t expect at least twenty thousand wounded,
and we haven't stretchers, or bunks, or dressers, or doctors enough for
six thousand. We have ten thousand carts, but we need other things as
well--we must manage as best we can!"

The strange thought that of the thousands of men, young and old, who
had stared with merry surprise at his hat (perhaps the very men he had
noticed), twenty thousand were inevitably doomed to wounds and death
amazed Pierre.

"They may die tomorrow; why are they thinking of anything but death?"
And by some latent sequence of thought the descent of the Mozhaysk hill,
the carts with the wounded, the ringing bells, the slanting rays of the
sun, and the songs of the cavalrymen vividly recurred to his mind.

"The cavalry ride to battle and meet the wounded and do not for a moment
think of what awaits them, but pass by, winking at the wounded. Yet from
among these men twenty thousand are doomed to die, and they wonder at my
hat! Strange!" thought Pierre, continuing his way to Tatarinova.

In front of a landowner's house to the left of the road stood carriages,
wagons, and crowds of orderlies and sentinels. The commander in chief
was putting up there, but just when Pierre arrived he was not in and
hardly any of the staff were there--they had gone to the church service.
Pierre drove on toward Gorki.

When he had ascended the hill and reached the little village street, he
saw for the first time peasant militiamen in their white shirts and with
crosses on their caps, who, talking and laughing loudly, animated and
perspiring, were at work on a huge knoll overgrown with grass to the
right of the road.

Some of them were digging, others were wheeling barrowloads of earth
along planks, while others stood about doing nothing.

Two officers were standing on the knoll, directing the men. On seeing
these peasants, who were evidently still amused by the novelty of their
position as soldiers, Pierre once more thought of the wounded men at
Mozhaysk and understood what the soldier had meant when he said: "They
want the whole nation to fall on them." The sight of these bearded
peasants at work on the battlefield, with their queer, clumsy boots
and perspiring necks, and their shirts opening from the left toward
the middle, unfastened, exposing their sunburned collarbones, impressed
Pierre more strongly with the solemnity and importance of the moment
than anything he had yet seen or heard.

CHAPTER XXI

P