by Marie Nizet
“A regiment dying.”
“Where?”
“To the left, in the valley; follow me, men!”
Relia stuck fast to Ioan’s side, mentally reciting the prayers that Domna Rosanda had taken the trouble to teach him.
“You’re frightened, little one,” said a Corporal with a scar on his forehead.
“I want to get out of here!” sobbed “Mademoiselle Aurélie,” rolling his startled eyes.
“Well, we’re getting out, my lad, sooner than we might wish!”
“Hurrah! The dead go quickly!” cried a Sublieutenant from Leipzig. “We’re dead, or very nearly!”
“Ajutatzi! Ajutatzi!” 47 These despairing cries rising up from the valley reignited the Rumanians’ anger.
“Throw away your rifle,” Ioan said to the distraught Relia, “and give me your hand.”
Relia obeyed mechanically.
Brave dorobantzi! They hurled themselves into the valley, more ardent than the zmeï of legend! The slopes were slippery, the men rolled over one another. It was raining lead. The incessant Turkish musket-fire tore frightful holes in their ranks. What did that matter? Comrades were in danger; they had to be saved, or, at least, one had to die with them! Smoke combined with the fog. Blood and mire mingled. Dead men–dead men everywhere! The valley slowly filled up. A bullet struck the regiment’s ensign. “The standard!” cried a dying voice. “Protect the standard!”
Mitica took possession of it; whining bullets passed through the tricolored pleats of the flag.
“The Turks shall not have the standard,” he said. The explosions succeeded one another more rapidly; little by little, the air was clearing.
“Well, men?” said a voice in the mist.
“Well, General, there’s a trench... it’s ours!”
“The nation shall know your names, my lads, and Europe shall know the nation’s name!”
Relia did not have a single scratch. He was astonished to find himself alive. “Is it over now, Ioan?” he said, fearfully.
“Not yet. After the trench, the redoubt.”
“Oh, my God! And...are there still Turks within it?”
“Of course! If there weren’t, the redoubt would be taken!”
“Mademoiselle Aurélie” resumed trembling; Ioan drew him on.
The Rumanians scaled the opposite slope. They were no longer thinking about Saint Alexander’s Day; they were thinking about the fatherland, positions to be taken–of all the ingredients of glory, in sum.
“Hey, Mitica Slobozianu! I’ve got a graze here that’ll get me a Sublieutenant’s epaulettes.”
“The taking of Gravitza! What a great story to tell at parties, eh?”
“Unfortunately, no one will believe us–we’ve told too many lies!”
“Our scars will shut the mouths of the incredulous.”
“When I become an officer, I’ll marry a city girl.”
He was not even to marry a peasant; a Muslim bullet put a permanent end to the young Walachian’s proud ambitions.
They were truly splendid in an attack, these “tin soldiers”! How they climbed! And how they died, with smiles and jokes on their lips! They really were, as they said to another with legitimate vanity, the Frenchmen of the Orient! Within a quarter of an hour, the redoubt would surely be taken. The first rank had arrived at the top of the hill crowning the Turkish earthworks.
Suddenly, a cry–a howl of rage–emerged from thousands of throats, which struck the Tsar’s ears from afar. The dorobantzi recoiled in consternation...
“Damnation!” cried General Cerneanu, in a voice that had nothing human in it. “There’s a ravine between the redoubt and us!”
“I told you, General,” Ioan said. “We’ll cross the ravine.”
“We’ll cross the ravine,” a powerful echo repeated.
At that same moment, a plaintive moan was heard from Ioan’s side. Relia’s grip relaxed.
“Ioan,” he murmured. “The crows...” And he fell, as if struck by lightning, at his friend’s feet.
Ioan remained motionless. His eyes went from the wounded man’s face, already pale, to the silhouette of the redoubt, outlined in black against the brown. He hesitated between the duty that called him to his companions and the friendship that retained him at his adopted brother’s side. A sigh from the unfortunate child sealed his decision. He loaded and fired his rifle one last time. While rapidly making the sign of the cross, he said: “My God help hem and pardon me!” Then he added: “I’ll come back!”
He lifted Comanescu–who weighed hardly any more than Mariora–effortlessly. “Put your arm around my neck,” he said to him.
