by Hugh Walpole
“Stand by this gate five minutes,” Nikitin whispered to me. “I must find the Colonel. The sanitars will come and fetch you when I’ve settled the spot for our bandaging.”
Nikitin disappeared and I was quite alone. I felt terribly desolate. I stood back against the gate of the villa watching soldiers hurry by, seeing high mysterious hedges, the roofs of houses, a line of lighted sky, the tops of trees, all these things rising and falling as the glare in the heavens rose and fell. There was sometimes a terrible noise and sometimes an equally terrible stillness. Somewhere in the darkness a man was groaning, “Oh! ah! — Oh! ah!” without cessation. Somewhere the gate of one of the villas swung to and fro, creaking. Sometimes soldiers would stare at my motionless figure and then pass on. All this time, as in one’s dreams sometimes one holds off a nightmare, I was keeping my fear at bay. I had now exactly the sensation that I had known so often in my dream, that I was standing somewhere in the dark, that the Enemy was watching me and waiting to spring. But to-night I was only nearly afraid. One step on my part, one extra noise, one more flare of light, and I would abandon myself to panic, but, although the perspiration was wet on my forehead, my heart thumping, and my hands dry and hot, I was not yet quite afraid.
I had a strange sensation of suffocation, as though I were at the bottom of a well, a well black and damp, with the stars of the sky miles away. There came to me, with a kind of ironic sentimentality, the picture of the drawing-room at home in Polchester, the corner where the piano stood with a palm in an ugly brass pot just behind it, the table near the door with a brass Indian tray and a fat photograph-book with, gilt clasps, the picture of “Christ being Scourged” above the fireplace, and the green silk screen that stood under the picture in the summer.
A soldier stopped and spoke to me: “Your Honour, it’s on the right — the next gate.” I followed him without attention, having no doubt but that this was one of our own sanitars, and accompanied a group of soldiers that surrounded a bobbing kitchen on wheels. I was puzzled by the kitchen because I knew that one had not been brought by our Otriad, but I thought that the doctors of the Division had perhaps begged our men to aid the army sanitars.
We hurried through a gate to the right, where in what appeared to be a yard of some kind, the kitchen was established and then, from out of the very earth as it seemed, soldiers appeared, clustering around it with their tin cans. The soldier who was in charge of the party said to me in a confidential whisper: “There’s plenty of Kasha, your Honour, and the soup will last us, too.”
“Very good,” said I in a bewildered voice. At the strange accent the soldier looked at me, and then I looked at the soldier. The soldier was a stranger to me (a pleasant round man with a huge smiling mouth and two chins) and I was a stranger to the soldier.
“Well,” said the soldier, looking, “I thought....”
“I thought—” said I, most uncomfortable.
The soldiers vanished back into the darknesses round the kitchen. Voices, whispering, could be heard.
“Now, that’s the end,” thought I. “I’m shot as a German spy.”
I looked at the soldiers, clustered like bees round the kitchen, then I slipped through the gate into the dark road. I stood there listening. The battle seemed to have drawn away, because I could hear rifles, machine-guns, cannon muffled round a corner of the hill. Here there was now silence, broken only by soldiers who hurried up the road or went in and out at the villa gates. I felt abandoned. How was I to discover Nikitin again? Before what gate had I stood? I did not know; I seemed to know nothing.
I moved down the road, very miserable and very cold. I had stupidly left my coat in one of the wagons. I walked on, my boots knocking against one another, thinking to myself: “If I’m not given something to do very soon I shall be just as I was the other night at Nijnieff — and then I shall suddenly take to my heels down this road as hard as I can go!”
It was then that I tumbled straight into the arms of Nikitin, who was standing at the edge of the forest, watching for me. I was so happy that I felt now afraid of nothing. I held Nikitin’s arm, babbling something about kitchens and Germans.
“Well, I don’t understand what you say,” I remember Nikitin replied; “but you must come and work. There’s plenty of it.”
