“If it is necessary that I die, if my absence is required, then bring it about, O Lord,” he prayed. “Do it swiftly. But if bravery and fortitude, which I lack, are what is needed, grant me them, but save me from shame and ignominy, which I am unable to bear, and teach me what I must do in order to carry out Your will.”
Volodya’s childish, frightened, limited soul suddenly acquired a new strength and radiance, and gained a perception of new, brighter and more spacious horizons. In the brief interval of time this sensation lasted he thought and felt much else besides, but soon fell peacefully asleep, without a care in the world, to the continued crackling and booming of the bombardment, and the trembling of the windowpanes.
Great Lord in heaven! You alone have heard, You alone know the simple but impassioned, desperate prayers of ignorance, anguished repentance and suffering that have ascended towards You from this terrible place of death—from the prayers of the general, who only a second ago had been thinking of his lunch and a St George Cross around his neck, but who was suddenly brought face to face with Your proximity, to those of the exhausted, hungry and louse-ridden private lying sprawled on the bare floor of the Nicholas battery, imploring You to grant him the reward he instinctively anticipates, the one that will compensate him for all these undeserved sufferings. Verily, You never weary of hearing the prayers of Your children, and in every time and in every place You send down a ministering angel to instil patience, a sense of duty and the comfort of hope into their souls.
— 15 —
The older Kozeltsov, meeting a private from his own regiment out on the street, set off with him directly to the 5th bastion. “Keep close to the wall, your honour,” said the private.
“Why should I do that?”
“It’s dangerous here, your honour; look, get your head down, here’s one coming now,” said the private, listening to a cannonball which came whistling over and slammed into the dry surface of the roadway on the other side of the street.
Paying no heed to the man, Kozeltsov walked off briskly down the centre of the road.
The streets were just the same as when he had visited Sebastopol back in the spring; so, too—though perhaps more frequent now—were the flashes, the explosions, the groans and the encounters with wounded men; so were the batteries, parapets and trenches. Now, however, it all for some reason appeared at once more melancholy and more in earnest—there were more shot-holes in the buildings, and there were no lights in the windows at all now, except for those in Kushchin House (the hospital); not one woman was to be seen anywhere; the former atmosphere of long-established habit and freedom from care had been replaced by one of gloomy expectation, of weariness and tension.
But here was the last trench, and here, too, was the voice of a private of the P—— Regiment who had recognized his old company commander; here, in darkness, was the 3rd battalion, huddled up against a wall, briefly and sporadically illuminated by salvoes of gunfire and betraying its presence by the muffled talk of the men and the clacking of their muskets.
“Where’s the regimental commander?” Kozeltsov asked.
“He’s in the naval casemate, your honour,” replied the private, eager to oblige. “Come on, sir, I’ll take you there myself.”
The soldier led Kozeltsov from trench to trench until, in one of them, they came to a small ditch. In the ditch sat a sailor, smoking his pipe; a door was visible, and behind it cracks of light could be seen.
“Is it all right to go in?”
“Just a moment, sir, I’ll tell them you’re here,” said the sailor, and he went inside.
On the other side of the door two voices could be heard in conversation.
“If Prussia insists on maintaining her neutrality,” one of the voices was saying, “then Austria will do the same . . . ”
“Never mind about Austria,” said the other voice. “What about the Slavic lands? . . . Well, find out what he wants.”
Kozeltsov had never been in this casemate before. He was struck by the decorative appearance of its interior. The floor was parqueted, and the door was closed off by little screens. Two beds stood against the walls, and in one corner hung a large, gold-framed icon of the Virgin Mary with a pink vigil lamp burning in front of it. A naval officer lay asleep, fully clothed, on one of the beds, while on the other, facing a table on which stood two opened bottles of wine, two men—the new regimental commander and an adjutant—sat talking to each other. Although Kozeltsov was certainly no coward and had, indeed, nothing to fear either from the military authorities in general or the regimental commander in particular, at the sight of this colonel who only a short time ago had been one of his everyday companions he lost his nerve and began to shake in his shoes, so haughtily did the colonel rise to his feet and fasten him with his attention. What made matters even worse was that the adjutant also intimidated him by the way he sat there looking, as if to say: “I’m merely a friend of your commander’s. It’s not me you’re reporting to, and I have neither the power nor the wish to demand deference of you.” “How strange,” thought Kozeltsov, as he looked at his commander. “It’s only seven weeks since he took the regiment over, yet everything about him—his uniform, his bearing, his gaze—displays the authority of a regimental commander, the kind of authority that’s based less upon age, seniority of rank and military prowess than it is on money. It seems like only yesterday,” he thought, “that this same Batrishchev was getting drunk with us, wearing the same dark-coloured cotton shirt week in, week out, and eating his eternal meatballs and fruit dumplings alone by himself in his room, yet now look at him! There’s a starched white shirt under that wide-sleeved overcoat he’s wearing, he’s smoking a ten-rouble cigar, and there’s a six-rouble bottle of Lafitte on the table—all bought at sky-high prices from the quartermaster in Simferopol—and his eyes have that cold arrogance proper to an aristocrat of wealth, which says: ‘Being one of the new breed of regimental commanders, I’m still one of you: but don’t forget that whereas all you’ve got is your sixty roubles—one third of your salary—tens of thousands pass through my hands, and believe me I know you’d give your right arm to be where I am.’”
