Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 1

SEVASTOPOL IN AUGUST 1855

I

TOWARDS the end of August, through the hot thick dust of the rocky and hilly highway between Duvánka¹ and Bakhchisaráy, an officer’s vehicle was slowly toiling towards Sevastopol (that peculiar kind of vehicle you never meet anywhere else – something between a Jewish britzka, a Russian cart, and a basket).

In the front of the trap, pulling at the reins, squatted an orderly in a nankeen coat and wearing a cap, now quite limp, that had once belonged to an officer: behind, on bundles and bales covered with a soldier’s overcoat, sat an infantry officer in a summer cloak. The officer, as far as one could judge while he was sitting, was not tall but very broad and massive, not across the shoulders so much as from back to chest. His neck and the back of his head were much developed and very solid. He had no waist, and yet his body did not appear to be stout in that part: on the contrary he was rather lean, especially in the face, which was burnt to an unwholesome yellow. He would have been good-looking had it not been for a certain puffiness and the broad soft wrinkles, not due to age, that blurred the outlines of his features, making them seem larger and giving the face a general look of coarseness and lack of freshness. His small eyes were hazel, with a daring and even insolent expression: he had very thick but not wide moustaches the ends of which were bitten off, and his chin and especially his jaws were covered with an exceedingly strong, thick, black stubble of two days’ growth.

This officer had been wounded in the head by a bomb splinter on 10 May² and still wore a bandage, but having felt well again for the past week, he had left the hospital at Simferópol and was now on his way to rejoin his regiment stationed somewhere in the direction of the firing – but whether in Sevastopol itself, on the North Side, or at Inkerman, no one had yet been able to tell him for certain. The sound of frequent firing, especially at times when no hills intercepted it and the wind carried it this way, was already very distinct and seemed quite near. Now an explosion shook the air and made one start involuntarily, now less violent sounds followed one another in quick succession like the roll of drums, broken now and then by a startling boom, and now again all these sounds mingled into a kind of rolling crash, like peals of thunder when a storm is raging in all its fury and rain has just begun to fall in torrents. Everyone was remarking (and one could moreover hear for oneself) that a terrific bombardment was going on. The officer kept telling his orderly to drive faster; he seemed in a hurry to get to his destination. They met a train of Russian peasant-carts that had taken provisions to Sevastopol and were now returning laden with sick and wounded soldiers in grey uniforms, sailors in black cloaks, volunteers with red fezes on their heads, and bearded militiamen. The officer’s trap had to stand still in the thick motionless cloud of dust raised by this train of carts and, frowning and blinking at the dust that filled his eyes, he sat looking at the faces of the sick and wounded as they drove past.

‘There’s a soldier of our company – that one who is so weak!’ said the orderly, turning to his master and pointing to a cart laden with wounded men which had just come up to them.

A bearded Russian in a felt hat sat sideways in the front of the cart plaiting the lash of a whip, the handle of which he held to his side with his elbow. Behind him in the cart five or six soldiers were being jolted along, some lying and some sitting in different positions. One with a bandaged arm and his cloak thrown loosely over his very dirty shirt, though he looked pale and thin, sat upright in the middle of the cart and raised his hand as if to salute the officer, but probably remembering that he was wounded, pretended that he only meant to scratch his head. Beside him on the bottom of the cart lay a man of whom all that was visible was his two hands holding on to the sides of the cart and his lifted knees swaying to and fro like rags. A third, whose face was swollen and who had a soldier’s cap stuck on the top of his bandaged head, sat on the side of the cart with his legs hanging down over the wheel, and, resting his elbows on his knees, seemed to be dozing. The officer addressed him: ‘Dolzhnikóv!’ he cried.

‘Here!’ answered the soldier, opening his eyes and taking off his cap and speaking in such a deep and abrupt bass that it sounded as if twenty soldiers had shouted all together.

‘When were you wounded, lad?’

The soldier’s leaden eyes with their swollen lids brightened. He had evidently recognized his officer.

‘Good-day, your Honour!’ said he in the same abrupt bass.

‘Where is your regiment stationed now?’

‘In Sevastopol. We were going to move on Wednesday, your Honour!’

‘Where to?’

‘Don’t know, your Honour – to the North Side, maybe.… Now they’re firing right across, your Honour!’ he added in a long-drawn tone, replacing his cap. ‘Mostly bombs – they reach us right across the bay. He’s giving it us awful hot now …’

What the soldier said further could not be heard, but the expression of his face and his pose showed that his words, spoken with the bitterness of one suffering, were not reassuring.

The officer in the trap, Lieutenant Kozeltsóv, was not an ordinary type of man. He was not one of those who live and act this way or that because others live and act so: he did what he chose, and others followed his example and felt sure it was right. He was by nature endowed with many minor gifts: he sang well, played the guitar, talked to the point, and wrote very easily (especially official papers – a knack for writing which he had acquired when he was adjutant of his battalion), but his most remarkable characteristic was his ambitious energy, which though chiefly founded on those same minor talents was in itself a marked and striking feature. He had ambition of a kind most frequently found among men and especially in military circles, and this had become so much a part of his life that he could imagine no other course than to lead or to perish. Ambition was at the root of his innermost impulses and even in his private thoughts he liked to put himself first when he compared himself with others.

‘It’s likely I should pay attention to the chatter of a private!’ he muttered, with a feeling of heaviness and apathy at heart and a certain dimness of thought left by the sight of the convoy of wounded men and the words of the soldier, enforced as they were by the sounds of the cannonade.

‘Funny fellow, that soldier! Now then, Nikoláev, get on!… Are you asleep?’ he added rather fretfully as he arranged the skirt of his cloak.

Nikoláev jerked the reins, clicked his tongue, and the trap rolled on at a trot.

‘We’ll only stop just to feed the horse, and then go on at once, to-night,’ said the officer.

II

WHEN he was entering what was left of a street of ruined stone Tartar houses in Duvánka, Lieutenant Kozeltsóv was stopped by a convoy of bombs and cannon-balls on its way to Sevastopol, that blocked the road.

Two infantrymen sat on the stones of a ruined wall amid a cloud of dust, eating a water-melon and some bread.

‘Going far, comrade?’ asked one of them, with his mouth full of bread, as another soldier with a little bag on his back stopped beside them.

‘Going to join our regiment,’ answered the soldier, looking past the water-melon and readjusting his bag. ‘We’ve been nearly three weeks in the province looking for hay for our company, and now we’ve all been recalled, but we don’t know where the regiment is. Some say it crossed to the Korábelnaya last week. Perhaps you have heard, friends?’

‘In the town, mate. It’s quartered in the town,’ muttered the other, an old convoy soldier who was digging a clasp-knife into an unripe, whitish water-melon. ‘We only left there this afternoon. [It’s so awful there, mate, you’d better not go, but fall down here somewhere among the hay and lie there for a day or two!]’

‘What do you mean, friend?’

‘Why, can’t you hear? They’re firing from all sides today, there’s not a place left whole. As for the likes of us as has been killed – there’s no counting ’em!’ And making an expressive gesture with his hand, the speaker set his cap straight.

The soldier who had stopped shook his head thoughtfully and clicked his tongue, then he took a pipe out of the leg of his boot, and not filling it but merely loosening the scorched tobacco in it, he lit a bit of tinder at the pipe of one of the others. Then he raised his cap and said:

‘One can’t get away from God, friends! Good-bye.’ And straightening his bag with a jerk he went his way.

‘It would be far better to wait!’ the man who was digging into the water-melon said with conviction.

‘It can’t be helped!’ muttered the newcomer, as he squeezed between the wheels of the crowded carts. [‘It seems I too must buy a water-melon for my supper. Just think what people are saying!’]

III

THE post-station was full of people when Kozeltsóv drove up. The first one he met in the porch was a very thin young man, the superintendent, bickering with two officers who were following him.

‘It’s not only three days you’ll have to wait but maybe ten.… Even generals have to wait, my good sir!’ said the superintendent, evidently wishing to hurt the travellers’ feelings. ‘I can’t hitch myself to a cart for you, can I?’

‘Then don’t give horses to anyone, if you have none! Why did you give them to that lackey with the baggage?’ shouted the elder of the officers, who had a tumbler of tea in his hand.

‘Just consider a moment, Mr Superintendent,’ said the other, a very young officer, hesitatingly. ‘We are not going for our own pleasure. You see, we are evidently wanted there, since we have been summoned. I shall really have to report it to the general. It will never do, you know.… It seems you don’t respect an officer’s position.’

But the elder man interrupted him crossly. ‘You always spoil everything! You only hinder me … a man has to know how to speak to these people. There you see, he has lost all respect.… Horses, I say, this very minute!’

‘Willingly, my dear sir, but where am I to get them from?’

The superintendent was silent for a few minutes. Then he suddenly flared up and waving his arms began:

‘I know it all very well, my dear sir, and fully understand it, but what am I to do? You give me but’ (a ray of hope showed itself on the faces of the officers) … ‘let me but hold out to the end of the month, and I’ll stay here no longer. I’d rather go to the Malákhov Hill than remain here, I swear I would! Let them do what they please. There’s not a single sound vehicle left in the whole place, and it’s the third day the horses haven’t had a wisp of hay.’ And the superintendent disappeared through the gate.

Kozeltsóv entered the room together with the officers.

‘Well,’ said the elder calmly to the younger, though the moment before he had seemed quite beside himself, ‘we’ve been three months on the road already and can wait a bit longer. No matter, we’ll get there soon enough!’

The dirty, smoky room was so full of officers and trunks that Kozeltsóv had some difficulty in finding a seat on the window-sill. While observing the faces and listening to the conversation of the others he began rolling himself a cigarette. To the right of the door sat the principal group round a crooked, greasy table on which stood two samovars with verdigris showing on them here and there, and with sugar spread on various bits of paper. A young officer who had not yet grown a moustache, in a new, quilted Caucasian coat which had certainly been made out of a woman’s dressing-gown, was filling a teapot, and there were four other equally young officers in different parts of the room. One of them lay asleep on the sofa with a fur coat of some kind rolled up under his head; another was standing at the table cutting up some roast mutton for a one-armed officer who sat there. Two officers, one in an adjutant’s cloak, the other in infantry uniform made of fine cloth and with a satchel across his shoulders, were sitting by the stove, and from the way they looked at the others and the manner in which the one with the satchel smoked his cigar, it was plain that they were not officers of the line and were glad they were not. Their manner did not show contempt so much as a certain calm self-satisfaction founded partly on money and partly on intimacy with generals – a consciousness of superiority extending even to a desire to conceal it. Then there was a thick-lipped young doctor and an artillery officer who looked like a German – these were sitting on the sofa almost on the feet of the sleeping officer, counting money. There were also several orderlies, some dozing, others near the door busy with bundles and portmanteaux. Among all these people Kozeltsóv did not recognize a single acquaintance, but he listened with interest to their conversation. He liked the young officers who, as he at once concluded from their appearance, had come straight from the Cadet College; they reminded him of the fact that his brother, who was coming straight from the College too, ought to reach one of the batteries in Sevastopol in a few days’ time. But he did not like the officer with the satchel, whose face he had seen somewhere before – everything about him seemed insolent and repellent. ‘We’ll put him down if he ventures to say anything!’ he thought, and he even moved from the window to the stove and sat down there. Belonging to a line regiment and being a good officer, he had a general dislike for those ‘on the Staff’, and such he at once recognized these officers to be.

IV

‘I SAY, isn’t it an awful nuisance that being so near we can’t get there?’ said one of the young officers. ‘There may be an action to-day and we shan’t be in it.’

