by Leo Tolstoy
‘What of Máslovski?’
‘Which one – the Leib-Uhlan, or the Horse Guard?’
‘I know them both. The one in the Horse Guards I knew when he was a boy just out of school. But the eldest – is he a captain yet?’
‘Oh yes, long ago.’
‘Is he still fussing about with his gipsy?’
‘No, he has dropped her.…’ And so on in the same strain.
Later on Prince Gáltsin went to the piano and gave an excellent rendering of a gipsy song. Praskúkhin, chiming in unasked, put in a second and did it so well that he was invited to continue, and this delighted him.
A servant brought tea, cream, and cracknels on a silver tray.
‘Serve the prince,’ said Kalúgin.
‘Isn’t it strange to think that we’re in a besieged town,’ said Gáltsin, taking his tea to the window, ‘and here’s a pianerforty, tea with cream, and a house such as I should really be glad to have in Petersburg?’
‘Well, if we hadn’t even that much,’ said the old and ever-dissatisfied lieutenant-colonel, ‘the constant uncertainty we are living in – seeing people killed day after day and no end to it – would be intolerable. And to have dirt and discomfort added to it —.’
‘But our infantry officers live at the bastions with their men in the bomb-proofs and eat the soldiers’ soup’, said Kalúgin, ‘what of them?’
‘What of them? Well, though it’s true they don’t change their shirts for ten days at a time, they are heroes all the same – wonderful fellows.’
Just then an infantry officer entered the room.
‘I … I have orders … may I see the gen … his Excellency? I have come with a message from General N.,’ he said with a timid bow.
Kalúgin rose and without returning the officer’s greeting asked with an offensive, affected, official smile if he would not have the goodness to wait; and without asking him to sit down or taking any further notice of him he turned to Gáltsin and began talking French, so that the poor officer left alone in the middle of the room did not in the least know what to do with himself.
‘It is a matter of the utmost urgency, sir,’ he said after a short silence.
‘Ah! Well then, please come with me,’ said Kalúgin, putting on his cloak and accompanying the officer to the door.
* * *
‘Eh bien, messieurs, je crois que cela chauffera cette nuit,’5 said Kalúgin when he returned from the general’s.
‘Ah! What is it – a sortie?’ asked the others.
‘That I don’t know. You will see for yourselves,’ replied Kalúgin with a mysterious smile.
‘And my commander is at the bastion, so I suppose I must go too,’ said Praskúkhin, buckling on his sabre.
No one replied, it was his business to know whether he had to go or not.
Praskúkhin and Nefërdov left to go to their appointed posts.
‘Good-bye gentlemen. Au revoir! We’ll meet again before the night is over,’ shouted Kalúgin from the window as Praskúkhin and Nefërdov, stooping on their Cossack saddles, trotted past. The tramp of their Cossack horses soon died away in the dark street.
‘Non, dites-moi, est-ce qu’il y aura véritablement quelque chose cette nuit?’6 said Gáltsin as he lounged in the window-sill beside Kalúgin and watched the bombs that rose above the bastions.
‘I can tell you, you see … you have been to the bastions?’ (Gáltsin nodded, though he had only been once to the Fourth Bastion). ‘You remember just in front of our lunette there is a trench,’ – and Kalúgin, with the air of one who without being a specialist considers his military judgement very sound, began, in a rather confused way and misusing the technical terms, to explain the position of the enemy, and of our own works, and the plan of the intended action.
‘But I say, they’re banging away at the lodgements! Oho! I wonder if that’s ours or his?… Now it’s burst,’ said they as they lounged on the window-sill looking at the fiery trails of the bombs crossing one another in the air, at flashes that for a moment lit up the dark sky, at puffs of white smoke, and listened to the more and more rapid reports of the firing.
‘Quel charmant coup d’œil! a?’7 said Kalúgin, drawing his guest’s attention to the really beautiful sight. ‘Do you know, you sometimes can’t distinguish a bomb from a star.’
‘Yes, I thought that was a star just now and then saw it fall … there! it’s burst. And that big star – what do you call it? – looks just like a bomb.’
