War And Peace полностью

‘Come on, Count, it’s time!’ cried the adjutant.

Telling his groom to come on behind with a horse, Pierre walked down the street and over towards the mound which had given him such a good view of the battlefield yesterday. There on top stood a crowd of military men. Pierre could hear staff-officers speaking French, and he soon saw Kutuzov, with his grey head, topped with a red and white cap, hunched down into his shoulders. Kutuzov was looking through a telescope down the main road that stretched before him.

At the top of the steps up on to the mound Pierre took one look ahead and was transfixed by the sheer splendour of the view. It was the same place, the same vista that he had enjoyed yesterday, but now the entire landscape was covered with troops and gunsmoke, and in the clear morning air, as the bright sun came up over Pierre’s left shoulder, it bathed the whole scene with slanting rays of piercing light, touching everything with gold and pink, and leaving long, dark shadows. Far away along the curving edge of the horizon the scene was bounded by stretches of woodland that might have been carved out of some yellowy-green precious stone, and up over Valuyevo they were broken by the Smolensk high road, swarming with troops. Down below, fields dotted with copses glittering with gold. And everywhere, right, left and centre, there were soldiers. It was a vibrant scene, astonishing in its splendour, but what struck Pierre most forcibly was the battlefield itself, Borodino, and the hollow winding its way along both sides of the Kolocha.

The ground above the Kolocha, in Borodino itself, and out on both sides but especially over on the left where the Voyna empties itself through marshy ground into the Kolocha, was overhung by the kind of mist that seeps down and thins out to let the bright sun come shimmering through, revealing the landscape and painting it in magical colours. Gunsmoke wreathed its way in, and the intermingling smoke and mist was everywhere shot through with lightning-flashes of early-morning sunlight glinting on water, dew and bayonets in the hands of soldiers swarming along the river banks and through Borodino. Through the mist you could make things out: a white church here, there the roofs of shacks in Borodino, with fitful glimpses of great masses of men, the odd green-coloured ammunition-box, an occasional cannon. And the whole scene was writhing, or it looked as if it was, because of the mist and smoke drifting across the entire landscape. All across the misty hollows close to Borodino, and outside the village on higher ground, especially to the left down the line, from copse and meadow puffs of smoke curled up out of thin air, either singly or in clusters, sporadically or in big, rapid bursts, weaving together on high then swelling, billowing out, seeping away and merging together in all over the landscape. Curiously enough, it was this swirling gunsmoke, with the ensuing bangs, that gave the whole spectacle its special beauty.

‘Pooff!’ Suddenly a thick, round ball of smoke rose up, shot through with flashes of purple, grey and a milky-white hue, followed a second later by the inevitable ‘boom!’

‘Pooff-pooff!’ Two clouds of smoke this time, jostling and merging in mid-air.

‘Boom-boom!’ came an echo confirming what the eye had seen.

Pierre took a long look at the first puff of smoke, watching it grow rapidly from a thick, round ball into bigger round palls of smoke drifting off to one side, and pooff . . . (then a pause) pooff-pooff . . . then three more, and another four all at once, each puff of smoke followed, after the same time-lapse, by another boom . . . boom-boom-boom , each sound beautiful, strong and true. Sometimes the smoke-clouds seemed to be scudding across the plain, sometimes they seemed to stand still and let everything fly by – copses, fields and glinting bayonets. These big palls of smoke rose up in an unceasing stream from the left, soaring over fields and bushes, each one followed by a triumphant boom. Much nearer, over the low ground and woodland, tiny puffs of smoke floated up from the musket-fire, hardly enough to form into balls of smoke, though each had its tiny after-echo too. ‘Tra-ta-ta-ta!’ came the persistent crackle of the muskets, but they sounded thin and sporadic compared with the steady booming of the cannons.

Pierre felt a sudden longing to be down there amidst all the smoke, the glinting bayonets, the movement and the din. He looked round at Kutuzov and his entourage to measure his own impressions against theirs. Like him they were all looking ahead, staring down at the battlefield, and they seemed to share his feelings. Every face glowed with that sensation of latent heat that Pierre had noticed the day before, and fully understood after his talk with Prince Andrey.