Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1031 page)

them as torches.  This is repeated as each fire is reached, till

the whole French position is one wide illumination.  The most

enthusiastic of the soldiers follow the Emperor in a throng as

he progresses, and his whereabouts in the vast field is denoted

by their cries.]

CHORUS OF PITIES
[aerial music]

Strange suasive pull of personality!

CHORUS OF IRONIC SPIRITS

His projects they unknow, his grin unsee!

CHORUS OF THE PITIES

Their luckless hearts say blindly—He!

[The night-shades close over.]

SCENE II

THE SAME.  THE RUSSIAN POSITION

[Midnight at the quarters of FIELD-MARSHAL PRINCE KUTUZOF at

Kresnowitz.  An inner apartment is discovered, roughly adapted

as a council-room.  On a table with candles is unfolded a large

map of Austerlitz and its environs.

The Generals are assembled in consultation round the table,

WEIROTHER pointing to the map, LANGERON, BUXHOVDEN, and

MILORADOVICH standing by, DOKHTOROF bending over the map,

PRSCHEBISZEWSKY indifferently walking up and down.  KUTUZOF,

old and weary, with a scarred face and only one eye, is seated

in a chair at the head of the table, nodding, waking, and

nodding again.  Some officers of lower grade are in the

background, and horses in waiting are heard hoofing and champing

outside.

WEIROTHER speaks, referring to memoranda, snuffing the nearest

candle, and moving it from place to place on the map as he

proceeds importantly.]

WEIROTHER

Now here, our right, along the Olmutz Road

Will march and oust our counterfacers there,

Dislodge them from the Sainton Hill, and thence

Advance direct to Brunn.—You heed me, sirs?—

The cavalry will occupy the plain:

Our centre and main strength,—you follow me?—

Count Langeron, Dokhtorof, with Prschebiszewsky

And Kollowrath—now on the Pratzen heights—

Will down and cross the Goldbach rivulet,

Seize Tilnitz, Kobelnitz, and hamlets nigh,

Turn the French right, move onward in their rear,

Cross Schwarsa, hold the great Vienna road:—

So, with the nightfall, centre, right, and left,

Will rendezvous beneath the walls of Brunn.

LANGERON
[taking a pinch of snuff]

Good, General; very good!—if Bonaparte

Will kindly stand and let you have your way.

But what if he do not!—if he forestall

These sound slow movements, mount the Pratzen hills

When we descend, fall on OUR rear forthwith,

While we go crying for HIS rear in vain?

KUTUZOF
[waking up]

Ay, ay, Weirother; that's the question—eh?

WEIROTHER
[impatiently]

If Bonaparte had meant to climb up there,

Being one so spry and so determinate,

He would have set about it ere this eve!

He has not troops to do so, sirs, I say:

His utmost strength is forty thousand men.

LANGERON

Then if so weak, how can so wise a brain

Court ruin by abiding calmly here

The impact of a force so large as ours?

He may be mounting up this very hour!

What think you, General Miloradovich?

MILORADOVICH

I?  What's the use of thinking, when to-morrow

Will tell us, with no need to think at all!

WEIROTHER

Pah!  At this moment he retires apace.

His fires are dark; all sounds have ceased that way

Save voice of owl or mongrel wintering there.

But, were he nigh, these movements I detail

Would knock the bottom from his enterprize.

KUTUZOF
[rising]

Well, well.  Now this being ordered, set it going.

One here shall make fair copies of the notes,

And send them round.  Colonel van Toll I ask

To translate part.—Generals, it grows full late,

And half-a-dozen hours of needed sleep

Will aid us more than maps.  We now disperse,

And luck attend us all.  Good-night.  Good-night.

[The Generals and other officers go out severally.]

Such plans are—paper!  Only to-morrow's light

Reveals the true manoeuvre to my sight!

[He flaps out with his hand all the candles but one or two,

slowly walks outside the house, and listens.  On the high

ground in the direction of the French lines are heard shouts,

and a wide illumination grows and strengthens; but the hollows

are still mantled in fog.]

Are these the signs of regiments out of heart,

And beating backward from an enemy!

[He remains pondering.  On the Pratzen heights immediately in front

there begins a movement among the Russians, signifying that the plan

which involves desertion of that vantage-ground is about to be put

in force.  Noises of drunken singing arise from the Russian lines at

various points elsewhere.

The night shades involve the whole.]

SCENE III

THE SAME.  THE FRENCH POSITION

[Shortly before dawn on the morning of the 2nd of December.  A

white frost and fog still prevail in the low-lying areas; but

overhead the sky is clear.  A dead silence reigns.

NAPOLEON, on a grey horse, closely attended by BERTHIER, and

surrounded by MARSHALS SOULT, LANNES, MURAT, and their aides-de

camp, all cloaked, is discernible in the gloom riding down

from the high ground before Bellowitz, on which they have

bivouacked, to the village of Puntowitz on the Goldbach stream,

quite near the front of the Russian position of the day before

on the Pratzen crest.  The Emperor and his companions come to

a pause, look around and upward to the hills, and listen.]

NAPOLEON

Their bivouac fires, that lit the top last night,

Are all extinct.

LANNES

     And hark you, Sire; I catch

A sound which, if I err not, means the thing

We have hoped, and hoping, feared fate would not yield!

NAPOLEON

My God, it surely is the tramp of horse

And jolt of cannon downward from the hill

Toward our right here, by the swampy lakes

That face Davout?  Thus, as I sketched, they work!

