War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
how battle was offered and accepted at Borodino and before that at Shevardino, there exists another clearly defined, universally familiar and totally false account. All the historians describe events as follows:
In retreat from Smolensk, they say, the Russian army scouted around to find the best location for a general engagement, and just such a location was discovered at Borodino. The Russians, they say, fortified this location in advance, on the left-hand side of the Moscow-Smolensk road and at right angles to it, all the way from Borodino to Utitsa, and that is where the battle was fought.
In front of this location, we are told, a fortified earthwork was thrown up on the rising ground at Shevardino as an outpost for the observation of enemy movements.
On the 24th, so the story goes, Napoleon attacked this outpost, and took it. On the 26th he attacked the whole Russian army, which had taken up position on the field of Borodino.
This is the historical version of events, and it is totally wrong, as anyone can tell if he is prepared to go into the matter.
The Russians did not scout round to find the best location; quite the reverse, as they retreated they had by-passed many locations better than Borodino. They did not take a stand at any of these positions, partly because Kutuzov refused to take up a position not chosen by himself personally, partly because the popular clamour for a battle was not yet strong enough, partly because Miloradovich had yet to arrive with the militia, and for lots of other reasons.
The fact is, there had been stronger positions earlier on, and the Borodino location where the battle took place was no improvement on anywhere else in the Russian empire that might have been chosen at random by sticking a pin into a map.
Far from fortifying a location on the left-hand side at right angles to the road, the place where the battle was fought, the Russians never even dreamt of fighting a battle on that spot until the 25th of August 1812. This is proved firstly by the fact that there were no fortifications there before the 25th, and the earthworks begun on that day had not been completed by the 26th; and secondly, proof is provided by the situation of the Shevardino redoubt itself, out in front of the battlefield, which rendered it valueless. For what purpose was this redoubt more strongly fortified than any other post? And for what purpose was every effort made and were six thousand men sacrificed to defend it until last thing on the 24th? A Cossack patrol would have been enough to keep track of enemy movements. And a third way of proving that the position of the battlefield was not anticipated, and the Shevardino redoubt was not an advance post of that position, lies in the fact that until the 25th Barclay de Tolly and Bagration were convinced that the Shevardino redoubt was the left flank of the position, and Kutuzov himself, in a report jotted down in haste immediately after the battle, speaks of Shevardino as the left flank of their position. It was only much later on, when reports of the battle came to be written down at leisure, that a curiously inaccurate statement was invented (probably to gloss over errors made by the commander-in-chief, who had to be seen as infallible) to the effect that the Shevardino redoubt served as an advance post, whereas it was nothing more than a fortified post on the left flank, and the battle of Borodino was undertaken by us in a fortified location selected in advance, whereas it was really fought in an unexpected place that was virtually without fortification.
What happened is clear. A location was chosen on the river Kolocha, which cuts across the high road not at ninety degrees, but at an acute angle, with the left flank at Shevardino, the right flank near the village of Novoye, and the centre at Borodino, near the confluence of the Kolocha and the Voyna. Anyone looking at the field of Borodino and disregarding the actual course of the battle would consider this location, conveniently covered by the Kolocha, the obvious one to be adopted by an army that wanted to check the advance of an enemy marching down the road from Smolensk towards Moscow.
