In the Darkness After Battle — War and Peace

The wind drops. Black clouds merge with powder smoke over two conflagrations as the cannonade dies and musketry sounds nearer. Túshin, driving round wounded men, meets staff officers and Zherkóv, who had been sent to the battery twice and never reached it. They interrupt one another with orders and reproaches. Túshin, afraid that any word will make him weep, rides silent on his nag. Orders are to abandon the wounded, but many cling to the carriages. The jaunty infantry officer from the wattle shed lies on Matvévna with a bullet in his stomach and dies. At the foot of the hill a pale hussar cadet, supporting one hand with the other, begs for a seat. It is Rostóv. Túshin has a cloak spread for him; the cloth is wet with blood. Asked if he is wounded, Rostóv says it is a sprain. They haul the guns to Gruntersdorf in darkness so thick uniforms vanish at ten paces. A last French attack flares in the village; the guns cannot move; then the firing dies and infantry stream out talking of shooting at their own fellows in the pitch dark.

The army becomes a gloomy unseen river of whispers, hoofs, wheels, and the groans of the wounded. Someone on a white horse passes; a rumour of a halt spreads; they stop in the muddy road and light fires. Túshin sends a soldier for a doctor and sits cross-legged by a bonfire. Rostóv, shaking with pain, cold, and damp, watches those kind eyes that wish to help and cannot. An infantryman who has lost his company warms his hands; two soldiers fight over a boot; a thin man with a bloodstained neck bandage asks for water rather than die like a dog; four men carry a body on a cloak. Túshin is summoned to a hut where Bagratión dines with commanders. The general of twenty-two years' service, flushed with vodka, describes a bayonet charge he so wished to make that it seems to have happened, and mentions Dólokhov's prisoner. Zherkóv, who has not seen the hussars all day, claims they broke two squares. Bagratión thanks all arms, then asks how two guns were abandoned in the centre. Túshin stumbles over a captured French standard, cannot speak, and will not say there were no covering troops. Prince Andrew breaks in: two thirds of the men and horses knocked out, two guns smashed, no supports, and today's success owed chiefly to that battery. He leaves the table without waiting for a reply. Túshin thanks him; Andrew looks at him, says nothing, and goes, sad that it is all so unlike what he had hoped.

By the fire Rostóv dozes into pain that mixes Telyánin, Bogdánich, and a harsh-voiced soldier pulling his arm. He wakes to snowflakes over charcoal, Túshin still gone, a naked soldier warming a thin yellow body. "Nobody wants me!" he thinks, remembering the warm house, the sleigh, and the family's care. "And why did I come here?" Next day the French do not renew the attack, and the remnant of Bagratión's detachment rejoins Kutúzov.