The high-pitched voice and the fresh rosy spots which appeared on his face betrayed the charming youthful bashfulness of one in constant fear of not saying the right thing.

The officer who had lost an arm looked at him with a smile.

‘You’ll get there soon enough, believe me,’ he said.

The young officer looked respectfully at the crippled man, whose emaciated face suddenly lit up with a smile, and then silently turned his attention to making his tea. And really the face, the attitude, and especially the empty sleeve of the officer expressed a kind of calm indifference that seemed to say in reply to every word and action: ‘Yes, all that is admirable, but I know it all, and can do it all if only I wish to.’

‘Well, and how shall we decide it?’ the young officer began again, turning to his comrade in the Caucasian coat. ‘Shall we stay the night here or go on with our own horse?’

His comrade decided to stay.

‘Just fancy, Captain,’ continued the one who was making the tea, addressing the one-armed officer and handing him a knife he had dropped, ‘we are told that horses were awfully dear in Sevastopol, so we two bought one together in Simferópol.’

‘I expect they made you pay a stiff price.’

‘I really don’t know, Captain. We paid ninety rubles for it with the trap. Is that very much?’ he said, turning to the company in general, including Kozeltsóv, who was looking at him.

‘It’s not much if it’s a young horse,’ said Kozeltsóv.

‘You think not?… And we were told it was too much. Only it limps a bit, but that will pass. We were told it’s strong.’

‘What Cadet College were you at?’ asked Kozeltsóv, who wished to get news of his brother.

‘We are now from the Nobles’ Regiment. There are six of us and we are all going to Sevastopol – by our own desire,’ said the talkative young officer. ‘Only we don’t know where our battery is. Some say it is Sevastopol, but those fellows there say it’s in Odessa.’

‘Couldn’t you have found out in Simferópol?’ asked Kozeltsóv.

‘They didn’t know.… Only think, one of our comrades went to the Chancellery there and got nothing but rudeness. Just think how unpleasant! Would you like a ready-made cigarette?’ he said to the one-armed officer who was trying to get out his cigar-case.

He attended to this officer’s wants with a kind of servile enthusiasm.

‘And are you from Sevastopol too?’ he continued. ‘How wonderful it is! How all of us in Petersburg used to think about you all and all our heroes!’ he said, addressing Kozeltsóv with respect and kindly affection.

‘Well then, you may find that you have to go back?’ asked the lieutenant.

‘That’s just what we are afraid of. Just fancy, when we had bought the horse and got all we needed – a coffee-pot with a spirit-lamp and other necessary little things – we had no money left at all,’ he said in a low tone, glancing at his comrade, ‘so that if we have to return we don’t at all know how we are to manage.’

‘Didn’t you receive your travelling allowance, then?’ asked Kozeltsóv.

‘No,’ answered the young officer in a whisper, ‘they promised to give it us here.’

‘Have you the certificate?’

‘I know that a certificate is the principal thing, but when I was in Moscow, a senator – he’s my uncle and I was at his house – told me they would give it to me here, or else he would have given it me himself. But will they give me one in Sevastopol?’

‘Certainly they will.’

‘Yes, I think so too,’ said the lad in a tone which showed that, having asked the same question at some thirty other post-stations and having everywhere received different answers, he did not now quite believe anyone.

V

[‘HOW can they help giving it?’ suddenly remarked the officer who had quarrelled with the station-master on the porch and had now approached the speakers, addressing himself partly to the staff-officers who were sitting near by, as to listeners more worthy of attention. ‘Why, I myself wanted to join the active army just as these gentlemen do. I even gave up a splendid post and asked to be sent right into Sevastopol. And they gave me nothing but a hundred and thirty-six rubles for post-horses from Petersburg and I have already spent more than a hundred and fifty rubles of my own money. Only think of it! It’s only eight hundred versts and this is the third month we have been on the way. I have been travelling with these gentlemen here for two months. A good thing I had money of my own, but suppose I hadn’t had any?’

‘The third month? Is it possible?’ someone asked.

‘Yes, and what can one do?’ the speaker continued. ‘You see if I had not wanted to go I would not have volunteered and left a good post, so I haven’t been stopping at places on the road because I was afraid.… It was just impossible. For instance I lived a fortnight in Perekóp, and the station-master wouldn’t even speak to me.… “Go when you like; here are a whole pile of requisition forms for couriers alone.” … It must be my fate.… You see I want – but it’s just my fate. It’s not because there’s a bombardment going on, but it evidently makes no difference whether one hurries or not – and yet how I should like.

The officer was at such pains to explain his delays and seemed so keen to vindicate himself that it involuntarily occurred to one that he was afraid. This was still more evident when he began to ask where his regiment was, and whether it was dangerous there. He even grew pale and his voice faltered when the one-armed officer, who belonged to the same regiment, told him that during those last two days they had lost seventeen officers.

In fact this officer was just then a thorough coward, though six months previously he had been very different. A change had come over him which many others experienced both before and after him. He had had an excellent and quiet post in one of our provincial towns in which there is a Cadet College, but reading in the papers and in private letters of the heroic deeds performed at Sevastopol by his former comrades, he was suddenly inspired by ambition and still more by patriotic heroism.

He sacrificed much to this feeling: his well-established position, his little home with its comfortable furniture painstakingly acquired by five years’ effort, his acquaintances, and his hopes of making a good marriage. He threw all this up, and in February already had volunteered for active service, dreaming of deathless honours and of a general’s epaulettes. Two months after he had sent in his application he received an official inquiry whether he would require assistance from the government. He replied in the negative, and continued to wait patiently for an appointment, though his patriotic ardour had had time to cool considerably during those eight weeks. After another two months he received an inquiry as to whether he belonged to a Freemasons’ Lodge,³ and other similar questions, and having replied in the negative, he at last, in the fifth month, received his appointment. But all that time his friends, and still more that subconscious feeling which always awakens at any change in one’s position, had had time to convince him that he was committing an act of extreme folly by entering the active army. And when he found himself alone, with a dry throat and his face covered with dust, at the first post-station – where he met a courier from Sevastopol who told him of the horrors of the war, and where he had to spend twelve hours waiting for relay horses – he quite repented of his thoughtlessness, reflecting with vague horror on what awaited him, and without realizing it continued on his way as to a sacrifice. This feeling constantly increased during his three months’ travelling from station to station, at which he always had to wait and where he met officers returning from Sevastopol with dreadful stories, and at last this poor officer – from being a hero prepared for desperate deeds, as in the provincial town he had imagined himself to be – arrived in Djánka a wretched coward, and having a month ago come across some young fellows from the Cadet College, he tried to travel as slowly as possible, considering these days to be his last on earth, and at every station put up his bed, unpacked his canteen, played preference, looked through the station complaint-book for amusement, and felt glad when horses were not to be had.

Had he gone at once from home to the bastions he would really have been a hero, but now he would have to go through much moral suffering before he could become such a calm, patient man, facing toil and danger, as Russian officers generally are. But it would by this time have been difficult to reawaken enthusiasm in him.]

VI

‘WHO ordered soup?’ demanded the landlady, a rather dirty, fat woman of about forty, as she came into the room with a tureen of cabbage-soup.

The conversation immediately stopped, and everyone in the room fixed his eyes on the landlady. One officer even winked to another with a glance at her.

‘Oh, Kozeltsóv ordered it,’ said the young officer. ‘We must wake him up.… Get up for dinner!’ he said, going up to the sofa and shaking the sleeper’s shoulder. A lad of about seventeen, with merry black eyes and very rosy cheeks, jumped up energetically and stepped into the middle of the room rubbing his eyes.

‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ he said to the doctor, whom he had knocked against in rising.

Lieutenant Kozeltsóv at once recognized his brother and went up to him.

‘Don’t you know me?’ he asked with a smile.

‘Ah-h-h!’ cried the younger Kozeltsóv. ‘This is wonderful!’ And he began kissing his brother.

They kissed three times, but hesitated before the third kiss, as if the thought, ‘Why has it to be just three times?’ had struck them both.

‘Well, I am glad!’ said the elder, looking into his brother’s face. ‘Come out into the porch and let’s have a chat.’

‘Yes, come along. I don’t want any soup. You eat it, Féderson,’ he said to his comrade.

‘But you wanted something to eat.’

‘I don’t want anything now.’

Out on the porch the younger one kept asking his brother: ‘Well, and how are you? Tell me how things are!’ and saying how glad he was to see him, but he did not tell him anything about himself.

When five minutes had passed and they had paused for a moment, the elder brother asked why the younger had not entered the Guards as everyone had expected him to do.

[‘Oh, yes!’ the younger replied, blushing at the very recollection, ‘that upsets me terribly. I never expected such a thing could happen. Just imagine, at the very end of the term three of us went to have a smoke – you remember that little room by the hall-porter’s lodge? It must have been there in your time – but just imagine, that beast of a hall-porter saw us and ran to tell the officer on duty (though we had tipped that porter several times) and the officer crept up on tiptoe. As soon as we noticed him the others threw away their cigarettes and bolted out by the side door – you know – but I hadn’t the chance. The officer was very nasty to me, and of course I answered him back. Well, he told the Inspector, and there was a row. Because of that, you see, they didn’t give me full marks for conduct, though for everything else my marks were excellent, except for mechanics, for which I got twelve. And so they wouldn’t let me enter the Guards. They promised to transfer me later … but I no longer wanted it, and applied to be sent to the front.’

‘Dear me!’

‘Really, I tell you seriously, I was so disgusted with everything that] I wanted to get to Sevastopol as quickly as possible. And you see, if things turn out well here one can get on quicker than in the Guards. There it takes ten years to become a colonel, but here in two years Todleben from a lieutenant-colonel has become a general. And if one gets killed – well, it can’t be helped.’

‘So that’s the sort of stuff you are made of!’ said his brother, with a smile.

‘But the chief thing, you know,’ said the younger brother, smiling and blushing as if he were going to say something very shameful – ‘the chief thing was that I felt rather ashamed to be living in Petersburg while here men are dying for the Fatherland. And besides, I wanted to be with you,’ he added, still more shyly.

The other did not look at him. ‘What a funny fellow you are!’ he said, taking out his cigarette-case. ‘Only the pity is that we shan’t be together.’

‘I say, tell me quite frankly: is it very dreadful at the bastions?’ asked the younger suddenly.

‘It seems dreadful at first but one gets used to it. You’ll see for yourself.’

‘Yes … and another thing: Do you think they will take Sevastopol? I don’t think they will. I’m certain they won’t.’

‘Heaven only knows.’

‘It’s so provoking.… Just think what a misfortune! Do you know, we’ve had a whole bundle of things stolen on the way and my shako was inside so that I am in a terrible position. Whatever shall I appear in? [You know we have new shakos now, and in general there are many changes, all improvements. I can tell you all about it. I have been everywhere in Moscow.]’

The younger Kozeltsóv, Vladímir, was very like his brother Michael, but it was the likeness of an opening rosebud to a withered dog-rose. He had the same fair hair as his brother, but it was thick and curled about his temples, and a little tuft of it grew down the delicate white nape of his neck – a sign of luck according to the nurses. The delicate white skin of his face did not always show colour, but the full young blood rushing to it betrayed his every emotion. His eyes were like his brother’s, but more open and brighter, and seemed especially so because a slight moisture often made them glisten. Soft, fair down was beginning to appear on his cheeks and above the red lips, on which a shy smile often played disclosing his white and glistening teeth. Straight, broad-shouldered, the uniform over his red Russian shirt unbuttoned – as he stood there before his brother, cigarette in hand, leaning against the banisters of the porch, his face and attitude expressing naïve joy, he was such a charming, handsome boy that one could not help wishing to look at him. He was very pleased to see his brother, and looked at him with respect and pride, imagining him to be a hero; but in some respects, namely, in what in society is considered good form (being able to speak good French, knowing how to behave in the presence of people of high position, dancing, and so on) he was rather ashamed of his brother, looked down on him, and even hoped if possible to educate him. All his views were still those he had acquired in Petersburg, particularly in the house of a lady who liked good-looking lads and had got him to spend his holidays at her house; and at a senator’s house in Moscow, where he had once danced at a grand ball.

