Chapter 8

“Infantry, don’t you kick up a dust!” jested a hussar, whose horse, prancing, sent a spurt of mud on an infantry soldier.

“I should like to see you after two long marches with the knapsack on your shoulder. Your frogs would be a bit shabby,” said the foot-soldier, rubbing the mud off his face with his sleeve; “perched up there you’re more like a bird than a man!”

“Wouldn’t you like to be popped on a horse, Zikin; you’d make an elegant rider,” jested a corporal at a thin soldier, bowed down by the weight of his knapsack.

“Put a stick between your legs and you’d have a horse to suit you,” responded the hussar.

THE REST of the infantry pressed together into a funnel shape at the entrance of the bridge, and hastily marched across it. At last all the baggage-waggons had passed over; the crush was less, and the last battalion were stepping on to the bridge. Only the hussars of Denisov’s squadron were left on the further side of the river facing the enemy. The enemy, visible in the distance from the opposite mountain, could not yet be seen from the bridge below, as, from the valley, through which the river flowed, the horizon was bounded by rising ground not more than half a mile away. In front lay a waste plain dotted here and there with handfuls of our scouting Cossacks. Suddenly on the road, where it ran up the rising ground opposite, troops came into sight wearing blue tunics and accompanied by artillery. They were the French. A scouting party of Cossacks trotted away down the hillside. Though the officers and the men of Denisov’s squadron tried to talk of other things, and to look in other directions, they all thought continually of nothing else but what was there on the hillside, and kept constantly glancing towards the dark patches they saw coming into sight on the sky-line, and recognised as the enemy’s forces. The weather had cleared again after midday, and the sun shone brilliantly as it began to go down over the Danube and the dark mountains that encircle it. The air was still, and from the hillside there floated across from time to time the sound of bugles and of the shouts of the enemy. Between the squadron and the enemy there was no one now but a few scouting parties. An empty plain, about six hundred yards across, separated them from the hostile troops. The enemy had ceased firing, and that made even more keenly felt the stern menace of that inaccessible, unassailable borderland that was the dividing-line between the two hostile armies.