hich had caught in his cloak. It was an old-fashioned saber of a kind
no longer in general use. Prince Andrew remembered the story of Suvorov
giving his saber to Bagration in Italy, and the recollection was
particularly pleasant at that moment. They had reached the battery at
which Prince Andrew had been when he examined the battlefield.

"Whose company?" asked Prince Bagration of an artilleryman standing by
the ammunition wagon.

He asked, "Whose company?" but he really meant, "Are you frightened
here?" and the artilleryman understood him.

"Captain Tushin's, your excellency!" shouted the red-haired, freckled
gunner in a merry voice, standing to attention.

"Yes, yes," muttered Bagration as if considering something, and he rode
past the limbers to the farthest cannon.

As he approached, a ringing shot issued from it deafening him and his
suite, and in the smoke that suddenly surrounded the gun they could see
the gunners who had seized it straining to roll it quickly back to its
former position. A huge, broad-shouldered gunner, Number One, holding
a mop, his legs far apart, sprang to the wheel; while Number Two with
a trembling hand placed a charge in the cannon's mouth. The short,
round-shouldered Captain Tushin, stumbling over the tail of the gun
carriage, moved forward and, not noticing the general, looked out
shading his eyes with his small hand.

"Lift it two lines more and it will be just right," cried he in a feeble
voice to which he tried to impart a dashing note, ill suited to his weak
figure. "Number Two!" he squeaked. "Fire, Medvedev!"

Bagration called to him, and Tushin, raising three fingers to his cap
with a bashful and awkward gesture not at all like a military salute
but like a priest's benediction, approached the general. Though Tushin's
guns had been intended to cannonade the valley, he was firing incendiary
balls at the village of Schon Grabern visible just opposite, in front of
which large masses of French were advancing.

No one had given Tushin orders where and at what to fire, but after
consulting his sergeant major, Zakharchenko, for whom he had great
respect, he had decided that it would be a good thing to set fire to the
village. "Very good!" said Bagration in reply to the officer's report,
and began deliberately to examine the whole battlefield extended before
him. The French had advanced nearest on our right. Below the height on
which the Kiev regiment was stationed, in the hollow wh