Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 1

by Leo Tolstoy

  ‘Yes, we have replaced the M— regiment. You’d better call at the Ambulance, you’ll find some of our fellows there – they’ll show you the way.’

  ‘And my lodgings in the Morskáya Street, are they safe?’

  ‘Safe, my dear fellow! They’ve long since been shattered by bombs. You won’t know Sevastopol again. Not a woman left, not a restaurant, no music! The last brothel left yesterday. It’s melancholy enough now. Good-bye!’

  And the officer trotted away.

  Terrible fear suddenly overcame Volódya. He felt as if a ball or a bomb-splinter would come the next moment and hit him straight on the head. The damp darkness, all these sounds, especially the murmur of the splashing water – all seemed to tell him to go no farther, that no good awaited him here, that he would never again set foot on this side of the bay, that he should turn back at once and run somewhere as far as possible from this dreadful place of death. ‘But perhaps it is too late, it is already decided now,’ thought he shuddering, partly at that thought and partly because the water had soaked through his boots and was making his feet wet.

  He sighed deeply and moved a few steps away from his brother.

  ‘O Lord! Shall I really be killed – just I? Lord, have mercy on me!’ he whispered, and made the sign of the cross.

  ‘Well, Volódya, come on!’ said the elder brother when the trap had driven on to the bridge. ‘Did you see the bomb?’

  On the bridge they met carts loaded with wounded men, with gabions, and one with furniture driven by a woman. No one stopped them at the farther side.

  Keeping instinctively under the wall of the Nicholas Battery and listening to the bombs that here were bursting overhead, and to the howling of the falling fragments, the brothers came silently to that part of the battery where the icon hangs. Here they heard that the Fifth Light Artillery, to which Volódya was appointed, was stationed at the Korábelnaya8 and they decided that Volódya, in spite of the danger, should spend the night with his elder brother at the Fifth Bastion and go from there to his battery next morning. After turning into a corridor and stepping across the legs of the soldiers who lay sleeping all along the wall of the battery they at last reached the Ambulance Station.

  XI

  ON entering the first room, full of beds on which lay wounded men and permeated by a horribly disgusting hospital smell, they met two Sisters of Mercy just going out.

  One, a woman of fifty, with black eyes and a stern expression, was carrying bandages and lint and giving orders to a young lad, a medical assistant, who was following her. The other, a very pretty girl of about twenty whose pale, delicate, fair face looked from under her white cap with a peculiarly sweet helplessness, was walking by the side of the older woman with her hands in her apron pockets, and seemed afraid of being left behind.

  Kozeltsóv asked them if they knew where Mártsov was, whose leg had been torn off the day before.

  ‘He is of the P— regiment, I think?’ asked the elder. ‘Is he a relation of yours?’

  ‘No, just a comrade.’

  ‘Take them to him,’ she said to the young sister in French. ‘It is this way,’ and she herself went up to one of the patients, followed by the assistant.

  ‘Come along, what are you looking at?’ said Kozeltsóv to Volódya, who stood with raised eyebrows and a look of suffering on his face, unable to tear his eyes from the wounded. ‘Come now!’

  Volódya followed his brother but still kept looking back and repeating unconsciously, ‘O, my God! My God!’

  ‘I suppose he has not been here long?’ the sister remarked to Kozeltsóv, indicating Volódya, who followed them along the corridor with exclamations and sighs.

  ‘He has only just come.’

  The pretty sister looked at Volódya and suddenly began to cry.

  ‘My God! My God! When will it all end?’ she said in a despairing voice.

  They entered the officers’ ward. Mártsov was lying on his back, his sinewy arms bare to the elbow thrown back behind his head, and on his yellow face the expression of one who has clenched his teeth to prevent himself from screaming with pain. His sound leg with a stocking on showed from under the blanket and one could see the toes moving spasmodically.

  ‘Well, how are you?’ asked the sister, raising his slightly bald head with her slender delicate fingers (on one of which Volódya noticed a gold ring) and arranging his pillow.