VII

HAVING talked almost their fill, and reached that stage which often comes when two people find that though they are fond of one another they have little in common, the brothers remained silent for some time.

‘Well then, collect your things and let us be off!’ said the elder.

The younger suddenly blushed and became confused.

‘Do we go straight to Sevastopol?’ he asked after a moment’s silence.

‘Well of course. You haven’t got much luggage, I suppose. We’ll get it all in.’

‘All right! Let’s start at once,’ said the younger with a sigh, and went towards the room.

But he stopped in the passage without opening the door, hung his head sorrowfully and began thinking.

‘Now, at once, straight to Sevastopol … into that hell … terrible! Ah well, never mind. It had to be sooner or later. And now at least I’ll have my brother with me.…’

In fact, only now, at the thought that after getting into the trap there would be nothing more to detain him and that he would not alight again before reaching Sevastopol, did he clearly realize the danger he had been seeking, and he grew confused and frightened at the mere thought of the nearness of that danger. Having mastered himself as well as he could, he went into the room; but a quarter of an hour passed and he did not return to his brother, so the latter at last opened the door to call him. The younger Kozeltsóv, in the attitude of a guilty schoolboy, was talking to an officer. When his brother opened the door he seemed quite disconcerted.

‘Yes, yes, I’m just coming!’ he cried, waving his hand to prevent his brother coming in. ‘Please wait for me there.’

A few minutes later he came out and went up to his brother with a sigh. ‘Just fancy,’ he said, ‘it turns out that I can’t go with you, after all!’

‘What? What nonsense!’

‘I’ll tell you the whole truth, Mísha … none of us have any money left and we are all in debt to that lieutenant-captain whom you saw in there. It’s such a shame!’

The elder brother frowned, and remained silent for some time.

‘Do you owe much?’ he asked at last, looking at his brother from under his brows.

‘Much? No, not very much, but I feel terribly ashamed. He paid for me at three post-stations, and the sugar was always his, so that I don’t.… Yes, and we played preference … and I lost a little to him.’

‘That’s bad, Volódya! Now what would you have done if you hadn’t met me?’ the elder remarked sternly without looking at him.

‘Well, you see, I thought I’d pay when I got my travelling allowance in Sevastopol. I could do that, couldn’t I?… So I’d better drive on with him to-morrow.’

The elder brother drew out his purse and with slightly trembling fingers produced two ten-ruble notes and one of three rubles.

‘There’s the money I have,’ he said. ‘How much do you owe?’

Kozeltsóv did not speak quite truly when he made it appear as if this were all the money he had. He had four gold coins sewn into his cuff in case of special need, but he had resolved not to touch them.

As it turned out the younger Kozeltsóv owed only eight rubles, including the sugar and the preference, his brother gave them to him, merely remarking that it would never do to go playing preference when one had no money.

‘How high did you play?’

The younger did not reply. The question seemed to suggest a doubt of his honour.

Vexed with himself, ashamed of having done anything that could give rise to such suspicions, and hurt at such offensive words from the brother he so loved, his impressionable nature suffered so keenly that he did not answer. Feeling that he could not suppress the sobs that were gathering in his throat he took the money without looking at it and returned to his comrades.

VIII

NIKOLÁEV, who had fortified himself in Duvánka with two cups of vodka⁴ sold by a soldier he had met on the bridge, kept pulling at the reins, and the trap bumped along the stony road that leads by the Belbék⁵ to Sevastopol. The two brothers, their legs touching as they jolted along, sat in obstinate silence though they never ceased to think about each other.

‘Why did he say that?’ thought the younger. ‘Couldn’t he have left it unsaid? Just as if he thought me a thief! And I believe he’s still angry, so that we have gone apart for good. And yet how fine it would have been for us to be together in Sevastopol! Two brothers, friends with one another, fighting the enemy side by side: one, the elder, not highly educated but a brave warrior, and the other young but … also a fine fellow.… In a week’s time I would have proved to everybody that I am not so very young! I shall leave off blushing and my face will look manly; my moustaches, too, will have grown by that time – not very big but quite sufficiently,’ and he pulled at the short down that showed at the corners of his mouth. ‘Perhaps when we get there to-day we may go straight into action, he and I together. And I’m certain he is very brave and steadfast – a man who says little, but does more than others. I wonder whether he is pushing me to the very edge of the trap on purpose? I expect he knows I am uncomfortable but pretends he doesn’t notice me.’ Pressing close to the edge of the trap for fear of his brother’s noticing his discomfort, he continued his meditations: ‘Well then, we shall get there to-day, and then perhaps straight to the bastion – I with the guns and my brother with his company, both together. Suddenly the French will fall upon us. I shall fire and fire. I shall kill quite a lot of them, but they will still keep coming straight at me. I can no longer fire and of course there is no escape for me, but suddenly my brother rushes to the front with his sword drawn and I seize a musket, and we run on with the soldiers. The French attack my brother: I run forward, kill one Frenchman, then another, and save my brother. I am wounded in the arm, I seize the gun in the other hand and still run on. Then my brother falls at my side, shot dead by a bullet. I stop for a moment, bend sadly over him, draw myself up and cry: “Follow me, we will avenge him! I loved my brother more than anything on earth,” I shall say. “I have lost him. Let us avenge him, let us annihilate the foe or let us all die here!” They will all rush after me shouting. Then all the French army, with Pélissier himself, will advance. We shall slaughter them, but at last I shall be wounded a second and a third time and shall fall down dying. Then they will all rush to me and Gorchakóv himself will come and ask if I want anything. I shall say that I want nothing – only to be laid near my brother: that I wish to die beside him. They will carry me and lay me down by the blood-stained corpse of my brother. I shall raise myself, and say only, “Yes, you did not know how to value two men who really loved the Fatherland: now they have both fallen. May God forgive you!” … and then I’ll die.’

Who knows how much of these dreams will come true?

‘I say, have you ever been in a hand-to-hand fight?’ he suddenly asked, having quite forgotten that he was not going to speak to his brother.

‘No, never,’ answered the elder. ‘We lost two thousand men from the regiment, but it was all at the trenches, and I was wounded while doing my work there. War is not carried on at all in the way you imagine, Volódya.’

The pet name Volódya touched the younger brother. He longed to put matters right with the elder, who had no idea that he had given offence.

‘You are not angry with me, Mísha?’ he asked after a minute’s pause.

‘Angry? What for?’

‘Oh, nothing … only because of what happened … it’s nothing.’

‘Not at all,’ answered the other, turning towards him and slapping him on the knee.

‘Then forgive me if I have pained you, Mísha!’ And the younger brother turned away to hide the tears that suddenly filled his eyes.

IX

‘CAN this be Sevastopol already?’ asked the younger brother when they reached the top of the hill.

Spread out before them they saw the Roadstead with the masts of the ships, the sea with the enemy’s fleet in the distance, the white shore-batteries, the barracks, the aqueducts, the docks, the buildings of the town, and the white and purple clouds of smoke that, rising continually from the yellow hills surrounding the town, floated in the blue sky lit up by the rosy rays of the sun, which was reflected brilliantly in the sea towards whose dark horizon it was already sinking.

Volódya looked without the slightest trepidation at the dreadful place that had so long been in his mind. He even gazed with concentrated attention at this really splendid and unique sight, feeling aesthetic pleasure and a heroic sense of satisfaction at the thought that in another half-hour he would be there, and he continued gazing until they came to the commissariat of his brother’s regiment, on the North Side, where they had to ascertain the exact location of the regiment and of the battery.

The officer in charge of the commissariat lived near the so-called ‘new town’ (a number of wooden sheds constructed by the sailors’ families) in a tent connected with a good-sized shed constructed of green oak branches that had not yet had time to dry completely.

The brothers found the officer seated at a dirty table on which stood a tumbler of cold tea, a tray with a vodka bottle, and bits of dry caviare and bread. He was wearing a dirty yellowish shirt, and, with the aid of a big abacus, was counting an enormous pile of bank-notes. But before speaking of the personality of this officer and of his conversation, we must examine the interior of the shed more attentively and see something of his occupations and way of living. His newly built shed was as big, as strongly wattled, and as conveniently arranged with tables and seats made of turf, as though it were built for a general or the commander of a regiment. To keep the dry leaves from falling in, the top and sides were lined with three carpets, which though hideous were new and must have cost money. On the iron bedstead, beside which a most striking carpet was fastened to the wall (the pattern of which represented a lady on horseback), lay a bright red plush coverlet, a torn and dirty leather pillow, and an overcoat lined with racoon fur. On the table was a looking-glass in a silver frame, an exceedingly dirty silver-backed hair-brush, a broken horn comb full of greasy hair, a silver candlestick, a bottle of liqueur with an enormous red and gold label, a gold watch with a portrait of Peter I, two gold rings, a box of some kind of capsules, a crust of bread, and a scattered pack of old cards. Bottles, full and empty, were stowed away under the bed. This officer was in charge of the regimental commissariat and the forage for the horses. With him lived his great friend, the commissioner employed on contracts. When the brothers entered, the latter was asleep in the tent while the commissariat officer was making up the regimental accounts for the month. He had a very handsome and military appearance: tall, with large moustaches and a portly figure. What was unpleasant about him was merely that his white face was so puffy as almost to hide his small grey eyes (as if he were filled with porter), and his extreme lack of cleanliness, from his thin greasy hair to his big bare feet thrust into ermine-lined slippers of some kind.

‘What a heap of money!’ said the elder Kozeltsóv on entering the shed, as he fixed his eyes eagerly on the pile of bank-notes. ‘If only you’d lend me half, Vasíli Mikháylovich!’

The commissariat officer shrank back when he saw his visitor, as if caught stealing, and gathering up the money bowed without rising.

‘Oh, if it were mine! But it’s Government money, my dear fellow.… And who is that with you?’ he asked, placing the money in a cash-box that stood near him and looking at Volódya.

‘It’s my brother, straight from the training college. We’ve come to learn from you where our regiment is stationed.’

‘Take a seat, gentlemen. Won’t you have something to drink? A glass of porter perhaps?’ he said, and without taking any further notice of his visitors he rose and went out into the tent.

‘I don’t mind if I do, Vasíli Mikháylovich.’

Volódya was struck by the grandeur of the commissariat officer, his off-hand manner, and the respect with which his brother addressed him.

‘I expect this is one of their best officers, whom they all respect – probably simple-minded but hospitable and brave,’ he thought as he sat down modestly and shyly on the sofa.

‘Then where is our regiment stationed?’ shouted the elder brother across to the tent.

‘What?’

The question was repeated.

‘Seifert was here this morning. He says the regiment has gone over to the Fifth Bastion.’

‘Is that certain?’

‘If I say so of course it’s certain. Still, the devil only knows if he told the truth! It wouldn’t take much to make him tell a lie either. Well, will you have some porter?’ said the commissariat officer, still speaking from the tent.

‘Well, yes, I think I will,’ said Kozeltsóv.

‘And you, Osip Ignátevich, will you have some?’ continued the voice from the tent, apparently addressing the sleeping contractor. ‘Wake up, it’s past four!’

