“Yes, a bit!” shouted Pest, his inconsequential reply showing that he had not been able to make out what Kalugin had said. The clatter of the small Cossack horses’ hooves quickly faded along the dark street.
“Non, dites-moi, est-ce qu’il y aura véritablement quelque chose cette nuit?” inquired Galtsin, who was lounging in the window-seat beside Kalugin, watching the shells rising and falling over the bastions.
“I suppose I can tell you. After all, you’ve been in the bastions, haven’t you?” Galtsin made a sign that this was so, although in fact he had been in the 4th bastion only once. “Well, then: in front of our lunette there used to be a trench . . . ” And Kalugin, who was not a specialist, though he considered he had a pretty sound grasp of military matters, began to deliver a somewhat labyrinthine account—in the course of which he got all the fortificational terms mixed up—of the enemy positions and those of our forces, and of the plan for the action that lay ahead.
“Look, they’re taking pot-shots at the lodgments now. Aha! Was that one of ours or one of his? See, there’s the explosion,” they said as they lounged in the window, watching the fiery traces of the shells crossing one another in mid-air, the flashes of gunfire that momentarily lit up the dark blue sky, and the white smoke of discharged gunpowder, and listening to the sounds of the ever intensifying cannonade.
“Quel charmant coup d’œil! Eh?” said Kalugin, drawing his guest’s attention to this spectacle, which was indeed one of great beauty. “You know, it’s sometimes impossible to tell which are shells and which are stars!”
“Yes, I thought that was a star just now, but it fell and exploded. And that large star there—what’s its name again?—looks just like a shell.”
“You know, I’m so used to these shells now that I’m sure when I get back to Russia I’ll see them whenever there’s a starry night. That’s how used to them one gets.”
“Do you think I ought to go on this sortie?” said Prince Galtsin, after a moment’s pause. The very thought of being out there during such a terrible cannonade made him shudder, and he reflected with a sense of relief that it was quite out of the question for him to be sent there at night.
“Enough of that, man! Stop thinking about it. Anyway, I won’t allow you to go,” replied Kalugin, who was perfectly well aware that wild horses would not drag Galtsin out there. “There’ll be plenty of other opportunities.”
“Are you sure? You really think I needn’t go? Eh?”
At that moment a terrible crackle of small-arms fire sounded above the din of the artillery, coming from the direction in which the two men were looking: thousands of tiny, constantly flaring points could be seen blazing along the whole length of the line.
“It’s really getting started now!” said Kalugin. “You know, I can never hear that sound of muskets and rifles without reacting to it in a special way—it seems to take hold of one, somehow. There’s a cheer going up,” he added, listening to the distant, protracted roar of hundreds of voices—“ah-ah-ah-ah-ah”—which were being carried towards him from the bastion.
“Whose hurrah is that? Theirs or ours?”
“I don’t know, but they must have started fighting hand-to-hand now, because the firing’s stopped.”
At that moment an orderly officer and a Cossack came galloping up to the house and stopped beneath the window. The officer dismounted.
“Where are you from?”
“The bastion. I must see the general.”
“All right, come with me. What’s the trouble?”
“They’ve launched an assault on the lodgments—and taken them . . . The French brought up massive reserves . . . they attacked our troops . . . we only had two battalions,” said the officer, panting. He was one of the men who had been there earlier that evening. Now, barely able to catch his breath, he none the less contrived to stroll up to the front door in a thoroughly nonchalant manner.
“What’s happened? Have our forces retreated?”
“No,” replied the officer, angrily. “Another battalion arrived and beat the enemy off, but the regimental commander was killed, as well as a lot of the officers, and I’ve been sent to ask for reinforcements . . . ”
Five minutes later, Kalugin was in the saddle of his Cossack horse (he too in that distinctive quasi-Cossack position which, I have observed, all adjutants appear for some reason to find particularly agreeable), and was setting off at a fast trot towards the bastion to deliver fresh orders and await some news concerning the final outcome of the action; while Prince Galtsin, infected with that painful excitement that is commonly experienced by onlookers who are confronted by the outward manifestations of a battle at close quarters but are not taking part in it, went out on to the street and began to walk aimlessly up and down.
