“Dolzhnikov!” he shouted.
“Er, present, sir,” replied the soldier, opening his eyes and taking his cap off. He spoke in a thick, jerky bass voice that sounded like twenty soldiers chorusing in unison.
“When were you wounded, old fellow?”
The soldier’s swollen, pewter-coloured eyes came to life: he had evidently recognized his military superior.
“Your health, your honour!” he exclaimed, in the same jerky bass voice.
“Where is the regiment stationed at present?”
“It was in Sebastopol, sir; they were going to transfer it on Wednesday.”
“Where to?”
“They didn’t say . . . Probably the North Side, sir! You know, today, sir,” he added in an expansive tone, putting his cap back on again, “he’s started blazing away all over the shop; nearly all shells, it is, he’s even landing them in the bay; he’s killed that many men, it’s bloody disgusting . . . ”
It was not possible to hear any more of what this soldier was saying; but from the expression on his face and from his posture, that of one who was suffering with a certain rancour of spirit, it could be guessed that nothing he said would bring anyone much comfort.
The itinerant officer, a certain Lieutenant Kozeltsov, was, for an army man, something rather out of the ordinary. He was not one of those people who live and act in a predetermined way, and who refrain from taking certain actions because they do not conform with the way others live their lives: he did everything he had a mind to do, and others tended to follow his example, convinced they were doing the right thing. His temperament was a many-sided one: he was a good singer, could play the guitar, spoke with great ease and had a talent for writing, particularly the writing of official documents, at which in his capacity of regimental adjutant he had developed into something of a dab hand. Most remarkable of all, however, was his quality of personal energy which, though it rested largely on these secondary endowments, was in itself a forceful and striking characteristic. His pride was of the kind most frequently encountered among exclusively male, especially military, circles; so thoroughly was it identified with life itself that he could see before him no other choice than either to excel or to expire. It could even be said that his pride acted as his most important personal incentive: he liked, merely for the sake of it, to excel among the people with whom he compared himself.
“Come along now, am I going to sit here listening to Moscow[g] wandering on all day?” muttered the lieutenant to himself, feeling his spirits sink slightly under the burden of apathy that was weighing them down, an effect produced partly by the confusion of vague thoughts left in him by the sight of the train of wounded, and partly by the soldier’s words, to which the sounds of the bombardment were lending an increased force and urgency. “That absurd Moscow . . . Let’s be off, Nikolayev . . . What’s the matter have you fallen asleep?” he said, somewhat peevishly, to his orderly, as he adjusted the skirts of his greatcoat.
The reins gave a jerk, Nikolayev clicked his tongue, and the waggon moved off at a swift pace.
“We’ll pull up for a moment to give the horses some fodder, and then it’s straight on; we’re not going to wait until tomorrow,” said the officer.
— 2 —
As he was driving into Duvankóy along a street of Tartar stone houses which had been practically reduced to rubble, Lieutenant Kozeltsov was once again held up by a military transport, this time one of shells and cannonballs which were being ferried to Sebastopol. The carts took up the whole width of the road, and Kozeltsov’s waggon was forced to stop.
In the dust at the side of the road two infantrymen were sitting on the stones of a ruined wall, eating bread and watermelon.
“Travelling far, countrymen?” said one of them, as he munched his bread. He was addressing a soldier who was carrying a small bag on his shoulder and who had stopped a short distance from them.
“We’ve been up in the province, and now we’re on our way back to rejoin our company,” the soldier replied, trying to ignore the watermelon and repositioning the bag on his back. “We’d been out gathering hay for our company these past three weeks, nearly, when they suddenly ordered us all back to our posts, just like that; only trouble is, we don’t know where the regiment is right now. The word is that it moved to the Korabelnaya last week. Have you heard anything about that, gents?”
“It’s in the town, mate, in the town,” said the man who had spoken first, an old convoy soldier, digging greedily into the unripe, whitish flesh of the watermelon with his camp knife. “We only got out of there this afternoon. It’s bloody terrible in there, mate, you’d do better to stick around here and lie low in the hay for a couple of days—far better, if you ask me.”
“How do you mean, gents?”
“Are you telling me you can’t hear it? He’s blazing the place to kingdom come today, there’s not a blade of grass left standing. As for our boys, nobody knows how many of them he’s picked off.”
And so saying, the speaker made a gesture with his arm and readjusted his cap.
The itinerant soldier shook his head thoughtfully, tut-tutted for a bit, and then took his pipe out from under his boot-flap; instead of filling it with fresh tobacco, however, he merely poked the half-burned strands it already contained, lit a spill on the pipe of his colleague, started to puff away and raised his cap.
“Nobody but God, gentlemen! Begging your pardon,” he said, and hoisting his bag into position once more, he set off down the road.
“Eh, you’d do better to wait,” said the man with the watermelon, in a tone of expansive cajolery.