But Relia did not put out his arm.
By clutching with one hand at tufts of grass and lump of rock, and digging his heels into the damp clay, Ioan managed to keep his balance, and regained the valley floor. Beneath a projecting block of granite, he perceived a few feet of ground carpeted with moss, which was scarcely dirtied; judging it to be a fairly safe shelter, he deposited his burden there.
There was not a drop of blood soiling Relia’s white shirt; had it not been for the pink foam seeping from his lips, one would not have suspected that he was wounded.
Ioan parted the dorobantz’s clothing. The bullet had pierced the chest in the vicinity of the heart; the wound was slightly moist, but all the blood was in the pleural cavity.
Ioan shook his head. “A mortal wound that doesn’t bleed!” he murmured.
Hastily, he improvised a dressing that he knew to be futile, and set about crawling between the corpses, carefully feeling the officers’ belts. He soon came back with a flask half full of selbovitza. He unclenched Relia’s teeth with the aid of his dagger, and introduced a drop of the beneficent liquor into his mouth.
The young man moved convulsively, and put a hand to his breast. An expression of indescribable terror overtook his features. “The crows!” he stammered, and fainted again.
“Let’s go!” said Ioan to himself. “One Rumanian doesn’t abandon another.”
Loading his friend on to his strong shoulders, he began slowly climbing the other slope of the valley. The descent had not been easy, but the ascent was painful. Ioan was continually bumping into irregularities in the ground, and more often still into body-parts clinging to old tree-trunks. He provided a target for the Turkish carbines; one bullet went straight through his cap, from back to front, another through the sleeve of his uniform. The slightest false step might have sent the courageous Walachian tumbling in a fatal fall, but a mysterious power seemed to be protecting him. After half an hour of anguish and extraordinary effort, he reached the top of the slope.
When he saw that he was in open country, he felt that he was safe. Presenting the flask to the unconscious Relia’s tight lips, he examined his friend’s discolored features with fraternal affection.
“Poor boy!” he said. “Another ten minutes and he’ll be finished.” A tear, quickly wiped away, glistened in the soldier’s eye. “He was good, but he wasn’t brave,” he added, as if to justify his moment of weakness.
A few horses–poor riderless beasts–were wandering in his vicinity. Murmuring the magic word puiu,48 well-known to Rumanian cattle and horses, he went up to one of them, which seemed to him more vigorous than the rest, and capable of undertaking a long trek. The horse whinnied and offered itself to the caresses of a benevolent hand.
Then, lifting Relia in his arms as mothers do with little children, Ioan set his feet in the stirrups, and the horse set off like an arrow, carrying the two riders. The gallop was so rapid that the horse’s shoes hardly seemed to touch the ground. The redoubt receded to the horizon, and Ioan soon perceived the outlying fires of the Russian encampment. He reined in his ardent mount in front of the door of a pretty cottage, which he took to be a hospital.
“Hey! Hey! What’s this?” said the churlish voice of a Cossack.
Ioan spoke Russian well enough, having learned it in Nicopolis. “Open up–it’s a wounded man.”
“A Russ
ian?”
“No, a Rumanian.”
“We don’t want any wounded men here–the Tsar’s in the house.”
“But you can surely see that he’s dying.”
“All the more reason! It’s Saint Alexander’s Day; the Tsar is here, as you’ve been told. We’re not receiving dead men. Go away!”
“Where shall I go, then?”
“To your own lot. They’re over there, mimicking our general headquarters as best they can. There’s some sort of Colonel they call Leganescu.”
In other circumstances, the Cossack’s insolent words would have rebounded, metamorphosed into blows with the flat of a saber, upon his own barbarous spine.
“At least give me a cart,” Ioan persisted.
“There are no carts here! Go away, as you’ve been told!”
And the Cossack slammed the door.
Ioan knew the Russian character well enough not to be astonished by these inhuman proceedings. He made a gesture of disgust, dug his spurs into the flanks of his horse, and the fantastic ride became even more so, by the uncertain light of the rising Moon, huge and pale in the mist.
The cool of the night and the repeated leaps of the chestnut horse, an impetuous emulator of Calul Vintesh,49 were more successful than the selbovitza in reviving the spark of life that still animated Relia. He recognized Ioan, smiled, slid his fingers into the dorobantz’s belt and closed his eyes again with a sigh.
