attery
and Pierre ran down the slope stumbling over the dead and wounded who,
it seemed to him, caught at his feet. But before he reached the foot
of the knoll he was met by a dense crowd of Russian soldiers who,
stumbling, tripping up, and shouting, ran merrily and wildly toward
the battery. (This was the attack for which Ermolov claimed the credit,
declaring that only his courage and good luck made such a feat possible:
it was the attack in which he was said to have thrown some St. George's
Crosses he had in his pocket into the battery for the first soldiers to
take who got there.)

The French who had occupied the battery fled, and our troops shouting
"Hurrah!" pursued them so far beyond the battery that it was difficult
to call them back.

The prisoners were brought down from the battery and among them was
a wounded French general, whom the officers surrounded. Crowds of
wounded--some known to Pierre and some unknown--Russians and French,
with faces distorted by suffering, walked, crawled, and were carried on
stretchers from the battery. Pierre again went up onto the knoll where
he had spent over an hour, and of that family circle which had received
him as a member he did not find a single one. There were many dead whom
he did not know, but some he recognized. The young officer still sat in
the same way, bent double, in a pool of blood at the edge of the earth
wall. The red-faced man was still twitching, but they did not carry him
away.

Pierre ran down the slope once more.

"Now they will stop it, now they will be horrified at what they have
done!" he thought, aimlessly going toward a crowd of stretcher bearers
moving from the battlefield.

But behind the veil of smoke the sun was still high, and in front and
especially to the left, near Semenovsk, something seemed to be seething
in the smoke, and the roar of cannon and musketry did not diminish, but
even increased to desperation like a man who, straining himself, shrieks
with all his remaining strength.

CHAPTER XXXIII

The chief action of the battle of Borodino was fought within the seven
thousand feet between Borodino and Bagration's fleches. Beyond that
space there was, on the one side, a demonstration made by the Russians
with Uvarov's cavalry at midday, and on the other side, beyond Utitsa,
Poniatowski's collision with Tuchkov; but these two were detached and
feeble actions in comparison with what took place in the center of the
battlefield