War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The stormcloud was now on them, and the flickering fire that Pierre had been watching lit up their faces more brightly than ever. He was standing beside the senior officer. The little boy officer ran up and saluted.
'Colonel, sir, I have the honour to inform you we have only eight rounds left. What shall we do, continue firing?' he asked.
'Grapeshot!' yelled the senior officer, still peering out over the trench top.
Suddenly something happened. The boy officer cried out, doubled up and sat down on the ground, like a bird shot on the wing. Pierre's vision blurred; everything looked weird and dark.
The cannonballs came whistling down one after another, smashing into eveything - breastwork, soldiers, cannons. These sounds had barely registered on Pierre before; now he could hear nothing else. To one side of the battery, the righthand side, some soldiers were shouting 'Hurrah!', but they seemed to be running back rather than going forwards.
A cannonball thudded into the very edge of the trench where Pierre was sitting and sent the earth flying; a little black ball flashed past him and smacked into something soft. The militiamen who were just about to come into the battery ran back.
'Grapeshot! Everybody!' shouted the officer.
The sergeant ran up to the officer and said in a timorous whisper (like a butler informing the dinner host that the wine he wanted has run out) there was nothing left to fire.
'Swine! What do they think they're doing?' shouted the officer, turning to Pierre. Sweat ran down the senior officer's red face. He scowled. There was a glint in his eye. 'Get down to the reserves. Fetch some ammunition-boxes!' he shouted, looking furiously past Pierre at the soldier.
'I'll go,' said Pierre. There was no response from the officer, who was off, striding down to the other end.
'Hold your fire! . . . Wait!' he called.
The soldier who had been told to go for ammunition bumped into Pierre.
'Listen, sir, this is no place for you,' he said as he ran away.
Pierre ran after him, making a detour round the spot where the boy officer was sitting.
A cannonball flew past him, then another, and another; they were raining down on all sides as he charged downhill. 'Where am I going?' he was beginning to wonder, when suddenly he was there beside the green ammunition-boxes. He hesitated - should he run back or go on? Suddenly a terrific bang sent him reeling backwards down to the ground. At the same instant he was dazzled by a great searing flash, and deafened by a terrible hissing sound and a thunderous roar that banged in his ears.
When he came to, Pierre found himself sitting on his bottom resting back on his hands. The ammunition-box that had been at his side had disappeared; all that was left were a few charred green bits of board and some rags littering the scorched grass. A horse was galloping away still attached to some shattered bits of shaft. Another horse lay like Pierre on the ground, letting out prolonged and piercing whinnies.
CHAPTER 32
Out of his mind with terror, Pierre leapt to his feet and ran back up to the battery, the one place where he might be safe from the horrors around him.
As he walked into the redoubt he realized there wasn't any firing from the battery, but there were some men in there busy doing something or other. He could not make out who they were. He caught a quick glimpse of the senior officer slumped over the earth wall with his back towards him, as if he was staring down at something, and he saw another soldier, someone he knew from before, struggling to free himself from some men who were holding him, and yelling 'Brothers! Help me!' And he saw something else that struck him as odd.
The colonel had been killed, the soldier shouting for help was a prisoner, and here at his feet was another soldier bayoneted in the back - but he had no time to take it all in. He had scarcely set foot in the redoubt when a thin man in a blue uniform with a sallow, sweaty face charged at him brandishing a sword and shouting. Pierre's instinct was to ward off the shock as they crashed blindly into each other, so he put out both hands and grabbed the man (it was a French officer) by the shoulder and the throat. The officer dropped his sword and seized Pierre by the scruff of his neck.
For a few seconds they stared with terrified eyes at one another's foreign faces, both of them suddenly unnerved, uncertain what they had done or were going to do next. 'Am I being taken prisoner or am I taking him prisoner?' they were both wondering. But the French officer was clearly more inclined to think he'd been captured, because Pierre's strong hand, an instrument of primitive terror, was tightening its grip on his throat. The Frenchman was trying to say something, when suddenly a cannonball zoomed across viciously low over their heads, and the Frenchman ducked down so sharply he seemed almost to have been decapitated by it.
Pierre had ducked too, and let go of his man. With no further thoughts about who was capturing whom, the Frenchman rushed back inside the battery, and Pierre tore off downhill, tripping over the dead and wounded, who seemed to be catching at his feet.
But before he got to the bottom of the hill he ran into vast hordes of Russian soldiers falling over each other and whooping with glee as they charged up to storm the battery. (This was the famous attack for which Yermolov claimed all the credit, on the grounds that without his courage and good luck this feat of arms would have been impossible, the attack when he is supposed to have scattered the redoubt with George Crosses that he happened to have in his pocket.)
The French, who had taken the battery, now fled, pursued so far beyond the battery by our soldiers, yelling 'Hurrah!', that there was almost no stopping the Russians.