Napoleon, riding towards Valuyevo on the 24th, did not (according to the history books) see the position of the Russians between Utitsa and Borodino (he could not have seen it since it didn't exist), and did not see the advance posts of the Russian army, but in his pursuit of the Russian rearguard he stumbled upon the left flank of the Russian position at the Shevardino redoubt, and surprised the Russians by taking his troops across the Kolocha. And since it was too late for a general engagement the Russians withdrew the left flank from their intended position and took up a new one, which had not been anticipated and was not fortified. By crossing the Kolocha on the left-hand side of the road Napoleon shifted the whole battle-to-be from right to left (looked at from the Russian side) and transferred it to the fields that lie between Utitsa, Semyonovsk and Borodino - fields with nothing more to offer in the way of military advantage than any others in Russia - and it was here that the whole battle of the 26th took place.6
If Napoleon had not reached the Kolocha on the evening of the 24th and had not ordered an immediate attack on the redoubt, if he had launched his attack the following morning, no one would have had any doubt that the Shevardino redoubt was the left flank of the Russian position, and the battle would have gone ahead as anticipated. In that case we would probably have defended the Shevardino redoubt even more stubbornly, it being our left flank; we would have attacked Napoleon in the centre or from the right, and the general engagement would have been fought out on the 25th in a location that had been anticipated and fortified. But since the attack on our left flank occurred in the evening following the retreat of our rearguard, that is, immediately after the action at Gridneva, and since the Russian generals would not or could not undertake a general engagement that same evening, the 24th, the first and most important action in the battle of Borodino was already lost on the 24th, a loss that clearly led straight to the debacle that occurred on the 26th.
Following the loss of the Shevardino redoubt, on the morning of the 25th we found ourselves without a position for the left flank, and we were forced to let the left wing curl back, fortifying it where and when we could.
So it wasn't just a question of our Russian troops being protected on the 26th of August by nothing but flimsy, unfinished earthworks; the disadvantage of their position was aggravated by the Russian generals' failure to grasp what had actually happened (the loss of the left-flank position, and the whole field of the battle-to-be swinging from right to left), which left them holding their extended line all the way from Novoye to Utitsa, and that meant they had to transfer troops from right to left in mid-battle. As a result of this, throughout the entire battle the Russians had to face the whole French army bearing down on our left wing, with our forces doubly disadvantaged.
(Poniatowski's action against Utitsa and Uvarov's action against the French on the right flank were outside the general course of the battle.)
And so the battle of Borodino was fought quite differently from the way it is normally described (by historians so anxious to gloss over the blunders of our generals they detract from the glorious achievements of the Russian army and the Russian people). The battle of Borodino was not fought out in a carefully selected and well-fortified location with some slight disadvantage in numbers on the Russian side. Following the loss of the Shevardino redoubt the battle of Borodino was fought out in an open location with almost no entrenchments, with Russian forces doubly disadvantaged vis-a-vis the French, in other words under conditions that made it unthinkable even to get through three hours without the army being utterly defeated and put to flight, let alone keep on fighting for ten hours and still leave the issue in doubt.
CHAPTER 20
It was the morning of the 25th, and Pierre was on his way out of Mozhaysk. When he got to the point where the road out of town meandered steeply downhill, Pierre got out of his carriage and walked past a cathedral on the right-hand side at the top of the slope, where a service was being held and the bells were ringing. One of the cavalry regiments was following him downhill, with the singers out in front. Coming up the hill towards them was a train of carts filled with casualties from the previous day's engagement. The peasant drivers were running this way and that, urging the horses on and wielding their whips. The carts, each carrying three or four wounded soldiers stretched out or sitting up, jolted over the stones that had been thrown down to make some sort of road up the hill. The wounded men, white-faced and bandaged with rags, clung to the sides wincing and scowling as they were shaken and thrown about in the carts. Almost all of them gawped at Pierre in his white hat and green swallowtail coat with the simple-minded curiosity of children.
Pierre's driver yelled furiously at the casualty convoy to keep to one side of the road. The cavalry regiment marching on downhill in step with the singers soon caught up with Pierre's carriage and this blocked the road. Pierre stopped and squeezed back to the edge of the road that had been dug into the hill. The slope of the hillside kept the sun off the cutting, and it was cold and damp down there, but overhead the bells sang out merrily on a bright August morning. A cart with wounded men on it came to a standstill at the edge of the road right in front of Pierre. The driver in his bark-fibre shoes ran round the back of his cart, and with much puffing and panting shoved some stones under the back wheels, which had no tyres on them; then he set to tightening his horse's harness.