‘Why do you bother me? I’m not asleep,’ answered a thin voice lazily, pronouncing the ls and rs with a pleasant lisp.

‘Well, get up, it’s dull without you,’ and the commissariat officer came out to his visitors.

‘A bottle of Simferópol porter!’ he cried.

The orderly entered the shed with an expression of pride as it seemed to Volódya, and in getting the porter from under the seat he even jostled Volódya.

[‘Yes, sir,’ said the commissariat officer, filling the glasses. ‘We have a new commander of the regiment now. Money is needed to get all that is required.’

‘Well, this one is quite a special type of the new generation,’ remarked Kozeltsóv, politely raising his glass.

‘Yes, of a new generation! He’ll be just as close-fisted as the battalion-commander was. How he used to shout when he was in command! But now he sings a different tune.’

‘Can’t be helped, old fellow. It just is so.’

The younger brother understood nothing of what was being said, but vaguely felt that his brother was not expressing what he thought, and spoke in that way only because he was drinking the commissariat officer’s porter.]

The bottle of porter was already emptied and the conversation had continued for some time in the same strain, when the flap of the tent opened and out stepped a rather short, fresh-looking man in a blue satin dressing-gown with tassels and a cap with a red band and a cockade. He came in twisting his little black moustaches, looking somewhere in the direction of one of the carpets, and answered the greetings of the officers with a scarcely perceptible movement of the shoulders.

‘I think I’ll have a glass too,’ he said, sitting down to the table.

‘Have you come from Petersburg, young man?’ he remarked, addressing Volódya in a friendly manner.

‘Yes, sir, and I’m going to Sevastopol.’

‘At your own request?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Now why do you do it, gentlemen? I don’t understand it,’ remarked the commissioner. ‘I’d be ready to walk to Petersburg on foot, I think, if they’d let me go. My God, I’m sick of this damned life!’

‘What have you to complain of?’ asked the elder Kozeltsóv – ‘As if you weren’t well enough off here!’

The contractor gave him a look and turned away.

‘The danger, privations, lack of everything,’ he continued, addressing Volódya. ‘Whatever induces you to do it? I don’t at all understand you, gentlemen. If you got any profit out of it – but no! Now would it be pleasant, at your age, to be crippled for life?’

‘Some want to make a profit and others serve for honour,’ said the elder Kozeltsóv crossly, again intervening in the conversation.

‘Where does the honour come in if you’ve nothing to eat?’ said the contractor, laughing disdainfully and addressing the commissariat officer, who also laughed. ‘Wind up and let’s have the tune from Lucia,’ he added, pointing to a musical box. ‘I like it.’

‘What sort of a fellow is that Vasíli Mikháylovich?’ asked Volódya when he and his brother had left the shed and were driving to Sevastopol in the dusk of the evening.

‘So-so, but terribly stingy! [You know he gets at least three hundred rubles a month, but lives like a pig, as you saw.] But that contractor I can’t bear to look at. I’ll give him a thrashing some day! [Why, that rascal carried off some twelve thousand rubles from Turkey.…’

And Kozeltsóv began to enlarge on the subject of usury, rather (to tell the truth) with the bitterness of one who condemns it not because it is an evil, but because he is vexed that there are people who take advantage of it.]

X

IT was almost night when they reached Sevastopol. Driving towards the large bridge across the Roadstead Volódya was not exactly dispirited, but his heart was heavy. All he saw and heard was so different from his past, still recent, experience: the large, light examination hall with its parquet floor, the jolly, friendly voices and laughter of his comrades, the new uniform, the beloved Tsar he had been accustomed to see for the past seven years, and who at parting from them with tears in his eyes had called them his children – all he saw now was so little like his beautiful, radiant, high-souled dreams.

‘Well, here we are,’ said the elder brother when they reached the Michael Battery and dismounted from their trap. ‘If they let us cross the bridge we will go at once to the Nicholas Barracks. You can stay there till the morning, and I’ll go to the regiment and find out where your battery is and come for you to-morrow.’

‘Oh, why? Let’s go together,’ said Volódya. ‘I’ll go to the bastion with you. It doesn’t matter. One must get used to it sooner or later. If you go, so can I.’

‘Better not.’

‘Yes, please! I shall at least find out how.…’

‘My advice is don’t go … however —’

The sky was clear and dark. The stars, the flash of the guns and the continual flare of the bombs already showed up brightly in the darkness, and the large white building of the battery and the entry to the bridge⁶ loomed out. The air was shaken every second by a quick succession of artillery shots and explosions which became ever louder and more distinct. Through this roar, and as if answering it, came the dull murmur of the Roadstead. A slight breeze blew in from the sea and the air smelt moist. The brothers reached the bridge. A recruit, awkwardly striking his gun against his hand, called out, ‘Who goes there?’

‘Soldier!’

‘No one’s allowed to pass!’

‘How is that? We must.’

‘Ask the officer.’

The officer, who was sitting on an anchor dozing, rose and ordered that they should be allowed to pass.

‘You may go there, but not back.’

‘Where are you driving, all of a heap?’ he shouted to the regimental wagons which, laden high with gabions, were crowding the entrance.

As the brothers were descending to the first pontoon, they came upon some soldiers going the other way and talking loudly.

‘If he’s had his outfit money his account is squared – that’s so.’

‘Ah, lads,’ said another, ‘when one gets to the North Side one sees light again. It’s a different air altogether.’

‘Is it though?’ said the first. ‘Why, only the other day a damned ball flew over and tore two soldiers’ legs off for them, even there.…’

Waiting for the trap the brothers after crossing the first pontoon stopped on the second, which was washed here and there by the waves. The wind which seemed gentle on land was strong and gusty here; the bridge swayed and the waves broke noisily against beams, anchors, and ropes, and washed over the boards. To the right, divided from the light blue-grey starry horizon by a smooth, endless black line, was the sea, dark, misty, and with a hostile sullen roar. Far off in the distance gleamed the lights of the enemy’s fleet. To the left loomed the black hulk of one of our ships, against whose sides the waves beat audibly. A steamer too was visible moving quickly and noisily from the North Side. The flash of a bomb exploding near the steamer lit up for a moment the gabions piled high on its deck, two men standing on the paddle-box, and the white foam and splash of the greenish waves cut by the vessel. On the edge of the bridge, his feet dangling in the water, a man in his shirt sat chopping something on the pontoon. In front, above Sevastopol, similar flashes were seen, and the terrible sounds became louder and louder. A wave flowing in from the sea washed over the right side of the bridge and wetted Volódya’s boots, and two soldiers passed by him splashing their feet through the water. Suddenly something came crashing down which lit up the bridge ahead of them, a cart driving over it, and a horseman, and fragments of a bomb fell whistling and splashing into the water.

‘Ah, Michael Semënich!’⁷ said the rider, stopping his horse in front of the elder Kozeltsóv. ‘Have you recovered?’

‘As you see. And where is fate taking you?’

‘To the North Side for cartridges. You see I’m taking the place of the regimental adjutant to-day.… We’re expecting an attack from hour to hour.’

‘And where is Mártsov?’

‘His leg was torn off yesterday while he was sleeping in his room in town.… Did you know him?’

‘Is it true that the regiment is at the Fifth Bastion now?’

‘Yes, we have replaced the M— regiment. You’d better call at the Ambulance, you’ll find some of our fellows there – they’ll show you the way.’

‘And my lodgings in the Morskáya Street, are they safe?’

‘Safe, my dear fellow! They’ve long since been shattered by bombs. You won’t know Sevastopol again. Not a woman left, not a restaurant, no music! The last brothel left yesterday. It’s melancholy enough now. Good-bye!’

And the officer trotted away.

Terrible fear suddenly overcame Volódya. He felt as if a ball or a bomb-splinter would come the next moment and hit him straight on the head. The damp darkness, all these sounds, especially the murmur of the splashing water – all seemed to tell him to go no farther, that no good awaited him here, that he would never again set foot on this side of the bay, that he should turn back at once and run somewhere as far as possible from this dreadful place of death. ‘But perhaps it is too late, it is already decided now,’ thought he shuddering, partly at that thought and partly because the water had soaked through his boots and was making his feet wet.

He sighed deeply and moved a few steps away from his brother.

‘O Lord! Shall I really be killed – just I? Lord, have mercy on me!’ he whispered, and made the sign of the cross.

‘Well, Volódya, come on!’ said the elder brother when the trap had driven on to the bridge. ‘Did you see the bomb?’

On the bridge they met carts loaded with wounded men, with gabions, and one with furniture driven by a woman. No one stopped them at the farther side.

Keeping instinctively under the wall of the Nicholas Battery and listening to the bombs that here were bursting overhead, and to the howling of the falling fragments, the brothers came silently to that part of the battery where the icon hangs. Here they heard that the Fifth Light Artillery, to which Volódya was appointed, was stationed at the Korábelnaya⁸ and they decided that Volódya, in spite of the danger, should spend the night with his elder brother at the Fifth Bastion and go from there to his battery next morning. After turning into a corridor and stepping across the legs of the soldiers who lay sleeping all along the wall of the battery they at last reached the Ambulance Station.

XI

ON entering the first room, full of beds on which lay wounded men and permeated by a horribly disgusting hospital smell, they met two Sisters of Mercy just going out.

One, a woman of fifty, with black eyes and a stern expression, was carrying bandages and lint and giving orders to a young lad, a medical assistant, who was following her. The other, a very pretty girl of about twenty whose pale, delicate, fair face looked from under her white cap with a peculiarly sweet helplessness, was walking by the side of the older woman with her hands in her apron pockets, and seemed afraid of being left behind.

Kozeltsóv asked them if they knew where Mártsov was, whose leg had been torn off the day before.

‘He is of the P— regiment, I think?’ asked the elder. ‘Is he a relation of yours?’

‘No, just a comrade.’

‘Take them to him,’ she said to the young sister in French. ‘It is this way,’ and she herself went up to one of the patients, followed by the assistant.

‘Come along, what are you looking at?’ said Kozeltsóv to Volódya, who stood with raised eyebrows and a look of suffering on his face, unable to tear his eyes from the wounded. ‘Come now!’

Volódya followed his brother but still kept looking back and repeating unconsciously, ‘O, my God! My God!’

‘I suppose he has not been here long?’ the sister remarked to Kozeltsóv, indicating Volódya, who followed them along the corridor with exclamations and sighs.

‘He has only just come.’

The pretty sister looked at Volódya and suddenly began to cry.

‘My God! My God! When will it all end?’ she said in a despairing voice.

They entered the officers’ ward. Mártsov was lying on his back, his sinewy arms bare to the elbow thrown back behind his head, and on his yellow face the expression of one who has clenched his teeth to prevent himself from screaming with pain. His sound leg with a stocking on showed from under the blanket and one could see the toes moving spasmodically.

‘Well, how are you?’ asked the sister, raising his slightly bald head with her slender delicate fingers (on one of which Volódya noticed a gold ring) and arranging his pillow.

‘In pain of course!’ he answered angrily. ‘That’ll do – the pillow’s all right!’ and the toes in the stocking moved still faster. ‘How d’you do? What’s your name?’ … ‘Excuse me,’ he added, when Kozeltsóv had told him. ‘Ah yes, I beg your pardon. One forgets everything here. Why, we lived together,’ he remarked without any sign of pleasure, and looked inquiringly at Volódya.

‘This is my brother, arrived to-day from Petersburg.’

‘H’m! And I have got my discharge!’ said the wounded man, frowning. ‘Oh, how it hurts! If only it would be over quicker!’