— 6 —
Crowds of soldiers were ferrying men on stretchers or helping them along by the arm. In the street it was pitch dark; lights shone only very occasionally here and there—in the windows of the hospital, or in those of a house where some officers were sitting up late. The same rumble of artillery and small-arms fire was still coming from the bastions, and lights still flared in the black sky. Now and then could be heard the thud of hooves as an orderly galloped by, the groans of a wounded man, the voices and footsteps of stretcher-bearers, or the murmur of women as the frightened inhabitants came out on to their porches to watch the cannonade.
Among these people was our friend Nikita, together with the old sailor’s widow, with whom he had now made his peace, and her ten-year-old daughter.
“Lord Almighty, Mother of Jesus,” the old woman was saying to herself, in between sighs, as she watched the shells hurtling constantly back and forth like balls of fire. “Horrible things, horrible things, aye-aye-aye! It was nothing like this during the first bombardment. Look where it’s exploded, the nasty brute, over there in the village, right on top of our house.”
“No, that’s further away, it’s Auntie Irina’s garden they’re landing in,” said the girl.
“And where, where is my master at this hour?” said Nikita, who was still slightly drunk, in a sing-song voice. “Oh, I love that master of mine more than words can tell. He beats me, oh how he beats me, but I still love him something terrible. I love him so much that if, God forbid, he were to be killed in all these carryings-on, I don’t know what I’d do with myself, Auntie, honest to God I don’t! Such a master he is, there’s only one word for it. Can you ever see me swapping him for one of that card-playing lot—what manner of men are those? Pah! There’s only one word for it,” Nikita concluded, pointing to the window of his master’s lighted room where in the lieutenant-captain’s absence the Polish cadet Zwadczeski had invited a couple of guests to help him celebrate the military cross he had just been awarded. These guests, who were also Poles, were Lieutenant-Colonel Ugrowicz and Lieutenant Nieprzysiecki, the very same man whose turn it was to go to the bastion that night and who was supposed to be incapacitated by a gumboil.
“Look at the stars, the stars are falling!” cried the girl, who was looking up at the sky, breaking the silence that had followed in the wake of Nikita’s monologue. “There! There’s another one fallen! Why are they doing that, mother?”
“Our house’ll be blowed to smithereens,” said the old woman with a sigh, leaving her daughter’s question unanswered.
“And mother, when uncle and I went there today,” continued the girl, prattling on in her melodious voice, “there was an enormous great cannonball lying in the parlour, right beside the cupboard: it must have smashed right through the passage. It was so enormous nobody could lift it.”
“The women who had husbands and money all moved away,” said the old woman, “but here—oh misery me, the poorest house in the neighbourhood, and they’ve blown it up, too. Look at him blazing away, the devil! Lord, Lord!”
“And just when we were about to leave a shell came whee-eeing over and burst to pie-ie-ces and sent earth strea-eaming all over us, and a splinter nearly got uncle and
me.”
“She ought to get a medal for that,” said the cadet, who had in the meantime come out on to the porch with the officers to watch the exchange of fire.
“You go in and see the general, old woman,” said Lieutenant Nieprzysiecki, patting her on the shoulder. “I mean it.”
“Pojdę na ulicę zobaczýc co tam nowego,”[b][32] he added, as he went down the steps.
“A my tymczasem napijmy sie wodki, bo cós dusza w pięty ucieka,”[c] said the sanguine Zwadczeski, laughing.
— 7 —
More and more wounded men, some on stretchers, some on foot being helped along by others, and all talking to one another in loud voices, were coming down the street in Prince Galtsin’s direction.
“You should have seen the way they came running, lads,” one tall soldier, who had two muskets slung over his shoulder, was saying in a deep voice. “You should have seen the way they came running, shouting ‘Allah! Allah!’[d] Climbing on top of one another, they were. You’d kill one of them, but the others would just run over him—there was nothing you could do to stop them. Millions of them, there were . . . ”
Galtsin stopped the man at this point in his narrative.
“Have you come from the bastion?”