A wounded veteran with his arm in a sling, who had been walking along behind the cart, took hold of it with his good arm, and looked round at Pierre.
'You from these parts?' he said. 'Are they dropping us here or taking us on to Moscow?'
Pierre was so preoccupied that he didn't hear. He was engrossed in watching the cavalry regiment that had come up against the casualty convoy, and the cart right in front of him with its three wounded men, two sitting up, one lying down. One of the pair sitting up seemed to have been wounded in the cheek. His whole head was swathed in rags, and one cheek had swollen up as big as a baby's head. His mouth and nose had been skewed to one side. He was looking over at the cathedral and he crossed himself. Another soldier, a conscript, only a boy, with blond hair and a thin white face that seemed to have been drained of all blood, was watching Pierre with a friendly smile. The third man was lying on his belly so you could not see his face. The cavalry singers were now level with the cart. They were belting out a good soldier's song that had the men dancing along.
My hair's all gone, I've got a spiky head,
And here I am a-wanderin' far from home . . .
A kind of echo, joyous in a very different way, came ringing down from the metallic clanging of the bells. And joyous in a different way again was the hot sunshine that bathed the top of the opposite slope. But under the hillside where Pierre stood next to the cart with the wounded soldiers and the gasping little nag, it was miserably damp and dismal.
The soldier with the swollen cheek looked savagely at the singing cavalrymen.
'All right for that lot, showing off!' he growled resentfully.
'It's not just soldiers now, you know, there's peasants, too, I've seen'em! Oh yes, the peasants, they're gettin' dragged in as well,' said the soldier standing by the cart and talking to Pierre with a lugubrious smile on his lips. 'No pickin' and choosin' now . . . Chuck everybody at 'em. It's all about Moscow, you know. Get it all over an' done with.' Although the soldier didn't express himself clearly, Pierre got his meaning and nodded in agreement.
Now at last the road was clear, so Pierre walked to the bottom of the hill and drove off again.
On he went, searching for familiar faces on either side of the road, but all he saw were unfamiliar ones, fighting faces from all over the military, every one of them staring in amazement at his white hat and green swallowtail coat.
He had gone two or three miles before he came across someone he knew, and he hailed him with great delight. It was a doctor, a senior member of the army medical staff. He was coming towards Pierre in a covered gig, with a young doctor at his side, and the moment he spotted Pierre, he called out to the Cossack who had taken over as his driver, and told him to stop.
'Count! Your Excellency, what are you doing down here?' asked the doctor.
'Oh, I just felt like having a look . . .'
'Well, there's going to be plenty to look at . . .' Pierre got out of his carriage, and stopped to exchange a few words with the doctor, telling him he had every intention of taking part in the battle.
The doctor advised Bezukhov to go straight to Kutuzov.
'What do you think you're doing, wandering off out of sight, God knows where on the battlefield?' he said, exchanging a quick glance with his young colleague, 'and his Serene Highness does know you, so you'll get a warm welcome. That's what you must do, my friend,' said the doctor.
The doctor had an exhausted and harassed look about him.
'So you think . . . Anyway, there's just one more thing I wanted to ask - where exactly is our position?' said Pierre.
'Our position?' said the doctor. 'Not really my cup of tea. Get yourself down past Tatarinova. There's a fair amount of digging going on there. Some high ground. You can see a lot from there,' said the doctor.
'Can you really? . . . If you could just . . .'
But the doctor had cut him short and was walking back to his gig.
'I would have taken you there, but I'm up to here, for heaven's sake . . .' (The doctor pointed to his throat.) 'Must rush. I'm off to see the corps commander. Do you know how bad things are? . . . Listen, Count, there's going to be a battle tomorrow with a hundred thousand troops. We can count on twenty thousand casualties at the very least, and we haven't enough stretchers, beds, dressers or doctors for six thousand. We have got ten thousand carts, but we need lots of other things. Just have to do what we can.'
