Nesvitsky’s imposing figure, the presence alongside him of his Cossack and Denisov’s determination based on much sword-waving and lusty shouting – all of this produced so great an effect that they did manage to get through to the other end of the bridge and halt the infantry. There Nesvitsky found the colonel to whom he was to deliver the command. Mission completed, he set off to ride back.
Having cleared the route, Denisov stopped at the bridge. Casually reining in his mount, which was neighing to the other horses and stamping its hoof, he watched as his squadron came towards him. The hollow clang of hooves on the boards of the bridge sounded like lots of horses galloping, and the squadron rode four abreast, officers leading, across the bridge and on to the far bank.
The halted infantrymen, crowded together in the trampled mud near the bridge, looked on as the clean, smart hussars rode past them so stylishly, with that special feeling of unfriendly rivalry and derision which different branches of the service usually show to each other when they meet.
‘Pretty boys, aren’t they? Do well in the circus!’
‘Useless lot. Showmen and showhorses!’ said another voice.
‘Infantrymen, no dust please!’ joked a hussar, as his horse pranced up and splattered an infantry soldier with mud.
‘I’d like to see you marching two days with a pack on your back. Bit of muck on your tassels,’ said the infantryman, wiping the mud off his face with his sleeve, ‘More like a bird than a man up there!’
‘Zikin, we should get you on a horse. What a rider!’ joked a corporal to a skinny soldier, stooping under the weight of his pack.
‘Put a stick between your legs – that’s your kind of horse,’ the hussar called back.
CHAPTER 8
The rest of the infantrymen funnelled on to the bridge and hurried across. Eventually all the baggage-wagons were over, there was less of a crush and the last battalion strode on to the bridge. Only the hussars of Denisov’s squadron were left on the far side of the river facing the enemy. The enemy, visible at a distance from the opposite hillside, could not yet be seen from the bridge below, because the river valley created a horizon not more than half a mile away at the top of the rising ground. Ahead lay an open space where the only movement came from the odd little group of our patrolling Cossacks. Suddenly along the road on the opposite slope some troops and artillery appeared; the men were wearing blue greatcoats. It was the French. A Cossack patrol trotted back downhill. The officers and men of Denisov’s squadron chatted on, trying to ignore all this and look elsewhere, but every last one of them had his mind on what was up there on the hillside and nothing else; they kept glancing at dark patches appearing on the skyline, which they knew to be enemy forces. The weather had cleared during the afternoon, and the sun shone brightly as it began to go down over the Danube and the dark surrounding hills. It was quiet. Except that now and then the far hillside rang with sounds: a bugle call or the enemy shouting. No one but a few patrolling men stood now between the squadron and the enemy. A mere half-mile of empty space separated the two sides. The enemy held their fire, increasing the sense of that dark, menacing, mysterious and intangible dividing line that exists between two warring armies.
‘One step across that dividing line, so like the one between the living and the dead, and you enter an unknown world of suffering and death. What will you find there? Who will be there? There, just beyond that field, that tree, that sunlit roof? No one knows, and yet you want to know. You dread crossing that line, and yet you still want to cross it. You know sooner or later you will have to go across and find out what is there beyond it, just as you must inevitably find out what lies beyond death. Yet here you are, fit and strong, carefree and excited, with men all around you just the same – strong, excited and full of life.’ This is what all men think when they get a sight of the enemy, or they feel it if they do not think it, and it is this feeling that gives a special lustre and a delicious edge to the awareness of everything that is now happening.
