"Where are you off to?" asked Boris.

"With a message to His Majesty."

"There he is!" said Boris, thinking Rostov had said "His Highness,"
and pointing to the Grand Duke who with his high shoulders and frowning
brows stood a hundred paces away from them in his helmet and Horse
Guards' jacket, shouting something to a pale, white uniformed Austrian
officer.

"But that's the Grand Duke, and I want the commander in chief or the
Emperor," said Rostov, and was about to spur his horse.

"Count! Count!" shouted Berg who ran up from the other side as eager
as Boris. "Count! I am wounded in my right hand" (and he showed his
bleeding hand with a handkerchief tied round it) "and I remained at the
front. I held my sword in my left hand, Count. All our family--the von
Bergs--have been knights!"

He said something more, but Rostov did not wait to hear it and rode
away.

Having passed the Guards and traversed an empty space, Rostov, to avoid
again getting in front of the first line as he had done when the Horse
Guards charged, followed the line of reserves, going far round the place
where the hottest musket fire and cannonade were heard. Suddenly he
heard musket fire quite close in front of him and behind our troops,
where he could never have expected the enemy to be.

"What can it be?" he thought. "The enemy in the rear of our army?
Impossible!" And suddenly he was seized by a panic of fear for himself
and for the issue of the whole battle. "But be that what it may,"
he reflected, "there is no riding round it now. I must look for the
commander in chief here, and if all is lost it is for me to perish with
the rest."

The foreboding of evil that had suddenly come over Rostov was more and
more confirmed the farther he rode into the region behind the village of
Pratzen, which was full of troops of all kinds.

"What does it mean? What is it? Whom are they firing at? Who is firing?"
Rostov kept asking as he came up to Russian and Austrian soldiers
running in confused crowds across his path.

"The devil knows! They've killed everybody! It's all up now!" he
was told in Russian, German, and Czech by the crowd of fugitives who
understood what was happening as little as he did.

"Kill the Germans!" shouted one.

"May the devil take them--the traitors!"

"Zum Henker diese Russen!" * muttered a German.

* "Hang these Russians!"

Several wounded men passed along the road, and words of abuse, screams,
and groans ming