Pierre was greatly affected by the curious idea that of all those thousands of men, alive and kicking, young and old, who had been staring at his hat with such easy amusement, twenty thousand were inexorably destined to be wounded or killed, maybe men he had seen with his own eyes.
'They may be going to die tomorrow. How can they think of anything but death?' And suddenly, by some mysterious association of ideas, he had a vivid recollection of walking down the hill outside Mozhaysk, with the carts and the wounded men, the clamour of the bells, the slanting rays of sunshine, and the cavalrymen singing.
'All those cavalrymen marching into battle, coming across wounded soldiers, never stopping to think what's in store for them - they just march past winking at their wounded comrades. And of all those men, twenty thousand are doomed to die - and they think my hat's funny! It's weird!' thought Pierre, moving on towards Tatarinova.
Outside some gentleman's house on the left side of the road there were carriages, wagons and orderlies and sentries in droves. This was where his Serene Highness, the commander-in-chief, was staying. But when Pierre arrived he was out, and so were most of the staff. They had all gone to church. Pierre pressed on towards Gorki, where he drove uphill and found himself on the little village street. There he had his first sight of conscripted peasants in their white shirts, with crosses on their caps. Brimming with energy and running with sweat, there they were on the right-hand side of the road working away at a huge grass-covered mound with raucous comments and roars of laughter. Some were digging, some were wheeling the earth away in barrows, while a third lot stood around doing nothing.
Two officers stood on the knoll telling them what to do. At the sight of these peasants, so obviously revelling in their new-found status as soldiers, Pierre thought again of the wounded men at Mozhaysk, and now he could see what the soldier had meant with his 'Chuck everybody at 'em'. The spectacle of these bearded peasants toiling on the field of battle with their funny, clumsy boots, their sweaty necks, one or two of them with shirts open from top left to bottom right showing their sunburnt collar-bones, told Pierre more about the primacy and solemn meaning of the here and now than anything he had yet seen and heard.
CHAPTER 21
Pierre got out of his carriage, walked past the toiling peasants and climbed up the mound which according to the doctor offered a good view of the field of battle.
It was about eleven in the morning. The sun was behind Pierre a little to his left, and it shone down brightly through the clear, rarefied air on the huge vista sprawling before him like an amphitheatre on rising ground.
The main road from Smolensk cut through the amphitheatre upwards at the top left, and in its meandering course it passed through a village with a white church five or six hundred yards away at the bottom of the hill. This was Borodino. The road cut down below the village, crossed over a bridge and then rose steadily, weaving up and down and in and out, until it got to the hamlet of Valuyev, clearly visible about four miles away - and that's where Napoleon was now. Beyond Valuyev the road disappeared into yellowing woodland on the horizon. In among those trees, far away amidst the birches and the firs on the right-hand side of the road, stood the gleaming sunlit cross and belfry of the Kolotsky monastery. At various places in the blue distance, to the right and left of the woodland and the road, smoke rose up from camp-fires and you could see the indistinct outline of massed troops, ours and the enemy's. Off to the right, the rivers Kolocha and Moskva ran through countryside that was broken and hilly. The villages of Bezzubovo and Zakharino could be seen through gaps in the hills. Over to the left the ground was flatter, with fields of corn, and smoke rose from a single village that had been set on fire - Semyonovsk.
Everything Pierre saw on either hand looked so indistinct that, glancing left or right over the landscape, he could find nothing that quite lived up to his expectations. Nowhere was there a field of battle as such, the kind of thing he had expected; there was nothing but ordinary fields, clearings, troops, woods, smoking camp-fires, villages, mounds and little streams. Here was a living landscape, and try as he might he could not make out any military positioning. He could not even tell our troops from theirs.
'I've got to ask someone who knows about these things,' he thought, and he turned to an officer who was much taken with the sight of his huge, unmilitary figure.