“All the same,” muttered the itinerant to himself as he threaded his way among the wheels of the carts that crowded the road, “I can see I might as well buy myself a watermelon for supper, too, the way folk are talking.”
— 3 —
The posthouse was full of people when Kozeltsov drew up outside it in his waggon. The first person he met, while he was still outside on the porch, was a thin man of extreme youth. This was the postmaster, and he was exchanging angry words with two officers who were following behind him.
“ . . . and it won’t be three days you’ll have to wait, it’ll be more like ten! My dear man, there are even generals waiting,” the postmaster was saying, in an effort to be wounding. “And I’m certainly not going to harness myself up for you.”
“If there aren’t any horses, then how did that footman with all the baggage get hold of one?” shouted the senior of the two officers, who was nursing a glass of tea in his hands. While avoiding the use of the personal pronoun, he made it clear that he might easily begin addressing the postmaster by the insultingly familiar “thou.”
“T-try to see it from our point of view,” said the younger officer, stammering. “It’s—it’s not as though we were on a pleasure trip. I mean, the fact that we’ve been sent for means that they need us. You know, I really think I’m going to let General Kramper know about this. It—it—what it boils down to is that you haven’t any respect for the rank of officer!”
“Why do you always go and put your foot in it?” said the older officer, breaking him off in vexation. “You do nothing but get in my way. One has to know how to talk to these people. He really has lost all respect for us now. Horses, this instant, I say!”
“Nothing would give me greater pleasure, sir, but where am I going to get them?”
The postmaster was silent for a moment. Then he suddenly flushed, and, embellishing his remarks with agitated gestures, said: “Look, sir, I hear what you’re saying and I understand it all very well—but what do you expect me to do? Just give me . . . ” (at this the officers’ faces lit up with hope) “ . . . give me to the end of the month here without being killed, and you won’t find me around any more. I’d sooner go to the Malakhov than stick around here. My God! They can damn well look after themselves if this is the way they’re going to run things: there’s not a decent cart left in the whole stage-post, and the horses ha
ven’t had a wisp of hay for three days now.”
And with this the postmaster slipped through the gate and disappeared off somewhere.
Kozeltsov followed the officers into the waiting-room.
“Oh well,” said the older officer to the younger in a tone of complete calm, even though only a moment before he had appeared to be in a white rage. “We’ve been on the road for three months now, so I suppose it won’t hurt us to wait for a bit longer. We’ll get there soon enough, don’t you worry!”
The smoky, dirty room was so full of officers and their trunks that Kozeltsov only barely managed to find himself a seat in the window. As he studied the men’s faces and listened to their conversation, he began to roll himself a cigarette. The main group of officers was seated to the right of the door around a sagging, greasy table on which stood two samovars, the brass of which was green in places, and lump sugar in various types of paper wrapping. A young, clean-shaven officer in a short, quilted caftan, which had probably been fashioned from a woman’s dressing-gown, was filling the teapot with hot water. There were four of these younger officers in different parts of the room: one of them, his head resting on a fur coat, was asleep on a sofa; another, standing at the table, was carving roast mutton for a one-armed officer who was sitting down. Two others, one in an adjutant’s greatcoat and the other in an infantryman’s summer coat with a cartridge-pouch slung across his shoulder, were sitting by the stove ledge; merely from the manner in which they looked at the rest of the men, and from the way in which the one with the cartridge-pouch was smoking his cigar, it was possible to tell that they were not front-line officers, and that this circumstance gave them satisfaction. Not that their bearing was in any way arrogant or contemptuous; rather, it exuded a certain complacent tranquillity, one that was founded partly on money and partly on their frequent association with generals—a consciousness of their own superiority so strong that it led them to try to conceal it. Also present were a young surgeon with thick lips, and an artillery officer who looked like a German: they were practically sitting on the legs of the young officer who was sleeping on the sofa, and were counting their money. There were, in addition, four or five orderlies—some of them taking a nap and others pottering about among the trunks and bundles over by the door. Among all these faces Kozeltsov could not find one that he knew; even so, he began to listen to the men’s conversation with curiosity. The young officers who, as he at once decided just by looking at them, had only recently left cadet corps,[38] made a favourable impression on him; principally, they reminded him of the fact that his brother, who had also just left cadet corps, was due to arrive at one of the Sebastopol batteries in a few days’ time. On the other hand, everything about the officer with the cartridge-pouch, whose face he thought he recognized from somewhere else, struck him as insolent and repugnant. He even left his seat for one on the stove ledge, with the thought: “If he says anything, I’ll soon cut him down to size.” As a true front-line officer and good military man he had an active loathing for staff officers, as one glance at these men was sufficient to tell him they were.
— 4 —
“It really is jolly annoying,” one of the young officers was saying. “Here we are, a stone’s throw away, yet we can’t get through. There may easily be some action tonight, and we won’t be there.” His squeaky tone of voice and the sudden blotches of red that appeared on his young face as he spoke revealed the attractive youthful timidity of one who is constantly afraid that the words are not going to come out right.
