beside him. Túshin's large, kind, intelligent eyes were fixed with sympathy and commiseration on Rostóv, who saw that Tushin with his whole heart wished to help him but could not.
From all sides were heard the footsteps and talk of the infantry, who were walking, driving past, and settling down all around. The sound of voices, the tramping feet, the horses' hoofs moving in mud, the crackling of wood fires near and afar, merged into one tremulous rumble.
It was no longer, as before, a dark, unseen river flowing through the gloom, but a dark sea swelling and gradually subsiding after a storm. Rostóv looked at and listened listlessly to what passed before and around him. An infantryman came to the fire, squatted on his heels, held his hands to the blaze, and turned away his face.
"You don't mind, your honor?" he asked Túshin. "I've lost my company, your honor. I don't know where . . . such bad luck!"
With the soldier, an infantry officer with a bandaged cheek came up to the bonfire, and addressing Túshin asked him to have the guns moved a trifle to let a wagon go past. After he had gone, two soldiers rushed to the campfire.
They were quarreling and fighting desperately, each trying to snatch from the other a boot they were both holding on to.
"You picked it up? ... I dare say! You're very smart!" one of them shouted hoarsely. Then a thin, pale soldier, his neck bandaged with a bloodstained leg band, came up and in angry tones asked the artillerymen for water.
"Must one die like a dog?" said he. Túshin told them to give the man some water. Then a cheerful soldier ran up, begging a little fire for the infantry.
"A nice little hot torch for the infantry! Good luck to you, fellow countrymen. Thanks for the fire–we'll return it with interest," said he, carrying away into the darkness a glowing stick.
Next came four soldiers, carrying something heavy on a cloak, and passed by the fire. One of them stumbled.
"Who the devil has put the logs on the road?" snarled he. "He's dead–why carry him?" said another.
"Shut up!"
And they disappeared into the darkness with their load.
"Still aching?" Túshin asked Rostóv in a whisper.
"Yes."
"Your honor, you're wanted by the general.
He is in the hut here," said a gunner, coming up to Túshin.
"Coming, friend."
Túshin rose and, buttoning his greatcoat and pulling it straight, walked away from the fire.
Not far from the artillery campfire, in a hut that had been prepared for him, Prince Bagratión sat at dinner, talking with some commanding officers who had gathered at his quarters. The little old man with the half-closed eyes was there greedily gnawing a mutton bone, and the general who had served blamelessly for twenty-two years, flushed by a glass of vodka and the dinner; and the staff officer with the signet ring, and Zherkóv, uneasily glancing at them all, and Prince Andrew, pale, with compressed lips and feverishly glittering eyes.
In a corner of the hut stood a standard captured from the French, and the accountant with the naïve face was feeling its texture, shaking his head in perplexity perhaps because the banner really interested him, perhaps because it was hard for him, hungry as he was, to look on at a dinner where there was no place for him. In the next hut there was a French colonel who had been taken prisoner by our dragoons.
Our officers were flocking in to look at him. Prince Bagratión was thanking the individual commanders and inquiring into details of the action and our losses. The general whose regiment had been inspected at Braunau was informing the prince that as soon as the action began he had withdrawn from the wood, mustered the men who were woodcutting, and, allowing the French to pass him, had made a bayonet charge with two battalions and had broken up the French troops.
"When I saw, your excellency, that their first battalion was disorganized, I stopped in the road and thought: 'I'll let them come on and will meet them with the fire of the whole battalion and that's what I did."
The general had so wished to do this and was so sorry he had not managed to do it that it seemed to him as if it had really happened.
Perhaps it might really have been so? Could one possibly make out amid all that confusion what did or did not happen?
"By the way, your excellency, I should inform you," he continued remembering Dólokhov's conversation with Kutuzov and his last interview with the gentleman-ranker "that Private Dólokhov, who was reduced to the ranks, took
