The small man with weak, awkward movements constantly asked his orderly to give him another little pipeful for that, as he put it, and spilling fire from it, ran forward and looked at the French from under his small hand.
“Smash ’em, lads!” he kept saying and would seize the guns by the wheel and unscrew the screws himself.
Amidst the smoke, deafened by the ceaseless firing, which made him jump each time, Tushin, without relinquishing his nose-warmer, ran from one gun to the other, now taking aim, now counting the charges, now ordering the dead and wounded horses to be changed and reharnessed, and shouting all the while in his weak, high, irresolute voice. His face was growing more and more animated. Only when people were killed or wounded, he winced and, turning away from the dead man, shouted angrily at his crew, who, as always, were slow to pick up a wounded man or a body. His soldiers, for the most part fine, handsome fellows (two heads taller and twice as broad as their officer, as always in a battery company), all looked to their commander, like children in a difficult situation, and the expression on his face was inevitably mirrored on theirs.
As a result of the dreadful rumbling, the noise, the necessity for attention and activity, Tushin did not experience the slightest unpleasant feeling of fear, and the thought that he could be killed or painfully wounded did not occur to him. On the contrary, he felt ever merrier and merrier. It seemed to him that the moment when he saw the enemy and fired the first shot was already very long ago, maybe even yesterday, and that the spot on the field where he stood was a long-familiar and dear place to him. Though he remembered everything, considered everything, did everything the best officer could do in his position, he was in a state similar to feverish delirium or to that of a drunken man.
From the deafening noise of his guns on all sides, from the whistling and thud of the enemy’s shells, from the sight of the sweaty, flushed crews hustling about the guns, from the sight of the blood of men and horses, from the sight of the little puffs of smoke on the enemy’s side (after each of which a cannonball came flying and hit the ground, a man, a cannon, or a horse)—owing to the sight of all these things, there was established in his head a fantastic world of his own, which made up his pleasure at that moment. In his imagination, the enemy’s cannon were not cannon but pipes, from which an invisible smoker released an occasional puff of smoke.
“Look, he’s puffing away again,” Tushin said to himself in a whisper, as a puff of smoke leaped from the hillside and was borne leftwards in a strip by the wind, “now wait for the ball—and send it back.”
“What orders, Your Honor?” asked the fireworker, who was standing close to him and heard him mutter something.
“Nothing…a shell…” he replied.
“Now for our Matvevna,” he said to himself. In his imagination, Matvevna was the big cannon at the end, of ancient casting. The French looked like ants around their guns. A handsome man and a drunkard, the number one at the second gun was known in his world as uncle; Tushin looked at him more often than at the others and rejoiced at his every movement. The sound of musket fire at the foot of the hill, now dying down, now intensifying again, seemed to him like someone’s breathing. He listened to the fading and flaring up of these sounds.
“Hah, breathing again, breathing,” he said to himself.
He pictured himself as of enormous size, a mighty man, flinging cannonballs at the French with both hands.
“Well, Matvevna, old girl, don’t let us down!” he said, moving away from the gun, when a strange, unfamiliar voice rang out over his head.
“Captain Tushin! Captain!”
Tushin turned around, frightened. It was the same staff officer who had driven him out of Grunt. He was shouting at him in a breathless voice:
“What, have you lost your mind? You’ve been ordered twice to retreat, but you…”
“Well, what are they getting at me for?…” Tushin thought to himself, looking fearfully at his superior.
“I…nothing…” he said, putting two fingers to his visor. “I…”
But the colonel did not finish everything he wanted to say. A cannonball flew close to him and made him duck and crouch down on his horse. He fell silent and was about to say something more when another cannonball stopped him. He turned his horse and galloped away.
“Retreat! Everybody retreat!” he called from the distance.
The soldiers laughed. A moment later an adjutant arrived with the same order.
This was Prince Andrei. The first thing he saw on riding out into the space occupied by Tushin’s cannon was an unharnessed horse with a shattered leg that was whinnying near the harnessed horses. Blood was pouring from its leg as from a spout. Among the limbers several men lay dead. One cannonball after another flew over him as he rode on, and he felt a nervous shiver run down his spine. But the thought alone that he was afraid picked him up again. “I can’t be afraid,” he thought and slowly dismounted among the cannon. He delivered the order and did not leave the battlefield. He decided that the guns would leave the position and be taken away in his presence. Together with Tushin, stepping over the bodies and under the dreadful fire of the French, he got busy with removing the guns.
“Another superior just came, and he turned tail quickly,” the fireworker said to Prince Andrei, “not like Your Honor.”
Prince Andrei said nothing to Tushin. The two men were so busy that they seemed not even to see each other. Having limbered up the two remaining guns of the four (one smashed cannon and a unicorn20 were abandoned), Prince Andrei rode up to Tushin.
“Well, good-bye,” said Prince Andrei, offering his hand to Tushin.
“Good-bye, dear heart,” said Tushin, “you good soul! Good-bye, dear heart,” Tushin said with tears, which for some reason suddenly came to his eyes.
XXI
The wind grew still, black clouds hung low over the place of battle, merging on the horizon with powder smoke. It was getting dark, and the glow of the fire showed more clearly in two places. The cannonade became weaker, but the crackle of gunfire behind and to the right was heard more often and close. As soon as Tushin with his guns, driving around or over the wounded, came out from under fire and descended into the ravine, he met the superiors and adjutants, among whom were the staff officer and Zherkov, who had been sent twice and had twice failed to reach Tushin’s battery. All of them, interrupting each other, gave and conveyed orders of how and where to go, and reproached and reprimanded him. Tushin had no orders to give and rode silently behind them on his artillery nag, fearing to speak, because he was ready at every word to burst into tears, not knowing why himself. Though the order was to abandon the wounded, many of them dragged after the troops, asking to be put on the guns. The dashing infantry officer who had run out of Tushin’s lean-to before the battle was put on Matvevna’s carriage, a bullet in his stomach. At the foot of the hill a pale hussar junker, holding one arm with his other hand, came up to Tushin and asked for a seat.
“Captain, for God’s sake, I’ve bruised my arm,” he said timidly. “For God’s sake, I can’t walk. For God’s sake!”