Already the day is drawing to a close. Just before it sets, the sun comes out from behind the grey storm-clouds that obscure the sky, and suddenly shines with a crimson light on the purple thunderheads, on the greenish sea bedizened with ships and sailboats and rocked by a broad, even swell, on the white structures of the town, and on the people moving about the streets. The strains of an old waltz that is being played by the regimental band on the Boulevard come floating across the water, together with the booming of the guns from the bastions, which seems strangely to echo them.
Sebastopol
23 April 1853
SEBASTOPOL
IN MAY
— 1 —
Six months have now passed since the first cannonball came hurtling over from the bastions of Sebastopol to churn up the earth on the enemy’s works; ever since then, thousands of shells, cannonballs and bullets have been fired from the bastions at the enemy trenches and from those trenches back at the bastions, and the angel of death has hovered ceaselessly above them.
During this time thousands of individual personal vanities have been insulted, thousands have been gratified, and thousands have gone to rest in the arms of death. How many military decorations have been pinned on, how many stripped off, how many St Anne Ribbons and Orders of St Vladimir have been awarded, how many pink coffins and linen palls have gone to the grave! And still the same booming resounds from the bastions, still on clear evenings the French survey, with involuntary trepidation and superstitious dread, the yellowish, churned-up earth of the Sebastopol bastions and the outlines of the Russian sailors moving about on them, and still they count the embrasures from which the cast-iron cannon angrily bristle; still, as before, from the tower on Telegraph Hill a navigational NCO examines through a telescope the brightly coloured figures of the French forces, their batteries, their tents, their columns moving on the Green Hill,[22] and the puffs of smoke that leap up from their trenches; and still, inspired by the same zeal, oddly assorted companies of men with desires that are even more oddly assorted come flocking, struggling their way from different corners of the earth towards this fatal spot.
But the dispute which the diplomats have failed to settle is proving to be even less amenable to settlement by means of gunpowder and human blood.
A strange thought often used to occur to me: what if one of the warring sides were to propose to the other that each should dismiss one soldier from its ranks? That might seem an odd thing to do, but why not try it? Then a second soldier from each side could be told to go, followed by a third, a fourth, and so on, until each army only had one soldier left (this always assuming that the two armies were equal in strength, and that it would be possible to substitute quality for quantity). Finally, if it still appeared that the really complex disputes arising between the rational representatives of rational creatures must be settled by combat, let the fighting be done by these two soldiers: one could lay siege to the town, and the other could defend it.
This argument may seem to be no more than a paradox, yet it is a sound one. For in truth, what difference is there between one Russian fighting one allied representative, and eighty thousand Russians fighting eighty thousand allied representatives? A hundred and thirty-five thousand against a hundred and thirty-five thousand; twenty against twenty; one against one—none of these figures is any more logical than another. Or, it might be argued, the latter figure is by far the most logical, because it represents the most humane suggestion. One of two things appears to be true: either war is madness, or, if men perpetrate this madness, they thereby demonstrate that they are far from being the rational creatures we for some reason commonly suppose them to be.
— 2 —
In the besieged town of Sebastopol a regimental band was playing next to the pavilion on the Boulevard, and crowds of military men accompanied by women were moving gaily along the paths in holiday mood. A bright spring sun had ascended the morning sky above the English positions, had moved over to the bastions, then to the town and the Nicholas Barracks and, shining with equal joy on all, was now descending towards the far-off, dark blue sea whose even swell gleamed with a silvery sheen.