  ‘In pain of course!’ he answered angrily. ‘That’ll do – the pillow’s all right!’ and the toes in the stocking moved still faster. ‘How d’you do? What’s your name?’ … ‘Excuse me,’ he added, when Kozeltsóv had told him. ‘Ah yes, I beg your pardon. One forgets everything here. Why, we lived together,’ he remarked without any sign of pleasure, and looked inquiringly at Volódya.

  ‘This is my brother, arrived to-day from Petersburg.’

  ‘H’m! And I have got my discharge!’ said the wounded man, frowning. ‘Oh, how it hurts! If only it would be over quicker!’

  He drew up his leg and, moving his toes still more rapidly, covered his face with his hands.

  ‘He must be left alone,’ said the sister in a whisper while tears filled her eyes. ‘He is very ill.’

  While still on the North Side the brothers had agreed to go to the Fifth Bastion together, but as they passed out of the Nicholas Battery it was as if they had agreed not to run unnecessary risks and for each to go his own way.

  ‘But how will you find it, Volódya?’ said the elder. ‘Look here! Nikoláev shall take you to the Korábelnaya and I’ll go on alone and come to you to-morrow.’

  Nothing more was said at this last parting between the brothers.

  XII

  THE thunder of the cannonade continued with unabated violence. Ekaterína Street, down which Volódya walked followed by the silent Nikoláev, was quiet and deserted. All he could distinguish in the dark was the broad street with its large white houses, many of them in ruins, and the stone pavement along which he was walking. Now and then he met soldiers and officers. As he was passing by the left side of the Admiralty Building, a bright light inside showed him the acacias planted along the side-walk of the streets with green stakes to support them and sickly, dusty leaves. He distinctly heard his own footsteps and those of Nikoláev, who followed him breathing heavily. He was not thinking of anything: the pretty Sister of Mercy, Mártsov’s foot with the toes moving in the stocking, the darkness, the bombs, and different images of death, floated dimly before his imagination. His whole young impressionable soul was weighed down and crushed by a sense of loneliness and of the general indifference shown to his fate in these dangerous surroundings. ‘I shall be killed, I shall suffer, endure torments, and no one will shed a tear!’ And all this instead of the heroic life abounding in energy and sympathy of which he had had such glorious dreams. The bombs whistled and burst nearer and nearer. Nikoláev sighed more and more often, but did not speak. As they were crossing the bridge that led to the Korábelnaya he saw a whistling something fall and disappear into the water near by, lighting the purple waves to a flaming red for a second and then come splashing up again.

  ‘Just look! Not quenched!’ said Nikoláev in a hoarse voice.

  ‘No,’ answered Volódya in an involuntarily high-pitched plaintive tone which surprised him.

  They met wounded men carried on stretchers and more carts loaded with gabions. In the Korábelnaya they met a regiment, and men on horseback rode past. One of these was an officer followed by a Cossack. He was riding at a trot, but seeing Volódya he reined up his horse, looked in his face, turned away, and rode on, touching his horse with the whip.

  ‘Alone, alone! No one cares whether I live or not,’ thought the lad, and felt inclined to cry in real earnest.

  Having gone up the hill past a high white wall he came into a street of small shattered houses, continually lit up by the bombs. A dishevelled, tipsy woman, coming out of a gate with a sailor, knocked up against Volódya.

  ‘Because if he’sh an on’ble ma
n,’ she muttered – ‘pardon y’r exshensh offisher!’

  The poor lad’s heart ached more and more. On the dark horizon the lightnings flashed oftener and offener and the bombs whistled and exploded more and more frequently around them. Nikoláev sighed and suddenly began to speak in what seemed to Volódya a lifeless tone.

  ‘There now, and we were in such a hurry to leave home! “We must go! We must go!” Fine place to hurry to! [Wise gentlemen when they are the least bit wounded lie up quietly in ’orspital. It’s so nice, what better can you want?]’

  ‘Well, but if my brother had recovered his health,’ answered Volódya, hoping by conversation to disperse the dreadful feeling that had seized him.

