He raised his head and sat up. A French soldier was squatting on his leels by the fire. He had just shoved away a Russian soldier, and was oasting a piece of meat on the end of a ramrod. His sinewy, lean, hairy, ed hands, with short fingers, were deftly turning the ramrod. His brown, norose face, with its sullen brows, could be clearly seen in the light of the ;lowing embers.
‘It’s just the same to him,’ he muttered, quickly addressing a soldier tanding behind him. ‘Brigand! go!’
And the soldier, turning the ramrod, glanced gloomily at Pierre. The atter turned away, gazing into the shadows. A Russian soldier, the one vho had been pushed away, was sitting near the fire, patting something nth his hand. Looking more closely, Pierre saw the grey dog, who was itting by the soldier, wagging her tail.
‘Ah, she has come . . .’ said Pierre. ‘And Plat . . .’ he was beginning, >ut he did not go on. All at once, instantly in close connection, there rose ip the memory of the look Platon had fixed upon him, as he sat under the ree, of the shot heard at that spot, of the dog’s howl, of the guilty faces f the soldiers as they ran by, of the smoking gun, of Karataev’s absence t that halting-place; and he was on the point of fully realising that Carataev had been killed, but at the same instant, at some mysterious ummons, there rose up the memory of a summer evening he had spent vith a beautiful Polish lady on the verandah of his house at Kiev. And nevertheless, making no effort to connect the impressions of the day, nd to deduce anything from them, Pierre closed his eyes, and the picture f the summer night in the country mingled with the thought of bathing nd of that fluid, quivering globe, and he seemed to sink deep down into /ater, so that the waters closed over his head.
Before sunrise he was wakened by loud and rapid shots and outcries, "he French were flying by him.
‘The Cossacks!’ one of them shouted, and a minute later a crowd of Russians were surrounding Pierre. For a long while Pierre could not nderstand what had happened to him. He heard all about him his omrades’ wails of joy.
‘Mates! our own folk! brothers!’ the old soldiers cried, weeping, as hey embraced the Cossacks and the hussars. The hussars and the Cosacks crowded round the prisoners, pressing on them clothes, and boots, nd bread. Pierre sat sobbing in their midst, and could not utter one mrd; he hugged the first soldier who went up to him, and kissed him, /eeping.
Dolohov was standing at the gates of a dilapidated house, letting the rowd of unarmed Frenchmen pass by him. The French, excited by all bat had happened, were talking loudly among themselves; but as they assed before Dolohov, who stood switching his boots with his riding- 'hip, and watching them with his cold, glassy eyes, that boded nothing
good, their talk died away. One of Dolohov’s Cossacks stood on the other side, counting the prisoners, and marking off the hundreds with a chalk mark on the gate.
‘How many?’ D'olohov asked him.
‘The second hundred,’ answered the Cossack.
‘Filez, filez’ said Dolohov, who had picked up the expression from the French; and when he met the eyes of the passing prisoners, his eyes gleamed with a cruel light.
With a gloomy face Denisov, holding his high Cossack hat in his hand, was walking behind the Cossacks, who were bearing to a hole freshly dug in the garden the body of Petya Rostov.
XVI
Fkom the 28th of October, when the frosts began, the flight of the French assumed a more tragic aspect, from the men being frozen or roasted to death by the camp-fires, while the Emperor, and kings, and dukes, still drove on with their stolen booty in fur cloaks and closed carriages. But in its essentials, the process of the flight and disintegration of the French army went on unchanged.
From Moscow to Vyazma of the seventy-three thousands of the French army (not reckoning the Guards, who had done nothing but pillage all through the war), only thirty-six thousand were left, though only five thousand had been killed in battle. Here we have the first term of a progression, by which the remaining terms are determined with mathematical exactness. The French army went on melting away and disappearing in the same ratio from Moscow to Vyazma, from Vyazma to Smolensk, from Smolensk to the Berezina, from the Berezina to Vilna, apart from the greater or less degree of cold, the pursuit and barring of the way, and all other conditions taken separately. After Vyazma, instead of three columns, the French troops formed a single mass, and so they marched on to the end. This is how Berthier wrote to the Emperor (and we know that generals feel it permissible to depart rather widely from the truth in describing the condition of their armies):—