Prisoners were brought down from the battery, including a wounded French general, who was soon surrounded by our officers. Down came a stream of wounded men, some known to Pierre, some not, French and Russian, walking, crawling or carried on stretchers, their faces hideously contorted by pain.
Pierre went back up on to the mound where he had spent more than an hour, and there was no one left from the little family group that had accepted him as one of their own. Dead bodies were everywhere, people he didn't know. But one or two he did know. The little boy officer was still sitting there huddled up against the earth wall in a pool of blood. The ruddy-faced soldier's body was still twitching, but nobody picked him up.
Pierre ran back down the slope.
'Oh, surely they'll stop now. They'll be horrified at what they've done!' he thought, aimlessly following on behind crowds of stretchers moving away from the battlefield.
But the sun stood high in the sky, veiled by a pall of smoke, and ahead of them, especially on the left, over by Semyonovsk, the smoke was alive with movement, and the clamour of cannon and musket, far from dying away, was getting louder, in mounting desperation, like a man in terrible agony putting all his effort into one last scream.
CHAPTER 33
The main action at the battle of Borodino was fought out in the seven-thousand-foot space between Borodino and Bagration's fleches. (Outside this area, there was action on one side by Uvarov's cavalry in the middle of the day, and on the other side, beyond Utitsa, there was a skirmish between Poniatowski and Tuchkov, but these two isolated outbursts were insignificant compared with what was going on in the centre of the battlefield.) The main action was fought out in the simplest, most unsophisticated manner in the open space, visible from both sides, that separated Borodino from the fleches by the wood.
The battle began with a barrage mounted by hundreds of guns on both sides. Then, when the whole plain was covered with smoke, the French brought forward two righthand divisions under Desaix and Compans to attack the fleches, while the Viceroy's regiments advanced on Borodino from the left. The fleches were not much more than half a mile from the Shevardino redoubt, where Napoleon was standing, but Borodino was nearly two miles further away in a straight line, so Napoleon could never have seen what was going on over there, especially with the intermingling of smoke and fog that completely obscured the whole locality. The soldiers of Desaix's division moving in on the fleches remained visible only
The sun was now shining brightly, and its angled rays shone straight on Napoleon's face as he looked over towards the fleches, shielding his eyes with one hand. Smoke wreathed over the ground in front of the fleches; at one moment the smoke itself seemed to move, the next it was the troops who seemed to be moving through the smoke. You might have heard the occasional shout through all the firing, but no one could tell what was going on over there.
Napoleon stood on his mound and peered through a telescope. There in the tiny circle of glass he could see smoke and soldiers, sometimes his own men, sometimes Russians, but when he looked again with the naked eye he could not find the place he had just been looking at. He walked down the mound, and started pacing up and down at the bottom.
From time to time he would stand still, listen carefully to the firing and peer out intently across the battlefield.
It was just not possible to work out what was happening in the fleches, not from down here where he was standing, not from the top of the mound where some of his generals were standing, not even inside the fleches themselves, because they were now constantly changing hands, occupied now by French, now by Russian soldiers, living, dead or wounded, panicking and scared out of their wits. For hours on end this was a scene of incessant cannon - and musket-fire, with control shifting between Russians and French, infantry and cavalry. They surged forward, fell, fired their guns, fought hand to hand, not knowing what to do with each other; all they could do was yell out and run back again.
Adjutants sent out by Napoleon and orderlies dispatched by the marshals were continually galloping in from the field with reports on the progress of the battle, but they were all false, partly because in the heat of battle no one can say what is actually happening at a given moment, partly because many of the adjutants never got to the battlefield as such, all they did was hand on what they had heard from other people, and also because in the time it took for an adjutant to ride the couple of miles that separated him from Napoleon circumstances would have changed, and the news he was bringing was already out of date. Thus an adjutant came galloping in from the Viceroy with news that Borodino had been taken and the bridge over the Kolocha was in French hands. What the adjutant wanted to know from Napoleon was: should the troops cross the bridge? Napoleon sent an order for them to form up on the far side and wait, but even as he issued it, in fact moments after the adjutant had set out from Borodino, the bridge had been retaken by the Russians and burnt down, in the very skirmish Pierre had become involved in first thing that morning.
Another adjutant galloped in ashen-faced and scared stiff from the region of the fleches, bringing word that the attack had been repulsed, Compans was wounded and Davout had been killed, while in actual fact the fleches had been captured by a different French unit just as the adjutant was being told they were lost, and Davout was alive and well except for a bit of bruising. Working on the basis of false reports like these, Napoleon issued a stream of instructions which had either been carried out already, or were not carried out at all, and never could have been.