“Indeed I have, your honour.”
“All right, tell me what happened there.”
“What happened, your honour? Well, sir, their forces came up and stormed the rampart, and that was that. They completely overpowered us, your honour!”
“What do you mean, overpowered you? You repulsed them, didn’t you?”
“How could we do that, your honour, when he sent the whole of his forces over? He slaughtered all our men, and we didn’t get any reinforcements.” (The soldier was mistaken, as the trench was still in Russian hands; but this is a curious phenomenon, and it is one that may be commonly observed: the soldier who has been wounded in action invariably believes the battle to have been lost with fearful carnage.)
“Then how was it they told me the assault had been repulsed?” said Galtsin, with irritation.
At that moment Lieutenant Nieprzysiecki, who had recognized Prince Galtsin in the darkness by his white cap, came up to him, anxious to take advantage of this opportunity of having a few words with such an important person.
“Are you able to inform me, sir, of what has happened?” he asked courteously, touching the peak of his cap.
“I’m trying to find out myself,” said Prince Galtsin, and he turned once more to the soldier with the two muskets: “Is it possible that the enemy were repulsed after you’d gone? How long is it since you left the scene of the battle?”
“I’ve only just arrived, your honour!” replied the soldier. “I doubt it, sir. No, sir, he must have taken the trench—completely overpowered us, he did.”
“Well, you ought to be ashamed—giving up a trench to the enemy! This is terrible!” said Galtsin, annoyed by the man’s apparent indifference. “You ought to be ashamed!” he repeated, turning away from the soldier.
“Oh! These men are dreadful. You don’t know them, sir,” said Nieprzysiecki, seizing the initiative. “But I can tell you that it’s no good expecting either pride or patriotism or indeed any noble feelings at all from them. Just look at them, those crowds of them marching along there, not even one in ten of those men is wounded—oh, no, they’re all ‘assistants’—anything, just so long as they don’t have to fight. What a despicable crew! Shame on you, men, shame on you! Giving up one of our trenches!” he added, addressing the soldiers.
“He had his forces there!” muttered the one Galtsin had spoken with.
“Ah, your honour,” said a man who was being carried on a stretcher which had at that moment drawn level with them. “If we’d had the men we’d never have surrendered, not in a million years. But what could we do? I got my bayonet into one of them, and then something hit me . . . Oh-h, easy, lads, not so rough, lads, not so rough . . . o-o-oh!” groaned the wounded man.
“You’re quite right, there really do seem to be too many men coming back,” said Galtsin, and once again he stopped the tall soldier with the two muskets. “Why are you coming back? Hey, you there, halt!”
The soldier stood still and removed his cap with his left hand.
“Where are you going, and on whose orders?” Galtsin thundered at him. “Good-for . . . ”
Just as he was about to accost the soldier at close quarters, however, he noticed that the man’s right hand was inside the cuff of his coat and that his arm was soaked up to the elbow in blood. “I’ve been wounded, your honour!”
“Where have you been wounded?”
“Here, your honour,” said the soldier, pointing to his arm. “It must have been a bullet. But I don’t know what it was that got my head.” And bowing his head forward, he showed the blood-smeared, matted hair at the nape of his neck.
“And who does that other musket belong to?”
“It’s a carbine, your honour. I took it off a Frenchman, sir; I would never have left the fight if I hadn’t had to look after this lad here—he’d fall down if I wasn’t here to help him along,” he added, pointing to a soldier who was making his way along with difficulty a short distance ahead, leaning on his musket and dragging his left leg.
“And where are you going, you scoundrel?” shouted Lieutenant Nieprzysiecki at another soldier who happened to be coming in his direction, hoping by this show of zeal to favourably impress the important prince. This soldier also turned out to have been wounded.
Prince Galtsin suddenly felt horribly ashamed of Lieutenant Nieprzysiecki, and even more so of himself. He could feel himself blushing—something he hardly ever did. He turned away from the lieutenant and, without questioning any more of the wounded men or bothering to keep an eye on them further, set off for the dressing station.
