Once you have passed the church and the barricade, you reach that part of the town which has the most animated life of its own. The hanging signs of shops and taverns on both sides of the streets; the merchants, the women in bonnets or kerchiefs, the dandified officers—all these things and people will impress you with the strength of mind, the security and self-confidence of the inhabitants.
If you want to listen to the talk of the naval and army officers, go into that tavern on the right: circulating there already, most likely, will be stories about the previous night, about some girl called Fenka, about the action on the 24th,[15] about the exorbitant price and poor quality of the meatballs, and about the death in action of such-and-such or such-and-such a comrade.
“It’s damned terrible up at our place!” a tow-haired, clean-shaven naval officer says in a deep voice; he is wearing a green knitted scarf.
“Where’s ‘our place’?” another man asks him.
“The 4th bastion,”[16] replies the young officer. When you hear those words, “the 4th bastion,” you are bound to view the tow-haired young man with heightened interest and even a certain degree of respect. His excessive and undue familiarity, the way he is waving his arms about, his loud laughter and loud voice, which until now seemed to you merely insolent, strike you all of a sudden as an expression of that curiously aggressive state of mind characteristic of certain young men when they have been exposed to danger. You may suppose he is about to say it is the shells and bullets that have been making the day so terrible for him and his men: not a bit of it! It is the mud that has been so terrible. “You can hardly get to the battery,” he says, pointing to his boots, which are caked knee-deep in mud.
“Yes, and they killed my best gunner, got him right between the eyes,” says another man.
“Who was that? Mityukhin?”
“No . . . Hey, are you ever going to bring me my veal? Blackguards!” he adds, in the direction of the waiter. “No, it wasn’t Mityukhin, it was Abrosimov. He was a plucky lad, too, took part in six sorties.”
At the other end of the table, with plates of meatballs and green peas and a bottle of the vinegary Crimean wine baptized “Bordeaux” before them, sit two infantry officers: the younger, red-collared one, who has two stars on his greatcoat, is telling the other, a man already advanced in years, with a black collar and no stars, about the battle of the Alma.[17] The young officer has had a bit to drink, and from the pauses in his narrative, the uncertain look on his face which betrays his misgivings as to whether the other man will believe him, and in particular as to whether the role he has played in all this has not been far too important, whether it has not all been far too terrible and extraordinary, it can be seen that he is straying too far from the strict relation of the truth. But you have no time to listen to these stories, which you will continue to hear in every corner of Russia for a long time yet to come: you would prefer to go up to the bastions—especially the 4th bastion, about which you have heard so many different things. Whenever anyone states that he has been in the 4th bastion, he says it with a peculiar pride and satisfaction; if a man says, “I’m going to the 4th bastion,” you are sure to notice that his voice and manner seem slightly agitated or too studiedly indifferent; when one man wishes to poke fun at another, he will say, “They ought to put you in the 4th bastion”; whenever the men meet a stretcher party and ask, “Where’s he from?,” the answer most usually heard is: “The 4th bastion.” There exist two entirely different attitudes towards this fearsome bastion: those who have never visited it are convinced that it is a certain deathtrap, while those like the tow-haired warrant officer who actually live on it tend to discuss it in terms of whether the terrain there is dry or muddy and whether the dugouts are tolerably warm or freezing cold.
During the half-hour you have spent in the tavern the weather has had time to change: the mist which earlier lay blanketed across the sea has now massed itself into moist, grey, dreary clouds, obscuring the sun; a melancholy drizzle sifts down, wetting the roofs, the pavements and the greatcoats of the soldiers . . .
