The French had time to fire three volleys of grape-shot before the hussars got back to their horses. Two were badly aimed, and the shot flew over them, but the last volley fell in the middle of the group of hussars and knocked down three men.
Rostov, absorbed by his relations with Bogdanitch, stepped on the bridge, not knowing what he had to do. There was no one to slash at with his sword （that was how he always pictured a battle to himself）, and he could be of no use in burning the bridge, because he had not brought with him any wisps of straw, like the other soldiers. He stood and looked about him, when suddenly there was a rattle on the bridge, like a lot of nuts being scattered, and one of the hussars, the one standing nearest him, fell with a groan on the railing. Rostov ran up to him with the others. Again some one shouted. “Stretchers！” Four men took hold of the hussar and began lifting him up. “Oooo！ … Let me be, for Christ’s sake！” shrieked the wounded man, but still they lifted him up and laid him on a stretcher. Nikolay Rostov turned away, and began staring into the distance, at the waters of the Danube, at the sky, at the sun, as though he were searching for something. How fair that sky seemed, how blue and calm and deep. How brilliant and triumphant seemed the setting sun. With what an enticing glimmer shone the water of the faraway Danube. And fairer still were the far-away mountains that showed blue beyond the Danube, the nunnery, the mysterious gorges, the pine forests, filled with mist to the tree-tops … there all was peace and happiness.… “There is nothing, nothing I could wish for, if only I were there,” thought Rostov. “In myself alone and in that sunshine there is so much happiness, while here … groans, agonies, and this uncertainty, this hurry.… Here they are shouting something again and again, all of them are running back somewhere, and I’m running with them, and here is it, it, death hanging over me, all round me.… One instant, and I shall never see that sunshine, that water, that mountain gorge again.…” At that moment the sun went behind the clouds; more stretchers came into view ahead of Rostov. And the terror of death and of the stretchers, and the loss of the sunshine and life, all blended into one sensation of sickening fear.
“Good God, Thou who art in that sky, save and forgive, and protect me,” Rostov whispered to himself.
The hussars ran back to their horses; their voices grew louder and more assured; the stretchers disappeared from sight.
“Well, lad, so you’ve had a sniff of powder！” Vaska Denisov shouted in his ear.
“It’s all over, but I am a coward, yes, I am a coward,” thought Rostov, and with a heavy sigh he took his Rook, who had begun to go lame of one leg, from the man who held him and began mounting.
“What was that—grape-shot？” he asked of Denisov.
“Yes, and something like it too,” cried Denisov; “they worked their guns in fine style. But it’s a nasty business. A cavalry attack’s a pleasant thing—slash away at the dogs; but this is for all the devil like aiming at a target.”
And Denisov rode away to a group standing not far from Rostov, consisting of the colonel, Nesvitsky, Zherkov, and the officer of the suite.
“It seems as if no one noticed it, though,” Rostov thought to himself. And indeed no one had noticed it at all, for every one was familiar with the feeling that the ensign, never before under fire, was experiencing for the first time.
“Now you’ll have something to talk about,” said Zherkov; “they’ll be promoting me a sub-lieutenant before I know where I am, eh？”
“Inform the prince that I have burnt the bridge,” said the colonel, in a cheerful and triumphant tone.
“And if he inquires with what losses？”
“Not worth mentioning,” boomed the colonel; “two hussars wounded and one stark dead on the spot,” he said, with undisguised cheerfulness. The German was unable to repress a smile of satisfaction as he sonorously enunciated the idiomatic Russian colloquialism of the last phrase.