We moved to a cottage on the very boundary of the forest, where a little common ran down to the moonlight. Passing through a narrow passage, I entered into a little room with a large white stove. On the top of the stove, under the roof, crouched a boy or a young man with long black hair and a white face. This youth wore what resembled a white shirt over baggy white trousers. His feet were bare and very dirty. Nothing moved except his eyes. He sat there, in exactly that position, all night.
The room was small but was the best that could be obtained. Within the space of ten minutes it became a perfect shambles. The wounded were brought in without pause and under the candlelight Nikitin, two sanitars, and I worked until the sweat ran down our backs and arms in streams. It dripped from my nose, into my mouth, into my eyes. The wounds were horrible. No man seemed to come into the room with an unmangled body. The smell rose higher and higher, the bloody rags lay about the kitchen floor, torn arms, smashed legs, heads with gaping wounds, the pitiful crying and praying, the shrill voices of the delirious, Nikitin, his arms steeped in blood to the elbows, probing, cutting, digging, I myself bandaging until I did not know what my hands were doing.... Then suddenly the battle coming right back to us again, overhead now as it seemed; the cannon shaking three silly staring china dogs on the kitchen dresser, the rifle fire clattering like tumbling crockery about the walls of the cottage — and through it all the white youth, crouched like a ghost on the stove, watching without pause....
“Ah, no, your Honour.... Ah, no! ... I can’t! I can’t! Oh, oh, oh, oh!” and then sobs, the man breaking down like a child, hiding his face in his arms, his wounded leg twitching convulsively. I paused, wiped the sweat from my eyes, stood up. Nikitin looked at me.
“Take some fresh air!” he said. “Go out with the stretcher for half an hour. I can manage here.”
I wiped my forehead.
“Sure you can manage?” I asked.
“Quite,” said Nikitin. “Here, hold his back!... No, durak, his back. Bojé moi, can’t you get your arm under? There — like that. Horosho, golubchik, horosho ... only a minute! There! There!”
I washed my hands and went out. The air caressed my forehead like cold water; from the little garden at the back there came scents of flowers; the moonlight was blue on the common. Eight sanitars were waiting to start. The Feldscher in charge of them did not, I thought, seem greatly pleased when he saw me, but then I am often stupidly sensitive; no one said anything and we started. We carried two stretchers and a soldier from the trenches was with us to guide us.
I could see that the men were not happy. I heard one of them mutter to another that they should not have been sent now; that they should have waited until the attack was over ... “and the full moon.... Did any one ever see such a moon?”
We came to cross-roads and advanced very carefully.
As we crossed the road I was conscious of great excitement. The noise around us was terrific and different from any noise that I heard before. I did not think at the time, but was informed afterwards that it was because we were almost directly under a high-wooded cliff (the actual position about whose possession the battle was being fought), that the noise was so tremendous. The echo flung everything back so that each report sounded three or four times. This certainly had the strangest effect — a background as it were of rolling thunder, sometimes distant, sometimes very close and, in front of this, clapping, bellowing, stamping, and then suddenly an absolutely smashing effect as though some one cried: “Well, this will settle it!” In quieter intervals one heard the birdlike flight of bullets above one’s head and the irritated bad temper of the machine-guns. At every smashing noise the sanitars, who were, I believe, schoolmasters and little clerks, and ther
efore of a more sensitive head than the peasant soldier, ducked their heads, and one fat red-faced man tried to lie down flat on two occasions and was cursed heartily by the Feldscher. I myself felt no fear but only a pounding exhilarating excitement, because I was at last “really in it.” We found one wounded man very soon, lying under the hedge with the top of his head gone. Four sanitars (their relief showed very plainly in their faces) returned with him. We advanced again, skirting now a little orchard and keeping always in the shadow under the hedge. Our guide, the soldier, assured us that the wounded man was “very near — quite close.” Then we came to a large barn on the edge of what seemed a silver lake but was in reality a long field under the full light of the moon. As we paused I saw, on the further side of the field, two shells burst, very quickly, one after the other.
We all stopped under the shelter of the barn.
“Well,” said the Feldscher to the soldier, “where’s your man?”