Passing through another barricade, you emerge from a doorway on the right and proceed up the main street. The houses on both sides of the street beyond this barricade are uninhabited; there are no hanging signs, the doorways are boarded up, the windows have had the glass knocked out of them, in one place the corner of a wall has been removed, in another a roof has been smashed in. These buildings look like old veterans who have experienced every kind of woe and affliction, and they seem to eye you with pride and a certain contempt. Along the way you stumble over cannonballs that lie strewn about in the road here and there, and lose your footing in the water-filled craters dug by shells in the stony soil. You overtake and meet coming towards you detachments of soldiers, Cossack scouts, officers; every once in a while you encounter a woman or a child—this time, however, it is not a woman in a bonnet but a sailor’s wife in an old winter jacket and soldier’s boots. As you pass further along the street and descend a small slope, what you see around you are not houses but strange heaps of rubble, boards, clay and beams; before you, on top of a steep hill, you can see a black, muddy area traversed by ditches—this is the 4th bastion . . . Here you meet even fewer people; there are no women at all to be seen, soldiers move swiftly about, you encounter patches of blood on the road, and here you are certain to come across four privates bearing a stretcher on which lie a blood-stained greatcoat and a pale, yellowish face. If you ask where the man has been wounded, the stretcher-bearers will reply irritably, without turning in your direction, “In the leg” or “In the arm,” if the wound is not serious; or, if no head is visible on the stretcher and the man has already died or is gravely wounded, they will grimly refrain from uttering a word.
The whistle, close at hand, of a shell or a cannonball, just at the very moment you start to climb the hill, gives you a nasty sensation. Suddenly you realize, in an entirely new way, the true significance of those sounds of gunfire you heard from the town. Some quiet, happy memory suddenly flickers to life in your brain; you start thinking more about yourself and less about what you observe around you, and are suddenly gripped by an unpleasant sense of indecision. The sight of a soldier glissading downhill over the wet mud, waving his arms and laughing, silences this cowardly voice that has begun to speak within you at the prospect of danger, however, and you find yourself straightening your chest, lifting your head a little higher and clambering up the slippery, clayey hill. You have only managed to climb a little way when the bullets from carbines[18] begin to hum around you, and you may wonder if it might not be more advisable for you to use the trench that runs parallel to the road; but this trench is filled with stinking yellow, watery mud, and you are certain to choose the road, particularly since everyone else seems to be using it. After you have gone a distance of some two hundred yards or so, you will enter a muddy, churned-up area, surrounded on all sides by gabions, earthworks, magazines, dugouts and platforms on which large cast-iron cannon stand beside neat piles of roundshot. It all looks as though it had been thrown together at random, without the slightest purpose, coherence or sense of order. Here, sitting on the battery, is a little group of sailors; here, right in the middle of the open area, sunk half in slime, lies a fractured cannon; here an infantryman, musket in hand, is making his way across the battery, dragging his feet with difficulty through the clinging mud. Wherever you look, in every conceivable corner, there seem to be shell-splinters, unexploded bombs, cannonballs and camp remains, all of them half submerged in watery ooze. You think you hear a cannonball land not far from you; all around you seem to hear the various sounds that bullets make—from the ones that hum like bees to the ones that whistle rapidly by or twang with a noise like a plucked string; you hear the terrible boom of an artillery discharge: it shakes you to the core and inspires you with a profound sense of dread.
