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You wont find your baggage or anything now, prince, and God knows whats become of your Pyotr, said the other adjutant. Where are the headquarters? We shall spend the night in Znaim. Well, I got everything I wanted packed up on two horses, said Nesvitsky; and capital packs they made for me, fit to scamper as far as the Bohemian mountains at least. Things are in a bad way, my boy. But, I say, you must be ill, shivering like that? Nesvitsky queried, noticing how Prince Andrey shuddered, as though in contact with a galvanic battery. No; Im all right, answered Prince Andrey. He had recalled at that instant the incident with the doctors wife and the transport officer. What is the commander-in-chief doing here? he asked. I cant make out anything, said Nesvitsky. I know one thing, that its all loathsome, loathsome, loathsome, said Prince Andrey, and he went into the house where the commander-in-chief was stopping. Passing by Kutuzovs carriage, the exhausted saddle-horses of his suite, and the Cossacks talking loudly together, Prince Andrey went into the outer room. Kutuzov himself was, as Prince Andrey had been told, in the inner room of the hut with Prince Bagration and Weierother. The latter was the Austrian general, who had taken Schmidts place. In the outer room little Kozlovsky was squatting on his heels in front of a copying-clerk. The latter was sitting on a tub turned upside down, he was writing rapidly with the cuffs of his uniform tucked up. Kozlovskys face was careworn; he too looked as if he had not slept all night. He glanced at Prince Andrey, and did not even nod to him. The second line. Ready? he went on, dictating to the clerk: the Kiev Grenadiers, the Podolsky Dont be in such a hurry, your honour, the clerk answered rudely and angrily, looking at Kozlovsky. Through the door he heard at that moment Kutuzovs voice, eager and dissatisfied, and other unfamiliar voices interrupting him. The sound of those voices, the inattention with which Kozlovsky glanced at him, the churlishness of the harassed clerk, the fact that the clerk and Kozlovsky were sitting round a tub on the floor at so little distance from the commander-in-chief, and that the Cossacks holding the horses laughed so loudly at the windowall made Prince Andrey feel that some grave calamity was hanging over them. Prince Andrey turned to Kozlovsky with urgent questions. In a minute, prince, said Kozlovsky. The disposition of Bagrations troops What about capitulation? Nothing of the sort; arrangements have been made for a battle! Prince Andrey went towards the door from which the sound of voices came. But at the moment when he was going to open the door, the voices in the room paused, the door opened of itself, and Kutuzov with his eagle nose and podgy face appeared in the doorway. Prince Andrey was standing exactly opposite Kutuzov; but from the expression of the commander-in-chiefs one seeing eye it was evident that thought and anxiety so engrossed him as to veil, as it were, his vision. He looked straight into his adjutants face and did not recognise him. Well, have you finished? he addressed Kozlovsky. |
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