“Only a short way,” said the soldier. “Quite close.”
“Across that field?” asked the Feldscher, pointing to the moonlight.
“Yes, certainly,” said the soldier.
The Feldscher scratched his head. “We can’t go further without orders,” he said. “That’s very dangerous in front there. I’m responsible for these men. We must return and ask, your Honour,” he said, turning to me.
“We shall be nearly an hour returning,” I said. “Is your friend badly wounded?” I asked the soldier.
“Very,” said he.
“You see ...” I said to the Feldscher. “We can’t possibly leave him like that. It’s only a little way.”
The Feldscher shook his head. “I can’t be responsible. I had my orders to go so far and no further. I must see that my men are safe.”
The sanitars who were sitting in a row on their haunches under the shadow of the barn all nodded their heads.
“I didn’t know Russians were cowards,” I said fiercely.
The Feldscher shook his head quite unmoved: “Your Honour must understand that I had my orders.” Then he added slowly: “but of course if your Honour wishes to go yourself ... I would come with you. The others ... they must do as they please. They are in their right to return. But I should advise that we return.”
“I’m going on,” I said.
I must say here that I felt no other sensation than a blind and quite obstinate selfishness. I had no thought of Nikitin or of the sanitars. I did not (and this I must emphasise) think, for a moment, of the wounded man. If the situation had been that by returning I should save many lives and by advancing should save only my own I should still have advanced. If the only hope for the wounded man was my instant speech with Nikitin I would not have gone back to speak with him. I was at this moment neither brave nor fearful. I repeat that I had no sensation except an absolutely selfish obstinate challenge that I, myself, was addressing to Something in space. I was saying: “At last, my chance has come. Now you shall see whether I fly from you or no. Now you shall do your worst and fail. I’m the hunter now, not the hunted.”
I was conscious of nothing but this quite childish preoccupation with myself. I was, nevertheless, pleased with myself. “There, you see,” some one near me seemed to say, “he’s not quite so unpractical after all. He’s full of common sense.” I looked at the row of sanitars squatting on the ground, and felt like a schoolmaster with his children.
“You’d better go home then,” I said scornfully. The Feldscher, who was a short stocky man, with a red face and melancholy eyes (something like a prize-fighter turned poet), dismissed them. They went off in a line under the hedge.
The man obviously thought me a tiresome prig. He had no romantic illusions about the business; he had not been a Feldscher during twenty years for nothing and knew that a wound was a wound; when a man was dead he was dead.
However.... “Truly it’s not far?” he asked the soldier.
“Tak totchno,” the man answered, his face quite without expression.
We crossed the moonlit field and for a brief moment silence fell, as though an audience were holding its breath watching us. On the other side were cottages, the outskirts of a tiny village. Here beside these cottages we fell into a fantastic world. That small village must in other times have been a pretty place, nestling with its gardens by the river under the hill. It seemed now to rock and rattle under the noise of the cannon. All the open spaces were like white marble in the moonlight and in these open spaces there was utter silence and emptiness. The place seemed deserted — and yet, in every shadow, in long lines under the cottage wells, in little clumps and clusters round trees or ruins there were eyes staring, the gleam of muskets shone, little specks of light, dancing from wall to wall. Everywhere there were bodies, legs, boots, arms, heads, sudden caps, sudden fingers, sudden hot and streaming breaths. And over everything this infernal noise and yet no human sound. A nightmare of the true nightmare of dreams. The open silver spaces, the little gardens thick with flowers, the high moon and the starry sky, not a living soul to be seen — and nevertheless watchers everywhere. “Step forward on to that little plot of grass in front of the cottage windows and you’re a dead man” — the moonlight said. There were men in the body of the earth, not in trenches, but in holes — my foot stepped on a head of hair and some low voice cursed me. I was, I suppose, by this time, a little delirious with my adventure. I know that I could now distinguish no separate sounds — shells and bullets had vanished and in their stead were whispers and screams and shouts of triumph and bursts of laughter. Songs in chorus, somewhere miners hammering below the earth, somewhere storm at sea with the crash of waves on rocks and the shriek of wind through rigging, somewhere some one who dropped heavy loads of furniture so carelessly that I cursed him — and always these little patches of moonlight, so tempting just because one was forbidden....