The one-armed officer surveyed him with a smile.
“You’ll get there soon enough, believe you me,” he said.
The young officer looked deferentially at the haggard face of the one-armed man, which was beaming in an unexpected smile, said nothing, and returned his attention to making the tea. And indeed, in the face of the one-armed officer, in his posture, and particularly in the empty sleeve of his greatcoat, one could read much of this man’s calm equanimity, which could be summed up as an attitude that seemed to say: “This is all very well, but I know it all already, and I’m capable of doing whatever I please.”
“Well, what are we going to do, then?” the young officer asked his companion in the quilted caftan. “Are we going to stay the night here or try to get through with the horse we’ve got?”
His companion rejected this last idea.
“Can you imagine, captain,” continued the officer, who had now finished pouring out the tea, turning to the one-armed man and picking up the knife the latter had dropped, “we were told that horses were horribly expensive in Sebastopol, so we went halves on one in Simferopol.”
“I bet they charged you a pretty sum there, too.”
“I honestly don’t know, captain: with the waggon thrown in it came to ninety roubles. Is that expensive?” he asked, addressing all the men including Kozeltsov, who was watching him.
“That’s not too bad, if it’s a young horse,” said Kozeltsov.
“Is that so? We were told it was rather expensive . . . It’s a bit lame, but they told us it would get over it. It’s really quite a sturdy animal.”
“Which corps have you come from?” asked Kozeltsov, who was anxious to have some news of his brother.
“Oh, we’ve come straight from the Nobiliary Regiment. There are six of us here: we’re all going to Sebastopol as volunteers,” replied the officer, who obviously enjoyed talking. “The only thing is, we don’t know where the batteries we’ve been assigned to are stationed. Some people have told us they’re in Sebastopol, but others say it’s Odessa.”
“But couldn’t you have found out in Simferopol?” Kozeltsov asked.
“Nobody seemed to know . . . [39] Can you imagine, sir, one of us went into a local government office to ask, and they were incredibly rude to him . . . just think how we felt! I’ve some cigarettes already made up, would you like one?” he asked the one-armed officer, who at this moment was reaching around for his cigarette case, in a positive ecstasy of obsequiousness.
“So you’ve come from Sebastopol, have you, sir?” he went on. “Goodness, how extraordinary this is! You’ve no idea how we’ve all been thinking about you in St Petersburg—and about all you heroes!” he said, turning to Kozeltsov with deferential good will.
“So what do you suppose, will you have to go back again?” the lieutenant asked.
“That’s what we’re afraid of. Can you imagine, I mean, we’ve bought a horse, and all these other things you can’t do without—a spirit coffee-maker and various bits and pieces besides—and now we’re practically broke,” he said in a quiet voice, exchanging glances with his companion. “So if we do have to go back, we don’t know what’s going to become of us.”
“But surely you must have been given your travel expenses?” said Kozeltsov.
“No, sir,” the young officer replied in a whisper. “All they said was that we’d be paid them here.”
“And do you have a certificate?”
“I know it’s supposed to be essential to have a certificate; but when I went to see a senator in Moscow about it (he’s my uncle, actually), he said they’d give me the money on demand, and he didn’t need to write me out a certificate. Do you suppose they will?”
“Oh, I’m sure they will.”
“Yes, I expect so too,” said the young officer, in a tone that suggested he had asked the same question at some thirty other posthouses along the way and had received a different reply at each one of them, so that now he no longer really believed what anyone said.
— 5 —
“They damn well ought to,” came the sudden voice of the officer who had had the angry exchange with the postmaster on the porch, and who had come over to join in the conversation. He addressed his remarks in part to the staff officers sitting nearby, evidently considering them a worthy audience. “I’m in the same boat as these gentlemen: I volunteered for active service, even offered to go to Sebastopol and leave behind a perfectly good position, but apart from 136 r
oubles’ travelling expenses for my journey from St Petersburg I haven’t had a kopeck paid to me. I’m already out of pocket to the tune of 150 roubles. To think of it! I’ve only covered a distance of 806 versts, yet I’ve been on the road for nearly three months now, two of them in the company of these fellows. It’s just as well I brought some money of my own with me. What would I have done without it?”
“Has the journey really taken you three months?” someone asked.
“How else could I have done it?” the officer went on. “After all, I wouldn’t have given up a comfortable position like that if I hadn’t actually wanted to go, would I? I didn’t start living like a gypsy because I was frightened . . . It was just that there was no other way. For example, I had to put up in Perekop for two whole weeks. The postmaster there didn’t want to have anything to do with me. You just want to go when it pleases you, he said, but look at all these post-haste orders I’ve got, and those are just for starters. Oh, I suppose it was fate, really . . . I mean, I kept wanting to get on with the journey, but fate had other ideas. It had absolutely nothing to do with there being a bombardment on at present, it just didn’t seem to make any difference whether I was in a hurry or not, that’s all; I really wanted to get on.”