helter.

"I have come from the staff, Count. Have you heard of Raevski's
exploit?"

And the officer gave them details of the Saltanov battle, which he had
heard at the staff.

Rostov, smoking his pipe and turning his head about as the water
trickled down his neck, listened inattentively, with an occasional
glance at Ilyin, who was pressing close to him. This officer, a lad
of sixteen who had recently joined the regiment, was now in the same
relation to Nicholas that Nicholas had been to Denisov seven years
before. Ilyin tried to imitate Rostov in everything and adored him as a
girl might have done.

Zdrzhinski, the officer with the long mustache, spoke grandiloquently of
the Saltanov dam being "a Russian Thermopylae," and of how a deed worthy
of antiquity had been performed by General Raevski. He recounted how
Raevski had led his two sons onto the dam under terrific fire and had
charged with them beside him. Rostov heard the story and not only said
nothing to encourage Zdrzhinski's enthusiasm but, on the contrary,
looked like a man ashamed of what he was hearing, though with no
intention of contradicting it. Since the campaigns of Austerlitz and
of 1807 Rostov knew by experience that men always lie when describing
military exploits, as he himself had done when recounting them; besides
that, he had experience enough to know that nothing happens in war at
all as we can imagine or relate it. And so he did not like Zdrzhinski's
tale, nor did he like Zdrzhinski himself who, with his mustaches
extending over his cheeks, bent low over the face of his hearer, as was
his habit, and crowded Rostov in the narrow shanty. Rostov looked at him
in silence. "In the first place, there must have been such a confusion
and crowding on the dam that was being attacked that if Raevski did lead
his sons there, it could have had no effect except perhaps on some dozen
men nearest to him," thought he, "the rest could not have seen how or
with whom Raevski came onto the dam. And even those who did see it
would not have been much stimulated by it, for what had they to do with
Raevski's tender paternal feelings when their own skins were in danger?
And besides, the fate of the Fatherland did not depend on whether
they took the Saltanov dam or not, as we are told was the case at
Thermopylae. So why should he have made such a sacrifice? And why expose
his own children in the battle? I would not have taken my brother Petya
there, or even Ilyin, who