MURAT

Yes!  They already move upon Tilnitz.

NAPOLEON

Leave them alone!  Nor stick nor stone we'll stir

To interrupt them.  Nought that we can scheme

Will help us like their own stark sightlessness!—

Let them get down to those white lowlands there,

And so far plunge in the level that no skill,

When sudden vision flashes on their fault,

Can help them, though despair-stung, to regain

The key to mastery held at yestereve!

Meantime move onward these divisions here

Under the fog's kind shroud; descend the slope,

And cross the stream below the Russian lines:

There halt concealed, till I send down the word.

[NAPOLEON and his staff retire to the hill south-east of Bellowitz

and the day dawns pallidly.]

'Tis good to get above that rimy cloak

And into cleaner air.  It chilled me through.

[When they reach the summit they are over the fog: and suddenly

the sun breaks forth to the left of Pratzen, illuminating the

ash-hued face of NAPOLEON and the faces of those around him.

All eyes are turned first to the sun, and thence to look for

the dense masses of men that had occupied the upland the night

before.]

MURAT

I see them not.  The plateau seems deserted!

NAPOLEON

Gone; verily!—Ah, how much will you bid,

An hour hence, for the coign abandoned now!

The battle's ours.—It was, then, their rash march

Downwards to Tilnitz and the Goldbach swamps

Before dawn, that we heard.—No hurry, Lannes!

Enjoy this sun, that rests its chubby jowl

Upon the plain, and thrusts its bristling beard

Across the lowlands' fleecy counterpane,

Peering beneath our broadest hat-brims' shade....

Soult, how long hence to win the Pratzen top?

SOULT

Some twenty minutes or less, your Majesty:

Our troops down there, still mantled by the mist,

Are half upon the way.

NAPOLEON

     Good!  Set forthwith

Vandamme and Saint Hilaire to mount the slopes—-

[Firing begins in the marsh to the right by Tilnitz and the pools,

though the thick air yet hides the operations.]

O, there you are, blind boozy Buxhovden!

Achieve your worst.  Davout will hold you firm.

[The head of and aide-de-camp rises through the fog on that

side, and he hastens up to NAPOLEON and his companions, to whom

the officer announces what has happened.  DAVOUT rides off,

disappearing legs first into the white stratum that covers the

attack.]

Lannes and Murat, you have concern enough

Here on the left, with Prince Bagration

And all the Austro-Russian cavalry.

Haste off.  The victory promising to-day

Will, like a thunder-clap, conclude the war!

[The Marshals with their aides gallop away towards their respective

divisions.  Soon the two divisions under SOULT are seen ascending

in close column the inclines of the Pratzen height.  Thereupon the

heads of the Russian centre columns disclose themselves, breaking

the sky-line of the summit from the other side, in a desperate

attempt to regain the position vacated by the Russian left.  A

fierce struggle develops there between SOULT'S divisions and these,

who, despite their tardy attempt to recover the lost post of

dominance, are pressed by the French off the slopes into the

lowland.]

SEMICHORUS I OF THE PITIES
[aerial music]

O Great Necessitator, heed us now!

     If it indeed must be

That this day Austria smoke with slaughtery,

Quicken the issue as Thou knowest how;

And dull their lodgment in a flesh that galls!

SEMICHORUS II

If it be in the future human story

To lift this man to yet intenser glory,

     Let the exploit be done

     With the least sting, or none,

To those, his kind, at whose expense such pitch is won!

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

Again ye deprecate the World-Soul's way

That I so long have told?  Then note anew

[Since ye forget]
the ordered potencies,

Nerves, sinews, trajects, eddies, ducts of It

The Eternal Urger, pressing change on change.

[At once, as earlier, a preternatural clearness possesses the

atmosphere of the battle-field, in which the scene becomes

anatomized and the living masses of humanity transparent.  The

controlling Immanent Will appears therein, as a brain-like

network of currents and ejections, twitching, interpenetrating,

entangling, and thrusting hither and thither the human forms.]

SEMICHORUS I OF IRONIC SPIRITS
[aerial music]

O Innocents, can ye forget

That things to be were shaped and set

Ere mortals and this planet met?

SEMICHORUS II

Stand ye apostrophizing That

Which, working all, works but thereat

Like some sublime fermenting-vat.

SEMICHORUS I

Heaving throughout its vast content

With strenuously transmutive bent

Though of its aim insentient?—

SEMICHORUS II

Could ye have seen Its early deeds

Ye would not cry, as one who pleads

For quarter, when a Europe bleeds!

SEMICHORUS I

Ere ye, young Pities, had upgrown

From out the deeps where mortals moan

Against a ruling not their own,

SEMICHORUS II

He of the Years beheld, and we,

Creation's prentice artistry

Express in forms that now unbe

SEMICHORUS I

Tentative dreams from day to day;

Mangle its types, re-knead the clay

In some more palpitating way;

SEMICHORUS II

Beheld the rarest wrecked amain,

Whole nigh-perfected species slain

By those that scarce could boast a brain;

SEMICHORUS I

Saw ravage, growth, diminish, add,

Here peoples sane, there peoples mad,

In choiceless throws of good and bad;

SEMICHORUS II

Heard laughters at the ruthless dooms

Which tortured to the eternal glooms

Quick, quivering hearts in hecatombs.

CHORUS

Us Ancients, then, it ill befits

To quake when Slaughter's spectre flits