take
up their positions were clearly audible.

Napoleon walked about in front of his tent, looked at the fires and
listened to these sounds, and as he was passing a tall guardsman in
a shaggy cap, who was standing sentinel before his tent and had drawn
himself up like a black pillar at sight of the Emperor, Napoleon stopped
in front of him.

"What year did you enter the service?" he asked with that affectation
of military bluntness and geniality with which he always addressed the
soldiers.

The man answered the question.

"Ah! One of the old ones! Has your regiment had its rice?"

"It has, Your Majesty."

Napoleon nodded and walked away.

At half-past five Napoleon rode to the village of Shevardino.

It was growing light, the sky was clearing, only a single cloud lay in
the east. The abandoned campfires were burning themselves out in the
faint morning light.

On the right a single deep report of a cannon resounded and died away in
the prevailing silence. Some minutes passed. A second and a third report
shook the air, then a fourth and a fifth boomed solemnly near by on the
right.

The first shots had not yet ceased to reverberate before others rang out
and yet more were heard mingling with and overtaking one another.

Napoleon with his suite rode up to the Shevardino Redoubt where he
dismounted. The game had begun.

CHAPTER XXX

On returning to Gorki after having seen Prince Andrew, Pierre ordered
his groom to get the horses ready and to call him early in the morning,
and then immediately fell asleep behind a partition in a corner Boris
had given up to him.

Before he was thoroughly awake next morning everybody had already left
the hut. The panes were rattling in the little windows and his groom was
shaking him.

"Your excellency! Your excellency! Your excellency!" he kept repeating
pertinaciously while he shook Pierre by the shoulder without looking at
him, having apparently lost hope of getting him to wake up.

"What? Has it begun? Is it time?" Pierre asked, waking up.

"Hear the firing," said the groom, a discharged soldier. "All the
gentlemen have gone out, and his Serene Highness himself rode past long
ago."

Pierre dressed hastily and ran out to the porch. Outside all was bright,
fresh, dewy, and cheerful. The sun, just bursting forth from behind a
cloud that had concealed it, was shining, with rays still half broken
by the clouds, over the roofs of the street opposite, on the