The colonel had been killed, the soldier shouting for help was a prisoner, and here at his feet was another soldier bayoneted in the back – but he had no time to take it all in. He had scarcely set foot in the redoubt when a thin man in a blue uniform with a sallow, sweaty face charged at him brandishing a sword and shouting. Pierre’s instinct was to ward off the shock as they crashed blindly into each other, so he put out both hands and grabbed the man (it was a French officer) by the shoulder and the throat. The officer dropped his sword and seized Pierre by the scruff of his neck.
For a few seconds they stared with terrified eyes at one another’s foreign faces, both of them suddenly unnerved, uncertain what they had done or were going to do next. ‘Am I being taken prisoner or am I taking him prisoner?’ they were both wondering. But the French officer was clearly more inclined to think he’d been captured, because Pierre’s strong hand, an instrument of primitive terror, was tightening its grip on his throat. The Frenchman was trying to say something, when suddenly a cannonball zoomed across viciously low over their heads, and the Frenchman ducked down so sharply he seemed almost to have been decapitated by it.
Pierre had ducked too, and let go of his man. With no further thoughts about who was capturing whom, the Frenchman rushed back inside the battery, and Pierre tore off downhill, tripping over the dead and wounded, who seemed to be catching at his feet.
But before he got to the bottom of the hill he ran into vast hordes of Russian soldiers falling over each other and whooping with glee as they charged up to storm the battery. (This was the famous attack for which Yermolov claimed all the credit, on the grounds that without his courage and good luck this feat of arms would have been impossible, the attack when he is supposed to have scattered the redoubt with George Crosses that he happened to have in his pocket.)
The French, who had taken the battery, now fled, pursued so far beyond the battery by our soldiers, yelling ‘Hurrah!’, that there was almost no stopping the Russians.
Prisoners were brought down from the battery, including a wounded French general, who was soon surrounded by our officers. Down came a stream of wounded men, some known to Pierre, some not, French and Russian, walking, crawling or carried on stretchers, their faces hideously contorted by pain.
Pierre went back up on to the mound where he had spent more than an hour, and there was no one left from the little family group that had accepted him as one of their own. Dead bodies were everywhere, people he didn’t know. But one or two he did know. The little boy officer was still sitting there huddled up against the earth wall in a pool of blood. The ruddy-faced soldier’s body was still twitching, but nobody picked him up.
Pierre ran back down the slope.
‘Oh, surely they’ll stop now. They’ll be horrified at what they’ve done!’ he thought, aimlessly following on behind crowds of stretchers moving away from the battlefield.
But the sun stood high in the sky, veiled by a pall of smoke, and ahead of them, especially on the left, over by Semyonovsk, the smoke was alive with movement, and the clamour of cannon and musket, far from dying away, was getting louder, in mounting desperation, like a man in terrible agony putting all his effort into one last scream.
CHAPTER 33
The main action at the battle of Borodino was fought out in the seven-thousand-foot space between Borodino and Bagration’s flèches. (Outside this area, there was action on one side by Uvarov’s cavalry in the middle of the day, and on the other side, beyond Utitsa, there was a skirmish between Poniatowski and Tuchkov, but these two isolated outbursts were insignificant compared with what was going on in the centre of the battlefield.) The main action was fought out in the simplest, most unsophisticated manner in the open space, visible from both sides, that separated Borodino from the flèches by the wood.
