Pierre did not take special notice of this redoubt. He did not dream that that spot would be more memorable for him than any other part of the plain of Borodino. Then they crossed a hollow to Semyonovskoye, where the soldiers were dragging away the last logs of the huts and barns. Then they rode on downhill and uphill again, across a field of rye, trampled
md laid as though by hail, along the track newly made by the artillery, Dver the ridges of the ploughed field, to the earthworks, at which the men were still at work.
Bennigsen halted at the earthworks, and looked in front at the redoubt jf Shevardino, which had been ours the day before. Several horsemen :ould be descried upon it. The officers said that Napoleon and Murat were ;here. And all gazed eagerly at the little group of horsemen. Pierre too ;tared at them, trying to guess which of the scarcely discernible figures vas Napoleon. At last the group of horsemen descended the hill and Dassed out of sight.
Bennigsen began explaining to a general who had ridden up to him the vhole position of our troops. Pierre listened to his words, straining every acuity of his mind to grasp the essential points of the coming battle, but 0 his mortification he felt that his faculties were not equal to the task. :Ie could make nothing of it. Bennigsen finished speaking, and noticing rflerre’s listening face, he said, turning suddenly to him:
‘It’s not very interesting for you, I expect.’
‘Oh, on the contrary, it’s very interesting,’ Pierre repeated, not quite ruthfully.
From the earthworks they turned still more to the left of the road hat ran winding through a thick, low-growing, birch wood. In the middle >f the wood a brown hare with white feet popped out on the road before hem, and was so frightened by the tramp of so many horses, that in ts terror it hopped along the road just in front of them for a long while, ousing general laughter, and only when several voices shouted at it, lashed to one side and was lost in the thicket. After a couple of versts >f woodland, they came out on a .clearing, where were the troops of futchkov’s corps, destined to protect the left flank.
At this point, at the extreme left flank, Bennigsen talked a great deal vith much heat; and gave instructions, of great importance from a miliary point of view, as it seemed to Pierre. Just in front of the spot where rutchkov’s troops were placed there rose a knoll, which was not occupied >y troops. Bennigsen was loud in his criticism of this oversight, saying hat it was insane to leave a height that commanded the country round moccupied and place troops just below it. Several generals expressed the ame opinion. One in particular, with martial warmth, declared that hey were doomed there to certain destruction. Bennigsen, on his own esponsibility, ordered the troops to be moved on to the high-road.
This change of position on the left flank made Pierre more than ever loubtful of his capacity for comprehending military matters. As he heard Jennigsen and the other generals criticising the position of the troops at he foot of the hill, Pierre fully grasped and shared their views. But that vas why he could not imagine how the man who had placed them there .oiild have made so gross and obvious a blunder.
Pierre did not know that the troops had not been placed there to de- end their position, as Bennigsen supposed, but had been stationed in hat concealed spot in ambush, in order unobserved to deal a sudden
blow at the enemy unawares. Bennigsen, ignorant of this project, mover the troops into a prominent position without saying anything about thi; change to the commander-in-chief.
XXIV
Prince Andrey was on that bright August evening lying propped on his elbow in a broken-down barn in the village of Knyazkovo, at the furthei end of the encampment of his regiment. Through a gap in the broken wall he was looking at the line of thirty-year-old pollard birches in the hedge, at the field with sheaves of oats lying about it, and at the bushes where he saw the smoke of camp-fires, at which the soldiers were doing their cooking.
Cramped and useless and burdensome as his life seemed now to Prince Andrey, he felt nervously excited and irritable on the eve of battle, just as he had felt seven years earlier before Austerlitz.