“So this is it, the 4th bastion, that dreadful, truly dreadful place,” you think to yourself, experiencing a slight feeling of pr
ide, and an anything-but-slight feeling of suppressed terror. You are, however, in for a disappointment: for this is not yet the 4th bastion proper. This is only the Yazon redoubt[19]—a relatively safe and in no way dreadful place. If you wish to reach the 4th bastion, you must turn to the right along this narrow trench, the one you saw that infantryman plodding along just now, ducking as he went. Here you may meet another stretcher party, a sailor, a soldier with his shovels. Here, perhaps, in the mud, you will see the wires of mines, dugouts so small that only two men can squeeze into them, and even then only if they bend almost double; and here too you will see the Cossack scouts of the Black Sea battalions eating, smoking, changing their boots and in general carrying on with their everyday lives; everywhere you will see the same stinking mud, camp remains and bits of scrap iron of all shapes and sizes. After you have gone another three hundred yards or so you will emerge at another battery; a flat, open area dug with trenches and surrounded by gabions, field guns mounted on platforms, and earthen ramparts. Here you may spot four or five sailors playing cards beneath the parapet; a naval officer, observing that you are a newcomer and, moreover, an inquisitive one, will show you with satisfaction around his domain, pointing out all the things that may be of interest to you. So calmly does this officer roll his yellow-papered cigarette as he sits on a cannon, so calmly does he saunter from one embrasure to another, so calmly, and without the slightest affectation, does he speak to you that, in spite of the bullets that are humming above your head with greater frequency now, you yourself begin to acquire a certain sang-froid and find yourself plying him with questions and listening attentively to his stories. This officer will tell you—but only if you ask him—about the bombardment on the fifth, and about how on his battery that day only one gun was operational and only eight men left out of the entire crew—yet the very next morning, on the sixth, he had all his guns “blazing”[a]; he will tell you how on the fifth a shell hit the dugout where some sailors were sheltering, killing eleven of them; from one of the embrasures he will point out to you the enemy batteries and trenches, which are no more than seventy or eighty yards away. I fear, however, that when you lean out of the embrasure in order to take a look at the enemy, the humming of the bullets will have the effect of preventing you from seeing anything at all; but if you do manage to see anything, you will find it very difficult to believe that this white stone rampart, which is so close to you and from which white puffs of smoke keep erupting, is in fact the enemy—“him,” as both soldiers and sailors say.
It is even quite possible that, either out of vanity or simply in order to provide himself with some diversion, the naval officer will decide to let off a few rounds while you are there. “Gunner and crew to the cannon!” he will order, and some fourteen sailors, this one putting his pipe away in his pocket, that one chewing the last remains of his “sukhar,”[20] will cheerily clatter off at the double along the platform to one of the cannon in their hobnailed boots, and start loading it. Take a good look at the faces, the bearing and movements of these men: in every crease of these bronzed, high-cheekboned countenances, in every muscle, in the breadth of these shoulders, in the thickness of these legs clad in their massive boots, in every calm, assured, unhurried movement may be seen those central characteristics that go to make up the Russian’s strength—his stubbornness and straightforwardness. As you study these faces you will perceive that the danger, savagery and sufferings of war have added to those central distinguishing features the marks of a conscious sense of dignity and the traces of lofty feelings and thoughts.
All of a sudden the noise of a most fearful explosion startles you out of your wits, delivering a severe jolt not only to your ears but to the whole of your being, making you tremble in every limb. Immediately afterwards you hear the fading whistle of the projectile, and a thick pall of powder smoke enshrouds you, likewise enveloping the platform and the black figures of the sailors moving to and fro on it. You hear the sailors exchanging various opinions on the subject of this discharge of ours; you observe how excited the men are, and watch them give expression to a feeling you for some reason did not expect them to be capable of, one of savage hatred for the enemy and a wish to have revenge on him, a feeling that lurks in the soul of every human being. “It landed right on that embrasure; looks as though it’s killed two of them . . . Yes, they’re carrying them away!” you hear them exclaim in high delight. “That’ll make him lose his rag: he’ll be sending one over here in a minute, someone says; and sure enough, a moment or two later you see lightning and smoke ahead of you; the sentry standing on the parapet shouts: “Ca-a-nnon!,” and then a cannonball shrieks past you, slaps into the earth and showers everything around with mud and stones, forming a crater. The battery commander will be very annoyed about this cannonball, he will order a second and a third piece to be loaded, the enemy will start to answer our fire, and you will experience some interesting feelings, and witness some interesting sights and sounds. Once again the sentry will shout “Cannon!,” and you will hear the