“Hurrah!” rang out the enthusiastic voices of the officers.
And old Captain Kirsten shouted enthusiastically and no less sincerely than the twenty-year-old Rostov.
When the officers drank up and smashed their glasses, Kirsten filled others, and, in nothing but his shirt and breeches, with the glass in his hand, went up to the soldiers’ campfires, struck a majestic pose, with his long gray mustache, his white chest showing through his unbuttoned shirt, stood in the firelight, and swung his arm up.
“Lads, to the health of the sovereign emperor, to victory over our foes, hurrah!” he cried in his dashing old hussar’s baritone.
The hussars clustered around him and responded all together in a loud shout.
Late that night, when everyone had dispersed, Denisov, with his short hand, patted his favorite, Rostov, on the shoulder.
“There’s nobody to fall in love with on campaign, so he’s fallen in love with the tsar,” he said.
“Don’t joke about that, Denisov,” cried Rostov, “this is such a lofty, such a beautiful feeling, such a…”
“I believe it, my friend, I believe it, and I share it and approve…”
“No, you don’t understand!”
And Rostov got up and began wandering among the campfires, dreaming of what happiness it would be to die, not saving the life (he dared not even dream of that), but simply to die before the eyes of the sovereign. He was indeed in love with the tsar, and with the glory of Russian arms, and with the hope of the future triumph. And he was not the only one who experienced that feeling in those memorable days preceding the battle of Austerlitz: nine tenths of the men in the Russian army were then in love, though less rapturously, with their tsar and with the glory of Russian arms.
XI
The next day the sovereign stayed at Wischau. The court physician Villiers was summoned to him several times. In headquarters and among the nearby troops the news spread that the sovereign was unwell. He had eaten nothing and slept poorly that night, as people close to him said. The cause of it was the strong impression made on the sovereign’s sensitive soul by the sight of the wounded and dead.
At dawn on the seventeenth, a French officer was sent to Wischau from our outposts, who had come under a flag of truce, asking for a meeting with the Russian emperor. This officer was Savary. The sovereign had only just fallen asleep, and therefore Savary had to wait. At noon he was admitted to the sovereign, and an hour later he rode with Prince Dolgorukov to the outposts of the French army.
As rumor had it, the purpose of sending Savary was to propose peace and to propose a meeting between the emperor Alexander and Napoleon. A personal meeting, to the joy and pride of the whole army, was refused, and instead of the sovereign, Prince Dolgorukov, the victor at Wischau, was sent with Savary to negotiate with Napoleon, on the chance that these negotiations, contrary to expectation, had as their purpose a real desire for peace.
In the evening Dolgorukov came back, went straight to the sovereign, and spent a long time alone with him.
On the eighteenth and nineteenth of November, the troops made two more marches forward, and the enemy’s outposts retreated after brief exchanges of fire. In the highest spheres of the army, an intense, bustlingly agitated movement began from noon of the nineteenth, continuing until the morning of the next day, the twentieth of November, when the memorable battle of Austerlitz took place.
Until noon on the nineteenth, the movement, animated conversation, running, and sending of adjutants were limited to the emperors’ headquarters; after noon of the same day the movement spread to the headquarters of Kutuzov and the staffs of the leaders of columns. By evening this movement had spread through adjutants to all ends and parts of the army, and during the night of the nineteenth to the twentieth, rising up from its night camp, humming with talk, the eighty-thousand-man mass of the allied army undulated and set off in a huge six-mile sheet.
The concentrated movement which began that morning in the emperors’ headquarters and gave a push to all subsequent movement was like the first movement of the central wheel in a big tower clock. Slowly one wheel started, another turned, a third, and the wheels, pulleys, and gears were set turning more and more quickly, chimes began to ring, figures popped out, and the clock hands started their measured advance, showing the result of that movement.
As in the mechanism of a clock, so also in the mechanism of military action, the movement once given is just as irrepressible until the final results, and just as indifferently motionless are the parts of the mechanism not yet involved in the action even a moment before movement is transmitted to them. Wheels whizz on their axles, cogs catch, fast-spinning pulleys whirr, yet the neighboring wheel is as calm and immobile as though it was ready to stand for a hundred years in that immobility; but a moment comes—the lever catches, and, obedient to its movement, the wheel creaks, turning, and merges into one movement with the whole, the result and purpose of which are incomprehensible to it.
As in a clock the result of the complex movement of numberless wheels and pulleys is merely the slow and measured movement of the hands pointing to the time, so also the result of all the complex human movements of these hundred and sixty thousand Russians and French—all the passions, desires, regrets, humiliations, sufferings, bursts of pride, fear, rapture—was merely the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three emperors, that is, a slow movement of the world-historical hand on the clockface of human history.
Prince Andrei was on duty that day and constantly by the commander in chief.
After five in the evening, Kutuzov came to the emperors’ headquarters and, having spent a short time with the sovereign, went to see the grand marshal of the court, Count Tolstoy.
Bolkonsky made use of this time to go to Dolgorukov and find out the details of the action. Prince Andrei sensed that Kutuzov was upset and displeased about something, and that there was displeasure with him at headquarters, and that all the persons of the imperial headquarters used with him the tone of people who knew something that others did not, and therefore he wanted to talk with Dolgorukov.
“Well, greetings, mon cher,” said Dolgorukov, who was having tea with Bilibin. “The fête is tomorrow. How’s your old man? In a bad humor?”
“I wouldn’t say he’s in a bad humor, but it seems he’d like to be heard.”
“He was heard at the council of war and will be heard when he talks to the point; but to drag our feet and wait for something now, when Bonaparte is afraid of a general battle more than anything—is impossible.”
“So you saw him?” asked Prince Andrei. “Well, what is Bonaparte like? What impression did he make on you?”
“Yes, I saw him and became convinced that he is afraid of a general battle more than anything in the world,” Dolgorukov repeated, obviously cherishing this overall conclusion which he had come to after his meeting with Napoleon. “If he wasn’t afraid of a battle, what would make him ask for this meeting, conduct negotiations, and, above all, retreat, when retreat is so contrary to his whole method of conducting war? Believe me, he’s afraid, afraid of a general battle, his hour has come. That I can tell you.”
“But tell me, how is he, what’s he like?” Prince Andrei asked again.
“He’s a man in a gray frock coat, who wished very much that I would say ‘Your Majesty’ to him, but, to his regret, did not receive any titles from me. That’s what he’s like, and nothing more,” Dolgorukov replied, glancing at Bilibin with a smile.
“Despite my full respect for old Kutuzov,” he went on, “what good ones we’d all be, waiting for something and giving him a chance to escape or trick us, whereas now he’s certainly in our hands. No, we mustn’t forget Suvorov and his rules: don’t put yourself in a position to be attacked, but attack yourself. Believe me, in war the energy of young men often points to a surer way than all the experience of the old cunctators.”5