|
PRINCE ANDREY BOLKONSKY was lying on the hill of Pratzen, on the spot where
he had fallen with the flagstaff in his hands. He was losing blood, and kept
moaning a soft, plaintive, childish moan, of which he himself knew nothing.
Towards evening he ceased moaning and became perfectly still. He did not know
how long his unconsciousness lasted. Suddenly he felt again that he was alive
and suffering from a burning, lacerating pain in his head.
“Where is it, that lofty sky that I knew not till now and saw to-day?” was
his first thought. “And this agony I did not know either,” he thought. “Yes, I
knew nothing, nothing till now. But where am I?”
He fell to listening, and caught the sound of approaching hoofs and voices
speaking French. He opened his eyes. Above him was again the same lofty sky,
with clouds higher than ever floating over it, and between them stretches of
blue infinity. He did not turn his head and did not see the men who, judging
from the voices and the thud of hoofs, had ridden up to him and stopped.
They were Napoleon and two adjutants escorting him. Bonaparte, making a tour
of the field of battle, had been giving his last instructions for the
strengthening of the battery firing at the Augest dam, and was inspecting the
dead and wounded on the field of battle.
“Fine men!” said Napoleon, looking at a dead Russian grenadier, who with his
face thrust into the earth and blackened neck lay on his stomach, one stiff arm
flung wide.
“The field-guns have exhausted their ammunition,” said an adjutant, arriving
that moment from the battery that was firing at Augest.
“Bring up more from the reserve,” said Napoleon, and riding a few steps away
stood still, looking at Prince Andrey, who lay on his back with the abandoned
flagstaff beside him (the flag had been taken by the French as a trophy).
“That's a fine death!” said Napoleon, looking at Bolkonsky. Prince Andrey
knew that it was said of him, and that it was Napoleon saying it. He heard the
speaker of those words addressed as “your majesty.” But he heard the words as he
heard the buzzing of flies. It was not merely that he took no interest in them,
but he did not attend to them and at once forgot them. There was a burning pain
in his head; he felt he was losing blood, and he saw above him the high,
far-away, everlasting sky. He knew it was Napoleon—his hero—but at that moment
Napoleon seemed to him such a small, insignificant creature in comparison with
what was passing now between his soul and that lofty, limitless sky with the
clouds flying over it. It meant nothing to him at that moment who was standing
over him, what was being said of him. He was only glad that people were standing
over him, and his only desire was that these people should help him and bring
him back to life, which seemed to him so good, because he saw it all quite
differently now. He made a supreme effort to stir and utter some sound. He moved
his leg faintly, and uttered a weak, sickly moan that touched himself. “Ah, he's
alive,” said Napoleon. “Pick up this young man and carry him to an ambulance!”
Saying this, Napoleon rode on to meet Marshal Lannes, who rode up to meet the
conqueror, smiling, taking off his hat and congratulating him on his
victory.
Prince Andrey remembered nothing more; he lost consciousness from the
excruciating pain caused by being laid on the stretcher, the jolting while he
was being moved, and the sounding of his wound at the ambulance. He only
regained consciousness towards the end of the day when with other Russian
officers, wounded and prisoners, he was being taken to the hospital. On this
journey he felt a little stronger, and could look about him and even
speak.
The first words he heard on coming to himself were from a French convoy
officer who was saying hurriedly: “They must stop here; the Emperor will be here
directly; it will be a pleasure for him to see these prisoners.”
“There are such a lot of prisoners to-day, almost the whole of the Russian
army, that he is probably weary of seeing them,” said another officer.
“Well, but this one, they say, is the commander of all the Emperor
Alexander's guards,” said the first speaker, pointing to a wounded Russian
officer in the white uniform of the horse-guards. Bolkonsky recognised Prince
Repnin, whom he had met in Petersburg society. Beside him stood another officer
of the horse-guards, a lad of nineteen, also wounded.
Bonaparte rode up at a gallop and pulled up. “Who is the senior officer?” he
said, on seeing the prisoners.
They named the colonel, Prince Repnin.
“Are you the commander of the regiment of Emperor Alexander's horse-guards?”
asked Napoleon.