Napoleon's marshals and generals were nearer the battle scene but, like him, they were not actually involved, and only now and then did they find themselves under fire; these men issued their own instructions without consulting Napoleon, telling people where to stand and what to fire at, where the cavalry should ride and the infantry run. But even these instructions, just like Napoleon's, were almost never followed, and if they were it was only to a tiny extent. More often than not, what happened was the opposite of what had been ordered. Soldiers told to advance would suddenly find themselves under a hail of grapeshot, and come running back. Soldiers told to stand still would suddenly see the Russians right in front of them, and either run away or surge forward, and the cavalry would charge off unbidden to catch up with any running Russians. In this way two cavalry regiments galloped through the Semyonovsk hollow and right up the hill, where they turned round and galloped flat out all the way back again. The same thing applied to the infantry, which was prone to run off in any direction other than the one they were supposed to go in.
All the real instructions - when and where to move the field-guns, when to send the infantry in and tell them to start firing, when to send Russian horses to ride down Russian infantry - all instructions of this kind were issued by officers on the spot, out in the ranks, without consulting Ney, Davout or Murat, let alone Napoleon himself. They were not scared of getting into trouble for disobedience or acting independently, because on the field of war what is at stake is the thing that matters most to any man - the saving of his own skin - and sometimes this means running away, sometimes it means rushing forward, and all those men that found themselves in the thick of the action did what they did on the spur of the moment.
And as it happened, all this rushing to and fro did little to relieve or even affect the position of the troops. All this charging at each other on foot and on horseback didn't do a great deal of harm; the harm, the death and the maiming were caused by cannonballs and bullets flying about all over that open space and men running into them. If ever they managed to get out of the area where balls and bullets were flying about, a superior officer, standing at the rear, would soon bring them back into line, reimpose discipline, and use it to get them back under fire, where once again, scared to death, they would lose all discipline and stampede anywhere on the spur of the moment.
CHAPTER 34
Napoleon's generals, Davout, Ney and Murat, who were situated not far from the field of fire, and even ventured into it once or twice, repeatedly directed vast masses of well-ordered troops back into that area. But, contrary to what had invariably happened in all their previous battles, instead of them duly reporting back that the enemy had been put to flight, the well-ordered masses of troops kept coming back in disorganized, panic-stricken mobs. They were soon brought back into line, but their numbers were dwindling. In the middle of the day Murat sent an adjutant to Napoleon with a request for reinforcements.
Napoleon was sitting at the foot of his mound drinking punch when the adjutant galloped in with a positive assurance that the Russians would be finished if his Majesty would just let them have another division.
'What do you mean reinforcements?' was Napoleon's astonished reaction, and he looked daggers at the adjutant, a handsome young man with a mane of black curly hair not unlike Murat's own locks, as if he could not understand what he was saying. 'Reinforcements!' he was thinking. 'How can they want reinforcements when they've already got half the army ranged against one weak Russian flank that hasn't got any support?'
'Tell the King of Naples,' said Napoleon stiffly, 'that it is still not midday, and I cannot yet see my chess-board clearly. You may go.'
The handsome young man with the curly black mane gave a deep sigh, backed away with one hand to his hat, and galloped off back to the killing field.
Napoleon got to his feet, sent for Caulaincourt and Berthier, and started to chat about things that had nothing to do with the battle.
In mid-conversation, just when Napoleon was getting interested, Berthier's eye was caught by a general galloping over to their redoubt on a steaming horse followed by his entourage. It was Belliard. He got down from his horse, strode rapidly across to the Emperor, and at the top of his voice he began explaining in no uncertain terms the absolute necessity for reinforcements. He gave his word that the Russians would be killed off if the Emperor would just let them have another division.
Napoleon gave a shrug, and continued to pace up and down without giving any answer. Belliard turned to the other generals in his ento
'You're being rather hot-headed, Belliard,' said Napoleon, coming back to speak to his roving general. 'It's too easy to get things wrong in the heat of battle. Go back and have another look, then you can come and talk to me.' Belliard was scarcely out of sight when another messenger came galloping in from the battlefield.
'Well, what do you want?' said Napoleon, with the air of a man thoroughly annoyed by constant pestering.
'Sire, the prince . . .' the adjutant began.
'Wants reinforcements?' growled Napoleon with an angry gesture. The adjutant confirmed this with a nod, and was about to go into detail, but the Emperor turned away, took a couple of steps, stopped, turned back, and called Berthier over. 'The reserves are needed,' he said with a slight spreading of the hands. 'Who shall we send in? What do you think?' he asked Berthier, whom he would later describe as 'that gosling I've turned into an eagle'.
'Claparede's division, sire,' said Berthier, who knew all the divisions, regiments and battalions by heart.
Napoleon nodded in agreement.
An adjutant galloped off to Claparede's division. Within minutes the young guards drawn up behind the redoubt were on the move. Napoleon gazed in their direction without saying a word. Then suddenly he said to Berthier, 'No. I can't send Claparede. Send Friant's division.'
Although there was nothing to be gained by sending Friant's division in preference to Claparede's, and in fact it would now be awkward and time-consuming to bring Claparede to a halt and dispatch Friant, the order was carried out to the letter. Napoleon could not see that as far as his troops were concerned he was acting like a doctor issuing prescriptions that would slow down the patient's progress, a function he knew well and roundly condemned.