“One can see them with the naked eye … Why, there!”
The officer pointed with his hand to the smoke visible on the left beyond the river, and the same stern and serious expression that Pierre had noticed on many of the faces he had met came into his face.
“Ah, those are the French! And over there? …” Pierre pointed to a knoll on the left, near which some troops could be seen.
“Those are ours.”
“Ah, ours! And there? …” Pierre pointed to another knoll in the distance with a big tree on it, near a village that lay in a hollow where also some campfires were smoking and something black was visible.
“That’s his again,” said the officer. (It was the Shevárdino Redoubt.) “It was ours yesterday, but now it is his .”
“Then how about our position?”
“Our position?” replied the officer with a smile of satisfaction. “I can tell you quite clearly, because I constructed nearly all our entrenchments. There, you see? There’s our center, at Borodinó, just there,”