“I was in command of a squadron,” replied Repnin.
“Your regiment did its duty honourably,” said Napoleon.
“The praise of a great general is a soldier's best reward,” said
Repnin.
“I bestow it upon you with pleasure,” said Napoleon. “Who is this young man
beside you?” Prince Repnin gave his name, Lieutenant Suhtelen.
Looking at him, Napoleon said with a smile: “He has come very young to meddle
with us.”
“Youth is no hindrance to valour,” said Suhtelen in a breaking voice.
“A fine answer,” said Napoleon; “young man, you will go far.”
Prince Andrey, who had been thrust forward under the Emperor's eyes to
complete the show of prisoners, could not fail to attract his notice. Napoleon
apparently remembered seeing him on the field, and addressing him he used the
same epithet, “young man,” with which his first sight of Bolkonsky was
associated in his memory.
“And you, young man,” he said to him, “how are you feeling, mon
brave?”
Although five minutes previously Prince Andrey had been able to say a few
words to the soldiers who were carrying him, he was silent now, with his eyes
fastened directly upon Napoleon. So trivial seemed to him at that moment all the
interests that were engrossing Napoleon, so petty seemed to him his hero, with
his paltry vanity and glee of victory, in comparison with that lofty, righteous,
and kindly sky which he had seen and comprehended, that he could not answer him.
And all indeed seemed to him so trifling and unprofitable beside the stern and
solemn train of thought aroused in him by weakness from loss of blood, by
suffering and the nearness of death. Gazing into Napoleon's eyes, Prince Andrey
mused on the nothingness of greatness, on the nothingness of life, of which no
one could comprehend the significance, and on the nothingness—still more—of
death, the meaning of which could be understood and explained by none of the
living.
The Emperor, after vainly pausing for a reply, turned away and said to one of
the officers in command—
“See that they look after these gentlemen and take them to my bivouac; let my
doctor Larrey attend to their wounds. Au revoir, Prince Repnin,” and he
galloped away.
His face was radiant with happiness and self-satisfaction.
The soldiers, who had been carrying Prince Andrey, had come across the golden
relic Princess Marya had hung upon her brother's neck, and taken it off him, but
seeing the graciousness the Emperor had shown to the prisoners, they made haste
to restore the holy image.
Prince Andrey did not see who put it on him again, nor how it was replaced,
but all at once he found the locket on its delicate gold chain on his chest
outside his uniform.
“How good it would be,” thought Prince Andrey, as he glanced at the image
which his sister had hung round his neck with such emotion and reverence, “how
good it would be if all were as clear and simple as it seems to Marie. How good
to know where to seek aid in this life and what to expect after it, there,
beyond the grave!”
“How happy and at peace I should be, if I could say now, ‘Lord, have mercy on
me!…' But to whom am I to say that? Either a Power infinite, inconceivable, to
which I cannot appeal, which I cannot even put into words, the great whole, or
nothing,” he said to himself, “or that God, who has been sewn up here in this
locket by Marie? There is nothing, nothing certain but the nothingness of all
that is comprehensible to us, and the grandeur of something incomprehensible,
but more important!”
The stretchers began to be moved. At every jolt he felt intolerable pain
again. The fever became higher, and he fell into delirium. Visions of his
father, his wife, his sister, and his future son, and the tenderness he had felt
for them on the night before the battle, the figure of that little, petty
Napoleon, and over all these the lofty sky, formed the chief substance of his
delirious dreams. The quiet home life and peaceful happiness of Bleak Hills
passed before his imagination. He was enjoying that happiness when suddenly
there appeared that little Napoleon with his callous, narrow look of happiness
in the misery of others, and there came doubts and torments, and only the sky
promised peace. Towards morning all his dreams mingled and melted away in the
chaos and darkness of unconsciousness and oblivion, far more likely, in the
opinion of Napoleon's doctor, Larrey, to be ended by death than by
recovery.
“He is a nervous, bilious subject,” said Larrey; “he won't recover.”
Prince Andrey, with the rest of the hopeless cases, was handed over to the
care of the inhabitants of the district.
|
