The Emperor Francis, a rosy, long-faced young man, sat excessively erect on his handsome sable horse, casting deliberate and anxious looks around him. He beckoned one of his white adjutants and asked him a question. “Most likely at what o’clock they started,” thought Prince Andrey, watching his old acquaintance with a smile, which he could not repress, as he remembered his audience with him. With the Emperors’ suite were a certain number of fashionable young aristocrats—Russians and Austrians selected from the regiments of the guards and the line. Among them were postillions leading extra horses, beautiful beasts from the Tsar’s stables, covered with embroidered horsecloths.

Like a breath of fresh country air rushing into a stuffy room through an open window was the youth, energy, and confidence of success that the cavalcade of brilliant young people brought with them into Kutuzov’s cheerless staff.

“Why aren’t you beginning, Mihail Larionovitch?” the Emperor Alexander said hurriedly, addressing Kutuzov, while he glanced courteously towards the Emperor Francis.

“I am waiting to see, your majesty,” Kutuzov answered, bowing reverentially.

The Emperor turned his ear towards him, with a slight frown and an air of not having caught his words.

“I’m waiting to see, your majesty,” repeated Kutuzov (Prince Andrey noticed that Kutuzov’s upper lip quivered unnaturally as he uttered that: “I’m waiting”). “Not all the columns are massed yet, your majesty.”

The Tsar heard him, but the answer apparently did not please him; he shrugged his sloping shoulders, and glanced at Novosiltsov, who stood near, with a look that seemed to complain of Kutuzov.

“We are not on the Tsaritsin field, you know, Mihail Larionovitch, where the parade is not begun till all the regiments are ready,” said the Tsar, glancing again at the Emperor Francis as though inviting him, if not to take part, at least to listen to what he was saying. But the Emperor Francis still gazed away and did not listen.

“That’s just why I’m not beginning, sire,” said Kutuzov in a resounding voice, as though foreseeing a possibility his words might be ignored, and once more there was a quiver in his face. “That’s why I am not beginning, sire; because we are not on parade and not on the Tsaritsin field,” he articulated clearly and distinctly.

All in the Tsar’s suite exchanged instantaneous glances with one another, and every face wore an expression of regret and reproach. “However old he may be, he ought not, he ought never to speak like that,” the faces expressed.

The Tsar looked steadily and attentively into Kutuzov’s face, waiting to see if he were not going to say more. But Kutuzov too on his side, bending his head respectfully, seemed to be waiting. The silence lasted about a minute.

“However, if it’s your majesty’s command,” said Kutuzov, lifting his head and relapsing into his former affectation of the tone of a stupid, uncritical general, who obeys orders. He moved away, and beckoning the commanding officer of the column, Miloradovitch, gave him the command to advance.

The troops began to move again, and two battalions of the Novgorod regiment and a battalion of the Apsheron regiment passed before the Tsar.

While the Apsheron battalion was marching by, Miloradovitch, a red-faced man, wearing a uniform and orders, with no overcoat, and a turned-up hat with huge plumes stuck on one side, galloped ahead of them, and saluting in gallant style, reined up his horse before the Tsar.

“With God’s aid, general,” said the Tsar.


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