The sun had long ago set. Stars were shining brightly here and there i the sky; there was a red flush, as of a conflagration on the horizon, /here the full moon was rising, and the vast, red ball seemed trembling trangely in the grey darkness. It became quite light. The evening was ver, but the night had not yet begun. Pierre left his new companions nd walked between the camp-fires to the other side of the road, where e had been told that the common prisoners were camping. He wanted to ilk to them. On the road a French sentinel stopped him and bade him o back.
Pierre did go back, but not to the camp-fire where his companions ere, but to an unharnessed waggon where there was nobody. Tucking is legs up under him, and dropping his head, he sat down on the cold •ound against the waggon wheel, and sat there a long while motionless, .linking. More than an hour passed by. No one disturbed Pierre. Suddenly he burst into such a loud roar of his fat, good-humoured laughter, lat men looked round on every side in astonishment at this strange id obviously solitary laughter. ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ laughed Tierre. And he Iked aloud to himself. ‘The soldier did not let me pass. They have ken me—shut me up. They keep me prisoner. Who is “me”? Me? jfe—my immortal soul! Pla.ha, ha! . . . Ha, ha, ha! . . .’he laughed, ith the tears starting into his eyes.
A man got up and came to see what this strange, big man was laugh- g at all by himself. Pierre left off laughing, got up, walked away from e inquisitive intruder, and looked about him.
The immense, endless bivouac, w r hich had been full of the sound of
crackling fires and men talking, had sunk to rest; the red camp-fire burnt low and dim. High overhead in the lucid sky stood the full mooi Forests and fields, that before could not be seen beyond the camp, carr into view now in the distance. And beyond those fields and forests coul be seen the bright, shifting, alluring, boundless distance. Pierre glance at the sky, at the far-away, twinkling stars. ‘And all that is mine, an all that is in me, and all that is II’ thought Pierre. ‘And all this the caught and shut up in a shed closed in with boards! ’ He smiled and wer to lie down to sleep beside his companions.
XV
Early in October another messenger came to Kutuzov from Napoleo with overtures for peace and a letter, falsely professing to come froi Moscow, though Napoleon was in fact not far ahead of Kutuzov on th old Kaluga road. Kutuzov answered this letter as he had done tb first one, brought him by Lauriston; he said that there could be no que; tion of peace.
Soon after this Dorohov’s irregulars, which were moving on the left c Tarutino, sent a report that French troops had appeared at Fominsko* that these troops were of Broussier’s division, and that that divisior being separate from the rest of the army, might easily be cut to piece; The soldiers and officers again clamoured for action. The staff general; elated by the easy victory of Tarutino, urged on Kutuzov that Dorohov' suggestion should be acted upon.
Kutuzov did not consider any action necessary. A middle course, a was inevitable, was adopted; a small detachment was sent to Fominsko to attack Broussier.
By strange chance this appointment, a most difficult and most irr portant one, as it turned out to be later, v/as given to Dohturov, tha modest little general, whom no one has depicted to us making plans c campaign, dashing at the head of regiments, dropping crosses about bal teries, or doing anything of the kind; whom people looked on and spok of as lacking decision and penetration, though all through the Russia wars with the French, from Austerlitz to the year 1813, we always fin' him in command where the position is particularly difficult. At Auster litz he was the last to remain at the ford of Augest, rallying the regi ments, saving what he could, when all was flight and ruin, and not , single other general was to be found in the rearguard. When ill wit; fever, he marched with twenty thousand men to Smolensk to defend th town against the whole of Napoleon’s army. In Smolensk he had onl; just fallen asleep at the Malahovsky gates in a paroxysm of fever whe he was waked by the cannonade of Smolensk, and Smolensk held out whole day. At Borodino when Bagration was killed, and nine-tenths 0 the men of our left flank had been slain, and the fire of all the Frenc artillery was turned upon it, Kutuzov made haste to recall another gen
