‘I’m not surprised . . . Look, she’s wounded!’ said the adjutant. ‘Right fore-leg, just above the knee. Must have been a bullet. Congratulations, Count,’ he said. ‘Your baptism of fire.’
They rode through the smoke of Sixth Corps territory right behind the artillery, which had been moved forward and was keeping up a deafening bombardment, and out into a small copse. Here under the trees it was cool and quiet, with a smell of autumn. Pierre and the adjutant got down from their horses and proceeded uphill on foot.
‘Is the general here?’ asked the adjutant when they got to the redoubt.
‘No, you’ve just missed him. He went that way,’ someone answered, pointing off to the right.
The adjutant glanced round at Pierre as if he wasn’t sure what to do with him.
‘Oh, please don’t bother about me,’ said Pierre. ‘I’ll go up on the mound, if I may.’
‘Yes, do. You can see everything from up there, and it’s not too dangerous. I’ll come and get you later.’
Pierre went up to the battery, and the adjutant rode away. They never saw each other again, and only much later on did Pierre learn that the adjutant had lost an arm that day.
The mound on which Pierre now stood – afterwards known to the Russians as the mound battery, or the Rayevsky redoubt, and to the French as the great redoubt, fatal redoubt or centre redoubt – was the famous place that the French looked on as the key position, where tens of thousands fell.
It consisted of a mound with trenches dug outwards on three sides. In the entrenchments there were ten cannons that fired out through gaps.
There was a line of further cannons on either side of the redoubt, and they also kept up a constant barrage. The infantrymen were stationed just behind this line. When Pierre got to the top of the mound he hadn’t the slightest idea that this place with its little trenches and one or two cannons firing away was the very heart of the battle. Quite the reverse: he assumed (by the very fact that he happened to be there) that it was one of the least important locations on the battlefield.
Pierre sat down at one end of the earthwork that enclosed the battery and watched what was going on with an instinctively happy smile. He got up from time to time and strolled about the battery with the same smile on his face, trying not to get in the way of the soldiers forever running past with pouches and ammunition, or loading the cannons and hauling them into position. The cannons never stopped firing, one after another, with a thunderous, deafening roar, and they smothered the surrounding countryside in blankets of powder-smoke.
Among the infantrymen providing cover for the battery fear was rampant and it showed, but here inside, by contrast, where only a small number of men toiled away together in seclusion, cut off from the rest of the trench, there was a shared camaraderie that could be sensed all round, a kind of family feeling.
At first the sudden appearance of Pierre’s unmilitary figure in a white hat made a bad impression on this little group. As they ran by the soldiers were surprised, even shocked, by the sight of him and he attracted many a sidelong glance. The senior artillery officer, a tall, lanky man with a pock-marked face, came right up to Pierre on the pretext of checking the action of the end cannon, and took a close look at him.
A boyish officer with a little round face, still wet behind the ears and obviously just out of cadet school, feeling very protective towards the two cannons they had given him charge of, spoke sharply to Pierre.
‘I’m sorry, sir, I’ll have to ask you to move,’ he said. ‘You can’t stay here.’
The soldiers shook their heads disapprovingly as they looked at Pierre. But once they were satisfied that the man in the white hat wasn’t doing any harm, as he either sat quietly on a slope, or politely got out of the soldiers’ way with a shy smile on his face as he walked about the battery, under full fire, like someone calmly strolling down a boulevard, suspicion and resentment gradually gave way to the kindly spirit of friendly banter that soldiers tend to reserve for their animals: the dogs, cockerels, goats and other creatures who happen to share the fortunes of the regiment. The soldiers soon made the mental adjustment and accepted Pierre into their family, calling him one of their own, and they gave him a special name. ‘Our gent’, as they called him, caused many a good-humoured laugh among them.
A cannonball ploughed the earth up a couple of paces from Pierre, spattering him with dirt. He looked round with a smile as he brushed it off his clothes.
‘How come you ain’t scared, sir?’ said a broad, red-faced soldier with a strong, white, toothy grin.
‘Are you, then?’ asked Pierre.
‘You bet I am!’ answered the soldier. ‘She don’t show no mercy. Bang, guts everywhere. You got to be scared, sir,’ he said with a laugh.
