“We beat them!” said Boris, growing talkative in his eagerness. “You can fancy …” And Boris began describing how the guards having taken up their position, and seeing troops in front of them had taken them for Austrians, and all at once had found out from the cannon balls aimed at them from those troops that they were in the front line, and had quite unexpectedly to advance to battle. Rostov set his horse moving without waiting to hear Boris to the end.

“Where are you off to?” asked Boris.

“To his majesty with a commission.”

“Here he is!” said Boris, who had not caught what Rostov said, and thinking it was the grand duke he wanted, he pointed him out, standing a hundred paces from them, wearing a helmet and a horse-guard’s white elk tunic, with his high shoulders and scowling brows, shouting something to a pale, white-uniformed Austrian officer.

“Why, that’s the grand duke, and I must see the commander-in-chief or the Emperor,” said Rostov, and he was about to start again.

“Count, count!” shouted Berg, running up on the other side, as eager as Boris. “I was wounded in my right hand” (he pointed to his blood-stained hand, bound up with a pocket-handkerchief), “and I kept my place in the front. Count, I held my sabre in my left hand. All my family, count, the Von Bergs, have been knights.” Berg would have said more, but Rostov rode on without listening.

After riding by the guards, and on through an empty space, Rostov rode along the line of the reserves for fear of getting in the way of the front line, as he had done in the charge of the horse-guards, and made a wide circuit round the place where he heard the hottest musket-fire and cannonade. All of a sudden, in front of him and behind our troops, in a place where he could never have expected the enemy to be, he heard the sound of musket-fire quite close

“What can it be?” thought Rostov. “The enemy in the rear of our troops? It can’t be,” thought Rostov, but a panic of fear for himself and for the issue of the whole battle came over him all at once. “Whatever happens, though,” he reflected, “it’s useless to try and escape now. It’s my duty to seek the commander- in-chief here, and if everything’s lost, it’s my duty to perish with all the rest.”

The foreboding of evil that had suddenly come upon Rostov grew stronger and stronger the further he advanced into the region behind the village of Pratzen, which was full of crowds of troops of all sorts.

“What does it mean? What is it? Whom are they firing at? Who is firing?” Rostov kept asking, as he met Austrian and Russian soldiers running in confused crowds across his path.

“Devil knows! Killed them all! Damn it all,” he was answered in Russian, in German, and in Czech, by the hurrying rabble, who knew no more than he what was being done.

“Kill the Germans!” shouted one.

“To hell with them—the traitors.”

“Zum Henker diese Russen,” muttered a German.

Several wounded were among the crowds on the road. Shouts, oaths, moans were mingled in the general hubbub. The firing began to subside, and, as Rostov found out later, the Russian and Austrian soldiers had been firing at one another.

“My God! how can this be?” thought Rostov. “And here, where any minute the Emperor may see them.… No, these can only be a few wretches. It will soon be over, it’s not the real thing, it can’t be,” he thought. “Only to make haste, make haste, and get by them.”