'Excuse me,
In retreat from Smolensk, they say, the Russian army scouted around to find the best location for a general engagement, and just such a location was discovered at Borodino. The Russians, they say, fortified this location in advance, on the left-hand side of the Moscow-Smolensk road and at right angles to it, all the way from Borodino to Utitsa, and that is where the battle was fought.
In front of this location, we are told, a fortified earthwork was thrown up on the rising ground at Shevardino as an outpost for the observation of enemy movements.
On the 24th, so the story goes, Napoleon attacked this outpost, and took it. On the 26th he attacked the whole Russian army, which had taken up position on the field of Borodino.
This is the historical version of events, and it is totally wrong, as anyone can tell if he is prepared to go into the matter.
The Russians did not scout round to find the best location; quite the reverse, as they retreated they had by-passed many locations better than Borodino. They did not take a stand at any of these positions, partly because Kutuzov refused to take up a position not chosen by himself personally, partly because the popular clamour for a battle was not yet strong enough, partly because Miloradovich had yet to arrive with the militia, and for lots of other reasons.
The fact is, there had been stronger positions earlier on, and the Borodino location where the battle took place was no improvement on anywhere else in the Russian empire that might have been chosen at random by sticking a pin into a map.
Far from fortifying a location on the left-hand side at right angles to the road, the place where the battle was fought, the Russians never even dreamt of fighting a battle on that spot until the 25th of August 1812. This is proved firstly by the fact that there were no fortifications there before the 25th, and the earthworks begun on that day had not been completed by the 26th; and secondly, proof is provided by the situation of the Shevardino redoubt itself, out in front of the battlefield, which rendered it valueless. For what purpose was this redoubt more strongly fortified than any other post? And for what purpose was every effort made and were six thousand men sacrificed to defend it until last thing on the 24th? A Cossack patrol would have been enough to keep track of enemy movements. And a third way of proving that the position of the battlefield was not anticipated, and the Shevardino redoubt was not an advance post of that position, lies in the fact that until the 25th Barclay de Tolly and Bagration were convinced that the Shevardino redoubt was the left flank of the position, and Kutuzov himself, in a report jotted down in haste immediately after the battle, speaks of Shevardino as the left flank of their position. It was only much later on, when reports of the battle came to be written down at leisure, that a curiously inaccurate statement was invented (probably to gloss over errors made by the commander-in-chief, who had to be seen as infallible) to the effect that the Shevardino redoubt served as an advance post, whereas it was nothing more than a fortified post on the left flank, and the battle of Borodino was undertaken by us in a fortified location selected in advance, whereas it was really fought in an unexpected place that was virtually without fortification.
What happened is clear. A location was chosen on the river Kolocha, which cuts across the high road not at ninety degrees, but at an acute angle, with the left flank at Shevardino, the right flank near the village of Novoye, and the centre at Borodino, near the confluence of the Kolocha and the Voyna. Anyone looking at the field of Borodino and disregarding the actual course of the battle would consider this location, conveniently covered by the Kolocha, the obvious one to be adopted by an army that wanted to check the advance of an enemy marching down the road from Smolensk towards Moscow.
