When Instinct Takes Over — War and Peace

Beside himself with terror Pierre jumps up and runs back to the battery, as to the only refuge from the horrors that surround him. On entering the earthwork he notices men doing something there but that no shots are being fired from the battery. He has no time to realize who these men are. He sees the senior officer lying on the earth wall with his back turned as if examining something down below, and one of the soldiers he had noticed before struggling forward shouting Brothers! trying to free himself from men holding his arm. He also sees something else that is strange. But he has not time to realize that the colonel has been killed, that the soldier shouting Brothers! is a prisoner, and that another man has been bayoneted in the back before his eyes, for hardly has he run into the redoubt before a thin, sallow-faced, perspiring man in a blue uniform rushes on him sword in hand, shouting something.

Instinctively guarding against the shock, for they have been running together at full speed before they saw one another, Pierre puts out his hands and seizes the man, a French officer, by the shoulder with one hand and by the throat with the other. The officer, dropping his sword, seizes Pierre by his collar. For some seconds they gaze with frightened eyes at one another's unfamiliar faces, both perplexed at what they have done and what they are to do next. Am I taken prisoner or have I taken him prisoner? each is thinking. But the French officer is evidently more inclined to think he has been taken prisoner, because Pierre's strong hand, impelled by instinctive fear, squeezes his throat ever tighter. The Frenchman is about to say something when, just above their heads, terrible and low, a cannon ball whistles, and it seems to Pierre that the French officer's head has been torn off, so swiftly has he ducked it. Pierre too bends his head and lets his hands fall. Without further thought as to who has taken whom prisoner, the Frenchman runs back to the battery and Pierre runs down the slope, stumbling over the dead and wounded who, it seems to him, catch at his feet.

Before he reaches the foot of the knoll he is met by a dense crowd of Russian soldiers who, stumbling, tripping up, and shouting, run merrily and wildly toward the battery. This is the attack for which Ermolov claimed the credit, declaring that only his courage and good luck made such a feat possible: the attack in which he was said to have thrown some St. George's Crosses from his pocket into the battery for the first soldiers to take who got there. The French who had occupied the battery flee, and our troops shouting Hurrah pursue them so far beyond that it is difficult to call them back. Prisoners are brought down, among them a wounded French general whom the officers surround. Crowds of wounded, some known to Pierre and some unknown, Russians and French, with faces distorted by suffering, walk, crawl, and are carried on stretchers. Pierre again goes up onto the knoll where he spent over an hour, and of that family circle which had received him as a member he does not find a single one. There are many dead whom he does not know, but some he recognizes. The young officer still sits in the same way, bent double, in a pool of blood at the edge of the earth wall. The red-faced man is still twitching, but they do not carry him away. Pierre runs down the slope once more. Now they will stop it, now they will be horrified at what they have done, he thinks, aimlessly going toward stretcher-bearers. But behind the veil of smoke the sun is still high, and in front and especially to the left, near Semenovsk, something seems to be seething in the smoke, and the roar of cannon and musketry does not diminish, but even increases to desperation like a man who, straining himself, shrieks with all his remaining strength.