“It’s taken you a while to get back on your feet again,” the colonel said to Kozeltsov, eyeing him coldly.
“I was quite badly injured, sir, and even now my wound hasn’t completely healed.”
“Well, you shouldn’t be here then,” said the colonel, casting a doubtful glance at the officer’s stocky figure. “Do you think you’ll be able to carry out your duties?”
“Yes, sir, of course I will, sir.”
“Right then, I’m very glad to hear it. You’ll take over from ensign Zaytsev in command of 9th company—that’s the one you had before; you’ll receive your orders directly.”
“Very well, sir.”
“And when you go there, please be so good as to tell the regimental adjutant I should like to have a word with him,” said the regimental commander by way of conclusion, signalling with a little bow that the audience was at an end.
As he emerged from the casemate, Kozeltsov muttered something under his breath several times, hunching his shoulders together as though in pain, embarrassment, or annoyance at something; his annoyance was, however, directed not at the regimental commander, with whom he had no complaint, but at himself and everything about himself. Discipline and its prerequisite, subordination, are only agreeable (the same is true of all relations derived from the sanction of law) in so far as they are grounded not simply in a mutual acceptance of their necessity, but on the subordinate’s recognition that those placed in authority over him are possessed of a higher degree of experience, military prowess or—not to beat about the bush—moral development; as soon, however, as discipline is founded, as often happens in society, on casual fortune or the money principle, it unfailingly ends up either as overweening arrogance on the one hand, or concealed envy and irritation on the other—instead of acting beneficially to unite a mass of men into a single unit, it prod
uces quite the opposite effect. The man who feels unable to inspire respect by virtue of his own intrinsic merits is instinctively afraid of contact with his subordinates and attempts to ward off criticism by means of superficial mannerisms. His subordinates, who see only this superficial aspect of the man, one which they find offensive, are inclined, quite often unjustly, to suppose it conceals nothing good.
— 16 —
Before joining his fellow officers, Kozeltsov went over to reintroduce himself to his company and see where it was stationed. The parapets constructed from gabions, the figurations of the trenches, the guns he passed, and even the shell-fragments and unexploded shells he tripped over as he walked along—all these things, constantly illuminated by the flash of gunfire, were very familiar to him. All of this had been deeply etched on his memory three months earlier during the two continuous weeks he had spent on this same bastion. Although there was much in this recollection that did not bear thinking about, it somehow merged with the fascination of the past, and he found himself recognizing familiar places and objects with pleasure, as though the two weeks he had spent here had been quite agreeable ones. The company was deployed along the wall that constituted the 6th battalion’s defences.
Kozeltsov walked in at the completely unprotected entrance to a long casemate in which, he was told, the 9th company was stationed. So full of soldiers was this casemate (it was packed to the door) that there was literally nowhere to put one’s feet. In one part of it a crooked tallow candle was burning, held by a soldier who was lying down. Another soldier was reading aloud from a book, spelling out the syllables one by one, and holding the text right up to the candle. In the stinking semi-darkness of the casemate, raised heads could be seen avidly listening to the reader. The book was a primer, and as he entered the casemate, Kozeltsov heard the following.
“Fear of death is an inborn sense in man.”
“Trim the wick a bit,” said a voice. “This is a real fine book.”
When Kozeltsov asked if the sergeant-major was present, the man stopped reading and the soldiers began to stir, coughing or blowing their noses in the way an audience always does after a prolonged spell of keeping quiet. The sergeant-major, buttoning up his coat, rose from beside the group of men surrounding the reader and, stepping across the legs of some and on the legs of others who had no room to move them, came over to the officer.
“Greetings, sergeant! Well, is this the whole of our company?”
“Greetings and welcome, your honour,” replied the sergeant-major, looking at Kozeltsov in a cheerful, friendly manner. “Are you better now, your honour? Well, thank the Lord! We’d been getting fair browned-off without you, truly we had.”
It was immediately obvious that Kozeltsov was popular with the men of the regiment.
From the interior of the casemate, voices could be heard saying: “Our old company commander’s here, the one who was wounded, you remember—Mikhail Semyonych, Kozeltsov’s his last name,” and so on. Some of the men even came over to him, and the drummer said hello to him.
