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The French, who had ceased firing at this field strewn with dead

and wounded where there was no one left to fire at, on seeing an

adjutant riding over it trained a gun on him and fired several

shots. The sensation of those terrible whistling sounds and of

the corpses around him merged in Rostov's mind into a single

feeling of terror and pity for himself. He remembered his

mother's last letter. "What would she feel," thought he, "if she

saw me here now on this field with the cannon aimed at me?"