Their swords catching in the reins and their spurs jingling, the hussars dismounted in haste, not knowing themselves what they were to do. The soldiers crossed themselves. Rostov did not look at the colonel now; he had no time. He dreaded, with a sinking heart he dreaded, being left behind by the hussars. His hand trembled as he gave his horse to an orderly, and he felt that the blood was rushing to his heart with a thud. Denisov, rolling backwards, and shouting something, rode by him. Rostov saw nothing but the hussars running around him, clinking spurs and jingling swords.
‘Stretchers!’ shouted a voice behind him. Rostov did not think of the meaning of the need of stretchers. He ran along, trying only to be ahead of all. But just at the bridge, not looking at his feet, he got into the slippery, trodden mud, and stumbling fell on his hands. The others outstripped him.
‘On both sides, captain,’ he heard shouted by the colonel, who, riding on ahead, had pulled his horse up near the bridge, with a triumphant and cheerful face.
Rostov, rubbing bis muddy hands on his riding-breeches, looked round at his enemy, and would have run on further, imagining that the forwarder he went the better it would be. But though Bogdanitch was not looking, and did not recognise Rostov, he shouted to him.
‘Who will go along the middle of the bridge? On the right side? Ensign, back!’ he shouted angrily, and he turned to Denisov, who with swaggering bravado rode on horseback on to the planks of the bridge.
‘Why run risks, captain? You should dismount,’ said the colonel.
‘Eh! it’ll strike the guilty one,’ said Vaska Denisov, turning in his saddle.
Meanwhile Nesvitsky, Zherkov, and the officer of the suite were standing together out of range of the enemy, watching the little group of men in yellow shakoes, dark-green jackets, embroidered with frogs, and blue riding-breeches, swarming about the bridge, and on the other side of the river the blue tunics and the groups with horses, that might so easily be taken for guns, approaching in the distance.
132 WAR AND. PEACE
‘Will they burn the bridge or not? Who’ll get there first? Will they run there and burn it, or the French train their grape-shot on them and kill them?’ These were the questions that, with a sinking of the heart, each man was asking himself in the great mass of troops overlooking the bridge. In the brilliant evening sunshine they gazed at the bridge and the hussars, and at the blue tunics, with bayonets and guns, moving up on the other side.
‘Ugh! The hussars will be caught,’ said Nesvitsky. ‘They’re not out of range of grape-shot now.’
‘He did wrong to take so many men,’ said the officer of the suite.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Nesvitsky. ‘If he’d sent two bold fellows it Avould have done as well.’
‘Ah, your excellency,’ put in Zherkov, his eyes fixed on the hussars, though he still spoke with his naive manner, from which one could not guess whether he were speaking seriously or not. ‘Ah, your excellency. How you look at things. Send two men, but who would give us the Vladimir and ribbon then? But as it is, even if they do pepper them, one can represent the squadron and receive the ribbon oneself. Our good friend Bogdanitch knows the way to do things.’
‘I say,’ said the officer of the suite, ‘that’s grape-shot.’
He pointed to the French guns, which had been taken out of the gun- carriages, and were hurriedly moving away.
On the French side, smoke rose among the groups that had cannons. One puff, a second and a third almost at the same instant; and at the very moment when they heard the sound of the first shot, there rose the smoke of a fourth; two booms came one after another, then a third.
‘Oh, oh! ’ moaned Nesvitsky, clutching at the hand of the officer of the suite, as though in intense pain. ‘Look, a man has fallen, fallen, fallen!’
‘Two, I think.’
‘If I were Tsar, I’d never go to war,’ said Nesvitsky, turning away.
The French cannons were speedily loaded again. The infantry in their blue tunics were running towards the bridge. Again the puffs of smoke rose at different intervals, and the grape-shot rattled and cracked on the bridge. But this time Nesvitsky could not see what was happening at the bridge. A thick cloud of smoke had risen from it. The hussars had succeeded in setting fire to the bridge, and the French batteries were firing at them now, not to hinder them, but because their guns had been brought up and they had some one to fire at.
The French had time to fire three volleys of grape-shot before the hussars got back to their horses. Two were badly aimed, and the shot flew over them, but the last volley fell in the middle of the group of hussars and knocked down three men.
