Without moving an inch or firing a shot the regiment lost another third of its men on this spot. Ahead of them, especially over to the right, the cannons boomed away through the never-thinning smoke, and from the mysterious pall that blanketed all the countryside up front came an unending stream of hurtling, hissing cannonballs, and grenades, which whizzed across more slowly. Sometimes there was a kind of breathing space for a quarter of an hour when all the cannonballs and grenades overshot them, but sometimes it took less than a minute for several men to be torn down, and we were for ever dragging away the dead and carrying off the wounded.
With every new hit the chances of staying alive grew less and less for anyone not yet killed. The regiment was split into battalion columns three hundred paces apart. It made no difference; morale was the same all over the regiment. All the men were the same: miserable and silent. There wasn’t much talking in the ranks, and what talking there was soon stopped when the next big bang came and the call of ‘Stretcher!’ Most of the time the men followed their orders and just sat there on the ground. One man would take off his shako, loosen the gathers and tie them up again; another would crumble up some dry clay to clean his bayonet; another would adjust a buckle or tighten a strap on his shoulder-belt; someone else would re-roll his leg bandages with infinite care and pull his boots back on again. Some men built tiny houses out of clods of earth, or plaited together stubble straw. They all seemed thoroughly engrossed in what they were doing. When men got killed or wounded, when stretchers were dragged past, when our troops started coming back, when massed ranks of the enemy suddenly appeared through the smoke, all these developments were completely ignored. Whenever our artillery or cavalry moved forward or the infantry was on the move, encouraging noises came from all sides. But quite the most interesting things were incidental events that had nothing to do with the battle. It was as if these morally exhausted men could find some relief in the ordinary events of everyday life. An artillery battery trundled across in front of their line. A horse pulling an ammunition cart had got one leg outside the traces.
‘Hey! Watch that trace-horse! . . . Get her leg out! She’ll go down! . . . Look! They haven’t seen it!’ A great cry rose from all the ranks.
Another time everybody homed in on a small brown dog with a stiff little tail, which had sprung out of nowhere and was fussing around, trotting up and down in front of the ranks. Suddenly a cannonball fell near by, and it yelped and ran off with its tail between its legs. The whole regiment came alive with yells and shrieks of laughter. But these distractions lasted no more than a minute, and the men had been eight hours with no food and nothing to do, in constant fear of death, and their pale and haggard faces grew paler and more haggard.
Prince Andrey, haggard and pale like everybody else in the regiment, paced the meadow next to the field of oats from one boundary-ditch to the next with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the ground. He had no orders to give and nothing to do. Everything took care of itself. The dead were dragged back behind the line, the wounded were carried away, and the ranks closed up. If any soldiers ran away they soon doubled back. At first Prince Andrey had felt duty-bound to keep his men’s spirits up and set an example, so he walked the ranks, but it wasn’t long before he realized he had nothing to teach them. All his energy, like every soldier’s, was instinctively concentrated on distracting himself from the horror of his situation. He paced the meadow, dragging his feet and rustling through the grass, and he watched the dust thickening on his boots. First he would lengthen his stride and try to follow in the footsteps left behind by the mowers, then he would count his steps and work out how many times he would have to walk from one ditch to another to cover half a mile; or he would strip the flowers from some wormwood growing in the ditch, rub them in his palms and sniff the acrid, bitter-sweet scent. Of yesterday’s thoughts not a trace remained. His mind was blank. Wearily he listened to the all too familiar sounds, the whine of the shells so different from the booming of the guns, he glanced at the faces of the men of the first battalion that he had seen a thousand times before, and waited. ‘Here she comes. This one’s for us!’ he thought, listening closely as something whistled over from the hidden region of the smoke. ‘One! Two! Here come some more! That one’s down . . .’ He stopped short and glanced down the ranks. ‘No, it must have gone over. Oh, that one