same shrieking sound, followed by the same slap and showering of earth; or he will shout “Mortar!” and you will hear the even whistle of a mortar shell, a sound that is quite pleasant and not at all easy to associate with anything very dreadful; you will hear this whistling sound come nearer and nearer in an accelerating crescendo, and then you will see a black sphere and witness the shell’s impact against the earth, its palpable, ringing explosion. Then shell-splinters will fly whistling and whining in all directions, stones will rustle through the air, and you will be spattered with mud. You will experience a sensation that is a strange blend of fear and enjoyment. At the moment you know the shell is heading in your direction, you are bound to think it is going to kill you; but a feeling of self-respect will sustain you, and no one will observe the knife that is lacerating your heart. When, however, the shell sails past, leaving you unscathed, you will recover your spirits and be seized, if only for a moment, by a sense of relief that is unutterably pleasant. You will discover a peculiar fascination in this dangerous game of life and death; you will want the shells and cannonballs to land closer and closer to you. But there is the sentry shouting “Mortar!” in his loud, guttural voice, here again are the whistle, impact and explosion of a shell. This time above the roar of the explosion you are suddenly aware of a man’s groans. You arrive by the wounded man’s side—covered in blood and dirt, he has a strangely inhuman appearance—just as a stretcher party is coming. He is a sailor, and he has had part of his chest blown away. During these first moments his face can register nothing but terror and the feigned, anticipatory look of suffering[21] that is characteristic of men in his condition; but as the stretcher is brought near him and he lies down on it on his good side, you observe that this expression is replaced by one of exaltation and lofty, unspoken thought: his eyes burn more brightly, his teeth are clenched, he lifts his head with effort; and as he is raised from the ground he makes the stretcher-bearers pause and he says to his companions with difficulty, in a trembling voice: “Sorry, lads!” It is evident that he wants to add something to this, and that it is something moving, but all he can manage is to repeat the words, “Sorry, lads!” At this point one of the wounded man’s sailor comrades approaches him, places a cap on the head that is raised for him, and calmly, indifferently, swinging his arms, returns to his gun. “We get seven or eight cases like that every day,” the naval officer informs you, in response to the look of horror on your face, as he yawns and rolls another of his yellow-papered cigarettes . . .
So now you have seen the defenders of Sebastopol on the lines of defence themselves, and you retrace your steps, for some reason paying no attention now to the cannonballs and bullets that continue to whistle across your route all the way back to the demolished theatre, and you walk in a state of calm exaltation. The one central, reassuring conviction you have come away with is that it is quite impossible for Sebastopol ever to be taken by the enemy. Not only that: you are convinced that the strength of the Russian people c
annot possibly ever falter, no matter in what part of the world it may be put to the test. This impossibility you have observed, not in that proliferation of traverses, parapets, ingeniously interwoven trenches, mines and artillery-pieces of which you have understood nothing, but in the eyes, words and behaviour—that which is called the spirit—of the defenders of Sebastopol. What they do, they do so straightforwardly, with so little strain or effort, that you are convinced they must be capable of a hundred times as much . . . they could do anything. You realize now that the feeling which drives them has nothing in common with the vain, petty and mindless emotions you yourself have experienced, but is of an altogether different and more powerful nature; it has turned them into men capable of living with as much calm beneath a hail of cannonballs, faced with a hundred chances of death, as people who, like most of us, are faced with only one such chance, and of living in those conditions while putting up with sleeplessness, dirt and ceaseless hard labour. Men will not put up with terrible conditions like these for the sake of a cross or an honour, or because they have been threatened: there must be another, higher motivation. This motivation is a feeling that surfaces only rarely in the Russian, but lies deeply embedded in his soul—a love of his native land. Only now do the stories of the early days of the siege of Sebastopol, when there were no fortifications, no troops, when there was no physical possibility of holding the town and there was nevertheless not the slightest doubt that it would be kept from the enemy—of the days when Kornilov, that hero worthy of ancient Greece, would say as he inspected his troops: “We will die, men, rather than surrender Sebastopol,” and when our Russian soldiers, unversed in phrase-mongering, would answer: “We will die! Hurrah!”—only now do the stories of those days cease to be a beautiful historic legend and become a reality, a fact. You will suddenly have a clear and vivid awareness that those men you have just seen are the very same heroes who in those difficult days did not allow their spirits to sink but rather felt them rise as they joyfully prepared to die, not for the town but for their native land. Long will Russia bear the imposing traces of this epic of Sebastopol, the hero of which was the Russian people.