‘Is the general here?’ asked the adjutant on reaching the redoubt.
‘He was here just now; he went this way,’ some one answered, pointing to the right.
The adjutant looked round at Pierre, as though he did not know what to do with him.
‘Don’t trouble about me,’ said Pierre. ‘I’ll go up on to the mound; may I?’
‘Yes, do; you can see everything from there, and it’s not so dangerous, and I will come to fetch you.’
Pierre went up to the battery, and the adjutant rode away. They did not see each other again, and only much later Pierre learned that that adjutant had lost an arm on that day.
The mound—afterwards known among the Russians as the battery mound, or Raevsky’s battery, and among the French as ‘the great redoubt,’ ‘fatal redoubt,’ and ‘central redoubt’—was the celebrated spot
at which tens of thousands of men were killed, and upon which the French looked as the key of the position.
The redoubt consisted of a mound, with trenches dug out on three sides of it. In the entrenchments stood ten cannons, firing through the gaps left in the earthworks.
In a line with the redoubt on both sides stood cannons, and these too kept up an incessant fire. A little behind the line of cannons were troops of infantry. When Pierre ascended this mound, he had no notion that this place, encircled by small trenches and protected by a few cannons, was the most important spot in the field.
He fancied, indeed (simply because he happened to be there), that it was a place of no importance whatever.
Pierre sat down on the end of the earthwork surrounding the battery and gazed at what was passing around him with an unconscious smile of pleasure. At intervals Pierre got up, and with the same smile on his face walked about the battery, trying not to get in the way of the soldiers, who were loading and discharging the cannons and were continually running by him with bags and ammunition. The cannons were firing continually, one after another, with deafening uproar, enveloping all the country round in clouds of smoke.
In contrast to the painful look of dread in the infantry soldiers who were guarding the battery, here in the battery itself, where a limited number of men were busily engaged in their work, and shut off from the rest of the trench, there was a general feeling of eager excitement, a sort of family feeling shared by all alike.
The appearance of Pierre’s unmartial figure and his white hat at first impressed this little group unfavourably. The soldiers cast sidelong glances of surprise and even alarm at him, as they ran by. The senior artillery officer, a tall, long-legged, pock-marked man, approached Pierre, as though he wanted to examine the action of the cannon at the end, and stared inquisitively at him.
A boyish, round-faced, little officer, quite a child, evidently only just out of the cadets’ school, and very conscientious in looking after the two cannons put in his charge, addressed Pierre severely.
‘Permit me to ask you to move out of the way, sir,’ he said. ‘You can’t stay here.’
The soldiers shook their heads disapprovingly as they looked at Pierre. But as the conviction gained ground among them that the man in the white hat was doing no harm, and either sat quietly on the slope of the earthwork, or, making way with a shy and courteous smile for the soldiers to pass, walked about the battery under fire as calmly as though he were strolling on a boulevard, their feeling of suspicious ill-will began to give way to a playful and kindly cordiality akin to the feeling soldiers always have for the dogs, cocks, goats, and other animals who share the fortunes of the regiment. The soldiers soon accepted Pierre in their own minds as one of their little circle, made him one of themselves, and
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gave him a name: ‘our gentleman’ they called him, and laughed good- humouredly about him among themselves.
A cannon ball tore up the earth a couple of paces from Pierre. Brushing the earth off his clothes, he looked about him with a smile.
‘And how is it you’re not afraid, sir, upon my word?’ said a broad, redfaced soldier, showing his strong, white teeth in a grin.
‘Why, are you afraid then?’ asked Pierre.
‘Why, to be sure!’ answered the soldier. ‘Why, she has no mercy on you. She smashes into you, and your guts are sent flying. Nobody could help being afraid,’ he said laughing.
Several soldiers stood still near Pierre with amused and kindly faces. They seemed not to expect him to talk like any one else, and his doing so delighted them.
‘It's our business—we’re soldiers. But for a gentleman—it’s surprising. It’s queer in a gentleman! ’
‘To your places!’ cried the little officer-boy to the soldiers, who had gathered round Pierre. It was evidently the first, or at most, the second time, this lad had been on duty as an officer, and so he behaved with the utmost punctiliousness and formality both to the soldiers and his superior officer.
