ide on, when a wounded
officer passing by addressed him:

"Who is it you want?" he asked. "The commander in chief? He was killed
by a cannon ball--struck in the breast before our regiment."

"Not killed--wounded!" another officer corrected him.

"Who? Kutuzov?" asked Rostov.

"Not Kutuzov, but what's his name--well, never mind... there are not
many left alive. Go that way, to that village, all the commanders are
there," said the officer, pointing to the village of Hosjeradek, and he
walked on.

Rostov rode on at a footpace not knowing why or to whom he was now
going. The Emperor was wounded, the battle lost. It was impossible to
doubt it now. Rostov rode in the direction pointed out to him, in which
he saw turrets and a church. What need to hurry? What was he now to say
to the Tsar or to Kutuzov, even if they were alive and unwounded?

"Take this road, your honor, that way you will be killed at once!" a
soldier shouted to him. "They'd kill you there!"

"Oh, what are you talking about?" said another. "Where is he to go? That
way is nearer."

Rostov considered, and then went in the direction where they said he
would be killed.

"It's all the same now. If the Emperor is wounded, am I to try to save
myself?" he thought. He rode on to the region where the greatest number
of men had perished in fleeing from Pratzen. The French had not yet
occupied that region, and the Russians--the uninjured and slightly
wounded--had left it long ago. All about the field, like heaps of manure
on well-kept plowland, lay from ten to fifteen dead and wounded to each
couple of acres. The wounded crept together in twos and threes and one
could hear their distressing screams and groans, sometimes feigned--or
so it seemed to Rostov. He put his horse to a trot to avoid seeing all
these suffering men, and he felt afraid--afraid not for his life, but
for the courage he needed and which he knew would not stand the sight of
these unfortunates.

The French, who had ceased firing at this field strewn with dead and
wounded where there was no one left to fire at, on seeing an adjutant
riding over it trained a gun on him and fired several shots. The
sensation of those terrible whistling sounds and of the corpses around
him merged in Rostov's mind into a single feeling of terror and pity for
himself. He remembered his mother's last letter. "What would she feel,"
thought he, "if she saw me here now on this field with the cannon aimed
at me?"

In