《War And Peace》　Book2 　CHAPTER XV
　　　　by Leo Tolstoy

BEFORE FOUR O'CLOCK in the afternoon Prince Andrey, who had persisted in his
petition to Kutuzov, reached Grunte, and joined Bagration. Bonaparte's adjutant
had not yet reached Murat's division, and the battle had not yet begun. In
Bagration's detachment, they knew nothing of the progress of events. They talked
about peace, but did not believe in its possibility. They talked of a battle,
but did not believe in a battle's being close at hand either.

Knowing Bolkonsky to be a favourite and trusted adjutant, Bagration received
him with a commanding officer's special graciousness and condescension. He
informed him that there would probably be an engagement that day or the next
day, and gave him full liberty to remain in attendance on him during the battle,
or to retire to the rear-guard to watch over the order of the retreat, also a
matter of great importance.

"To-day, though, there will most likely be no action," said Bagration, as
though to reassure Prince Andrey.

"If this is one of the common run of little staff dandies, sent here to win a
cross, he can do that in the rear-guard, but if he wants to be with me, let him
... he'll be of use, if he's a brave officer," thought Bagration. Prince Andrey,
without replying, asked the prince's permission to ride round the position and
find out the disposition of the forces, so that, in case of a message, he might
know where to take it. An officer on duty, a handsome and elegantly dressed man,
with a diamond ring on his forefinger, who spoke French badly, but with
assurance, was summoned to conduct Prince Andrey.

On all sides they saw officers drenched through, with dejected faces,
apparently looking for something, and soldiers dragging doors, benches, and
fences from the village.

"Here we can't put a stop to these people," said the staff-officer, pointing
to them. "Their commanders let their companies get out of hand. And look here,"
he pointed to a canteen-keeper's booth, "they gather here, and here they sit. I
drove them all out this morning, and look, it's full again. I must go and scare
them, prince. One moment."

"Let us go together, and I'll get some bread and cheese there," said Prince
Andrey, who had not yet had time for a meal.

"Why didn't you mention it, prince? I would have offered you
something."

They got off their horses and went into the canteen-keeper's booth. Several
officers, with flushed and exhausted faces, were sitting at the tables, eating
and drinking.

"Now what does this mean, gentlemen?" said the staff-officer, in the
reproachful tone of a man who has repeated the same thing several times. "You
mustn't absent yourselves like this. The prince gave orders that no one was to
leave his post. Come, really, captain," he remonstrated with a muddy, thin
little artillery officer, who in his stockings (he had given his boots to the
canteen-keeper to dry) stood up at their entrance, smiling not quite
naturally.

"Now aren't you ashamed, Captain Tushin?" pursued the staff-officer. "I
should have thought you as an artillery officer ought to set an example, and you
have no boots on. They'll sound the alarm, and you'll be in a pretty position
without your boots on." (The staff-officer smiled.) "Kindly return to your
posts, gentlemen, all, all," he added in a tone of authority.

Prince Andrey could not help smiling as he glanced at Captain Tushin.
Smiling, without a word, Tushin shifted from one bare foot to the other, looking
inquiringly, with his big, shrewd, and good-natured eyes, from Prince Andrey to
the staff-officer.

"The soldiers say it's easier barefoot," said Captain Tushin, smiling shyly,
evidently anxious to carry off his awkward position in a jesting tone. But
before he had uttered the words, he felt that his joke would not do and had not
come off. He was in confusion.

"Kindly go to your places," said the staff-officer, trying to preserve his
gravity.

Prince Andrey glanced once more at the little figure of the artillery
officer. There was something peculiar about it, utterly unsoldierly, rather
comic, but very attractive.

The staff-officer and Prince Andrey got on their horses and rode on.

Riding out beyond the village, continually meeting or overtaking soldiers and
officers of various ranks, they saw on the left earthworks being thrown up,
still red with the freshly dug clay. Several battalions of soldiers, in their
shirt-sleeves, in spite of the cold wind were toiling like white ants at these
entrenchments; from the trench they saw spadefuls of red clay continually being
thrown out by unseen hands. They rode up to the entrenchment, examined it, and
were riding on further. Close behind the entrenchment they came upon dozens of
soldiers continually running to and from the earthworks, and they had to hold
their noses and put their horses to a gallop to get by the pestilential
atmosphere of this improvised sewer.

"Voilà l'agrément des camps, monsieur le prince," said the
staff-officer. They rode up the opposite hill. From that hill they had a view of
the French. Prince Andrey stopped and began looking closer at what lay before
them.

"You see here is where our battery stands," said the staff-officer, pointing
to the highest point, "commanded by that queer fellow sitting without his boots;
from there you can see everything; let us go there, prince."

"I am very grateful to you, I'll go on alone now," said Prince Andrey,
anxious to be rid of the staff-officer; "don't trouble yourself further,
please."

The staff-officer left him, and Prince Andrey rode on alone.

The further forward and the nearer to the enemy he went, the more orderly and
cheerful he found the troops. The greatest disorder and depression had prevailed
in the transport forces before Znaim, which Prince Andrey had passed that
morning, ten versts from the French. At Grunte too a certain alarm and vague
dread could be felt. But the nearer Prince Andrey got to the French line, the
more self-confident was the appearance of our troops. The soldiers, in their
great-coats, stood ranged in lines with their sergeant, and the captain was
calling over the men, poking the last soldier in the line in the ribs, and
telling him to hold up his hand. Soldiers were dotted all over the plain,
dragging logs and brushwood, and constructing shanties, chatting together, and
laughing good-humouredly. They were sitting round the fires, dressed and
stripped, drying shirts and foot-gear. Or they thronged round the porridge-pots
and cauldrons, brushing their boots and their coats. In one company dinner was
ready, and the soldiers, with greedy faces, watched the steaming pots, and
waited for the sample, which was being taken in a wooden bowl to the
commissariat officer, sitting on a piece of wood facing his shanty.

