"Your excellency!" he said. "Why, we were beginning to despair! How is
it you are on foot? And where are you going, please?"

"Oh, yes!" said Pierre.

The soldiers stopped.

"So you've found your folk?" said one of them. "Well, good-by, Peter
Kirilych--isn't it?"

"Good-by, Peter Kirilych!" Pierre heard the other voices repeat.

"Good-by!" he said and turned with his groom toward the inn.

"I ought to give them something!" he thought, and felt in his pocket.
"No, better not!" said another, inner voice.

There was not a room to be had at the inn, they were all occupied.
Pierre went out into the yard and, covering himself up head and all, lay
down in his carriage.

CHAPTER IX

Scarcely had Pierre laid his head on the pillow before he felt himself
falling asleep, but suddenly, almost with the distinctness of reality,
he heard the boom, boom, boom of firing, the thud of projectiles, groans
and cries, and smelled blood and powder, and a feeling of horror and
dread of death seized him. Filled with fright he opened his eyes and
lifted his head from under his cloak. All was tranquil in the yard. Only
someone's orderly passed through the gateway, splashing through the mud,
and talked to the innkeeper. Above Pierre's head some pigeons, disturbed
by the movement he had made in sitting up, fluttered under the dark roof
of the penthouse. The whole courtyard was permeated by a strong peaceful
smell of stable yards, delightful to Pierre at that moment. He could see
the clear starry sky between the dark roofs of two penthouses.

"Thank God, there is no more of that!" he thought, covering up his head
again. "Oh, what a terrible thing is fear, and how shamefully I yielded
to it! But they... they were steady and calm all the time, to the
end..." thought he.

They, in Pierre's mind, were the soldiers, those who had been at the
battery, those who had given him food, and those who had prayed before
the icon. They, those strange men he had not previously known, stood out
clearly and sharply from everyone else.

"To be a soldier, just a soldier!" thought Pierre as he fell asleep,
"to enter communal life completely, to be imbued by what makes them what
they are. But how cast off all the superfluous, devilish burden of my
outer man? There was a time when I could have done it. I could have run
away from my father, as I wanted to. Or I might have been sent to serve
as a soldier after the duel with Dolokhov." And the mem