‘Do you know I am so used to these bombs that I am sure when I’m back in Russia I shall fancy I see bombs every starlight night – one gets so used to them.’
‘But hadn’t I better go with this sortie?’ said Prince Gáltsin after a moment’s pause.
‘Humbug, my dear fellow! Don’t think of such a thing. Besides, I won’t let you,’ answered Kalúgin. ‘You will have plenty of opportunities later on.’
‘Really? You think I need not go, eh?’
At that moment, from the direction in which these gentlemen were looking, amid the boom of the cannon came the terrible rattle of musketry, and thousands of little fires flaming up in quick succession flashed all along the line.
‘There! Now it’s the real thing!’ said Kalúgin. ‘I can’t keep cool when I hear the noise of muskets. It seems to seize one’s very soul, you know. There’s an hurrah!’ he added, listening intently to the distant and prolonged roar of hundreds of voices – ‘Ah – ah – ah’ – which came from the bastions.
‘Whose hurrah was it? Theirs or ours?’
‘I don’t know, but it’s hand-to-hand fighting now, for the firing has ceased.’
At that moment an officer followed by a Cossack galloped under the window and alighted from his horse at the porch.
‘Where are you from?’
‘From the bastion. I want the general.’
‘Come along. Well, what’s happened?’
‘The lodgements have been attacked – and occupied. The French brought up tremendous reserves – attacked us – we had only two battalions,’ said the officer, panting. He was the same officer who had been there that evening, but though he was now out of breath he walked to the door with full self-possession.
‘Well, have we retired?’ asked Kalúgin.
‘No,’ angrily replied the officer, ‘another battalion came up in time – we drove them back, but the colonel is killed and many officers. I have orders to ask for reinforcements.’
And saying this he went with Kalúgin to the general’s, where we shall not follow him.
Five minutes later Kalúgin was already on his Cossack horse (again in the semi-Cossack manner which I have noticed that all adjutants, for some reason, seem to consider the proper thing), and rode off at a trot towards the bastion to deliver some orders and await the final result of the affair. Prince Gáltsin, under the influence of that oppressive excitement usually produced in a spectator by proximity to an action in which he is not engaged, went out, and began aimlessly pacing up and down the street.
VI
SOLDIERS passed carrying the wounded on stretchers or supporting them under their arms. It was quite dark in the streets, lights could be seen here and there, but only in the hospital windows or where some officers were sitting up. From the bastions still came the thunder of cannon and the rattle of muskets,8 and flashes kept on lighting up the dark sky as before. From time to time the tramp of hoofs could be heard as an orderly galloped past, or the groans of a wounded man, the steps and voices of stretcher-bearers, or the words of some frightened women who had come out onto their porches to watch the cannonade.
Among the spectators were our friend Nikita, the old sailor’s widow with whom he had again made friends, and her ten-year-old daughter.
‘O Lord God! Holy Mary, Mother of God!’ said the old woman, sighing as she looked at the bombs that kept flying across from side to side like balls of fire; ‘What horrors! What horrors! Ah, ah! Oh, oh! Even at the first bondbarment it wasn’t like that. L
ook now where the cursed thing has burst just over our house in the suburb.’
‘No, that’s further, they keep tumbling into Aunt Irene’s garden,’ said the girl.
‘And where, where, is master now?’ drawled Nikita, who was not quite sober yet. ‘Oh! You don’t know how I love that master of mine! I love him so that if he were killed in a sinful way, which God forbid, then would you believe it, granny, after that I myself don’t know what I wouldn’t do to myself! I don’t! … My master is that sort, there’s only one word for it. Would I change him for such as them there, playing cards? What are they? Ugh! There’s only one word for it!’ concluded Nikita, pointing to the lighted window of his master’s room to which, in the absence of the lieutenant-captain, Cadet Zhvadchévski had invited Sub-Lieutenants Ugróvich and Nepshisétski – the latter suffering from face-ache – and where he was having a spree in honour of a medal he had received.
‘Look at the stars! Look how they’re rolling!’ the little girl broke the silence that followed Nikíta’s words as she stood gazing at the sky. ‘There’s another rolled down. What is it a sign of, mother?’
