War and Peace. graf Leo Tolstoy

was the brilliant charge of the Horse Guards that amazed the French themselves. Rostóv was horrified to hear later that of all that mass of huge and handsome men, of all those brilliant, rich youths, officers and cadets, who had galloped past him on their thousand-ruble horses, only eighteen were left after the charge.

      “Why should I envy them? My chance is not lost, and maybe I shall see the Emperor immediately!” thought Rostóv and galloped on.

      When he came level with the Foot Guards he noticed that about them and around them cannon balls were flying, of which he was aware not so much because he heard their sound as because he saw uneasiness on the soldiers’ faces and unnatural warlike solemnity on those of the officers.

      Passing behind one of the lines of a regiment of Foot Guards he heard a voice calling him by name.

      “Rostóv!”

      “What?” he answered, not recognizing Borís.

      “I say, we’ve been in the front line! Our regiment attacked!” said Borís with the happy smile seen on the faces of young men who have been under fire for the first time.

      Rostóv stopped.

      “Have you?” he said. “Well, how did it go?”

      “We drove them back!” said Borís with animation, growing talkative. “Can you imagine it?” and he began describing how the Guards, having taken up their position and seeing troops before them, thought they were Austrians, and all at once discovered from the cannon balls discharged by those troops that they were themselves in the front line and had unexpectedly to go into action. Rostóv without hearing Borís to the end spurred his horse.

      “Where are you off to?” asked Borís.

      “With a message to His Majesty.”

      “There he is!” said Borís, thinking Rostóv had said “His Highness,” and pointing to the Grand Duke who with his high shoulders and frowning brows stood a hundred paces away from them in his helmet and Horse Guards’ jacket, shouting something to a pale, white uniformed Austrian officer.

      “But that’s the Grand Duke, and I want the commander in chief or the Emperor,” said Rostóv, and was about to spur his horse.

      “Count! Count!” shouted Berg who ran up from the other side as eager as Borís. “Count! I am wounded in my right hand” (and he showed his bleeding hand with a handkerchief tied round it) “and I remained at the front. I held my sword in my left hand, Count. All our family—the von Bergs—have been knights!”

      He said something more, but Rostóv did not wait to hear it and rode away.

      Having passed the Guards and traversed an empty space, Rostóv, to avoid again getting in front of the first line as he had done when the Horse Guards charged, followed the line of reserves, going far round the place where the hottest musket fire and cannonade were heard. Suddenly he heard musket fire quite close in front of him and behind our troops, where he could never have expected the enemy to be.

      “What can it be?” he thought. “The enemy in the rear of our army? Impossible!” And suddenly he was seized by a panic of fear for himself and for the issue of the whole battle. “But be that what it may,” he reflected, “there is no riding round it now. I must look for the commander in chief here, and if all is lost it is for me to perish with the rest.”

      The foreboding of evil that had suddenly come over Rostóv was more and more confirmed the farther he rode into the region behind the village of Pratzen, which was full of troops of all kinds.

      “What does it mean? What is it? Whom are they firing at? Who is firing?” Rostóv kept asking as he came up to Russian and Austrian soldiers running in confused crowds across his path.

      “The devil knows! They’ve killed everybody! It’s all up now!” he was told in Russian, German, and Czech by the crowd of fugitives who understood what was happening as little as he did.

      “Kill the Germans!” shouted one.

      “May the devil take them—the traitors!”

      “Zum Henker diese Russen!” * muttered a German.