Poor Aurelio! Ioan thought, pressing his friend to his bosom. The empty space he leaves behind isn’t very large in the hearts of his family! Who loved him? Whom has he loved? Me–and me alone! While he’s dying here, his mother and sisters are running from ball to ball, listening to the ridiculous flatteries of the Russians who have killed him. His father doesn’t even know what people call him! “He’s a boyar! Ah, poor little boyar!” he cried, aloud, in a tone in which pity was laced with slight disdain. His face suddenly darkened; his gaze, which was almost hard, came to rest on Relia’s feminine traits. “And in 50 years time, this child would have been my master!”
He lost himself in his reflections–and, while telling himself that a boyar was a very little thing, unworthy of being carried in the arms of a son of the people, and that men were all equal before God and circumstance, he arrived at the Rumanian headquarters. Relia did not seem to want him to dismount, though; his hand would not let go of Ioan’s belt.
“We’re among friends,” Ioan said, taking his foot from the stirrup.
Relia did not reply, and continued to hold his companion back. Ioan then realized that he was dead.
At the sight of the corpse, Colonel Leganescu bared his head, with the respect Rumanians show to that which has been a man. “His name!” he asked, in a soft voice, as if he feared to trouble the dead man’s sleep.
“Aurelio Comanescu, from Bucharest,” Ioan replied.
“Cerneanu’s cousin! The one who...”
Ioan interrupted him. “Yes,” he said, and added, simply: “I’m the other.”
Leganescu slapped his forehead. He drew the dorobantz nearer to the nightlight, which gave birth to more shadows than brightness in his tent. “That’s right!” he said. “I remember you!” He paused, then resumed: “My boy, forgive me for the harm I did you, indirectly, by sending you to that incarnate Beelzebub.”
“On the contrary, Colonel–I thank you.”
Leaving Leganescu to his astonishment, Ioan departed, after depositing a last kiss on Relia’s cold forehead. Then, as he had said he would do, he set off again for Gravitza.
The ravine had been crossed, but the redoubt had not been taken. “Curse it!” he cried.
The odor of blood and gunpowder caused him instantly to forget Relia, Mariora, perhaps even Liatoukine. He threw himself into the battle, thrusting with his saber, taking aim and firing, with a kind of desperation. He was terrible thus, and the Turkish corpses piled up around him.
He caught sight of Mitica’s tall figure in the distance, defending the Rumanian eagle, removed from its staff, against a furious attack. That vision lasted two seconds before everything before his eyes became confused.
In spite of General Cerneanu’s incontestable skill and the unbreakable courage of his soldiers, the Rumanians were visibly losing ground. Strategy could achieve nothing in the face of that thunderous artillery; it required men–men who would have formed a wall of flesh thick enough to impenetrable to bullets.
Cerneanu tore his hair and, while still exhorting what remained of his troops, he murmured: “We won’t make it! We won’t make it!”
“Hurrah!” a voice suddenly shouted, resounding like that of an angel of salvation in the besiegers’ ears. “Colonel Boris Liatoukine’s bringing us reinforcements!”
All eyes turned, and all hopes too, towards the Cossack regiment that was emerging from the mist like an army of phantoms in a dream–and while the Rumanians greeted the unexpected apparition with repeated cries of Traiéscà Russia! 50 Ioan, suddenly reclaimed by the idea of vengeance, murmured: “Liatoukine! Before the present hour is over, my dagger will have seen the color of your blood!”
Despite the profound obscurity of that fatal night, in spite of the distance that still separated him from Liatoukine, he recognized his adversary easily by his tall stature and his strident voice, which rose above the various noises of battle like the blast of a clarion.
Ioan reloaded his revolver, even though he did not expect to make use of it. The accomplishment of what he considered an act of justice was solely reserved for Old Mani’s knife. He loosened that terrible weapon–which was nothing but than a long yataghan snatched from the hand of a bashi-bazouk–in its leather scabbard.
Rumanians are as indifferent in religious matters as they are strong in superstition. Ioan signed himself more by habit than devotion. “Boris Liatoukine is dead,” he said.