  ‘Health indeed! Where’s his health, when he’s quite ill? Even them as is really well had best lie in ’orspital these times. Not much pleasure to be got. All you get is a leg or an arm carried off. It’s done before you know where you are! It’s horrible enough even here in the town, but what’s it like at the baksions! You say all the prayers you know when you’re going there. See how the beastly thing twangs past you!’ he added, listening to the buzzing of a flying fragment.

  ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘I’m to show y’r Honour the way. Our business is o’ course to obey orders: what’s ordered has to be done. But the trap’s been left with some private or other, and the bundle’s untied.… “Go, go!” but if something’s lost, why Nikoláev answers for it!’

  A few more steps brought them to a square. Nikoláev did not speak but kept sighing. Then he said suddenly:

  ‘There, y’r Honour, there’s where your antillary’s stationed. Ask the sentinel, he’ll show you.’

  A few steps farther on Volódya no longer heard Nikoláev sighing behind him. He suddenly felt himself utterly and finally deserted. This sense of loneliness, face to face as it seemed to him with death, pressed like a heavy, cold stone on his heart. He stopped in the middle of the square, glanced round to see if anyone was looking, seized his head and thought with horror:

  ‘O Lord, am I really a vile, miserable coward … when it’s for my Fatherland, for the Tsar for whom I used to long to die? Yes! I am a miserable, wretched being!’ And Volódya, filled with despair and disappointed at himself, asked the sentinel the way to the house of the commander of the battery and went where he was directed.

  XIII

  THE commander of the battery lived in a small two-storeyed house with an entrance from the yard, which the sentinel pointed out. The faint light of a candle shone through a window patched up with paper. An orderly, who sat on the steps smoking his pipe, went in to inform the commander of the battery of Volódya’s arrival and then showed him into the room. In the room, under a broken mirror between two windows, was a table littered with official papers; there were also several chairs and an iron bedstead with clean bedding, with a small rug beside it.

  Just beside the door stood a handsome sergeant-major with large moustaches, wearing side-arms, and with a cross and a Hungarian medal9 on his uniform. A staff-officer, a short man of about forty in a thin old cloak and with a swollen cheek tied round with a bandage, was pacing up and down the room.

  ‘I have the honour to report myself, Ensign Kozeltsóv, secundus, ordered to join the Fifth Light Artillery,’ said Volódya on entering the room, repeating the sentence he had been taught.

  The commander answered his greeting dryly and without shaking hands asked him to take a seat.

  Volódya sat down shyly on a chair by the writing table, and began playing with a pair of scissors his hand happened to fall on. The commander, with his hands at his back and with drooping head, continued to pace the room in silence as if trying to remember something, only now and then glancing at the hand that was playing with the scissors.

  The commander of the battery was rather stout, with a large bald patch on his head, thick moustaches hanging straight down over his mouth, and pleasant hazel eyes. His hands were plump, well-shaped, and clean, his small feet were much turned out and he trod with firmness in a way that indicated that he was not a diffident man.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, stopping opposite the sergeant-major, ‘the ammunition horses must have an extra peck beginning from to-morrow. They are getting very thin. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘Well, we can manage an extra peck, your Honour! Oats are a bit cheaper now,’ answered the sergeant-major, standing at attention but moving his fingers, which evidently liked to aid his conversation by gestures. ‘Then our forage-master, Frantchúk, sent me a note from the convoy yesterday that we must be sure, your Excellency, to buy axles there. They say they can be got cheap. Will you give the order?’

  ‘Well, let him buy them – he has the money,’ said the commander, and again began to pace the room. ‘And where are your things?’ he suddenly asked, stopping short in front of Volódya.

  Poor Volódya was so oppressed by the thought that he was a coward, that he saw contempt for himself as a miserable craven in every look and every word. He felt as if the commander of the battery had already discerned his secret, and was chaffing him. He was abashed, and replied that his things were at the Gráfskaya and that his brother had promised to send them on next day.

  The commander did not stop to hear him out, but turning to the sergeant-major asked, ‘Where could we put the ensign up?’

  ‘The ensign, sir?’ said the sergeant-major, making Volódya still more confused by casting a rapid glance at him which seemed to ask: ‘What sort of an ensign is he?’

