The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal Page B

standing where he was, as if paralyzed; he felt he had no strength to remount. What horrified him most was that open eye.
    “She’ll think I’m a coward,” he realized bitterly, but he felt it was quite impossible to move: he would have fallen down. This was a terrible moment; Fabrizio was about to be sick. The canteen-woman realized this, jumped down from her cart and without a word offered him a shot of brandy, which he swallowed in one gulp; after that he could remount, and they continued along the path without speaking. The canteen-woman glanced at him from time to time out of the corner of her eye.
    “You’ll fight tomorrow, my boy,” she said at last, “today you’re staying with me. You see now, you’ve still got something to learn about soldiering.”
    “No, I want to fight right away,” exclaimed our hero grimly, which the canteen-woman took for a good sign.
    The cannon-fire redoubled and seemed to come closer. The explosions now formed a kind of
basso continuo
, there was no interval separating the explosions, and against this
basso continuo
, which suggested the sound of a distant stream, they could now make out the regimental gunfire.
    Just then the road sloped down into a grove of trees: the canteen-womancaught sight of three or four French soldiers running toward her as fast as they could; she quickly jumped down from her cart and managed to hide fifteen or twenty feet off the road, crouching in a hole where a huge tree had been uprooted. “Now,” Fabrizio decided, “now I’ll find out if I’m a coward!” He stood beside the little cart the canteen-woman had abandoned and drew his saber. The soldiers paid no attention to him and ran past him through the grove to the left of the path.
    “Those are our men,” the canteen-woman said calmly, returning quite winded to her wagon. “If your horse could gallop, I’d send you to the edge of the woods to see what’s out there on the field.”
    Fabrizio did not need to be told twice; he tore off a poplar branch, stripped its leaves, and began whipping his horse with all his might; the mare broke into a gallop for a moment, then returned to her customary trot. The canteen-woman had whipped her horse to a gallop as well.
    “Now stop there, whoa!” she shouted to Fabrizio.
    Soon both of them were out of the woods; at the edge of the field they heard a dreadful racket, cannon-fire and muskets rattling on all sides, to the right, to the left, and behind them. And since the grove they had just left covered a hill some eight or ten feet above the field, they saw a corner of the battle quite clearly; but there was no one to be seen in the field beyond the woods. This field was bordered, about a thousand paces from where they were, by a long row of bushy willows; above these appeared some white smoke circling upward into the sky.
    “If only I knew where the regiment was!” said the canteen-woman, at a loss. “We can’t cross this big open space. And by the way, you,” she said to Fabrizio, “if you see an enemy soldier, run him through, don’t bother trying to cut him down …”
    At this moment the canteen-woman caught sight of the four soldiers just mentioned, coming out of the woods onto the field to the left of the path. One of them was mounted.
    “There’s what you want,” she said to Fabrizio. “Hey, you there!” she shouted to the man on the horse. “Come over here and have some brandy.”
    The soldiers approached.
    “Where’s the Sixth Light?” she shouted.
    “Over there, five minutes from here, on the other side of that ditch, behind the willows. And Colonel Macon’s just been killed.”
    “How much do you want for your horse—will you take five francs?”
    “Five francs! You’re joking, Mother—this here’s an officer’s horse I can sell for five napoleons any time I want.”
    “Give me one of your napoleons,” the canteen-woman murmured to Fabrizio. Then, approaching the mounted soldier: “Get off quick,” she said,