ask.

While the marshal was passing, the prisoners had huddled together in a
crowd, and Pierre saw Karataev whom he had not yet seen that morning.
He sat in his short overcoat leaning against a birch tree. On his face,
besides the look of joyful emotion it had worn yesterday while telling
the tale of the merchant who suffered innocently, there was now an
expression of quiet solemnity.

Karataev looked at Pierre with his kindly round eyes now filled with
tears, evidently wishing him to come near that he might say something to
him. But Pierre was not sufficiently sure of himself. He made as if he
did not notice that look and moved hastily away.

When the prisoners again went forward Pierre looked round. Karataev
was still sitting at the side of the road under the birch tree and two
Frenchmen were talking over his head. Pierre did not look round again
but went limping up the hill.

From behind, where Karataev had been sitting, came the sound of a shot.
Pierre heard it plainly, but at that moment he remembered that he
had not yet finished reckoning up how many stages still remained to
Smolensk--a calculation he had begun before the marshal went by. And
he again started reckoning. Two French soldiers ran past Pierre, one of
whom carried a lowered and smoking gun. They both looked pale, and
in the expression on their faces--one of them glanced timidly at
Pierre--there was something resembling what he had seen on the face of
the young soldier at the execution. Pierre looked at the soldier and
remembered that, two days before, that man had burned his shirt while
drying it at the fire and how they had laughed at him.

Behind him, where Karataev had been sitting, the dog began to howl.
"What a stupid beast! Why is it howling?" thought Pierre.

His comrades, the prisoner soldiers walking beside him, avoided looking
back at the place where the shot had been fired and the dog was howling,
just as Pierre did, but there was a set look on all their faces.

CHAPTER XV

The stores, the prisoners, and the marshal's baggage train stopped at
the village of Shamshevo. The men crowded together round the campfires.
Pierre went up to the fire, ate some roast horseflesh, lay down with his
back to the fire, and immediately fell asleep. He again slept as he had
done at Mozhaysk after the battle of Borodino.

Again real events mingled with dreams and again someone, he or another,
gave expression to his thoughts, and even to the