In another company-a lucky one, for not all had vodka-the soldiers stood in a
group round a broad-shouldered, pock-marked sergeant, who was tilting a keg of
vodka, and pouring it into the covers of the canteens held out to him in turn.
The soldiers, with reverential faces, lifted the covers to their mouths, drained
them, and licking their lips and rubbing them with the sleeves of their coats,
they walked away looking more good-humoured than before. Every face was as
serene as though it were all happening not in sight of the enemy, just before an
action in which at least half of the detachment must certainly be left on the
field, but somewhere at home in Russia, with every prospect of a quiet
halting-place. Prince Andrey rode by the Chasseur regiment, and as he advanced
into the ranks of the Kiev Grenadiers, stalwart fellows all engaged in the same
peaceful pursuits, not far from the colonel's shanty, standing higher than the
rest, he came upon a platoon of grenadiers, before whom lay a man stripped
naked. Two soldiers were holding him, while two others were brandishing supple
twigs and bringing them down at regular intervals on the man's bare back. The
man shrieked unnaturally. A stout major was walking up and down in front of the
platoon, and regardless of the screams, he kept saying: "It's a disgrace for a
soldier to steal; a soldier must be honest, honourable, and brave, and to steal
from a comrade, he must be without honour indeed, a monster. Again,
again!"

And still he heard the dull thuds and the desperate but affected
scream.

"Again, again," the major was saying.

A young officer, with an expression of bewilderment and distress in his face,
walked away from the flogging, looking inquiringly at the adjutant.

Prince Andrey, coming out to the foremost line, rode along in front of it.
Our line and the enemy's were far from one another at the left and also at the
right flank; but in the centre, at the spot where in the morning the messengers
had met, the lines came so close that the soldiers of the two armies could see
each other's faces and talk together. Besides these soldiers, whose place was in
that part of the line, many others had gathered there from both sides, and they
were laughing, as they scrutinised the strange and novel dress and aspect of
their foes.

Since early morning, though it was forbidden to go up to the line, the
commanding officers could not keep the inquisitive soldiers back. The soldiers,
whose post was in that part of the line, like showmen exhibiting some curiosity,
no longer looked at the French, but made observations on the men who came up to
look, and waited with a bored face to be relieved. Prince Andrey stopped to look
carefully at the French.

"Look'ee, look'ee," one soldier was saying to a comrade, pointing to a
Russian musketeer, who had gone up to the lines with an officer and was talking
warmly and rapidly with a French grenadier. "I say, doesn't he jabber away fine!
I bet the Frenchy can't keep pace with him. Now, then, Sidorov?"

"Wait a bit; listen. Aye, it's fine!" replied Sidorov, reputed a regular
scholar at talking French.

The soldier, at whom they had pointed laughing, was Dolohov. Prince Andrey
recognised him and listened to what he was saying. Dolohov, together with his
captain, had come from the left flank, where his regiment was posted.

"Come, again, again!" the captain urged, craning forward and trying not to
lose a syllable of the conversation, though it was unintelligible to him.
"Please, go on. What's he saying?"

Dolohov did not answer the captain; he had been drawn into a hot dispute with
the French grenadier. They were talking, as was to be expected, of the campaign.
The Frenchman, mixing up the Austrians and the Russians, was maintaining that
the Russians had been defeated and had been fleeing all the way from Ulm.
Dolohov declared that the Russians had never been defeated, but had beaten the
French.

"We have orders to drive you away from here, and we shall too," said
Dolohov.

"You had better take care you are not all captured with all your Cossacks,"
said the French grenadier.

Spectators and listeners on the French side laughed.

"We shall make you dance, as you danced in Suvorov's day" (on vous fera
danser), said Dolohov.

"What is he prating about?" said a Frenchman.

"Ancient history," said another, guessing that the allusion was to former
wars. "The Emperor will show your Suvorov, like the others...."

"Bonaparte ..." Dolohov was beginning, but the Frenchman interrupted him.

"Not Bonaparte. He is the Emperor! Sacré nom ..." he said angrily.

"Damnation to him, your Emperor!"

And Dolohov swore a coarse soldier's oath in Russian, and, shouldering his
gun, walked away.

"Come along, Ivan Lukitch," he said to his captain.

"So that's how they talk French," said the soldiers in the line. "Now then,
you, Sidorov." Sidorov winked, and, turning to the French, he fell to gabbling
disconnected syllables very rapidly.

"Kari-ma-la-ta-fa-sa-fi-mu-ter-kess-ka," he jabbered, trying to give
the most expressive intonation to his voice.

"Ho, ho, ho! ha ha! ha ha! Oh! oo!" the soldiers burst into a roar of such
hearty, good-humoured laughter, in which the French line too could not keep from
joining, that after it it seemed as though they must unload their guns, blow up
their ammunition, and all hurry away back to their homes. But the guns remained
loaded, the port-holes in the houses and earthworks looked out as menacingly as
ever, and the cannons, taken off their platforms, confronted one another as
before.