‘They’ll smash up our hut altogether,’ said the old woman with a sigh, leaving her daughter unanswered.
‘As we went there to-day with uncle, mother,’ the little girl continued in a sing-song tone, becoming loquacious, ‘there was such a b – i – g cannon-ball inside the room close to the cupboard. Must have smashed in through the passage and right into the room! Such a big one – you couldn’t lift it.’
‘Those who had husbands and money all moved away,’ said the old woman, ‘and there’s the hut, all that was left me, and that’s been smashed. Just look at him blazing away! The fiend! … O Lord! O Lord!’
‘And just as we were going out, comes a bomb fly-ing, and goes and bur-sts and co-o-vers us with dust. A bit of it nearly hit me and uncle.’
VII
PRINCE GÁLTSIN met more and more wounded carried on stretchers or walking supported by others who were talking loudly.
‘Up they sprang, friends,’ said the bass voice of a tall soldier with two guns slung from his shoulder, ‘up they sprang, shouting “Allah! Allah!”9 and just climbing one over another. You kill one and another’s there, you couldn’t do anything; no end of ’em —’
But at this point in the story Gáltsin interrupted him.
‘You are from the bastion?’
‘Yes, your Honour.’
‘Well, what happened? Tell me.’
“What happened? Well, your Honour, such a force of ’em poured down on us over the rampart, it was all up. They quite overpowered us, your Honour!’
‘Overpowered?… But you repulsed them?’
‘How could we repulse them when his whole force came on, killed all our men, and no re’forcements were given us?’
The soldier was mistaken, the trench had remained ours; but it is a curious fact which anyone may notice, that a soldier wounded in action always thinks the affair lost and imagines it to have been a very bloody fight.
‘How is that? I was told they had been repulsed,’ said Gáltsin irritably. ‘Perhaps they were driven back after you left? Is it long since you came away?’
‘I am straight from there, your Honour,’ answered the soldier, ‘it is hardly possible. They must have kept the trench, he quite overpowered us.’
‘And aren’t you ashamed to have lost the trench? It’s terrible!’ said Gáltsin, provoked by such indifference.
‘Why, if the strength is on their side …’ muttered the soldier.
‘Ah, your Honour,’ began a soldier from a stretcher which had just come up to them, ‘how could we help giving it up when he had killed almost all our men? If we’d had the strength we wouldn’t have given it up, not on any account. But as it was, what could we do? I stuck one, and then something hits me. Oh, oh-h! Steady, lads, steady! Oh, oh!’ groaned the wounded man.
‘Really, there seem to be too many men returning,’ said Gáltsin, again stopping the tall soldier with the two guns. ‘Why are you retiring? You there, stop!’
The soldier stopped and took off his cap with his left hand.
‘Where are you going, and why?’ shouted Gáltsin severely, ‘you scoun—’
But having come close up to the soldier, Gáltsin noticed that no hand was visible beneath the soldier’s right cuff and that the sleeve was soaked in blood to the elbow.
‘I am wounded, your Honour.’
‘Wounded? How?’
‘Here. Must have been with a bullet,’ said the man, pointing to his arm, ‘but I don’t know what struck my head here,’ and bending his head he showed the matted hair at the back stuck together with blood.
‘And whose is this other gun?’
‘It’s a French rifle I took, your Honour. But I wouldn’t have come away if it weren’t to lead this fellow – he may fall,’ he added, pointing to a soldier who was walking a little in front leaning on his gun and painfully dragging his left leg.
Prince Gáltsin suddenly felt horribly ashamed of his unjust suspicions. He felt himself blushing, turned away, and went to the hospital without either questioning or watching the wounded men any more.
Having with difficulty pushed his way through the porch among the wounded who had come on foot and the bearers who were carrying in the wounded and bringing out the dead, Gáltsin entered the first room, gave a look round, and involuntarily turned back and ran out into the street: it was too terrible.