A tall, slightly stooping infantry officer, pulling on a glove that was, if not immaculately white, at least fairly presentable, emerged from the gate of one of the little seamen’s houses on Main Street and, looking reflectively at the ground as he walked, set off up the hill towards the Boulevard. The expression on this officer’s plain, low-browed face bespoke limited intellectual ability, but it also reflected a certain sober-mindedness, honesty and inclination towards tidiness. He was of poor build—long-legged, awkward and somewhat diffident in his movements. He wore a smart new cap, a thin summer greatcoat of a slightly peculiar lilac shade, from beneath the breast of which a gold watch-chain peeped; his trousers had foot-straps, and he was shod in a pair of calf leather boots that were clean and shiny, though slightly worn at the heels in several places. It was, however, less from these items, which are not commonly encountered upon the person of an infantry officer, than from the man’s general bearing that an experienced military eye was at once able to perceive that this was no ordinary infantry officer, but someone a little higher up in rank. He might have passed for a German, if his facial features had not belied his purely Russian origins; or he might have been an adjutant, or a regimental quartermaster (but then he would have worn spurs), or an officer who had been transferred from the cavalry, or possibly the guard, for the duration of the campaign. In fact he had been transferred from the cavalry, and at this moment, as he made his way up to the Boulevard, he was thinking about a letter he had just received from an old military friend and colleague, now retired, a landowner in the province of T——, and his wife, the pale, blue-eyed Natasha, who was a great friend of the officer’s. He was thinking in particular about one passage in the letter, where his comrade had written:
When our copies of the Veteran[23] are delivered, Pupka [such was the pet name the retired Uhlan had given his wife] rushes headlong into the hallway, seizes the newspapers and runs off with them to the S-shaped seat in the arbour, or the drawing-room (in which, you’ll remember, we whiled away the winter evenings so gloriously when your regiment was stationed in our town), and you simply can’t imagine the excitement with which she reads about your noble exploits. She often says of you: “That Mikhailov,” she says, “such a darling man, I feel like smothering him with kisses whenever I set eyes on him, he’s fighting in the bastions; he’s sure to get the St George Cross and be written about in the newspapers,” and so on and so forth, with the result that I’m definitely beginning to feel jealous.
At another point in the letter he had written:
The newspapers are terribly late in arriving, and although a lot of the news gets around by word of mouth, you can’t believe it all. For example, those musical young ladies you’re familiar with were claiming yesterday that Napoleon[24] has been taken prisoner by our Cossacks and sent off to St Petersburg, but you can imagine how much of that I believe. One visitor from St Petersburg (he works for a government minister on special assignments, a really capital fellow, such a risource for us now that there’s hardly anybody left in town, you’ve simply no idea) was stating it to us as a fact that our chaps have taken Eupatoria, that the French have lost their line of communication to Balaclava,[25] and that while we only lost two hundred men in the assault, the French lost as many as fifteen thousand. Pupka was so overjoyed that she went on the spree all night, and she says she’s had a sort of premonition that you probably took part in that assault and distinguished yourself . . .
In spite of the words and expressions I have purposely marked in italics, and notwithstanding the whole tone of the letter, from which the high-minded reader will doubtless form a correct and negative impression concerning the respectability of Lieutenant-Captain Mikhailov with his own down-at-heel boots, and of his friend who writes “risource” and has such strange notions of geography, concerning the pale friend on the S-shaped sea
t (he may, not without justification, imagine this Natasha with dirty fingernails), and in general concerning the whole of this dirty, idle, provincial milieu, so contemptible to him—in spite of all this, Lieutenant-Captain Mikhailov remembered his pale, provincial lady friend with an inexpressibly sweet sadness, recalling how he had used to sit with her in the arbour discussing sentiments. He remembered his good-natured Uhlan friend who would lose his temper and end up having to pay fines when they played cards for copeck stakes in the study, and how his wife would laugh at him; he remembered the friendly feelings these people entertained in his regard (possibly it seemed to him that there was even more than this where his pale friend was concerned): these people and their surroundings flickered in his mind’s eye, suffused in a wonderfully sweet, comfortingly rosy light, and, smiling at his memories, he patted the pocket which contained the letter that was so dear to him. These memories were lent an even greater aura of charm for Lieutenant-Captain Mikhailov by the fact that the milieu in which he was now constrained to live—that of an infantry regiment—was far more lowly than the one in which, as a cavalryman and knight of the ladies, he had previously moved in the town of T——, being everywhere well received.
