‘All those cavalrymen marching into battle, coming across wounded soldiers, never stopping to think what’s in store for them – they just march past winking at their wounded comrades. And of all those men, twenty thousand are doomed to die – and they think my hat’s funny! It’s weird!’ thought Pierre, moving on towards Tatarinova.
Outside some gentleman’s house on the left side of the road there were carriages, wagons and orderlies and sentries in droves. This was where his Serene Highness, the commander-in-chief, was staying. But when Pierre arrived he was out, and so were most of the staff. They had all gone to church. Pierre pressed on towards Gorki, where he drove uphill and found himself on the little village street. There he had his first sight of conscripted peasants in their white shirts, with crosses on their caps. Brimming with energy and running with sweat, there they were on the right-hand side of the road working away at a huge grass-covered mound with raucous comments and roars of laughter. Some were digging, some were wheeling the earth away in barrows, while a third lot stood around doing nothing.
Two officers stood on the knoll telling them what to do. At the sight of these peasants, so obviously revelling in their new-found status as soldiers, Pierre thought again of the wounded men at Mozhaysk, and now he could see what the soldier had meant with his ‘Chuck everybody at ’em’. The spectacle of these bearded peasants toiling on the field of battle with their funny, clumsy boots, their sweaty necks, one or two of them with shirts open from top left to bottom right showing their sunburnt collar-bones, told Pierre more about the primacy and solemn meaning of the here and now than anything he had yet seen and heard.
CHAPTER 21
Pierre got out of his carriage, walked past the toiling peasants and climbed up the mound which according to the doctor offered a good view of the field of battle.
It was about eleven in the morning. The sun was behind Pierre a little to his left, and it shone down brightly through the clear, rarefied air on the huge vista sprawling before him like an amphitheatre on rising ground.
The main road from Smolensk cut through the amphitheatre upwards at the top left, and in its meandering course it passed through a village with a white church five or six hundred yards away at the bottom of the hill. This was Borodino. The road cut down below the village, crossed over a bridge and then rose steadily, weaving up and down and in and out, until it got to the hamlet of Valuyev, clearly visible about four miles away – and that’s where Napoleon was now. Beyond Valuyev the road disappeared into yellowing woodland on the horizon. In among those trees, far away amidst the birches and the firs on the right-hand side of the road, stood the gleaming sunlit cross and belfry of the Kolotsky monastery. At various places in the blue distance, to the right and left of the woodland and the road, smoke rose up from camp-fires and you could see the indistinct outline of massed troops, ours and the enemy’s. Off to the right, the rivers Kolocha and Moskva ran through countryside that was broken and hilly. The villages of Bezzubovo and Zakharino could be seen through gaps in the hills. Over to the left the ground was flatter, with fields of corn, and smoke rose from a single village that had been set on fire – Semyonovsk.
Everything Pierre saw on either hand looked so indistinct that, glancing left or right over the landscape, he could find nothing that quite lived up to his expectations. Nowhere was there a field of battle as such, the kind of thing he had expected; there was nothing but ordinary fields, clearings, troops, woods, smoking camp-fires, villages, mounds and little streams. Here was a living landscape, and try as he might he could not make out any military positioning. He could not even tell our troops from theirs.
‘I’ve got to ask someone who knows about these things,’ he thought, and he turned to an officer who was much taken with the sight of his huge, unmilitary figure.
‘Excuse me,’ said Pierre. ‘What’s that village down there?’
‘I think it’s called Burdino, isn’t it?’ said the officer, turning to ask his comrade.
‘Borodino,’ said the other man, putting him right.
The officer was obviously delighted at the chance to have a chat, and he came over to Pierre.
‘Is that where our men are?’ asked Pierre.
‘Yes, and that’s the French, a bit further away,’ said the officer. ‘There you are, you can see them, just over there.’
‘And are our men over yonder?’ asked Pierre.
‘Yes, you can see them with the naked eye . . . Look, there they are!’ The officer pointed to columns of smoke on the left rising up beyond the river, and his face had the same stern and serious expression that Pierre had noticed on many of the faces he had come across.
‘Ah, that’s the French! What about those over there?’ Pierre was now pointing to a slight rise on the left with some troops moving round it.
‘No, they’re ours.’
