When Leaders Disappear and Soldiers Must Choose — War and Peace

Rostóv has been ordered to look for Kutúzov and the Emperor near Pratzen. Neither they nor any commanding officer is there, only disorganized crowds. The highroad is thronged with calèches, carriages, and Russian and Austrian soldiers under cannon balls from French batteries on the heights. A drunken soldier laughs that they have all bolted. A groom of some important personage, sure he knows the Imperial horses and Ilyá Iványch, says the Tsar was driven past an hour ago, pale, dangerously wounded, four black horses flying. A wounded officer says the commander in chief was struck in the breast; another corrects him: not killed, wounded; not Kutúzov, someone else. They point him to Hosjeradek. Rostóv rides toward the turrets and a church, no longer hurrying. If the Emperor is wounded, is he to try to save himself? He takes the road a soldier says will kill him, across a field where the French have stopped firing because no one is left to fire at, dead and wounded lying like heaps of manure, ten to fifteen to each couple of acres. Seeing an adjutant, they train a gun on him. Terror and pity for himself merge with his mother's last letter.

In Hosjeradek troops are retiring, less disordered; everyone says the battle is lost. The rumour of the Emperor's wound is explained: his carriage did gallop from the field with pale Count Tolstóy, the Ober-Hofmarschal. An officer has seen someone from headquarters behind the village to the left. Two miles on, past the last Russian troops, Rostóv sees two horsemen by a kitchen-garden ditch. One with a white plume refuses to jump; the other on a chestnut leaps it twice and defers to him. The gesture of refusal lets Rostóv recognise his adored monarch, alone in an empty field. Alexander turns his head: pale, cheeks sunken, eyes hollow, the mildness all the greater. The wound rumours are false. Rostóv knows he might and even ought to go straight to him with Dolgorúkov's message. He cannot. It would be taking advantage of solitude and despondency; his mouth is dry; the speeches he composed were for victory, for dying of wounds while the sovereign thanked him. It is nearly four o'clock and the battle is lost. Better die a thousand times than risk an unkind look. He rides away, looking back at the Tsar still in the same attitude of indecision.

Captain von Toll rides up at once, offers his services, and helps the Emperor across the ditch on foot. Alexander, unwell, sits under an apple tree, weeps, covers his eyes, and presses von Toll's hand. Rostóv, watching from a distance with envy and remorse, thinks he might have been in that place, gallops back, and finds no one beyond the ditch, only carts. A driver says Kutúzov's staff are in the village ahead. In front walks a groom, then a cart, then an old bandy-legged serf: "Tit! I say, Tit! Go, Tit! Thresh a bit!" Before five the battle is lost at all points. More than a hundred cannon are in French hands. Przebyszéwski's corps has laid down its arms. Around the Augesd Dam, where an old miller used to fish and Moravians drove wheat carts, men crush one another under horses' hoofs. Every ten seconds a ball or shell kills some and splashes those near them. Dólokhov, now an officer, wounded in the arm, on foot with some ten men, is jammed where a horse has fallen under a gun. He forces his way onto the slippery millpond ice: "Turn this way! It bears!" It creaks and will not long bear even his weight. A ball drops the general from his horse in a pool of blood; nobody looks. Crowds run onto the frozen pond. The ice collapses under a gun and some forty men, drowning one another. Cannon balls still whistle onto the ice, into the water, and most often among the crowd on the dam, the pond, and the bank.