So much more elevated were the circles in which he had previously moved than those in which he presently found himself, that when in moments of candour he happened to tell his fellow infantrymen that he had driven his own droshky, had attended balls at the house of the provincial governor and had played cards with a government service general, they would listen to him with a kind of sceptical indifference, as though all that mattered was that they should not contradict him or demonstrate that none of this had in fact been the case—“Let him talk,” they would say, implying that if he showed no obvious contempt for the vodka-swilling of his fellows, for their quarter-copeck-stake games with old packs of cards and for the general vulgarity of the life they led, then this must be attributable to the unusually modest, easy-going and discreet quality of his disposition.
From memories, Lieutenant-Captain Mikhailov found himself passing to hopes and dreams. “How astonished and delighted Natasha will be,” he thought as he strode along a narrow lane in his down-at-heel boots, “when she suddenly comes across a report in the Veteran of how I was the first man to climb up on the cannon and receive the St George Cross. I ought to be made a captain on account of that decoration, in any case. It’s quite likely that I’ll be made a battalion commander this year, because a lot of men have already been killed in this campaign, and a lot more are going to die before it’s over. There’ll be another battle and I, as a famous man, will be given a regiment to lead . . . I’ll be made a lieutenant-colonel . . . I’ll get the St Anne Ribbon . . . then I’ll be a colonel . . . ”—and in no time he was a general, deigning to visit Natasha, the widow of his comrade (who in his dreams was dead by now). Just then, however, the playing of the regimental band came more clearly to his ears, the crowds of people burst upon his sight and he found himself on the Boulevard, a lieutenant-captain as before, awkward, timid and of no significance.
— 3 —
First he went over to the pavilion, beside which the bandsmen were standing, together with other soldiers from the same regiment who were holding the band parts open in front of them for them to read; they in turn were surrounded by a little circle of clerks, cadets, nannies with young children and officers in old greatcoats, observing rather than listening. The people round the pavilion, either standing, sitting or strolling about, were for the most part naval officers, adjutants and army officers in white gloves and new greatcoats. Along the broad avenue of the Boulevard strolled officers of all classes and women of all classes; a few of the women were dressed in hats, but most of them wore kerchiefs (there were also some who wore neither kerchiefs nor hats), and it was a striking fact that there was not an old woman among them—indeed, they were all of them young. Below, in the shady, scented alleys of acacia, individual groups sat or wandered.
No one seemed unusually pleased to meet Lieutenant-Captain Mikhailov, with the possible exception of Captains Obzhogov and Suslikov, both of whom were members of his regiment and both of whom warmly shook hands with him; but the former was dressed in camelhair trousers and a frayed greatcoat, wore no gloves, and had a face that was red and streaming with perspiration, while the latter shouted his remarks so loudly and in such an over-familiar manner that it was embarrassing to walk in his company, particularly under the gaze of the officers in white gloves, with one of whom—an adjutant—Mikhailov exchanged bows, and with another of whom—a field officer—it would have been permissible for him to exchange bows, since he had twice encountered the man at the house of a mutual acquaintance. Moreover, what possible enjoyment could be had from walking with Messrs Obzhogov and Suslikov when he already met them and shook hands with them six times a day as it was? It was not for the sake of this that he had come to hear the band.
He would dearly have liked to have gone up to the adjutant with whom he exchanged bows and talked to those gentlemen for a while, not at all in order that Captains Obzhogov and Suslikov, Lieutenant Pashtetsky and the rest should see him talking to them, but simply because they were nice people, who were acquainted with all the latest news, what was more, and might be able to tell him a thing or two . . .
But why is Lieutenant-Captain Mikhailov afraid, unable to bring himself to go up to them? “What if they should suddenly decide they’re not going to bow back to me,” he thinks, “or what if they bow and then just carry on talking to one another as though I weren’t there; or turn their backs on me completely, leaving me there all on my own among the aristocrats?” The word aristocrats (used to designate the highest select circle of any social order) has for some time now enjoyed considerable popularity among us here in Russia, where one might have supposed it ought not really to exist at all, and has found its way into every region of the country and every social stratum where vanity has managed to penetrate (and into what areas of occasion and circumstance does this vile peccadillo not reach?)—among merchants, among civil servants, government clerks and officers, to Saratov, to Mamadysh, to Vinnitsa—everywhere where there are people, in fact. And since there are a great many people in the besieged town of Sebastopol, there is also a great deal of vanity to be found; there are, in other words, aristocrats, even though death hangs above the heads of aristocrat and non-aristocrat alike, ready to strike at any moment.