He drew up his leg and, moving his toes still more rapidly, covered his face with his hands.

‘He must be left alone,’ said the sister in a whisper while tears filled her eyes. ‘He is very ill.’

While still on the North Side the brothers had agreed to go to the Fifth Bastion together, but as they passed out of the Nicholas Battery it was as if they had agreed not to run unnecessary risks and for each to go his own way.

‘But how will you find it, Volódya?’ said the elder. ‘Look here! Nikoláev shall take you to the Korábelnaya and I’ll go on alone and come to you to-morrow.’

Nothing more was said at this last parting between the brothers.

XII

THE thunder of the cannonade continued with unabated violence. Ekaterína Street, down which Volódya walked followed by the silent Nikoláev, was quiet and deserted. All he could distinguish in the dark was the broad street with its large white houses, many of them in ruins, and the stone pavement along which he was walking. Now and then he met soldiers and officers. As he was passing by the left side of the Admiralty Building, a bright light inside showed him the acacias planted along the side-walk of the streets with green stakes to support them and sickly, dusty leaves. He distinctly heard his own footsteps and those of Nikoláev, who followed him breathing heavily. He was not thinking of anything: the pretty Sister of Mercy, Mártsov’s foot with the toes moving in the stocking, the darkness, the bombs, and different images of death, floated dimly before his imagination. His whole young impressionable soul was weighed down and crushed by a sense of loneliness and of the general indifference shown to his fate in these dangerous surroundings. ‘I shall be killed, I shall suffer, endure torments, and no one will shed a tear!’ And all this instead of the heroic life abounding in energy and sympathy of which he had had such glorious dreams. The bombs whistled and burst nearer and nearer. Nikoláev sighed more and more often, but did not speak. As they were crossing the bridge that led to the Korábelnaya he saw a whistling something fall and disappear into the water near by, lighting the purple waves to a flaming red for a second and then come splashing up again.

‘Just look! Not quenched!’ said Nikoláev in a hoarse voice.

‘No,’ answered Volódya in an involuntarily high-pitched plaintive tone which surprised him.

They met wounded men carried on stretchers and more carts loaded with gabions. In the Korábelnaya they met a regiment, and men on horseback rode past. One of these was an officer followed by a Cossack. He was riding at a trot, but seeing Volódya he reined up his horse, looked in his face, turned away, and rode on, touching his horse with the whip.

‘Alone, alone! No one cares whether I live or not,’ thought the lad, and felt inclined to cry in real earnest.

Having gone up the hill past a high white wall he came into a street of small shattered houses, continually lit up by the bombs. A dishevelled, tipsy woman, coming out of a gate with a sailor, knocked up against Volódya.

‘Because if he’sh an on’ble man,’ she muttered – ‘pardon y’r exshensh offisher!’

The poor lad’s heart ached more and more. On the dark horizon the lightnings flashed oftener and offener and the bombs whistled and exploded more and more frequently around them. Nikoláev sighed and suddenly began to speak in what seemed to Volódya a lifeless tone.

‘There now, and we were in such a hurry to leave home! “We must go! We must go!” Fine place to hurry to! [Wise gentlemen when they are the least bit wounded lie up quietly in ’orspital. It’s so nice, what better can you want?]’

‘Well, but if my brother had recovered his health,’ answered Volódya, hoping by conversation to disperse the dreadful feeling that had seized him.

‘Health indeed! Where’s his health, when he’s quite ill? Even them as is really well had best lie in ’orspital these times. Not much pleasure to be got. All you get is a leg or an arm carried off. It’s done before you know where you are! It’s horrible enough even here in the town, but what’s it like at the baksions! You say all the prayers you know when you’re going there. See how the beastly thing twangs past you!’ he added, listening to the buzzing of a flying fragment.

‘Now,’ he continued, ‘I’m to show y’r Honour the way. Our business is o’ course to obey orders: what’s ordered has to be done. But the trap’s been left with some private or other, and the bundle’s untied.… “Go, go!” but if something’s lost, why Nikoláev answers for it!’

A few more steps brought them to a square. Nikoláev did not speak but kept sighing. Then he said suddenly:

‘There, y’r Honour, there’s where your antillary’s stationed. Ask the sentinel, he’ll show you.’

A few steps farther on Volódya no longer heard Nikoláev sighing behind him. He suddenly felt himself utterly and finally deserted. This sense of loneliness, face to face as it seemed to him with death, pressed like a heavy, cold stone on his heart. He stopped in the middle of the square, glanced round to see if anyone was looking, seized his head and thought with horror:

‘O Lord, am I really a vile, miserable coward … when it’s for my Fatherland, for the Tsar for whom I used to long to die? Yes! I am a miserable, wretched being!’ And Volódya, filled with despair and disappointed at himself, asked the sentinel the way to the house of the commander of the battery and went where he was directed.

XIII

THE commander of the battery lived in a small two-storeyed house with an entrance from the yard, which the sentinel pointed out. The faint light of a candle shone through a window patched up with paper. An orderly, who sat on the steps smoking his pipe, went in to inform the commander of the battery of Volódya’s arrival and then showed him into the room. In the room, under a broken mirror between two windows, was a table littered with official papers; there were also several chairs and an iron bedstead with clean bedding, with a small rug beside it.

Just beside the door stood a handsome sergeant-major with large moustaches, wearing side-arms, and with a cross and a Hungarian medal⁹ on his uniform. A staff-officer, a short man of about forty in a thin old cloak and with a swollen cheek tied round with a bandage, was pacing up and down the room.

‘I have the honour to report myself, Ensign Kozeltsóv, secundus, ordered to join the Fifth Light Artillery,’ said Volódya on entering the room, repeating the sentence he had been taught.

The commander answered his greeting dryly and without shaking hands asked him to take a seat.

Volódya sat down shyly on a chair by the writing table, and began playing with a pair of scissors his hand happened to fall on. The commander, with his hands at his back and with drooping head, continued to pace the room in silence as if trying to remember something, only now and then glancing at the hand that was playing with the scissors.

The commander of the battery was rather stout, with a large bald patch on his head, thick moustaches hanging straight down over his mouth, and pleasant hazel eyes. His hands were plump, well-shaped, and clean, his small feet were much turned out and he trod with firmness in a way that indicated that he was not a diffident man.

‘Yes,’ he said, stopping opposite the sergeant-major, ‘the ammunition horses must have an extra peck beginning from to-morrow. They are getting very thin. Don’t you think so?’

‘Well, we can manage an extra peck, your Honour! Oats are a bit cheaper now,’ answered the sergeant-major, standing at attention but moving his fingers, which evidently liked to aid his conversation by gestures. ‘Then our forage-master, Frantchúk, sent me a note from the convoy yesterday that we must be sure, your Excellency, to buy axles there. They say they can be got cheap. Will you give the order?’

‘Well, let him buy them – he has the money,’ said the commander, and again began to pace the room. ‘And where are your things?’ he suddenly asked, stopping short in front of Volódya.

Poor Volódya was so oppressed by the thought that he was a coward, that he saw contempt for himself as a miserable craven in every look and every word. He felt as if the commander of the battery had already discerned his secret, and was chaffing him. He was abashed, and replied that his things were at the Gráfskaya and that his brother had promised to send them on next day.

The commander did not stop to hear him out, but turning to the sergeant-major asked, ‘Where could we put the ensign up?’

‘The ensign, sir?’ said the sergeant-major, making Volódya still more confused by casting a rapid glance at him which seemed to ask: ‘What sort of an ensign is he?’

‘Why, downstairs, your Excellency. We can put his Honour up in the lieutenant-captain’s room,’ he continued after a moment’s thought. ‘The lieutenant-captain is at the baksion at present, so there’s his bed empty.’

‘Well then, if you don’t mind for the present,’ said the commander. ‘I should think you are tired, and we’ll make better arrangements to-morrow.’

Volódya rose and bowed.

‘Would you like a glass of tea?’ said the commander of the battery when Volódya had nearly reached the door. ‘The samovar can be lit.’

Volódya bowed and went out. The colonel’s orderly showed him downstairs into a bare, dirty room, where all sorts of rubbish was lying about and a man in a pink shirt and covered with a thick coat lay asleep on a bed without sheets or blankets. Volódya took him for a soldier.

‘Peter Nikoláevich!’ said the orderly, shaking the sleeper by the shoulder. ‘The ensign will sleep here.… This is our cadet,’ he added, turning to Volódya.

‘Oh, please don’t let me disturb you!’ said Volódya, but the cadet, a tall, solid young man with a handsome but very stupid face, rose from the bed, threw the cloak over his shoulders, and evidently not yet quite awake, left the room saying: ‘Never mind, I’ll lie down in the yard.’

XIV

LEFT alone with his thoughts Volódya’s first feeling was one of fear at the disordered and cheerless state of his own soul. He longed to fall asleep, to forget all that surrounded him and especially himself. Putting out the candle, he took off his cloak and lay down on the bed, drawing the cloak over his head to shut out the darkness, of which he had been afraid from childhood. But suddenly the thought occurred to him that now, immediately, a bomb would crash through the roof and kill him, and he began listening. Just above his head he heard the steps of the commander of the battery.

‘If it does come,’ he thought, ‘it will first kill those upstairs and then me – anyway not me alone.’ This thought comforted him a little and he was about to fall asleep.

‘But supposing that suddenly, to-night, Sevastopol is taken and the French break in here? What shall I defend myself with?’ He rose and paced up and down the room. The fear of real danger drove away the fanciful fear of the darkness. A saddle and a samovar were the only hard things in the room.

‘What a wretch I am – a coward, a despicable coward!’ he thought again, and once more the oppressive feeling of contempt and even disgust for himself came over him. He lay down again and tried not to think. Then, under the influence of the unceasing noise which made the panes rattle in the one window of the room, the impressions of the day rose in his imagination, reminding him of danger. Now he seemed to see wounds and blood, then bombs and splinters flying into the room, then the pretty Sister of Mercy bandaging his wounds and crying over him as he lay dying, then his mother seeing him off in the little country town and praying fervently with tears in her eyes before the wonder-working icon – and again sleep seemed impossible. But suddenly the thought of God Almighty, who can do anything and hears every prayer, came clearly into his mind. He knelt down, crossed himself, and folded his hands as he had been taught to do when a child. This attitude suddenly brought back to him an old, long-forgotten sense of comfort.

‘If I must die, if I must cease to exist, then do it, Lord,’ he thought, ‘do it quickly, but if courage is needed and firmness, which I lack, grant them to me! Deliver me from the shame and disgrace which are more than I can bear, and teach me what I must do to fulfil Thy Will.’

The frightened, cramped, childish soul suddenly matured, brightened, and became aware of new, bright, and broad horizons. He thought and felt many things during the short time this state continued, but soon fell into a sweet untroubled slumber, amid the continued booming of the cannonade and rattle of the window-panes.

O Lord Almighty! Thou alone hast heard and knowest the simple yet burning and desperate prayers of ignorance, of confused repentance, prayers for bodily health and for spiritual enlightenment, that have risen to Thee from this dreadful place of death: from the general who, an instant after his mind has been absorbed by the Order of St George upon his neck, feels with trepidation the nearness of Thy presence – to the private soldier prostrate on the bare floor of the Nicholas Battery, who prays for the future reward he dimly expects for all his sufferings.

XV

THE elder Kozeltsóv happening to meet a soldier of his regiment in the street went with him straight to the Fifth Bastion.

‘Keep to the wall, your Honour!’ said the soldier.

‘Why?’