VIII
THE large, lofty, dark hall, lit up only by the four or five candles with which the doctors examined the wounded, was quite full. Yet the bearers kept bringing in more wounded – laying them side by side on the floor which was already so packed that the unfortunate patients were jostled together, staining one another with their blood – and going to fetch more wounded. The pools of blood visible in the unoccupied spaces, the feverish breathing of several hundred men, and the perspiration of the bearers with the stretchers, filled the air with a peculiar, heavy, thick, fetid mist, in which the candles burnt dimly in different parts of the hall. All sorts of groans, sighs, death-rattles, now and then interrupted by shrill screams, filled the whole room. Sisters with quiet faces, expressing no empty feminine tearful pity, but active practical sympathy, stepped here and there across the wounded with medicines, water, bandages, and lint, flitting among the blood-stained coats and shirts. The doctors, kneeling with rolled-up sleeves beside the wounded, by the light of the candles their assistants held, examined, felt, and probed their wounds, heedless of the terrible groans and entreaties of the sufferers. One doctor sat at a table near the door and at the moment Gáltsin came in was already entering No. 532.
‘Iván Bogáev, Private, Company Three, S— Regiment, fractura femuris complicata!’ shouted another doctor from the end of the room, examining a shattered leg. ‘Turn him over.’
‘Oh, oh, fathers! Oh, you’re our fathers!’ screamed the soldier, beseeching them not to touch him.
‘Perforatio capitis!’
‘Simon Nefërdov, Lieutenant-Colonel of the N— Infantry Regiment. Have a little patience, Colonel, or it is quite impossible: I shall give it up!’ said a third doctor, poking about with some kind of hook in the unfortunate colonel’s skull.
‘Oh, don’t! Oh, for God’s sake be quick! Be quick! Ah —!’
‘Perforatio pectoris … Sebastian Seredá, Private … what regiment? But you need not write that: moritur. Carry him away,’ said the doctor, leaving the soldier, whose eyes turned up and in whose throat the death-rattle already sounded.
About forty soldier stretcher-bearers stood at the door waiting to carry the bandaged to the wards and the dead to the chapel. They looked on at the scene before them in silence, only broken now and then by a heavy sigh.
IX
ON his way to the bastion Kalúgin met many wounded, but knowing by experience that in action such sights have a bad effect on one’s spirits, he did not stop to question them but tried on the contrary not to
notice them. At the foot of the hill he met an orderly-officer galloping fast from the bastion.
‘Zóbkin! Zóbkin! Wait a bit!’
‘Well, what is it?’
‘Where are you from?’
‘The lodgements.’
‘How are things there – hot?’
‘Oh, awful!’
And the orderly galloped on.
In fact, though there was now but little small-arms firing, the cannonade had recommenced with fresh heat and persistence.
‘Ah, that’s bad!’ thought Kalúgin with an unpleasant sensation, and he too had a presentiment – a very usual thought, the thought of death. But Kalúgin was ambitious and blessed with nerves of oak – in a word, he was what is called brave. He did not yield to the first feeling but began to nerve himself. He recalled how an adjutant, Napoleon’s he thought, having delivered an order, galloped with bleeding head full speed to Napoleon. ‘Vous êtes blessé?’10 said Napoleon. ‘Je vous demande pardon, sire, je suis mort,’11 and the adjutant fell from his horse, dead.
That seemed to him very fine, and he pictured himself for a moment in the role of that adjutant. Then he whipped his horse, assuming a still more dashing Cossack seat, looked back at the Cossack who, standing up in his stirrups, was trotting behind, and rode quite gallantly up to the spot where he had to dismount. Here he found four soldiers sitting on some stones smoking their pipes.
‘What are you doing there?’ he shouted at them.
‘Been carrying off a wounded man and sat down to rest a bit, your Honour,’ said one of them, hiding his pipe behind his back and taking off his cap.
‘Resting, indeed! … To your places, march!’
And he went up the hill with them through the trench, meeting wounded men at every step.
After ascending the hill he turned to the left, and a few steps farther on found himself quite alone. A splinter of a bomb whizzed near him and fell into the trench. Another bomb rose in front of him and seemed flying straight at him. He suddenly felt frightened, ran a few steps at full speed, and lay down flat. When the bomb burst a considerable distance off he felt exceedingly vexed with himself and rose, looking round to see if anyone had noticed his downfall, but no one was near.