THE TEARFUL SPECTACLE of the battlefield, heaped with dead and wounded, in conjunction with the heaviness of his head, the news that some twenty generals he knew well were among the killed or wounded, and the sense of the impotence of his once mighty army, made an unexpected impression on Napoleon, who was usually fond of looking over the dead and wounded, proving thereby, as he imagined, his dauntless spirit. On that day, the awful spectacle of the battlefield overcame this dauntless spirit, which he looked upon as a merit and a proof of greatness. He hastened away from the field of battle and returned to Shevardino. With a yellow, puffy, heavy face, dim eyes, a red nose, and a husky voice, he sat on a camp-stool, looking down and involuntarily listening to the sounds of the firing. With sickly uneasiness he awaited the end of this action, in which he considered himself the prime mover, though he could not have stopped it. The personal, human sentiment for one brief moment gained the ascendant over the artificial phantasm of life, that he had served so long. He imagined in his own case the agonies and death he had seen on the battlefield. The heaviness of his head and chest reminded him of the possibility for him too of agony and death. At that minute he felt no longing for Moscow, for victory or for glory. （What need had he for more glory？） The one thing he desired now was repose, tranquillity, and freedom. But when he was on the height above Semyonovskoye, the officer in command of the artillery proposed to him to bring several batteries up on to that height to increase the fire on the Russian troops before Knyazkovo. Napoleon assented, and gave orders that word should be brought him of the effect produced by this battery.
An adjutant came to say that by the Emperor’s orders two hundred guns had been directed upon the Russians, but that they were still holding their ground.
“Our fire is mowing them down in whole rows, but they stand firm,” said the adjutant.
“They want more of it！” said Napoleon in his husky voice.
“Sire？” repeated the adjutant, who had not caught the words.
“They want even more！” Napoleon croaked hoarsely, frowning. “Well, let them have it then.”
Already, without orders from him, what he did not really want was being done, and he gave the order to do it simply because he thought the order was expected of him. And he passed back again into his old artificial world, peopled by the phantoms of some unreal greatness, and again （as a horse running in a rolling wheel may imagine it is acting on its own account） he fell back into submissively performing the cruel, gloomy, irksome, and inhuman part destined for him.
And not for that hour and day only were the mind and conscience darkened in that man, on whom the burden of all that was being done lay even more heavily than on all the others who took part in it. Never, down to the end of his life, had he the least comprehension of good, of beauty, of truth, of the significance of his own acts, which were too far opposed to truth and goodness, too remote from everything human for him to be able to grasp their significance. He could not disavow his own acts, that were lauded by half the world, and so he was forced to disavow truth and goodness and everything human.