‘It’s dangerous, your Honour. There it is, flying over us!’ said the soldier, listening to the sound of a ball that whistled past and fell on the hard ground on the other side of the road.

[Without heeding the soldier’s words Kozeltsóv went boldly down the middle of the road.]

Here were still the same streets, the same or even more frequent firing, the same sounds, the same groans from the wounded one met on the way, and the same batteries, breastworks, and trenches, as when he was in Sevastopol in the spring; but somehow it all seemed more melancholy now and yet more vigorous. There were more holes in the houses, there were no lights in any of the windows except those of Kústchin’s house (a hospital), not a woman was to be seen, and the place no longer bore its former customary character and air of unconcern, but seemed burdened with heavy suspense and weariness.

But here is the last trench and the voice of a soldier of the P—regiment who has recognized his former company-commander, and there stands the third battalion, pressing against the wall in the darkness, now and then lit up for an instant by the firing, and sounds are heard, subdued talking and the clatter of muskets.

‘Where is the commander of the regiment?’ asked Kozeltsóv.

‘In the naval officers’ casemate, your Honour,’ answers an obliging soldier. ‘Let me show you the way.’

Passing from trench to trench, the soldier led the way to a cutting in the trench. A sailor sat there smoking a pipe. Behind him was a door through a chink in which a light shone.

‘Can I go in?’

‘I’ll announce you at once,’ and the sailor went in at the door.

Two voices were heard talking inside.

‘If Prussia remains neutral,’ said one voice, ‘Austria will too.…’

‘What does Austria matter?’ said the other, ‘when the Slavonic lands.… Well, ask him in.’

Kozeltsóv had never been in this casemate and was struck by its elegance. It had a parquet floor and a screen in front of the door, two beds stood against the walls, and in a corner of the room there was a large icon – the Mother of God with an embossed gilt cover – with a pink lamp alight before it. A naval officer, fully dressed, was lying asleep on one of the beds. On the other, before a table on which stood two uncorked bottles of wine, sat the speakers – the new regimental commander and his adjutant. Though Kozeltsóv was far from being a coward and was not at all guilty of any offence either against the government or the regimental commander, still he felt abashed in the presence of his former comrade the colonel, so proudly did that colonel rise and give him his attention.

[And the adjutant who was sitting there also made Kozeltsóv feel abashed by his pose and look, that seemed to say: ‘I am only a friend of your regimental commander’s. You have not come to present yourself to me, and I can’t and don’t wish to demand any deference from you.’]

‘How strange!’ thought Kolzeltsóv as he looked at his commander, ‘It’s only seven weeks since he took the command, and yet all his surroundings – his dress, manner, and looks – already indicate the power a regimental commander has: [a power based not so much on his age, seniority, or military worth, as on his wealth as a regimental commander.] It isn’t long since this same Batríshchev used to hobnob with us, wore one and the same dark cotton print shirt a whole week, ate rissoles and curd dumplings every day, never asking anyone to share them – but look at him now! [A fine linen shirt showing from under his wide-sleeved cloth coat, a ten-ruble cigar in his hand, a six-ruble bottle of claret on the table – all bought at incredible prices through the quartermaster at Simferópol – and] in his eyes that look of the cold pride of a wealthy aristocrat, which says: though as a regimental commander of the new school I am your comrade [don’t forget that your pay is sixty rubles once in four months, while tens of thousands pass through my hands, and] believe me I know very well that you’d give half your life to be in my place!’

‘You have been under treatment a long time,’ said the colonel, with a cold look at Kozeltsóv.

‘I have been ill, Colonel. The wound is not thoroughly closed even now.’

‘Then it’s a pity you’ve come,’ said the colonel, looking suspiciously at the officer’s solid figure. ‘But still, you are capable of taking duty?’

‘Certainly sir, I am.’

‘I am very glad to hear it. Then you’ll take over from Ensign Záytsev the Ninth Company that you had before. You will receive your orders at once.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Be so good as to send the regimental adjutant to me when you go.’ The commander finished with a slight bow, thereby intimating that the audience was at an end.

On leaving the casemate Kozeltsóv muttered something to himself several times, and shrugged his shoulders as if he were hurt, or uncomfortable, or provoked – and provoked not with the colonel (he had no ground to be so) but with himself, and he felt dissatisfied with everything around him.

[Discipline and the subordination that goes with it, like every legalized relationship, is pleasant only when it rests on a mutual consciousness of its necessity, and of a superiority in experience, military worth, or simply on a moral superiority recognized by the inferior. But if the discipline is founded on arbitrary or pecuniary considerations, as is often the case among us, it always turns into pretentiousness on the one side and into suppressed envy and irritation on the other, and instead of a useful influence uniting the mass into one whole it produces a quite opposite effect. A man who does not feel that he can inspire respect by his own worth, instinctively fears intimacy with his subordinates and tries by ostentation to keep criticism at a distance. The subordinates, seeing only this external side which is offensive to themselves, suppose (often unjustly) that there is nothing good behind it.]

XVI

BEFORE going to join his fellow officers Kozeltsóv went to greet the men of his company and to see where it was stationed. The breastworks of gabions, the plan of the trenches, the cannon he passed, and even the fragments and bombs he stumbled over on the way, all lit up incessantly by the flashes of the firing, were quite familiar to him. All this had vividly impressed itself on his memory three months before, when he had spent two consecutive weeks at this bastion. Though there was much that was dreadful in the recollection, a certain charm of old times was mingled with it and he recognized all the familiar places and objects with pleasure, as if the fortnight spent there had been an agreeable one. His company was stationed against the wall of defence on the side towards the Sixth Bastion.

Kozeltsóv entered a long bomb-proof, quite open on the entrance side, where he was told he would find the Ninth Company. There was literally no room to set one’s foot in the whole shelter: it was crowded with soldiers from the very entrance. At one side burned a crooked tallow candle which a soldier, lying on the ground, held over the book another was reading from, spelling out the words. Through the smoky atmosphere of the place, in the dim light near the candle, heads were visible, raised eagerly to listen to the reader. The book was a primer, and on entering the bomb-proof Kozeltsóv heard the following:

‘Pra-yer af-ter les-sons. We Thank Thee, O Cre-a-tor.…’

‘Snuff the candle!’ said a voice. ‘It’s a fine book.’

‘God … is’ … continued the reader.

When Kozeltsóv asked for the sergeant-major the reader stopped and the soldiers began moving, coughing and blowing their noses, as is usual after a restrained silence. The sergeant-major, buttoning his uniform, rose not far from the reader’s group, and stepping over and onto the legs of those who could not get out of his way for lack of room, came up to the officer.

‘Good evening, friend! Is this the whole of our company?’

‘We wish your Honour health. Welcome back, your Honour!’ answered the sergeant-major with a cheerful and friendly look at Kozeltsóv. ‘How is your health getting on, your Honour? Thank God you’re better! We have missed you.’

It was easy to see that Kozeltsóv was liked by his company.

Far back in the bomb-proof voices were heard saying: ‘Our old company-commander has come back!’ ‘Him that was wounded.’ ‘Kozeltsóv.’ ‘Michael Semënich,’ and so on. Some men even moved nearer to him, and the drummer greeted him.

‘How do you do, Obantchúk?’ said Kozeltsóv. ‘Still whole? Good evening, lads!’ he added, raising his voice.

The answer, ‘Wish your Honour health!’ resounded through the casemate.

‘How are you getting on, lads?’

‘Badly, your Honour. The French are getting the better of us. They give it us hot from behind their ‘trenchments, but don’t come out into the open.’

‘Perhaps it will be my luck to see them coming out into the open, lads,’ said Kozeltsóv. ‘It won’t be the first time … you and I will give them a thrashing.’

‘We’ll do our best, your Honour,’ several voices replied.

‘Yes, he’s really brave!’ said a voice.

‘Awfully brave!’ said the drummer to another soldier, not loud but so as to be heard, and as if justifying the commander’s words to himself and proving that there was nothing boastful or unlikely in what he had said.

From the soldiers, Kozeltsóv went to join his fellow officers in the Defence Barracks.

XVII

IN the large caserne there was a crowd of naval, artillery, and infantry officers. Some slept, others talked, sitting on a chest of some kind and on the carriage of a garrison gun, but the largest and noisiest group sat on two Cossack cloaks spread out on the floor beyond the arch, and were drinking porter and playing cards.

‘Ah, Kozeltsóv! Kozeltsóv! … So you’ve come! That’s good.… You’re a brick.… How’s your wound?’ It was evident that he was liked here also, and that his return gave pleasure.

When he had shaken hands with those he knew, Kozeltsóv joined the noisy group of officers playing cards. With some of them he was acquainted. A thin, dark, handsome man, with a long thin nose and large moustaches which joined his whiskers, was keeping the bank and dealt the cards with thin white fingers on one of which he wore a large seal-ring with a crest. He dealt straight ahead and carelessly, being evidently excited about something, and only trying to appear at ease. On his right lay a grey-haired major leaning on his elbows who with affected coolness kept staking half-rubles and paying at once. On his left squatted an officer with a red perspiring face, smiling unnaturally and joking. When his cards lost he kept fumbling with one hand in his empty trouser pocket. He was playing high, but evidently no longer for ready money, and it was this that upset the handsome dark man. A bald, thin, pale officer with a huge nose and mouth paced the room with a large bundle of paper money in his hand and continually staked va-banque for ready money and won. Kozeltsóv drank a glass of vodka and sat down with the players.

‘Stake something, Michael Semënich!’ said the banker. ‘You must have brought back heaps of money.’

‘Where should I get money? On the contrary, what I had I’ve spent in the town.’

‘Never! … You’ve surely cleared someone out in Simferópol!’

‘I’ve really very little,’ said Koseltsóv, but evidently not wishing to be believed he unbuttoned his uniform and took up an old pack of cards.

‘Well, suppose I have a try! Who knows what the devil may do for one? Even a mosquito, you know, wins his battles sometimes. But I must have a drink to keep up my courage.’

And having drunk another glass of vodka and some porter he soon lost his last three rubles.

A hundred and fifty rubles were noted down against the perspiring little officer.

‘No, I’ve no luck,’ he said, carelessly preparing another card.

‘I’ll trouble you to hand up the money,’ said the banker, ceasing to deal the cards for a moment and looking at him.

‘Allow me to send it to-morrow,’ replied the other, rising and fumbling with renewed vigour in his empty pocket.

The banker cleared his throat loudly, and angrily throwing the cards right and left finished the deal.

‘But this won’t do. I give up the bank. This won’t do, Zakhár Ivánich,’ he repeated. ‘We were playing for cash, not on credit.’

‘What? Don’t you trust me? It’s really too ridiculous!’

‘Who am I to receive from?’ muttered the major, who was quite drunk by this time and had won some eight rubles. ‘I have paid up more than twenty rubles and when I win I get nothing.’

‘What am I to pay with,’ said the banker, ‘when there’s no money on the board?’

‘That’s not my business,’ shouted the major, rising. ‘I’m playing with you, with honest people, and not with him.’

The perspiring officer suddenly flared up:

‘I shall pay to-morrow, I tell you. How dare you insult me?’

‘I shall say what I please! Honest people don’t behave like that. So there!’ shouted the major.

‘That’s enough, Fëdor Fëdorich!’ said everybody, trying to pacify him.

But let us hasten to drop the curtain on this scene. Tomorrow or to-day, perhaps, each of these men will cheerfully and proudly go to face death, and die steadfastly and calmly; but the only relief in these inhuman conditions, horrible even to the coldest imagination and from which there is no hope of escape, is to forget and to suppress consciousness. Deep in each soul is a noble spark capable of making its possessor a hero, but it wearies of burning brightly – till a fateful moment comes when it will flash into flame and illumine great deeds.