Napoleon, riding towards Valuyevo on the 24th, did not (according to the history books) see the position of the Russians between Utitsa and Borodino (he could not have seen it since it didn't exist), and did not see the advance posts of the Russian army, but in his pursuit of the Russian rearguard he stumbled upon the left flank of the Russian position at the Shevardino redoubt, and surprised the Russians by taking his troops across the Kolocha. And since it was too late for a general engagement the Russians withdrew the left flank from their intended position and took up a new one, which had not been anticipated and was not fortified. By crossing the Kolocha on the left-hand side of the road Napoleon shifted the whole battle-to-be from right to left (looked at from the Russian side) and transferred it to the fields that lie between Utitsa, Semyonovsk and Borodino - fields with nothing more to offer in the way of military advantage than any others in Russia - and it was here that the whole battle of the 26th took place.6
If Napoleon had not reached the Kolocha on the evening of the 24th and had not ordered an immediate attack on the redoubt, if he had launched his attack the following morning, no one would have had any doubt that the Shevardino redoubt was the left flank of the Russian position, and the battle would have gone ahead as anticipated. In that case we would probably have defended the Shevardino redoubt even more stubbornly, it being our left flank; we would have attacked Napoleon in the centre or from the right, and the general engagement would have been fought out on the 25th in a location that had been anticipated and fortified. But since the attack on our left flank occurred in the evening following the retreat of our rearguard, that is, immediately after the action at Gridneva, and since the Russian generals would not or could not undertake a general engagement that same evening, the 24th, the first and most important action in the battle of Borodino was already lost on the 24th, a loss that clearly led straight to the debacle that occurred on the 26th.
Following the loss of the Shevardino redoubt, on the morning of the 25th we found ourselves without a position for the left flank, and we were forced to let the left wing curl back, fortifying it where and when we could.
So it wasn't just a question of our Russian troops being protected on the 26th of August by nothing but flimsy, unfinished earthworks; the disadvantage of their position was aggravated by the Russian generals' failure to grasp what had actually happened (the loss of the left-flank position, and the whole field of the battle-to-be swinging from right to left), which left them holding their extended line all the way from Novoye to Utitsa, and that meant they had to transfer troops from right to left in mid-battle. As a result of this, throughout the entire battle the Russians had to face the whole French army bearing down on our left wing, with our forces doubly disadvantaged.
(Poniatowski's action against Utitsa and Uvarov's action against the French on the right flank were outside the general course of the battle.)
And so the battle of Borodino was fought quite differently from the way it is normally described (by historians so anxious to gloss over the blunders of our generals they detract from the glorious achievements of the Russian army and the Russian people). The battle of Borodino was not fought out in a carefully selected and well-fortified location with some slight disadvantage in numbers on the Russian side. Following the loss of the Shevardino redoubt the battle of Borodino was fought out in an open location with almost no entrenchments, with Russian forces doubly disadvantaged vis-a-vis the French, in other words under conditions that made it unthinkable even to get through three hours without the army being utterly defeated and put to flight, let alone keep on fighting for ten hours and still leave the issue in doubt.
CHAPTER 20
It was the morning of the 25th, and Pierre was on his way out of Mozhaysk. When he got to the point where the road out of town meandered steeply downhill, Pierre got out of his carriage and walked past a cathedral on the right-hand side at the top of the slope, where a service was being held and the bells were ringing. One of the cavalry regiments was following him downhill, with the singers out in front. Coming up the hill towards them was a train of carts filled with casualties from the previous day's engagement. The peasant drivers were running this way and that, urging the horses on and wielding their whips. The carts, each carrying three or four wounded soldiers stretched out or sitting up, jolted over the stones that had been thrown down to make some sort of road up the hill. The wounded men, white-faced and bandaged with rags, clung to the sides wincing and scowling as they were shaken and thrown about in the carts. Almost all of them gawped at Pierre in his white hat and green swallowtail coat with the simple-minded curiosity of children.
Pierre's driver yelled furiously at the casualty convoy to keep to one side of the road. The cavalry regiment marching on downhill in step with the singers soon caught up with Pierre's carriage and this blocked the road. Pierre stopped and squeezed back to the edge of the road that had been dug into the hill. The slope of the hillside kept the sun off the cutting, and it was cold and damp down there, but overhead the bells sang out merrily on a bright August morning. A cart with wounded men on it came to a standstill at the edge of the road right in front of Pierre. The driver in his bark-fibre shoes ran round the back of his cart, and with much puffing and panting shoved some stones under the back wheels, which had no tyres on them; then he set to tightening his horse's harness.
