‘This gentleman wants to see a battle,’ said Zherkov to Bolkonsky, indicating the auditor, ‘but has begun to feel queer already.’
‘Come, leave off,’ said the auditor, with a beaming smile at once naive and cunning, as though he were flattered at being the object of Zherkov’s jests, and was purposely trying to seem stupider than he was in reality.
‘It’s very curious, mon Monsieur Prince,’ said the staff-officer on duty. (He vaguely remembered that the title prince was translated in some peculiar way in French, but could not get it quite right.) By this time they were all riding up to Tushin’s battery, and a ball struck the ground before them.
‘What was that falling?’ asked the auditor, smiling naively.
‘A French pancake,’ said Zherkov.
‘That’s what they hit you with, then?’ asked the auditor. ‘How awful! ’ And he seemed to expand all over with enjoyment. He had hardly uttered the words when again there was a sudden terrible whiz, which ended abruptly in a thud into something soft, and flop—a Cossack, riding a little behind and to the right of the auditor, dropped from his horse to the ground. Zherkov and the staff-officer bent forward over their saddles and turned their horses away. The auditor stopped facing the; Cossack, and looking with curiosity at him. The Cossack was dead, the horse was still struggling. J f
Prince Bagration dropped his eyelids, looked round, and seeing the ( cause of the delay, turned away indifferently, seeming to ask, ‘Why t notice these trivial details?’ With the ease of a first-rate horseman he it stopped his horse, bent over a little and disengaged his sabre, which had: (a caught under his cloak. The sabre was an old-fashioned one, unlike whatj | are worn now. Prince Andrey remembered the story that Suvorov had ft given his sabre to Bagration in Italy, and the recollection was particu- m larly pleasant to him at that moment. They had ridden up to the very u battery from which Prince Andrey had surveyed the field of battle.
‘Whose company?’ Prince Bagration asked of the artilleryman stand-L ing at the ammunition boxes. liiti
He asked in words: ‘Whose company?’ but what he was really asking was, ‘You’re not in a panic here?’ And the artilleryman understood that.
‘Captain Tushin’s, your excellency,’ the red-haired, freckled artilleryman sang out in a cheerful voice, as he ducked forward.
‘To be sure, to be sure,’ said Bagration, pondering something, and he rode by the platforms up to the end cannon. Just as he reached it, a shot boomed from the cannon, deafening him and his suite, and in the smoke that suddenly enveloped the cannon t'he artillerymen could be seen hauling at the cannon, dragging and rolling it back to its former position. A broad-shouldered, gigantic soldier, gunner number one, with a mop, darted up to the wheel and planted himself, his legs wide apart; while number two, with a shaking hand, put the charge into the cannon’s mouth; a small man with stooping shoulders, the officer Tushin, stumbling against the cannon, dashed forward, not noticing the general, and looked out, shading his eyes with his little hand.
‘Another two points higher, and it will be just right,’ he shouted in a shrill voice, to which he tried to give a swaggering note utterly out of keeping with his figure. ‘Two! ’ he piped. ‘Smash away, Medvyedev! ’
Bagration called to the officer, and Tushin went up to the general, putting three fingers to the peak of his cap with a timid and awkward gesture, more like a priest blessing some one than a soldier saluting. Though Tushin’s guns had been intended to cannonade the valley, he was throwing shells over the village of Schongraben, in part of which immense masses of French soldiers were moving out.