XVIII

THE bombardment continued with equal vigour the next day. At about eleven o’clock Volódya Kozeltsóv was sitting among the officers of his battery whom he was already beginning to get used to. He was examining the new faces, observing, asking questions, and talking. The modest conversation, with some pretension to knowledge, of these artillery officers inspired him with respect and pleased him, and on the other hand, Volódya’s bashful and innocent good looks inclined the officers in his favour. The senior of the battery, a captain, a short man with reddish hair standing up in a tuft above his forehead and brushed smooth on his temples, brought up in the old artillery traditions, a ladies’ man with pretensions to scientific knowledge, questioned Volódya about what he knew of artillery and new inventions, joked in a friendly manner about his youth and his pretty face, and in general treated him like a son – and this pleased Volódya very much. Sub-lieutenant Dyádenko, a young officer who spoke with an Ukrainian accent and who wore a torn cloak and had dishevelled hair – though he talked loudly, snatched every opportunity to begin a hot dispute, and was abrupt in his movements – nevertheless seemed attractive to Volódya, for he could not help seeing that a very kind heart and much that was good lay beneath this rough exterior. Dyádenko kept offering to be of use to Volódya, and demonstrating to him that none of the guns in Sevastopol were placed according to rule.

The only one Volódya did not like was Lieutenant Tchernovítski with his arched eyebrows, though he was the most polite of them all, and wore a coat which was clean enough and neatly patched if not very new, and though he displayed a gold chain over his satin waistcoat. He kept asking what the Emperor and the Minister of War were doing, and told him with unnatural rapture of feats of valour performed in Sevastopol, regretted [the ill-advised arrangements that were being made, and] that there were so few real patriots, and in general displayed much knowledge, intelligence, and noble feeling; but for some reason it all seemed unnatural and unpleasant. Volódya noticed in particular that the other officers hardly spoke to Tchernovítski. Cadet Vlang, whom Volódya had disturbed the night before, was also there. He did not speak, but sitting modestly in a corner laughed when there was anything funny, helped to recall anything that was forgotten, handed the vodka bottle, and made cigarettes for all the officers. Whether it was the modest, courteous manner of Volódya, who treated him as an officer and did not order him about as if he were a boy, or whether Volódya’s attractive appearance charmed Vlánga (as the soldiers called him, giving a feminine form to his name), at any rate he did not take his large kindly eyes from the new officer, foresaw and anticipated his wants, and was all the time in a state of enamoured ecstasy which of course the officers noticed and made fun of.

Before dinner the lieutenant-captain was relieved from the bastion and joined them. Lieutenant-Captain Kraut was a fair-haired, handsome, vivacious officer with big sandy moustaches and whiskers. He spoke Russian excellently, but too accurately and elegantly for a Russian. In the service and in his life he was just the same as in his speech: he served admirably, was a first-rate comrade, most reliable in money matters, but as a man he seemed to lack something just because everything about him was so satisfactory. Like all Russo-Germans, in strange contradistinction to the idealist German-Germans, he was praktisch in the extreme.

‘Here he comes – our hero!’ said the captain, as Kraut entered the room swinging his arms and jingling his spurs. ‘What will you take, Friedrich Christiánich, tea or vodka?’

‘I have already ordered some tea,’ answered Kraut, ‘but meanwhile I do not mind taking a drop of vodka as a refreshment for my soul.… Very pleased to make your acquaintance. I hope you will favour me with your company and your friendship,’ he added, turning to Volódya, who rose and bowed to him. ‘Lieutenant-Captain Kraut.… The master-gunner at our bastion told me yesterday that you had arrived.’

‘I am very grateful to you for your bed: I slept on it.’

‘But were you comfortable? One of the legs is broken; no one has time to mend it in this state of siege, it has to be propped up.’

‘Well, what luck have you had on duty?’ asked Dyádenko.

‘Oh, all right; only Skvortsóv was hit, and yesterday we had to mend a gun-carriage – the cheek was blown to shivers.’

He rose and began to walk up and down. It was evident that he was under the influence of that pleasant feeling men experience who have just left a post of danger.

‘Well, Dmítri Gavrílich,’ he said, shaking the captain by his knee, ‘how are you getting on? What of your recommendation? Is it still silent?’

‘There’s no news as yet.’

‘And there won’t be any,’ began Dyádenko. ‘I told you so before.’

‘Why won’t there be?’

‘Because the report was not written properly.’

‘Ah, you wrangler! You wrangler!’ said Kraut, smiling merrily. ‘A real obstinate Ukrainian! There now, just to spite you you’ll get a lieutenancy.’

‘No I shan’t!’

‘Viang, get me my pipe and fill it,’ said Kraut, turning to the cadet, who rose at once and readily ran for the pipe.

Kraut brightened them all up: he talked of the bombardment, asked what had been going on in his absence, and spoke to everybody.

XIX

‘WELL, have you established yourself satisfactorily among us?’ Kraut asked Volódya. ‘Excuse me, what is your name and patronymic? You know that’s our custom in the artillery.… Have you a horse?’

‘No,’ said Volódya, ‘I don’t know what I’m to do. I was telling the captain … I have no horse nor any money until I get my forage-money and travelling expenses paid. I thought meanwhile of asking the commander of the battery to let me have a horse, but I’m afraid he’ll refuse.’

‘Apollón Sergéich …?’ and Kraut made a sound with his lips expressive of strong doubt, and looking at the captain added, ‘Hardly!’

‘Well, if he does refuse there’ll be no harm done,’ said the captain. ‘To tell you the truth, a horse is not much wanted here. Still, it’s worth trying. I will ask him to-day.’

‘How little you know him,’ Dyádenko put in: ‘he might refuse anything else, but not that.… Will you bet?’

‘Oh, we know you can’t help contradicting!’

‘I contradict because I know. He’s close in other matters, but he’ll give a horse because he gains nothing by refusing.’

‘Gains nothing when oats are eight rubles?’ said Kraut. ‘The gain is not having to keep an extra horse.’

‘You ask for Skvoréts, Vladímir Semënich,’ said Vlang, returning with Kraut’s pipe. ‘He’s a capital horse.’

‘Off which you fell into a ditch in Soróki, eh, Vlánga?’ remarked the lieutenant-captain.

‘What does it matter if oats are eight rubles, when in his estimates they figure at ten and a half?¹⁰ That’s where the gain comes in,’ said Dyádenko, continuing to argue.

‘Well naturally you can’t expect him to keep nothing. When you’re commander of a battery I daresay you won’t let a man have a horse to ride into town.’

‘When I’m commander of a battery my horses will get four measures each and I shan’t make an income, no fear!’

‘We shall see if we live …’ said the lieutenant-captain. ‘You’ll act in just the same way – and so will he,’ pointing to Volódya.

‘Why do you think that he too would wish to make a profit?’ said Tchernovítski to Kraut. ‘He may have private means, then why should he want to make a profit?’

‘Oh no, I … excuse me, Captain,’ said Volódya, blushing up to his ears, ‘but I should think such a thing dishonourable.’

‘Dear me! What a severe fellow he is!’ said Kraut.

‘No, I only mean that I think that if the money is not mine I ought not to take it.’

‘But I’ll tell you something, young man,’ began the lieutenant-captain in a more serious tone. ‘Do you know that if you are commanding a battery you have to conduct things properly, and that’s enough. The commander of a battery doesn’t interfere with the soldiers’ supplies: that’s always been the custom in the artillery. If you are a bad manager you will have no surplus. But you have to spend over and above what’s in the estimates: for shoeing – that’s one’ (he bent down one finger), ‘and for medicine – that’s two’ (and he bent down another finger), ‘for office expenses – that’s three: then for off-horses one has to pay up to five hundred rubles my dear fellow – that’s four: you have to supply the soldiers with new collars, spend a good bit on charcoal for the samovars, and keep open table for the officers. If you are in command of a battery you must live decently: you must have a carriage and a fur coat, and one thing and another.… It’s quite plain!’

‘And above all,’ interrupted the captain, who had been silent all the time, ‘look here, Vladímir Semënich – imagine a man like myself say, serving for twenty years with a pay of first two hundred, then three hundred rubles a year. Can one refuse him a crust of bread in his old age, after all his service?’

‘Ah, what’s the good of talking,’ began the lieutenant-captain again. ‘Don’t be in a hurry to judge, but live and serve.’

Volódya felt horribly confused and ashamed of what he had so thoughtlessly said. He muttered something, and then listened in silence while Dyádenko began very irritably to dispute and to argue the contrary of what had been said. The dispute was interrupted by the colonel’s orderly who came to call them to dinner.

‘Ask Apollón Sergéich to give us some wine to-day,’ said Tchernovítski to the captain, buttoning his uniform. ‘Why is he so stingy? If we get killed, it will all be wasted.’

‘Ask him yourself.’

‘Oh no, you’re the senior officer. We must observe order in everything.’

XX

IN the room where Volódya had presented himself to the colonel the evening before, the table had been moved away from the wall and covered with a dirty table-cloth. To-day the commander of the battery shook hands with him and asked him for the Petersburg news, and about his journey.

‘Well, gentlemen, who takes vodka? Please help yourselves.… Ensigns don’t take any,’ he added with a smile.

Altogether he did not seem at all as stern as the night before; on the contrary he seemed a kind and hospitable host and an elder comrade among fellow officers. But in spite of it all, the officers from the old captain down to Ensign Dyádenko showed him great respect, if only by the way they addressed him, politely looking him straight in the eyes, and by the timid way they came up one by one to the side-table to drink their glass of vodka.

The dinner consisted of Polish cutlets with mustard, dumplings with butter that was not very fresh, and a large tureen of cabbage-soup in which floated pieces of fat beef with an enormous quantity of pepper and bay-leaves. There were no napkins, the spoons were of tin or wood, there were only two tumblers, and there was only water on the table, in a bottle with a broken neck; but the meal was not dull and the conversation never flagged. At first they talked about the battle of Inkerman, in which the battery had taken part, and each gave his own impressions of it and reasons for our reverse, but all were silent as soon as the commander spoke. Then the conversation naturally passed to the insufficient calibre of our field-guns, and to the subject of the new lighter guns, which gave Volódya an opportunity to show his knowledge of artillery. But the conversation never touched on the present terrible condition of Sevastopol: it was as if each man had thought so much on this subject that he did not wish to speak of it. Nor to Volódya’s great surprise and regret was there any mention at all of the duties of the service he would have to perform. It was as if he had come to Sevastopol solely to discuss lighter guns and to dine with the commander of the battery. During dinner a bomb fell near the house they were in. The floor and walls shook as if from an earthquake, and the windows were darkened by the powder smoke.

‘You didn’t see that sort of thing in Petersburg, I fancy, but here we get many such surprises,’ said the commander of the battery. ‘Vlang, go and see where it burst.’

Vlang went out to see, and reported that it had fallen in the square, and no more was said about the bomb.

Just before dinner ended, a little old man, the battery clerk, came into the room with three sealed envelopes and handed them to the commander: ‘This one is very important: a Cossack has just brought it from the Chief of the Artillery.’

The officers all watched with eager impatience as the commander with practised fingers broke the seal and drew out the very important paper. ‘What can it be?’ each one asked himself. It might be an order to retire from Sevastopol to recuperate, or the whole battery might be ordered to the bastions.

‘Again!’ said the commander, angrily throwing the paper on the table.

‘What is it, Apollón Sergéich?’ asked the senior officer.

