jolted over the stones that had been thrown on the steep
incline to make it something like a road. The wounded, bandaged with
rags, with pale cheeks, compressed lips, and knitted brows, held on to
the sides of the carts as they were jolted against one another. Almost
all of them stared with naive, childlike curiosity at Pierre's white hat
and green swallow-tail coat.

Pierre's coachman shouted angrily at the convoy of wounded to keep to
one side of the road. The cavalry regiment, as it descended the hill
with its singers, surrounded Pierre's carriage and blocked the road.
Pierre stopped, being pressed against the side of the cutting in which
the road ran. The sunshine from behind the hill did not penetrate into
the cutting and there it was cold and damp, but above Pierre's head was
the bright August sunshine and the bells sounded merrily. One of the
carts with wounded stopped by the side of the road close to Pierre. The
driver in his bast shoes ran panting up to it, placed a stone under one
of its tireless hind wheels, and began arranging the breech-band on his
little horse.

One of the wounded, an old soldier with a bandaged arm who was following
the cart on foot, caught hold of it with his sound hand and turned to
look at Pierre.

"I say, fellow countryman! Will they set us down here or take us on to
Moscow?" he asked.

Pierre was so deep in thought that he did not hear the question. He was
looking now at the cavalry regiment that had met the convoy of wounded,
now at the cart by which he was standing, in which two wounded men
were sitting and one was lying. One of those sitting up in the cart had
probably been wounded in the cheek. His whole head was wrapped in rags
and one cheek was swollen to the size of a baby's head. His nose
and mouth were twisted to one side. This soldier was looking at the
cathedral and crossing himself. Another, a young lad, a fair-haired
recruit as white as though there was no blood in his thin face, looked
at Pierre kindly, with a fixed smile. The third lay prone so that his
face was not visible. The cavalry singers were passing close by:

Ah lost, quite lost... is my head so keen,
Living in a foreign land.

they sang their soldiers' dance song.

As if responding to them but with a different sort of merriment, the
metallic sound of the bells reverberated high above and the hot rays of
the sun bathed the top of the opposite slope with yet another sort of
merriment. But beneath