War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy [interesting novels to read .TXT] 📗

piercingly. Seeing Prince Andréy she leaned out from behind the apron and, waving her thin arms from under the woolen shawl, cried:

“Mr. Aide-de-camp! Mr. Aide-de-camp!⁠ ⁠… For heaven’s sake⁠ ⁠… Protect me! What will become of us? I am the wife of the doctor of the Seventh Chasseurs.⁠ ⁠… They won’t let us pass, we are left behind and have lost our people⁠ ⁠…”

“I’ll flatten you into a pancake!” shouted the angry officer to the soldier. “Turn back with your slut!”

“Mr. Aide-de-camp! Help me!⁠ ⁠… What does it all mean?” screamed the doctor’s wife.

“Kindly let this cart pass. Don’t you see it’s a woman?” said Prince Andréy riding up to the officer.

The officer glanced at him, and without replying turned again to the soldier. “I’ll teach you to push on!⁠ ⁠… Back!”

“Let them pass, I tell you!” repeated Prince Andréy, compressing his lips.

“And who are you?” cried the officer, turning on him with tipsy rage, “who are you? Are you in command here? Eh? I am commander here, not you! Go back or I’ll flatten you into a pancake,” repeated he. This expression evidently pleased him.

“That was a nice snub for the little aide-de-camp,” came a voice from behind.

Prince Andréy saw that the officer was in that state of senseless, tipsy rage when a man does not know what he is saying. He saw that his championship of the doctor’s wife in her queer trap might expose him to what he dreaded more than anything in the world⁠—to ridicule; but his instinct urged him on. Before the officer finished his sentence Prince Andréy, his face distorted with fury, rode up to him and raised his riding whip.

“Kind⁠ ⁠… ly let⁠—them⁠—pass!”

The officer flourished his arm and hastily rode away.

“It’s all the fault of these fellows on the staff that there’s this disorder,” he muttered. “Do as you like.”

Prince Andréy without lifting his eyes rode hastily away from the doctor’s wife, who was calling him her deliverer, and recalling with a sense of disgust the minutest details of this humiliating scene he galloped on to the village where he was told who the commander in chief was.

On reaching the village he dismounted and went to the nearest house, intending to rest if but for a moment, eat something, and try to sort out the stinging and tormenting thoughts that confused his mind. “This is a mob of scoundrels and not an army,” he was thinking as he went up to the window of the first house, when a familiar voice called him by name.

He turned round. Nesvítski’s handsome face looked out of the little window. Nesvítski, moving his moist lips as he chewed something, and flourishing his arm, called him to enter.

“Bolkónski! Bolkónski!⁠ ⁠… Don’t you hear? Eh? Come quick⁠ ⁠…” he shouted.

Entering the house, Prince Andréy saw Nesvítski and another adjutant having something to eat. They hastily turned round to him asking if he had any news. On their familiar faces he read agitation and alarm. This was particularly noticeable on Nesvítski’s usually laughing countenance.

“Where is the commander in chief?” asked Bolkónski.

“Here, in that house,” answered the adjutant.

“Well, is it true that it’s peace and capitulation?” asked Nesvítski.

“I was going to ask you. I know nothing except that it was all I could do to get here.”

“And we, my dear boy! It’s terrible! I was wrong to laugh at Mack, we’re getting it still worse,” said Nesvítski. “But sit down and have something to eat.”

“You won’t be able to find either your baggage or anything else now, Prince. And God only knows where your man Pyotr is,” said the other adjutant.

“Where are headquarters?”

“We are to spend the night in Znaim.”

“Well, I have got all I need into packs for two horses,” said Nesvítski. “They’ve made up splendid packs for me⁠—fit to cross the Bohemian mountains with. It’s a bad lookout, old fellow! But what’s the matter with you? You must be ill to shiver like that,” he added, noticing that Prince Andréy winced as at an electric shock.

“It’s nothing,” replied Prince Andréy.

He had just remembered his recent encounter with the doctor’s wife and the convoy officer.

“What is the commander in chief doing here?” he asked.

“I can’t make out at all,” said Nesvítski.

“Well, all I can make out is that everything is abominable, abominable, quite abominable!” said Prince Andréy, and he went off to the house where the commander in chief was.

Passing by Kutúzov’s carriage and the exhausted saddle horses of his suite, with their Cossacks who were talking loudly together, Prince Andréy entered the passage. Kutúzov himself, he was told, was in the house with Prince Bagratión and Weyrother. Weyrother was the Austrian general who had succeeded Schmidt. In the passage little Kozlóvski was squatting on his heels in front of a clerk. The clerk, with cuffs turned up, was hastily writing at a tub turned bottom upwards. Kozlóvski’s face looked worn⁠—he too had evidently not slept all night. He glanced at Prince Andréy and did not even nod to him.

“Second line⁠ ⁠… have you written it?” he continued dictating to the clerk. “The Kiev Grenadiers, Podolian⁠ ⁠…”

“One can’t write so fast, your honor,” said the clerk, glancing angrily and disrespectfully at Kozlóvski.

Through the door came the sounds of Kutúzov’s voice, excited and dissatisfied, interrupted by another, an unfamiliar voice. From the sound of these voices, the inattentive way Kozlóvski looked at him, the disrespectful manner of the exhausted clerk, the fact that the clerk and Kozlóvski were squatting on the floor by a tub so near to the commander in chief, and from the noisy laughter of the Cossacks holding the horses near the window, Prince Andréy felt that something important and disastrous was about to happen.

He turned to Kozlóvski with urgent questions.

“Immediately, Prince,” said Kozlóvski. “Dispositions for Bagratión.”

“What about capitulation?”

“Nothing of the sort. Orders are issued for a battle.”

Prince Andréy moved toward the door from whence voices were heard. Just as he was going to open it the sounds ceased, the door opened, and Kutúzov with his eagle nose and puffy face appeared in the doorway. Prince Andréy stood right in front of