Page 101 of 470
“If we fought before,” he said, “not letting the French pass, as at Schn Grabern, what shall we not do now when he is at the front? We will all die for him gladly! Is it not so, gentlemen? Perhaps I am not saying it right, I have drunk a good deal—but that is how I feel, and so do you too! To the health of Alexander the First! Hurrah!”
“Hurrah!” rang the enthusiastic voices of the officers.
And the old cavalry captain, Krsten, shouted enthusiastically and no less sincerely than the twenty-year-old Rostv.
When the officers had emptied and smashed their glasses, Krsten filled others and, in shirt sleeves and breeches, went glass in hand to the soldiers’ bonfires and with his long gray mustache, his white chest showing under his open shirt, he stood in a majestic pose in the light of the campfire, waving his uplifted arm.
“Lads! here’s to our Sovereign, the Emperor, and victory over our enemies! Hurrah!” he exclaimed in his dashing, old, hussar’s baritone.
The hussars crowded round and responded heartily with loud shouts.
Late that night, when all had separated, Densov with his short hand patted his favorite, Rostv, on the shoulder.
“As there’s no one to fall in love with on campaign, he’s fallen in love with the Tsar,” he said.
“Densov, don’t make fun of it!” cried Rostv. “It is such a lofty, beautiful feeling, such a...”
“I believe it, I believe it, fwiend, and I share and appwove...”
“No, you don’t understand!”
And Rostv got up and went wandering among the campfires, dreaming of what happiness it would be to die—not in saving the Emperor’s life (he did not even dare to dream of that), but simply to die before his eyes. He really was in love with the Tsar and the glory of the Russian arms and the hope of future triumph. And he was not the only man to experience that feeling during those memorable days preceding the battle of Austerlitz: nine tenths of the men in the Russian army were then in love, though less ecstatically, with their Tsar and the glory of the Russian arms.
The next day the Emperor stopped at Wischau, and Villier, his physician, was repeatedly summoned to see him. At headquarters and among the troops near by the news spread that the Emperor was unwell. He ate nothing and had slept badly that night, those around him reported. The cause of this indisposition was the strong impression made on his sensitive mind by the sight of the killed and wounded.
At daybreak on the seventeenth, a French officer who had come with a flag of truce, demanding an audience with the Russian Emperor, was brought into Wischau from our outposts. This officer was Savary. The Emperor had only just fallen asleep and so Savary had to wait. At midday he was admitted to the Emperor, and an hour later he rode off with Prince Dolgorkov to the advanced post of the French army.
It was rumored that Savary had been sent to propose to Alexander a meeting with Napoleon. To the joy and pride of the whole army, a personal interview was refused, and instead of the Sovereign, Prince Dolgorkov, the victor at Wischau, was sent with Savary to negotiate with Napoleon if, contrary to expectations, these negotiations were actuated by a real desire for peace.
Toward evening Dolgorkov came back, went straight to the Tsar, and remained alone with him for a long time.
On the eighteenth and nineteenth of November, the army advanced two days’ march and the enemy’s outposts after a brief interchange of shots retreated. In the highest army circles from midday on the nineteenth, a great, excitedly bustling activity began which lasted till the morning of the twentieth, when the memorable battle of Austerlitz was fought.
Till midday on the nineteenth, the activity—the eager talk, running to and fro, and dispatching of adjutants—was confined to the Emperor’s headquarters. But on the afternoon of that day, this activity reached Kutzov’s headquarters and the staffs of the commanders of columns. By evening, the adjutants had spread it to all ends and parts of the army, and in the night from the nineteenth to the twentieth, the whole eighty thousand allied troops rose from their bivouacs to the hum of voices, and the army swayed and started in one enormous mass six miles long.
The concentrated activity which had begun at the Emperor’s headquarters in the morning and had started the whole movement that followed was like the first movement of the main wheel of a large tower clock. One wheel slowly moved, another was set in motion, and a third, and wheels began to revolve faster and faster, levers and cogwheels to work, chimes to play, figures to pop out, and the hands to advance with regular motion as a result of all that activity.
Just as in the mechanism of a clock, so in the mechanism of the military machine, an impulse once given leads to the final result; and just as indifferently quiescent till the moment when motion is transmitted to them are the parts of the mechanism which the impulse has not yet reached. Wheels creak on their axles as the cogs engage one another and the revolving pulleys whirr with the rapidity of their movement, but a neighboring wheel is as quiet and motionless as though it were prepared to remain so for a hundred years; but the moment comes when the lever catches it and obeying the impulse that wheel begins to creak and joins in the common motion the result and aim of which are beyond its ken.
Just as in a clock, the result of the complicated motion of innumerable wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the hands which show the time, so the result of all the complicated human activities of 160,000 Russians and French—all their passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm—was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three Emperors—that is to say, a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history.
Prince Andrew was on duty that day and in constant attendance on the commander in chief.
At six in the evening, Kutzov went to the Emperor’s headquarters and after staying but a short time with the Tsar went to see the grand marshal of the court, Count Tolsty.
Bolknski took the opportunity to go in to get some details of the coming action from Dolgorkov. He felt that Kutzov was upset and dissatisfied about something and that at headquarters they were dissatisfied with him, and also that at the Emperor’s headquarters everyone adopted toward him the tone of men who know something others do not know: he therefore wished to speak to Dolgorkov.
“Well, how d’you do, my dear fellow?” said Dolgorkov, who was sitting at tea with Bilbin. “The fete is for tomorrow. How is your old fellow? Out of sorts?”