A wounded veteran with his arm in a sling, who had been walking along behind the cart, took hold of it with his good arm, and looked round at Pierre.
'You from these parts?' he said. 'Are they dropping us here or taking us on to Moscow?'
Pierre was so preoccupied that he didn't hear. He was engrossed in watching the cavalry regiment that had come up against the casualty convoy, and the cart right in front of him with its three wounded men, two sitting up, one lying down. One of the pair sitting up seemed to have been wounded in the cheek. His whole head was swathed in rags, and one cheek had swollen up as big as a baby's head. His mouth and nose had been skewed to one side. He was looking over at the cathedral and he crossed himself. Another soldier, a conscript, only a boy, with blond hair and a thin white face that seemed to have been drained of all blood, was watching Pierre with a friendly smile. The third man was lying on his belly so you could not see his face. The cavalry singers were now level with the cart. They were belting out a good soldier's song that had the men dancing along.
My hair's all gone, I've got a spiky head,
And here I am a-wanderin' far from home . . .
A kind of echo, joyous in a very different way, came ringing down from the metallic clanging of the bells. And joyous in a different way again was the hot sunshine that bathed the top of the opposite slope. But under the hillside where Pierre stood next to the cart with the wounded soldiers and the gasping little nag, it was miserably damp and dismal.
The soldier with the swollen cheek looked savagely at the singing cavalrymen.
'All right for that lot, showing off!' he growled resentfully.
'It's not just soldiers now, you know, there's peasants, too, I've seen'em! Oh yes, the peasants, they're gettin' dragged in as well,' said the soldier standing by the cart and talking to Pierre with a lugubrious smile on his lips. 'No pickin' and choosin' now . . . Chuck everybody at 'em. It's all about Moscow, you know. Get it all over an' done with.' Although the soldier didn't express himself clearly, Pierre got his meaning and nodded in agreement.
Now at last the road was clear, so Pierre walked to the bottom of the hill and drove off again.
On he went, searching for familiar faces on either side of the road, but all he saw were unfamiliar ones, fighting faces from all over the military, every one of them staring in amazement at his white hat and green swallowtail coat.
He had gone two or three miles before he came across someone he knew, and he hailed him with great delight. It was a doctor, a senior member of the army medical staff. He was coming towards Pierre in a covered gig, with a young doctor at his side, and the moment he spotted Pierre, he called out to the Cossack who had taken over as his driver, and told him to stop.
'Count! Your Excellency, what are you doing down here?' asked the doctor.
'Oh, I just felt like having a look . . .'
'Well, there's going to be plenty to look at . . .' Pierre got out of his carriage, and stopped to exchange a few words with the doctor, telling him he had every intention of taking part in the battle.
The doctor advised Bezukhov to go straight to Kutuzov.
'What do you think you're doing, wandering off out of sight, God knows where on the battlefield?' he said, exchanging a quick glance with his young colleague, 'and his Serene Highness does know you, so you'll get a warm welcome. That's what you must do, my friend,' said the doctor.
The doctor had an exhausted and harassed look about him.
'So you think . . . Anyway, there's just one more thing I wanted to ask - where exactly is our position?' said Pierre.
'Our position?' said the doctor. 'Not really my cup of tea. Get yourself down past Tatarinova. There's a fair amount of digging going on there. Some high ground. You can see a lot from there,' said the doctor.
'Can you really? . . . If you could just . . .'
But the doctor had cut him short and was walking back to his gig.
'I would have taken you there, but I'm up to here, for heaven's sake . . .' (The doctor pointed to his throat.) 'Must rush. I'm off to see the corps commander. Do you know how bad things are? . . . Listen, Count, there's going to be a battle tomorrow with a hundred thousand troops. We can count on twenty thousand casualties at the very least, and we haven't enough stretchers, beds, dressers or doctors for six thousand. We have got ten thousand carts, but we need lots of other things. Just have to do what we can.'
