“I thank you all, gentlemen; all branches of the service behaved heroically—infantry, cavalry, and artillery. How did two cannons come to be abandoned in the centre?” he inquired, looking about for some one. (Prince Bagration did not ask about the cannons of the left flank; he knew that all of them had been abandoned at the very beginning of the action.) “I think it was you I sent,” he added, addressing the staff-officer.

“One had been disabled,” answered the staff-officer, “but the other, I can’t explain; I was there all the while myself, giving instructions, and I had scarcely left there.… It was pretty hot, it’s true,” he added modestly.

Some one said that Captain Tushin was close by here in the village, and that he had already been sent for.

“Oh, but you went there,” said Prince Bagration, addressing Prince Andrey.

“To be sure, we rode there almost together,” said the staff-officer, smiling affably to Bolkonsky.

“I had not the pleasure of seeing you,” said Prince Andrey, coldly and abruptly. Every one was silent.

Tushin appeared in the doorway, timidly edging in behind the generals’ backs. Making his way round the generals in the crowded hut, embarrassed as he always was before his superior officers, Tushin did not see the flag-staff and tumbled over it. Several of the officers laughed.

“How was it a cannon was abandoned?” asked Bagration, frowning, not so much at the captain as at the laughing officers, among whom Zherkov’s laugh was the loudest. Only now in the presence of the angry-looking commander, Tushin conceived in all its awfulness the crime and disgrace of his being still alive when he had lost two cannons. He had been so excited that till that instant he had not had time to think of that. The officers’ laughter had bewildered him still more. He stood before Bagration, his lower jaw quivering, and could scarcely articulate:

“I don’t know … your excellency … I hadn’t the men, your excellency.”

“You could have got them from the battalions that were covering your position!” That there were no battalions there was what Tushin did not say, though it was the fact. He was afraid of getting another officer into trouble by saying that, and without uttering a word he gazed straight into Bagration’s face, as a confused schoolboy gazes at the face of an examiner.

The silence was rather a lengthy one. Prince Bagration, though he had no wish to be severe, apparently found nothing to say; the others did not venture to intervene. Prince Andrey was looking from under his brows at Tushin and his fingers moved nervously.

“Your excellency,” Prince Andrey broke the silence with his abrupt voice, “you sent me to Captain Tushin’s battery. I went there and found two-thirds of the men and horses killed, two cannons disabled and no forces near to defend them.”

Prince Bagration and Tushin looked now with equal intensity at Bolkonsky, as he went on speaking with suppressed emotion.

“And if your excellency will permit me to express my opinion,” he went on, “we owe the success of the day more to the action of that battery and the heroic steadiness of Captain Tushin and his men than to anything else,” said Prince Andrey, and he got up at once and walked away from the table, without waiting for a reply.

Prince Bagration looked at Tushin and, apparently loath to express his disbelief in Bolkonsky’s off-handed judgment, yet unable to put complete faith in it, he bent his head and said to Tushin that he could go. Prince Andrey walked out after him.

“Thanks, my dear fellow, you got me out of a scrape,” Tushin said to him.