Clearing a path through the ranks of the dorobantzi and the Cossacks, stepping over the heaps of uniforms, beneath which a few items of bloody debris still stirred, he succeeded in reaching Captain Vampire.
“It’s me!” he said, with a hateful stare that would have disconcerted a man less sure of himself than the Colonel.
The latter studied him coldly, apparently neither annoyed nor surprised. “I’ve been expecting you,” he said, dismounting. In a casual manner that the fine gentlemen of Bucharest would have admired, he threw the bridle of his horse to an aide-de-camp.
“Leave us, Dmitri Nikitich,” he said. He turned towards Ioan. “Come with me,” he said. “This place is scarcely appropriate for conversation.”
Ioan followed him, with his revolver in one hand and his dagger in the other. Contact with these weapons heated the Rumanian’s feverish fingers, and the sharpened point of the yataghan caressed Liatoukine’s clothing.
There aren’t two cowards here, Ioan thought, recoiling slightly. I don’t want to stab him in the back!
When there were no longer any but dead men around them to serve as witnesses, Liatoukine turned. “Well,” he said, “what do you want with me?”
“What do I want?” Ioan cried, in a voice broken by sorrow and anger. “He asks what I want! Will you efface the brand from my father’s forehead that your whip imprinted there? Can you render my honor intact, which you threw as a bone to the dogs who flatter your odious whims? Can you give me back my Mariora? Can you do that? If so, I’ll forgive you.”
“Cut it short!” said Liatoukine, nonchalantly brushing off the mud that stained his clothing.
“Mariora! All the gold in the world cannot repay me for my Mariora!”
“Pooh!” said the Russian, with a gesture of indifference. “If it’s gold you want, you can have it.” And he made the rubles in his belt clink.
This new insult changed Ioan’s wrath into a furious madness. He leapt towards Liatoukine with a raucous cry. “I want the last drop of your blood, the last breath from your lips! I want your life!” he howled.
“My life?” repeated the impassive Prince. “That’s easily sa
id, my boy!”
“No more words, Boris Liatoukine! One of us will die, I swear! Defend yourself!”
Ioan applied the barrel of his revolver to Liatoukine’s breast. The latter shrugged his shoulders, an enigmatic smile playing upon his features.
An explosion resounded, the blade of the dagger glittered in the sinister rays of moonlight, and Captain Vampire, still smiling, collapsed without uttering a plaint or releasing a sigh.
The warm sensation of the blood that ran in rivulets over his hands only served to excite the Walachian’s rage. The Byzantine ring caught his eye; it was very tight–Liatoukine had been wearing it for more than three months. Ioan, unable to remove it quickly enough from the dead man’s finger, cut it away; he placed it, all red as it was, on his own finger. But his vengeance was unsatisfied. This man, normally animated by the noblest sentiments, had taken on the manners and the passions of a tiger. He fell upon the cadaver and his fingernails raked its scarcely-chilled flesh.
His yataghan was plunged into the Prince’s heart three times over.
“For Mani Isacescu!” he howled, in a savage voice. “For Aurelio Comanescu! For Mar...”
He did not finish. The hiss of bullets was audible. Ioan slumped on top of the body of his enemy.
The following morning, when the Rumanian stretcher-bearers came to recover the wounded, Ioan Isacescu was still alive. He was taken to the ambulance; he had a bullet in his chest and another in his left knee; the latter could not be extracted.
A violent traumatic fever overwhelmed the wounded man; the physicians said that he would have to endure atrocious suffering. When typhus broke out in the hospital, Ioan was one of the first to be infected by it. For three weeks, he was prey to the most intense delirium. The grimacing face of Boris Liatoukine never left his bedside. Captain Vampire’s mutilated hand was suspended above the victim of hallucination, who believed that he could hear the sound of drops of blood falling upon his forehead one by one. Soon, the sheets, the curtain and everything else appeared red to him.
“Liatoukine!” he cried. “He’s here! Chase him away!”
When he leapt from his bed, it took three strong men to wrestle the madman to the ground. His incessant cries disturbed the sleep of the other invalids, and he was relegated to a distant room. One night, it seemed to him that Captain Vampire cut off his little finger and tore away the copper ring. Then a gentler chimera came to abuse him: Mariora took him in her arms.