“Adjutant! Mister Adjutant!…For God’s sake…protect us…What’s it all about?…I’m the wife of the doctor of the seventh chasseurs…they won’t let us pass; we couldn’t keep up, lost our people…”
“I’ll flatten you like a pancake—turn back!” the officer shouted angrily at the soldier. “Turn back with your trollop!”
“Mister Adjutant, protect us. What is it?” cried the doctor’s wife.
“Kindly let this wagon pass. Don’t you see it’s a woman?” said Prince Andrei, riding up to the officer.
The officer glanced at him and, without replying, turned back to the soldier:
“I’ll teach you to go ahead…Back!”
“Let them pass, I tell you,” Prince Andrei repeated, pressing his lips.
“And who do you think you are?” the officer addressed him with drunken rage. “Who do you think you are? Are you” (he especially emphasized the word you) “a superior officer, or what? I’m the superior here, not you. And you, back!” he repeated, “or I’ll flatten you like a pancake.”
The officer obviously liked the expression.
“He told that little adjutant off grandly,” a voice came from behind.
Prince Andrei could see that the officer was in the sort of drunken fit of senseless rage when people do not know what they are saying. He could see that his intercession for the doctor’s wife in the kibitka was replete with what he feared most in the world, with what is known as ridicule.*216 But his instinct told him otherwise. Before the officer had time to finish his last words, Prince Andrei, his face disfigured with rage, rode up to him and raised his whip:
“Kind-ly-let-them-pass!”
The officer waved his hand and hastily rode off.
“It’s all from them, these staff officers, all this disorder,” he grumbled. “Do it your way.”
Prince Andrei, without raising his eyes, hastily rode away from the doctor’s wife, who was calling him her savior, and, recalling with disgust the minutest details of this humiliating scene, rode on towards the village where he had been told the commander in chief was.
On entering the village, he got off his horse and went to the first house, intending to rest for at least a moment, eat something, and bring clarity to all these insulting, tormenting thoughts. “These are not troops, they’re a mob of ruffians,” he was thinking as he went to the window of the first house, when a familiar voice called his name.
He turned around. Nesvitsky’s handsome face was looking out of a small window. Nesvitsky, chewing something with his juicy mouth and waving his arms, was calling to him.
“Bolkonsky, Bolkonsky! Are you deaf, or what? Come quickly,” he shouted.
Going into the house, Prince Andrei saw Nesvitsky and another adjutant having something to eat. They hastily turned to Bolkonsky with the question whether he had any fresh news. On their familiar faces Prince Andrei read the expression of alarm and anxiety. This expression was especially noticeable on the always laughing face of Nesvitsky.
“Where’s the commander in chief?” asked Bolkonsky.
“Here, in that house,” the adjutant replied.
“Well, so, is it true there’s peace and capitulation?” asked Nesvitsky.
“I was going to ask you. I know nothing except that I had a hard time getting to you.”
“And what’s going on with us, brother! Terrible! I confess, brother, we laughed at Mack, and yet it’s going much worse for us,” said Nesvitsky. “But sit down, eat something.”
“Now, Prince, you’ll find no wagons, nothing, and God knows where your Pyotr is,” said the other adjutant.
“Where are headquarters?”
“We’ll spend the night in Znaim.”
“What I did was repack everything I need onto two horses,” said Nesvitsky, “and I had excellent packs made for me. I could skip off over the Bohemian Mountains now. It’s bad, brother. But you’re surely unwell, the way you’re shivering?” asked Nesvitsky, noticing how Prince Andrei twitched as if he had touched a Leiden jar.16
“It’s nothing,” replied Prince Andrei.
He had just recalled his recent encounter with the doctor’s wife and the convoy officer.
“What is the commander in chief doing here?” he asked.
“I understand nothing,” said Nesvitsky.
“I understand one thing, that it’s all vile, vile, vile,” said Prince Andrei, and he went to the house where the commander in chief was staying.
Going past Kutuzov’s carriage, the winded riding horses of the suite, and the Cossacks talking loudly among themselves, Prince Andrei came to the entryway. Kutuzov himself, as Prince Andrei was told, was inside the cottage with Prince Bagration and Weyrother. Weyrother was an Austrian general who had replaced the slain Schmidt. In the entryway, little Kozlovsky was crouching in front of a scribe. The scribe, the cuffs of his tunic turned up, was writing hurriedly on an overturned tub. Kozlovsky’s face looked exhausted—obviously he also had not slept that night. He glanced at Prince Andrei and did not even nod to him.
“Second line…Have you written that?” he went on dictating to the scribe. “The Kievsky grenadiers, the Podolsky…”
“Don’t rush, Your Honor,” the scribe replied disrespectfully and crossly, looking up at Kozlovsky.
From behind the door just then came the animated and displeased voice of Kutuzov, interrupted by another, unknown voice. From the sound of that voice, from the inattention with which Kozlovsky had glanced at him, from the disrespectfulness of the exhausted scribe, from the fact that the scribe and Kozlovsky were sitting so close to the commander in chief on the floor by the tub, and from the fact that the Cossacks who tended the horses were laughing loudly outside the window—from all that Prince Andrei could feel that something grave and unfortunate must be happening.
Prince Andrei plied Kozlovsky with insistent questions.
“One moment, Prince,” said Kozlovsky. “A disposition for Bagration.”
“And capitulation?”
“Nothing of the sort; orders have been issued for battle.”
Prince Andrei went to the door, behind which voices could be heard. But just as he was about to open the door, the voices in the room fell silent, the door opened by itself, and Kutuzov, with his eagle’s beak on his plump face, appeared in the doorway. Prince Andrei was standing directly in front of Kutuzov; but from the expression in the commander in chief’s one good eye, it was clear that his thoughts and concerns occupied him so greatly that it was as if they interfered with his vision. He looked directly at his adjutant’s face and did not recognize him.
“Well, what, are you finished?” he addressed Kozlovsky.
“This second, Your Excellency.”
Bagration, of medium height, with a firm and immobile face of the Oriental type, dry, not yet an old man, came out after the commander in chief.
“I have the honor of reporting to you,” Prince Andrei repeated quite loudly, handing him an envelope.
“Ah, from Vienna? Very well. Later, later!”
Kutuzov and Bagration stepped out to the porch.
“Well, good-bye, Prince,” he said to Bagration. “Christ be with you. I bless you for a great deed.”
Kutuzov’s face suddenly softened, and tears welled up in his eyes. He pulled Bagration to him with his left hand, and with his right, which had a ring on it, making an obviously habitual gesture, crossed him and offered him his plump cheek, instead of which Bagration kissed him on the neck.