  ‘Why, downstairs, your Excellency. We can put his Honour up in the lieutenant-captain’s room,’ he continued after a moment’s thought. ‘The lieutenant-captain is at the baksion at present, so there’s his bed empty.’

  ‘Well then, if you don’t mind for the present,’ said the commander. ‘I should think you are tired, and we’ll make better arrangements to-morrow.’

  Volódya rose and bowed.

  ‘Would you like a glass of tea?’ said the commander of the battery when Volódya had nearly reached the door. ‘The samovar can be lit.’

  Volódya bowed and went out. The colonel’s orderly showed him downstairs into a bare, dirty room, where all sorts of rubbish was lying about and a man in a pink shirt and covered with a thick coat lay asleep on a bed without sheets or blankets. Volódya took him for a soldier.

  ‘Peter Nikoláevich!’ said the orderly, shaking the sleeper by the shoulder. ‘The ensign will sleep here.… This is our cadet,’ he added, turning to Volódya.

  ‘Oh, please don’t let me disturb you!’ said Volódya, but the cadet, a tall, solid young man with a handsome but very stupid face, rose from the bed, threw the cloak over his shoulders, and evidently not yet quite awake, left the room saying: ‘Never mind, I’ll lie down in the yard.’

  XIV

  LEFT alone with his thoughts Volódya’s first feeling was one of fear at the disordered and cheerless state of his own soul. He longed to fall asleep, to forget all that surrounded him and especially himself. Putting out the candle, he took off his cloak and lay down on the bed, drawing the cloak over his head to shut out the darkness, of which he had been afraid from childhood. But suddenly the thought occurred to him that now, immediately, a bomb would crash through the roof and kill him, and he began listening. Just above his head he heard the steps of the commander of the battery.

  ‘If it does come,’ he thought, ‘it will first kill those upstairs and then me – anyway not me alone.’ This thought comforted him a little and he was about to fall asleep.

  ‘But supposing that suddenly, to-night, Sevastopol is taken and the French break in here? What shall I defend myself with?’ He rose and paced up and down the room. The fear of real danger drove away the fanciful fear of the darkness. A saddle and a samovar were the only hard things in the room.

  ‘What a wretch I am – a coward, a despicable coward!’ he thought again, and once more the oppressive feeling of contempt and even disgust for himself came over him. He lay down again and tried not to think. Then, under the i
nfluence of the unceasing noise which made the panes rattle in the one window of the room, the impressions of the day rose in his imagination, reminding him of danger. Now he seemed to see wounds and blood, then bombs and splinters flying into the room, then the pretty Sister of Mercy bandaging his wounds and crying over him as he lay dying, then his mother seeing him off in the little country town and praying fervently with tears in her eyes before the wonder-working icon – and again sleep seemed impossible. But suddenly the thought of God Almighty, who can do anything and hears every prayer, came clearly into his mind. He knelt down, crossed himself, and folded his hands as he had been taught to do when a child. This attitude suddenly brought back to him an old, long-forgotten sense of comfort.

  ‘If I must die, if I must cease to exist, then do it, Lord,’ he thought, ‘do it quickly, but if courage is needed and firmness, which I lack, grant them to me! Deliver me from the shame and disgrace which are more than I can bear, and teach me what I must do to fulfil Thy Will.’

  The frightened, cramped, childish soul suddenly matured, brightened, and became aware of new, bright, and broad horizons. He thought and felt many things during the short time this state continued, but soon fell into a sweet untroubled slumber, amid the continued booming of the cannonade and rattle of the window-panes.

  O Lord Almighty! Thou alone hast heard and knowest the simple yet burning and desperate prayers of ignorance, of confused repentance, prayers for bodily health and for spiritual enlightenment, that have risen to Thee from this dreadful place of death: from the general who, an instant after his mind has been absorbed by the Order of St George upon his neck, feels with trepidation the nearness of Thy presence – to the private soldier prostrate on the bare floor of the Nicholas Battery, who prays for the future reward he dimly expects for all his sufferings.

  XV

  THE elder Kozeltsóv happening to meet a soldier of his regiment in the street went with him straight to the Fifth Bastion.