War and Peace: Original Version. Лев Толстой

encouraging us to get across quick,” another said agitatedly. The crowd began moving again. Nesvitsky realised that it had been a shot.

      “Hey, Cossack, give me my horse!” he said. “Right, you! Stand aside! Stand aside! Make way!”

      With a great effort he managed to reach his horse. Still continuing to shout, he began moving forward. The soldiers squeezed together to make way for him, but then bore against him again so strongly that they squeezed his leg tight, and the ones closest to him were not to blame, because they were being crushed even more powerfully.

      “Nesvitsky! Nesvitsky! You ugly pig!” a hoarse voice called out from behind at just that moment.

      Nesvitsky glanced round and fifteen paces away, separated from him by the living mass of moving infantry, he saw Vaska Denisov, red-faced, black-haired and tousled, with his cap on the back of his head and a hussar’s pelisse thrown dashingly across his shoulder.

      “Order these devils to make way,” shouted Denisov, evidently in the throes of a fit of passion, rolling his glittering eyes as black as coal in their inflamed whites and waving his sabre still in its scabbard, holding it in a naked little hand as red as his face.

      “Hey! Vasya!” Nesvitsky replied happily. “What are you up to?”

      “The squadron can’t get through,” shouted Vaska Denisov, baring his white teeth angrily, spurring on his beautiful black thoroughbred Bedouin, who, twitching his ears as he ran up against bayonets, was snorting and scattering spray around himself from his curb-bit, beating his hooves resoundingly on the boards of the bridge, and seemed ready to leap over the railings of the bridge, if his rider would allow him. “What’s this? Like sheep! Exactly like sheep! Exactly … give way! Stop, over there, you, the cart, damn it! I’ll slice you with my sabre …” he shouted, actually baring his sabre and beginning to wave it about.

      The soldiers squeezed against each other with frightened faces, and Denisov joined Nesvitsky.

      “Why aren’t you drunk today, then?” Nesvitsky said to Denisov when he rode up to him.

      “They won’t even give you time to get drunk!” replied Vaska Denisov. “All day long, dragging the regiment this way and that way. Let’s fight, if we’re going to. But God only knows what’s going on!”

      “What a dandy you are today!” said Nesvitsky, examining Denisov’s new pelisse and saddlecloth.

      Denisov smiled, took a handkerchief that gave off a smell of perfume out of his flap pocket, and thrust it under Nesvitsky’s nose.

      “But of course, I’m going into action! I shaved, brushed my teeth and put on scent.”

      The imposing figure of Denisov, accompanied by the Cossack, and Denisov’s determination, waving his sabre and shouting wildly, had such an effect that they managed to squeeze through to the other side of the bridge and halted the infantry. At the exit Nesvitsky found the colonel to whom he had to pass on the orders and, having carried out his assignment, set off back.

      After clearing the way, Denisov halted at the entrance to the bridge. Casually restraining the stallion that was straining to get to its fellows and stamping its foot, he looked at the squadron moving towards him. The hollow echoing of hoof beats rang along the boards of the bridge, as though there were several horses galloping, and the squadron, riding four men abreast in each row, with the officers in front, stretched out along the bridge and began emerging on to the other side.

      Handsome young Peronsky, the finest horseman in the regiment and a rich man, brought up the rear, weaving to and fro on his three-thousand-rouble stallion. The foot soldiers, forced to halt, jostled in the trampled mud by the bridge, watching the clean, dandified hussars riding past them in strict order with that special feeling of spiteful, derisive antipathy with which different kinds of troops meet each other.

      “Fine smart lads! Just the thing for the Podnovinskoe Park!”

      “What are they good for? They only keep them for show!” said another.

      “Don’t kick up the dust, infantry!” joked a hussar whose horse pranced and splashed mud on a foot soldier.

      “If I put you through a couple of days’ marching with a knapsack, your fancy laces would soon be looking tattered,” said the infantryman, wiping the mud from his face with his sleeve, “perched up there like a bird, not a man!”

      “And if they sat you on a horse, Zinkin, you’d manage really well,” said a corporal, mocking the thin little soldier hunched over under the weight of his knapsack.

      “Put a club between your legs, and that will be your steed,” the hussar responded.

      VIII

      The remaining infantry hurriedly crossed the bridge, funnelling in tightly at the entrance. Eventually the carts all got across, the crush became less heavy and the final battalion stepped onto the bridge. Only the hussars of Denisov’s squadron were left at the other end of the bridge to face the enemy. The enemy, visible in the far distance from the facing mountain, could still not be seen from the bridge below, since the horizon of the depression along which the river flowed was bounded by the opposing elevation at a distance of no more than half a verst. Ahead of them lay a wasteland, across which a mounted patrol of our Cossacks was moving here and there in little clusters. Suddenly troops in blue coats and artillery appeared on the opposite elevation of the road. It was the French. The Cossack patrol withdrew downhill at a canter. All the officers and men of Denisov’s squadron, although they tried to talk about something else and look somewhere else, could not stop thinking about what was up there on the hill, and they all kept glancing constantly at the spots of colour appearing on the horizon, which they recognised as enemy troops. After midday the weather had cleared up again, the sun was bright as it moved lower over the Danube and the dark mountains surrounding it. It was quiet, and occasionally the sounds of horns and the shouts of the enemy reached them from that mountain. There was no one left now between the squadron and the enemy soldiers, apart from small mounted patrols. An empty space, about three hundred sazhens across, separated them from the enemy, who had stopped firing, so that the stern, menacing, unassailable and imperceptible line that separates two hostile forces could be sensed even more clearly.

      A single step across that line, which resembles the line separating the living from the dead, and there is the mystery of suffering and death. And what is over there? Who is there? There, beyond this field and village and roof lit up by the sunlight? Nobody knows, you want to know and at the same time you are afraid to cross this line, and you want to cross it, and you know that sooner or later you will have to cross it and learn what is over there, on the far side of the line, just as you will inevitably learn what is over there, on the far side of the death. And you are so strong, healthy, merry and excited and surrounded by such healthy and boisterously excited men. Although no one thinks this, every man senses it when he is within view of the enemy, and this feeling lends a particular brilliance and joyful clarity to the impressions of everything that takes place at such moments.

      The smoke-puff of a shot appeared on a hillock beside the enemy and the shot whistled over the heads of the squadron of hussars. The officers, who had been standing together, each went to their own places and the hussars began painstakingly drawing the horses up in lines. Everyone in the squadron fell silent. They all kept glancing straight ahead at the enemy and the squadron commander, waiting for the command. Another shot, the third, flew past. It was obvious that they were firing at the hussars; but the shot flew past over the hussars’ heads with a swift, uniform whistle and struck somewhere behind them. The hussars did not look round, but every time there was the sound of a shot flying over, the whole squadron, with its faces that were all identical but different, and its trimmed moustaches, held its breath as if by command while the shot was in the air and, tensing the muscles of all its legs in their tight blue breeches, half-stood in the stirrups and then sank down again. Without turning their heads, the soldiers squinted sideways at each other, curious to spy out the impression made on their comrades.