e enemy was already
visible. Suddenly something like a birch broom seemed to sweep over the
squadron. Rostov raised his saber, ready to strike, but at that instant
the trooper Nikitenko, who was galloping ahead, shot away from him, and
Rostov felt as in a dream that he continued to be carried forward
with unnatural speed but yet stayed on the same spot. From behind him
Bondarchuk, an hussar he knew, jolted against him and looked angrily at
him. Bondarchuk's horse swerved and galloped past.

"How is it I am not moving? I have fallen, I am killed!" Rostov asked
and answered at the same instant. He was alone in the middle of a field.
Instead of the moving horses and hussars' backs, he saw nothing before
him but the motionless earth and the stubble around him. There was warm
blood under his arm. "No, I am wounded and the horse is killed." Rook
tried to rise on his forelegs but fell back, pinning his rider's leg.
Blood was flowing from his head; he struggled but could not rise. Rostov
also tried to rise but fell back, his sabretache having become entangled
in the saddle. Where our men were, and where the French, he did not
know. There was no one near.

Having disentangled his leg, he rose. "Where, on which side, was now the
line that had so sharply divided the two armies?" he asked himself and
could not answer. "Can something bad have happened to me?" he wondered
as he got up: and at that moment he felt that something superfluous was
hanging on his benumbed left arm. The wrist felt as if it were not his.
He examined his hand carefully, vainly trying to find blood on it. "Ah,
here are people coming," he thought joyfully, seeing some men running
toward him. "They will help me!" In front came a man wearing a strange
shako and a blue cloak, swarthy, sunburned, and with a hooked nose. Then
came two more, and many more running behind. One of them said something
strange, not in Russian. In among the hindmost of these men wearing
similar shakos was a Russian hussar. He was being held by the arms and
his horse was being led behind him.

"It must be one of ours, a prisoner. Yes. Can it be that they will take
me too? Who are these men?" thought Rostov, scarcely believing his eyes.
"Can they be French?" He looked at the approaching Frenchmen, and though
but a moment before he had been galloping to get at them and hack them
to pieces, their proximity now seemed so awful that he could not believe
his eyes. "Who are they? Why are they ru