Forcing his way with difficulty up the steps through the throngs of walking wounded and stretcher-bearers arriving with casualties and leaving with corpses, Galtsin entered the Assembly Hall, took one quick look round, and immediately found himself turning back and running out on to the street. This was too dreadful!
— 8 —
The large, high-ceilinged chamber, lit only by the four or five candles the surgeons used on their rounds of inspection, was literally full. Stretcher parties were constantly arriving with casualties, setting them down one beside the other on the floor—which was already so closely packed that the wretched men were jostling one another and smearing one another with their blood—and then leaving to fetch more. The pools of blood that were visible wherever there was a vacant space, the fevered breathing of the several hundreds of men and the sweating of the stretcher-bearers combined to produce a characteristic thick, heavy, stinking fetor, in which the surgeons’ candles bleakly glimmered from various corners of the room. A murmur of groans, sighs and crepitations, broken now and again by a bloodcurdling scream, ran throughout the entire area. The Sisters, with their calm faces that expressed not the futile, morbidly tearful kind of sympathy that might have been expected of women, but an active, no-nonsense and practical concern, strode to and fro among the wounded men, bearing medicine, water, bandages and lint, their uniforms flashing white against the blood-stained shirts and greatcoats. Gloomy-faced surgeons in their rolled-up shirtsleeves knelt beside wounded men while an apothecary assistant held up the candle, pushing their fingers into bullet wounds and searching them, or turning over severed limbs that still hung by a thread, in spite of the terrible groans and entreaties of the sufferer. One of the surgeons sat at a small table beside the entry door; as Galtsin came in he was recording the five hundred and thirty-second admission.
“Ivan Bogayev, private, 3rd company, S—— Regiment, compound fracture of the thigh!” shouted a surgeon from the far end of the chamber, as he examined a man’s shattered leg. “Turn him over for a minute.”
“Oh—oh, father in heaven, father in heaven!” cried the soldier, begging to be left alone.
“Fracture of the skull!?
??
“Semyon Neferdov, lieutenant-colonel, N—— Infantry Regiment. Try to put a brave face on it, colonel, or else I’ll have to stop,” said another surgeon, as he picked at the unfortunate lieutenant-colonel’s head with a kind of hook.
“Ah! Ah! Stop it! Oh, for the love of God, be quick, be quick, for the love of . . . A-a-a-ah!”
“Perforation of the chest . . . Sevasty an Sereda, private . . . what regiment? . . . Don’t bother writing it down, he’ll be dead in a minute. Take him away,” said a surgeon, walking away from one soldier whose eyes had started to roll up and was already beginning to emit a death rattle . . .
A crowd of some forty soldiers, who were acting as stretcher-bearers and were waiting for patched-up casualties to take to the hospital or corpses to take to the chapel, stood at the doorway observing this scene in silence; now and then one or the other of them would heave a deep sigh . . .
— 9 —
On his way to the bastion Kalugin encountered a large number of wounded men. Since he knew from experience what a bad effect such a spectacle is likely to have on a man who is about to go into battle, he did not stop to question them and tried, indeed, to ignore them altogether. As he was about to climb the hill he met an orderly galloping down from the bastion at full tilt.
“Zobkin! Zobkin! Stop for a moment, will you?”
“Yes, sir, what is it?”
“Where have you just come from?”
“The lodgments, sir.”
“What’s it like there? Pretty warm, eh?”
“It’s hot as hell, sir. Terrible!”
And the orderly galloped on.
Although there was not much in the way of rifle and musketry fire, the cannonade had begun again with renewed ardour and ferocity.
“That doesn’t sound too good,” thought Kalugin with an unpleasant sensation, and he, too, was visited by a forewarning—that is to say, by a very commonplace thought, the thought of death. But Kalugin was not Lieutenant-Captain Mikhailov; he was proud, and possessed of nerves that would withstand anything—he was, in short, what is termed “brave,” he did not allow his initial reactions to get the better of him, and set about reassuring himself. He recalled the adjutant—it had been one of Napoleon’s, he thought—who, after communicating the orders with which he had been entrusted, had galloped back to the Emperor at full tilt, his head covered in blood.