Chapter 7

“One!” they heard the word of command. Number one bounded back nimbly. The cannon boomed with a deafening metallic sound, and whistling over the heads of our men under the mountainside, the grenade flew across, and falling a long way short of the enemy showed by the rising smoke where it had fallen and burst.

The faces of the soldiers and officers lightened up at the sound. Every one got up and busily watched the movements of our troops below, which could be seen as in the hollow of a hand, and the movements of the advancing enemy. At the same instant, the sun came out fully from behind the clouds, and the full note of the solitary shot and the brilliance of the bright sunshine melted into a single inspiriting impression of light-hearted gaiety.

OVER THE BRIDGE two of the enemy’s shots had already flown and there was a crush on the bridge. In the middle of the bridge stood Nesvitsky. He had dismounted and stood with his stout person jammed against the railings. He looked laughingly back at his Cossack, who was standing several paces behind him holding the two horses by their bridles. Every time Nesvitsky tried to move on, the advancing soldiers and waggons bore down upon him and shoved him back against the railings. There was nothing for him to do but to smile.

“Hi there, my lad,” said the Cossack to a soldier in charge of a waggon-load who was forcing his way through the foot-soldiers that pressed right up to his wheels and his horses; “what are you about? No, you wait a bit; you see the general wants to pass.”

But the convoy soldier, taking no notice of the allusion to the general, bawled to the soldiers who blocked the way: “Hi! fellows, keep to the left! wait a bit!” But the fellows, shoulder to shoulder, with their bayonets interlocked, moved over the bridge in one compact mass. Looking down over the rails, Prince Nesvitsky saw the noisy, rapid, but not high waves of the Enns, which, swirling in eddies round the piles of the bridge, chased one another down stream. Looking on the bridge he saw the living waves of the soldiers, all alike as they streamed by: shakoes with covers on them, knapsacks, bayonets, long rifles, and under the shakoes broad-jawed faces, sunken cheeks, and looks of listless weariness, and legs moving over the boards of the bridge, that were coated with sticky mud. Sometimes among the monotonous streams of soldiers, like a crest of white foam on the waves of the Enns, an officer forced his way through, in a cloak, with a face of a different type from the soldiers. Sometimes, like a chip whirling on the river, there passed over the bridge among the waves of infantry a dismounted hussar, an orderly, or an inhabitant of the town. Sometimes, like a log floating down the river, there moved over the bridge, hemmed in on all sides, a baggage-waggon, piled up high and covered with leather covers.

“Why, they’re like a river bursting its banks,” said the Cossack, stopping hopelessly. “Are there many more over there?”