We were not popular here. Husky, breathless voices whispered to us “to be away from here, quick. We would draw the fire. What did we want here now?”
“Have you any wounded?” we whispered in return.
“No, no,” the answer came. “Keep away from the moonlight.” The voices came to us connected sometimes with a nose, an eye, or a leg, often enough out of the heaven itself.
“There’s a man wounded behind the next lines,” some voice murmured.
We stumbled on and suddenly came to a river with very steep banks and a number of narrow and slender bridges. If this had in reality been a nightmare this river could not have obtruded itself more often than it did. We discovered to our dismay that our soldier-guide had disappeared (exactly as in a nightmare he would have done). We crossed the river (bathed of course in moonlight), the plank bridge shaking and quivering beneath us.
We had then a difficult task. Here a row of cottages beneath the very edge of the bank and in the cottage shadow the soldiers were ranged in a long line. Their boots stretched to the verge of the bank, which was slippery and uncertain. We had to walk on this with our stretchers, stepping between the boots, stumbling often and slipping down towards the water.
“Any wounded?” we whispered again and again.
“No,” the whisper came back. “Hasten.... Take care of the moonlight.”
And then, to my infinite relief and comfort, behind the cottages we found our wounded man. There was a dark yard here, apparently quite deserted. The Feldscher made an exclamation and stepped forward. Three bodies lay together, over one another; two men were dead and cold, the third stirred, very faintly, as we came up, opened his eyes, smiled and said:
“Eh, Bojé moi ... at last!”
As we moved him on to the stretcher, with a little sigh he fainted again. He had a bad stomach-wound. Before picking up the stretcher, the Feldscher wiped his forehead and crossed himself.
“It’s a heavy thing for two,” he said. “He’s a big man,” looking at the soldier. There was now somewhere, apparently not very far away, hot rifle fire. The crackle sparkled in the air, as though one were living in a wo
rld in which all the electricity was loose. The other firing seemed to have drawn away, and the “Boom — Boom — boom” in front of us was echo from the hill....
We picked up the stretcher and started. It was fortunate for us that we had that difficult bit beside the river at the beginning of our journey. I don’t know how we managed it, stepping over the endless row of legs, with every side step the stretcher lurching over to the left and threatening to pitch us into the river. So slippery too was the ground that our boots refused to grip. The man on the stretcher was dreaming, making a little sound like an unceasing lullaby on two notes— “Na ... na! Na ... na! Na ... na!”
We were compelled to cross the river twice, and the planks bent under our weight until I was assured that they would snap. My arms were beginning to ache and the sweat to trickle down my spine. My right boot had rubbed my heel. We left the river behind us and then, suddenly, my right hand began to slip off the iron handle of the stretcher.
“We’ll have to put it down a moment,” I said. We laid it on the ground and at the same instant a bullet sang so close to my ear that I felt it as though an insect had bitten me. Then a shell, exploding, as it seemed to us, amongst the very cottages where we had just been, startled us.
“We saved our man,” said the Feldscher, looking at the soldier, “but we’d better move on. It’s uncomfortable here.”
We picked the thing up and started again, and at once my hand began to slip away from its hold (nightmare sensation exactly). I bent my head down, managed to lick my hand without raising it, and stiffened the muscles of my arm. We were watched, once more, by a million eyes — again I stepped on a head of hair buried somewhere in the ground. Then some voice cried shrilly: “Ah! Ah!” ... some man hit.
Every bone in my body began to ache. I was, of course, rottenly trained, without a sound muscle in my body, and my legs threatened cramp, my heel grated against my boot and sent a stab to my stomach with every movement, my shoulders seemed to pull away from the stretcher as though they would separately rebel against my orders ... and my hand began again to slip. The Feldscher also began to feel the strain. Once he asked me to stop. He apologised; I could see the sweat pouring down his face: “A very big man’” he said.