizzling rain with intermittent flashes of lightning in the distance searing through the evening darkness.
‘Rostov, where are you?’
‘Over here . . . Look at that lightning!’ they called to one another.
CHAPTER 13
The doctor’s little covered cart stood waiting by an abandoned inn; inside there were half a dozen officers. Marya Genrikhovna, a buxom little German blonde, was sitting on a broad bench in the front corner wearing her short dressing-gown and night-cap. Her husband, the doctor, lay asleep just behind her. Rostov and Ilyin came in to a raucous welcome of shouting and happy laughter.
‘Hey! You’re having a wonderful time in here!’ said Rostov with a laugh.
‘Well, don’t just stand there gawping at us!’