In the eyes of Captain Obzhogov, Lieutenant-Captain Mikhailov is an aristocrat because he is wearing a clean greatcoat and gloves, and for this reason he finds him insufferable, even though he has a slight respect for the man; in the eyes of Lieutenant-Captain Mikhailov, Adjutant Kalugin is an aristocrat simply because he is an adjutant and is on “thou” terms with another adjutant, and for this reason he is not entirely well disposed towards him, even though he fears him. In the eyes of Adjutant Kalugin, Count Nordov is an aristocrat, and he is forever cursing him in silence and inwardly despising him because he is an aide-de-camp to the Tsar. It is a formidable word, this aristocrat. Why does Second Lieutenant Zobov laugh such a forced laugh—even though there is nothing to laugh at—as he walks past his companion who is sitting there with a field officer? In order to show that even though he may not be an aristocrat, he is in no way inferior to him. Why is the field officer talking in such a faint, indolently mournful and affected voice? In order to demonstrate to the man with whom he is talking that he, the field officer, is an aristocrat and is really being extremely gracious in deigning to talk to a second lieutenant. Why is the cadet volunteer[26] waving his arms about and winking like that as he follows a lady he has only just set eyes on for the first time and would never dare accost for anything in the world? Why has the captain of artillery been so rude to the good-natured orderly? In order to demonstrate to all the men present that he never curries favour and has no need of aristocrats, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam.
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity—even on the brink of the grave, and among men who
are ready to die for the sake of a lofty conviction. Vanity! It must be the distinguishing characteristic and special malady of our age. Why is it that in the records of peoples of earlier times not a mention is made of this vice, any more than there is mention of smallpox or cholera? Why, in the age we live in, are there only three kinds of people: those who accept vanity as a fact that is unavoidable and therefore justified, and who freely abandon themselves to it; those who accept it as an unfortunate but insuperable condition of human existence; and those who slavishly and unconsciously act under its influence? Why did authors such as Homer and Shakespeare write of love, glory and suffering, while the literature of our own age is merely an endless sequel to The Book of Snobs and Vanity Fair?[27]
Twice, in his inability to pluck up enough courage, Lieutenant-Captain Mikhailov walked past the little circle of “his” aristocrats but on the third attempt he managed to pull himself together and approached them. The circle was made up of four officers: Adjutant Prince Galtsin, who was something of an aristocrat even in Kalugin’s eyes; Lieutenant-Colonel Neferdov, one of the so-called “Hundred and Twenty-two” men of society who had come out of retirement and back into active service partly under the influence of patriotism, partly out of ambition, and partly because “everyone else” was doing it; an old bachelor Moscow clubman who, while he had been here, had joined the number of those malcontents who never did anything, had no idea of what was what, and condemned every decree the authorities made; and cavalry Captain Praskukhin, who was also one of the “Hundred and Twenty-two” heroes. Luckily for Mikhailov, Kalugin was in an excellent mood (the general had just had a highly confidential word in his ear, and Prince Galtsin, who had come all the way from St Petersburg, was putting up at his quarters), and did not consider it beneath his dignity to shake hands with the lieutenant-captain. This was more than could be said of Praskukhin, who had run across Mikhailov quite a few times in the bastion, had drunk his wine and vodka on more than one occasion, and was even in debt to him to the tune of twelve and a half roubles, lost at preference. Since Praskukhin did not really know Prince Galtsin, he was reluctant to betray to him the fact of his acquaintance with a mere infantry lieutenant-captain, so he made a slight bow in Mikhailov’s direction.