From the flèches they rode off further to the left down a road that wound its way through a thick copse of small birch-trees. In the middle of the wood a brown hare with white paws hopped out on to the road just in front of them, startled by the sound of so many hoofbeats. Panicking, it skipped along the road for quite some time to general amusement and much laughter, and it was only when several voices shouted at it that it darted off to one side and disappeared into a thicket. After a mile and a half of woodland they emerged into a clearing, where Tuchkov’s corps had been stationed to defend the left flank.
At this point, on the outer edge of the left flank, Bennigsen had much to say and do, and he spoke with some passion; Pierre took this to be of signal importance from the military point of view. Just ahead of Tuchkov’s troops there was a little hill, a little hill unoccupied by troops. This, according to the vociferous Bennigsen, was a bad mistake: it was madness to leave a commanding height unoccupied and station troops down below it. Several generals were of the same opinion. One in particular waxed eloquent, aggressively asserting that they would just get slaughtered. Bennigsen took personal responsibility for moving the troops uphill.
This adjustment on the left flank gave Pierre even more pause for thought on the subject of warfare. Listening to Bennigsen and the other generals as they castigated the disposition of the troops at the bottom of the hill, Pierre could see what they were getting at and he fully shared their view. But for this very reason he could not imagine how the man who had placed them there at the bottom of a hill could have made such a terrible and obvious mistake.
Pierre was not to know that these troops had been stationed where they were not to defend the position, as Bennigsen had assumed; they had been hidden away out of sight to catch the enemy unawares, to keep under cover and suddenly lash out at him as he moved forward. Bennigsen had no knowledge of this, and he moved the men up for his own reasons, without informing the commander-in-chief.
CHAPTER 24
It was bright that evening (the 25th of August), and Prince Andrey was lying propped up on one elbow in a dilapidated barn in the village of Knyazkovo, out at one end of his regiment’s encampment. Through a gap in a broken-down wall he was looking out on a row of thirty-year-old pollarded birch-trees running along a hedge, a field with piles of oats all over it, and some bushes where he could see camp-fires smoking as the soldiers got down to their cooking.
For all his present consciousness of life as something oppressive, irrelevant and wearisome, Prince Andrey felt no less excited and edgy than he had done at Austerlitz seven years previously on the eve of battle.