“Hello there, Obanchuk!” said Kozeltsov. “Still in one piece?” Then, raising his voice, he said, addressing all the men: “Good health, men!”
“Good health, sir!” came a dull roar from the casemate.
“How are you, men?”
“Poorly, your honour: those Frenchies are getting the better of us—they’re giving us a really nasty hammering from behind those trenches of theirs. But that’s all they ever do: they never come out into the open.”
“Well, perhaps I’ll bring you luck and God will see to it that they do come out into the open, lads!” said Kozeltsov. “It won’t be the first time we’ve fought together: let’s give them another thrashing!”
“We’ll do our best, your honour!” several voices piped up.
“He’s got a lot of guts, his honour has, he’s really got a lot of guts,” said the drummer to another soldier in a voice which, though soft, was still loud enough to be audible, as if in support of what the company commander had been saying, and as if in order to persuade the soldier that there had been nothing boastful or fanciful about it.
After visiting the soldiers, Kozeltsov walked over to the defended barracks to join his fellow officers.
— 17 —
There was a large number of men in the big room that constituted the barracks: they were all either naval, artillery or infantry officers. Some were asleep; others had seated themselves on a packing crate and a gun carriage and were talking to one another; others yet again—these formed the largest and noisiest group—had spread out two felt cloaks on the floor beyond the central arch and were sitting on them, drinking porter and playing cards.
“Aha! Kozeltsov, Kozeltsov! Good to see you, man! . . . How’s your wound?” cried voices from every side. Here, too, it was evident that Kozeltsov was well liked, and that his fellow officers were glad to see him back.
When he had finished shaking hands with men he knew, Kozeltsov joined the large group of officers who were playing cards—most of these were his friends. A lean, handsome man with dark brown hair, a long, thin nose and a bushy moustache with sideburns was dealing cards with white, shapely fingers, on one of which there was a large gold ring with a seal. He was dealing the cards rapidly and carelessly, clearly anxious about something and trying to conceal the fact by his offhand manner. Beside him, to his right a grey-haired major who had had a considerable amount to drink was leaning his head in his elbows, punting with affected indifference for fifty-copeck pieces, and paying his debts as he went along. On his left, a small, red-complexioned officer with a perspiring face squatted on his heels, reacting with a forced smile and a strained laugh each time he lost; he kept fumbling with one hand in the empty pocket of his sharovary, and he played for high stakes—not, however, in ready money, a fact that was clearly jarring upon the handsome, brown-haired man. A thin, pale, clean-shaven officer with a bald head and an enormous, cruel mouth prowled up and down the room holding a wad of banknotes. Every so often he would stake the whole wad, and every time he won.
Kozeltsov took a glass of vodka and sat down near the card-players.
“Come and punt with us, Mikhail Semyonych!” the officer who was acting as banker said to him. “I’ll bet you’ve brought plenty of money with you.”
“Where would I get money? Actually, I spent all I had left in town.”
“I don’t believe you. You must have won something in Simferopol, surely?”
“Yes, but not very much,” said Kozeltsov; evidently, though, he did not wish the others to believe him, for he undid his coat and took the old cards into his hands.
“Well, let’s see what jokes the Devil can play, or perhaps it’s only a gnat—you know what they’re capable of. Only I’ll have to have a few drinks first, to strengthen my nerve.”
After a while, having drunk another three vodkas and several glasses of porter, he felt completely in tune with the mood of the assembled company—one of a general stupefaction and oblivion of reality—and lost his three remaining roubles.
By this time the small, perspiring officer had run up a debt of 150 roubles.
“No it’s not my lucky day,” he said casually, preparing a fresh card.
“Kindly pay what you owe,” said the officer who was banker, interrupting his dealing for a moment and giving him a look.
“Will you allow me to pay tomorrow?” the perspiring officer asked, getting to his feet and fumbling energetically in his empty pocket.
“Hm!” growled the banker, dealing out all the cards in the pack to right and to left. “It’s no good,” he said, when he had finished. “I’ve had enough. We can’t go on like this, Zakhar Ivanych,” he added. “We’re supposed to be playing for cash, not credit.”
“Do you doubt my word, then? I don’t find that very amusing.”
“Who’s going to pay me? That’s what I’d like to know,” muttered the major, who by this time was thoroughly drunk and had won about eight roubles. “I
’ve paid in more than twenty roubles now, yet whenever I win I don’t get a copeck.”
“How can I pay you when there’s no money on the table?” said the banker.
“That’s no concern of mine!” shouted the major, getting to his feet. “It’s you chaps I’m playing with, honest ones—not the likes of him.”
The perspiring officer immediately lost his temper.
“I’ve told you—I’ll pay tomorrow. How dare you say an insolent thing like that to me?”
“I’ll say whatever I like. Honest chaps don’t behave like that, that’s what I think!” shouted the major.