g to a general who stood beside him, not taking his eye from the
battlefield.

Having received this order the general passed by Pierre on his way down
the knoll.

"To the crossing!" said the general coldly and sternly in reply to one
of the staff who asked where he was going.

"I'll go there too, I too!" thought Pierre, and followed the general.

The general mounted a horse a Cossack had brought him. Pierre went to
his groom who was holding his horses and, asking which was the quietest,
clambered onto it, seized it by the mane, and turning out his toes
pressed his heels against its sides and, feeling that his spectacles
were slipping off but unable to let go of the mane and reins, he
galloped after the general, causing the staff officers to smile as they
watched him from the knoll.

CHAPTER XXXI

Having descended the hill the general after whom Pierre was galloping
turned sharply to the left, and Pierre, losing sight of him, galloped
in among some ranks of infantry marching ahead of him. He tried to pass
either in front of them or to the right or left, but there were soldiers
everywhere, all with the same preoccupied expression and busy with
some unseen but evidently important task. They all gazed with the same
dissatisfied and inquiring expression at this stout man in a white hat,
who for some unknown reason threatened to trample them under his horse's
hoofs.

"Why ride into the middle of the battalion?" one of them shouted at him.

Another prodded his horse with the butt end of a musket, and Pierre,
bending over his saddlebow and hardly able to control his shying horse,
galloped ahead of the soldiers where there was a free space.

There was a bridge ahead of him, where other soldiers stood firing.
Pierre rode up to them. Without being aware of it he had come to the
bridge across the Kolocha between Gorki and Borodino, which the French
(having occupied Borodino) were attacking in the first phase of the
battle. Pierre saw that there was a bridge in front of him and that
soldiers were doing something on both sides of it and in the meadow,
among the rows of new-mown hay which he had taken no notice of amid the
smoke of the campfires the day before; but despite the incessant firing
going on there he had no idea that this was the field of battle. He did
not notice the sound of the bullets whistling from every side, or the
projectiles that flew over him, did not see the enemy on the other side
of the riv