Pierre was greatly affected by the curious idea that of all those thousands of men, alive and kicking, young and old, who had been staring at his hat with such easy amusement, twenty thousand were inexorably destined to be wounded or killed, maybe men he had seen with his own eyes.
'They may be going to die tomorrow. How can they think of anything but death?' And suddenly, by some mysterious association of ideas, he had a vivid recollection of walking down the hill outside Mozhaysk, with the carts and the wounded men, the clamour of the bells, the slanting rays of sunshine, and the cavalrymen singing.
'All those cavalrymen marching into battle, coming across wounded soldiers, never stopping to think what's in store for them - they just march past winking at their wounded comrades. And of all those men, twenty thousand are doomed to die - and they think my hat's funny! It's weird!' thought Pierre, moving on towards Tatarinova.
Outside some gentleman's house on the left side of the road there were carriages, wagons and orderlies and sentries in droves. This was where his Serene Highness, the commander-in-chief, was staying. But when Pierre arrived he was out, and so were most of the staff. They had all gone to church. Pierre pressed on towards Gorki, where he drove uphill and found himself on the little village street. There he had his first sight of conscripted peasants in their white shirts, with crosses on their caps. Brimming with energy and running with sweat, there they were on the right-hand side of the road working away at a huge grass-covered mound with raucous comments and roars of laughter. Some were digging, some were wheeling the earth away in barrows, while a third lot stood around doing nothing.
Two officers stood on the knoll telling them what to do. At the sight of these peasants, so obviously revelling in their new-found status as soldiers, Pierre thought again of the wounded men at Mozhaysk, and now he could see what the soldier had meant with his 'Chuck everybody at 'em'. The spectacle of these bearded peasants toiling on the field of battle with their funny, clumsy boots, their sweaty necks, one or two of them with shirts open from top left to bottom right showing their sunburnt collar-bones, told Pierre more about the primacy and solemn meaning of the here and now than anything he had yet seen and heard.
CHAPTER 21
Pierre got out of his carriage, walked past the toiling peasants and climbed up the mound which according to the doctor offered a good view of the field of battle.
It was about eleven in the morning. The sun was behind Pierre a little to his left, and it shone down brightly through the clear, rarefied air on the huge vista sprawling before him like an amphitheatre on rising ground.
The main road from Smolensk cut through the amphitheatre upwards at the top left, and in its meandering course it passed through a village with a white church five or six hundred yards away at the bottom of the hill. This was Borodino. The road cut down below the village, crossed over a bridge and then rose steadily, weaving up and down and in and out, until it got to the hamlet of Valuyev, clearly visible about four miles away - and that's where Napoleon was now. Beyond Valuyev the road disappeared into yellowing woodland on the horizon. In among those trees, far away amidst the birches and the firs on the right-hand side of the road, stood the gleaming sunlit cross and belfry of the Kolotsky monastery. At various places in the blue distance, to the right and left of the woodland and the road, smoke rose up from camp-fires and you could see the indistinct outline of massed troops, ours and the enemy's. Off to the right, the rivers Kolocha and Moskva ran through countryside that was broken and hilly. The villages of Bezzubovo and Zakharino could be seen through gaps in the hills. Over to the left the ground was flatter, with fields of corn, and smoke rose from a single village that had been set on fire - Semyonovsk.
Everything Pierre saw on either hand looked so indistinct that, glancing left or right over the landscape, he could find nothing that quite lived up to his expectations. Nowhere was there a field of battle as such, the kind of thing he had expected; there was nothing but ordinary fields, clearings, troops, woods, smoking camp-fires, villages, mounds and little streams. Here was a living landscape, and try as he might he could not make out any military positioning. He could not even tell our troops from theirs.
'I've got to ask someone who knows about these things,' he thought, and he turned to an officer who was much taken with the sight of his huge, unmilitary figure.
'Excuse me,