‘They order an officer and men to some mortar-battery or other.… As it is I have only four officers, and not enough men for the gun detachments,’ grumbled the commander of the battery, ‘and here they are taking more away.… However, gentlemen, someone will have to go,’ he said after a short silence, ‘the order is, to be at the outposts at seven. Send the sergeant-major to me. Well, who will go? Decide, gentlemen.’

‘There’s your man – he’s not been anywhere yet,’ said Tchernovítski, pointing to Volódya.

The commander of the battery did not answer.

‘Yes, I should like to go,’ said Volódya, feeling a cold sweat break out on his back and neck.

‘No, why should he?’ interrupted the captain. ‘Of course no one would refuse, but one need not offer oneself either: if Apollón Sergéich leaves it to us, let us cast lots as we did last time.’

All agreed. Kraut cut up some paper, rolled up the pieces, and threw them into a cap. The captain joked and on this occasion even ventured to ask the colonel for some wine – to keep up their courage, as he said. Dyádenko sat looking grim, something made Volódya smile. Tchernovítski declared he was sure to draw it. Kraut was perfectly calm. Volódya was allowed to draw first. He took a roll of paper a bit longer than the others but then decided to change it, and taking a thinner and shorter one unrolled it and read, ‘Go.’

‘It’s I,’ he said with a sigh.

‘Well, God be with you! You’ll get your baptism of fire at once,’ said the commander, looking at the ensign’s perturbed face with a kindly smile. ‘But make haste and get ready, and to make it more cheerful for you, Vlang shall go with you as gun-sergeant.’

XXI

VLANG was extremely pleased with his appointment, ran off quickly to get ready, and when dressed came to help Volódya, trying to persuade him to take with him a bed, a fur coat, some back numbers of Fatherland Records, the coffee-pot with the spirit-lamp, and other unnecessary things. The captain advised Volódya to read up in the Handbook (Bezák’s Artillery Officer’s Handbook) about firing mortars, and especially to copy out the tables in it. Volódya set to work at once and noticed to his surprise and joy that his fear of the danger and even greater fear that he was a coward, though it still troubled him a little, was far from what it had been the night before. This was partly the effect of daylight and activity, but was chiefly due to the fact that fear, like every strong feeling, cannot long continue with the same intensity. In short he had already had time to live through the worst of it. At about seven o’clock, just as the sun began to disappear behind the Nicholas Barracks, the sergeant-major came and announced that the men were ready and waiting.

‘I have given Vlánga the list, your Honour will please receive it from him,’ said he.

About twenty artillerymen, with side-arms only, stood behind the corner of the house. Volódya and the cadet walked up to them. ‘Shall I make them a little speech or simply say “Good-day lads,” or say nothing at all?’ he thought. ‘But why not say “Good-day lads”, it is even right that I should,’ and he cried boldly with his ringing voice, ‘Good-day lads!’ The soldiers answered gaily. The fresh young voice sounded pleasantly in the ears of each. Volódya went briskly in front of the soldiers, and though his heart beat as fast as if he had run full-speed for miles his step was light and his face cheerful. As they approached the Malákhov Redoubt and mounted the hill he noticed that Vlang, who kept close to him all the time and had seemed so brave before leaving the house, was continually dodging and stooping, as if all the bombs and cannon-balls, which whistled past very frequently here, were flying straight at him. Some of the soldiers did the same, and in general most of the faces expressed uneasiness if not exactly alarm. These circumstances emboldened Volódya and completely comforted him.

‘So here am I too on the Malákhov mound, which I fancied a thousand times more terrible. And I get along without bowing to the balls, and am even much less frightened than the others. So I am no coward,’ he thought with pleasure, and even with a certain self-complacent rapture.

This feeling however was quickly shaken by a sight he came upon in the twilight at the Kornílov Battery while looking for the commander of the bastion. Four sailors stood by the breastwork holding by its arms and legs the blood-stained corpse of a man without boots or coat and swinging it before heaving it over. (On the second day of this bombardment it was found impossible in some parts to clear away the corpses from the bastions, and they were therefore thrown out into the ditch so as not to be in the way at the batteries.) Volódya felt stunned for a moment when he saw the body bump on the top of the breastwork and then roll down into the ditch, but luckily for him the commander of the bastion met him just then and gave him his orders and a guide to show him the way to the battery and to the bomb-proof assigned to his men. We will not speak of all the dangers and disenchantments our hero lived through that evening: how – instead of the firing he was used to on the Vólkov field amid conditions of perfect exactitude and order which he had expected to meet with here also – he found two damaged mortars, one with its muzzle battered in by a ball, the other standing on the splinters of its shattered platform; how he could not get workmen before the morning to mend the platform; how not a single charge was of the weight specified in the Handbook; how two of the men under him were wounded, and how he was twenty times within a hair’s-breadth of death. Fortunately a gigantic gunner, a seaman who had served with the mortars since the commencement of the siege, had been appointed to assist Volódya, and convinced him of the possibility of using the mortars. By the light of a lantern this gunner showed him all over the battery as he might have shown him over his own kitchen-garden, and undertook to have everything right by the morning. The bomb-proof to which his guide led him was an oblong hole dug in the rocky ground, twenty-five cubic yards in size and covered with oak beams two and a half feet thick. He and all his soldiers installed themselves in it.

As soon as he discovered the little door, not three feet high, Vlang rushed in headlong before anyone else, and at the risk of breaking his limbs against the stone bottom squeezed into the farthest corner and remained there. Volódya, when all the soldiers had settled on the ground along the walls and some had lit their pipes, made up his own bed in a corner, lit a candle, and after lighting a cigarette, lay down.

The reports of continuous firing could be heard overhead but not very distinctly, except from one cannon which stood quite close and shook the bomb-proof with its thunder. In the bomb-proof all was quiet, except when one or other of the soldiers, still rather shy in the presence of the new officer, spoke, asking a neighbour to move a little or to give him a light for his pipe, when a rat scratched somewhere among the stones, or when Vlang, who had not yet recovered and was still looking wildly around him, heaved a deep sigh.

Volódya, on his bed in this quiet corner crammed with people and lighted by a solitary candle, experienced a sensation of cosiness such as he had felt as a child when, playing hide-and-seek, he used to creep into a cupboard or under his mother’s skirt and sit listening in breathless silence, afraid of the dark yet conscious of enjoyment. It felt rather uncanny, yet his spirits were high.

XXII

AFTER ten minutes or so the soldiers grew bolder and began to talk. The more important ones – two non-commissioned officers: an old grey-haired one with every possible medal and cross except the St George, and a young one, a Cantonist,¹¹ who was smoking cigarettes he had rolled himself – settled nearest to the light and to the officer’s bed. The drummer had as usual assumed the duty of waiting upon the officer. The bombardiers and those who had medals came next, and farther off, in the shadow nearer the entrance, sat the humbler folk. It was these last who started a conversation, caused by the noise a man made who came tumbling hurriedly into the bomb-proof.

‘Hullo, old fellow! Why don’t you stay outside? Don’t the lasses play merrily enough out there?’ said a voice.

‘They’re playing such tunes as we never hear in our village,’ laughingly replied the man who had just run in.

‘Ah, Vásin don’t like bombs – that he don’t!’ said someone in the aristocratic corner.

‘If it was necessary, that would be a different matter,’ replied Vásin slowly, and when he spoke all the others were silent. ‘On the 24th we were at least firing, but why grumble at me now? The authorities won’t thank the likes of us for getting killed uselessly.’

At these words everyone laughed.

‘There’s Mélnikov – he’s out there now, I fancy,’ said someone.

‘Go and send Mélnikov in here,’ said the old sergeant, ‘or else he really will get killed uselessly.’

‘Who is Mélnikov?’ asked Volódya.

‘Oh, he’s a poor silly soldier of ours, your Honour. He’s just afraid of nothing, and he’s walking about outside now. You should have a look at him, he’s just like a bear.’

‘He knows a charm,’ came Vásin’s long-drawn accents from the other corner.

Mélnikov entered the bomb-proof. He was stout (an extremely rare thing among soldiers), red-haired and red-faced, with an enormous bulging forehead and prominent pale-blue eyes.

‘Aren’t you afraid of the bombs?’ asked Volódya.

‘What’s there to be afraid of in them bombs?’ answered Mélnikov, wriggling and scratching himself. ‘They won’t kill me with a bomb, I know.’

‘So you’d like to live here?’

‘’Course I should. It’s jolly here,’ he said and burst out laughing.

‘Oh, then they should take you for a sortie! Shall I speak to the general about it?’ said Volódya, though he did not know a single genera] in the place.

‘Like, indeed! ‘Course I should!’ And Mélnikov hid behind the others.

‘Let’s have a game of “noses” lads! Who has the cards?’ his voice was heard to say hurriedly.

And soon the game had started in the far corner: laughter could be heard, and noses being smacked and trumps declared. The drummer having heated the samovar for him, Volódya drank some tea, treated the non-commissioned officers to some, and, wishing to gain popularity, joked and talked with them and felt very pleased at the respect paid him. The soldiers, seeing that the gentleman gave himself no airs, became talkative too. One of them explained that the siege of Sevastopol would not last much longer, because a reliable fellow in the fleet had told him that Constantine, the Tsar’s brother, was coming with the ‘merican fleet to help us, and also that there would soon be an agreement not to fire for a fortnight, but to have a rest, and that if anyone did fire, he’d have to pay a fine of seventy-five kopeks for each shot. Vásin, who was a small man with whiskers and large kind eyes, as Volódya had already noticed, related, first amid general silence and then amid roars of laughter, how he had gone home on leave and at first everyone was glad to see him, but then his father had begun sending him to work while the forester-lieutenant sent a horse and trap to fetch his wife! All this amused Volódya very much. He not only felt no fear or annoyance because of the overcrowding and bad air in the bomb-proof, but on the contrary felt exceedingly bright and contented.

Many of the soldiers were already snoring. Vlang had also stretched himself out on the floor, and the old sergeant having spread his cloak on the ground was crossing himself and muttering prayers before going to sleep, when Volódya felt moved to go out of the bomb-proof and see what was happening outside.

‘Draw in your legs!’ the soldiers called to one another as soon as he rose, and the legs were drawn in to make room for him.

Vlang, who had seemed to be asleep, suddenly raised his head and seized Volódya by the skirts of his cloak.

‘Don’t go! Don’t go – how can you?’ he began in a tearfully persuasive voice. ‘You don’t know what it’s like. Cannon-balls are falling all the time out there. It’s better in here.’

But in spite of Vlang’s entreaties Volódya made his way out of the bomb-proof and sat down on the threshold, where Mélnikov was already sitting making his feet comfortable.

The air was pure and fresh, especially after that of the bombproof, and the night was clear and calm. Mingling with the booming of the cannon could be heard the rumbling of the wheels of carts bringing gabions, and voices of men at work in the powder-vault. High overhead stretched the starry sky, across which the fiery trails of the bombs ran incessantly. On the left was another bomb-proof, through the three-foot opening of which the legs and backs of the sailors who lived there could be seen and their voices heard. In front was the roof of the powder-vault, past which flitted the figures of stooping men, while on the top of it, under the bullets and bombs that kept flying past, was a tall figure in a black cloak with its hands in its pockets, treading down the earth the others carried up in sacks. Many a bomb flew past and exploded very near the vault. The soldiers who were carrying the earth stooped and stepped aside, but the black figure continued calmly to stamp the earth down with its feet and remained on the spot in the same position.

‘Who is that black fellow there?’ said Volódya to Mélnikov.

‘Can’t say. I’ll go and see.’

‘No, don’t. There’s no need.’

But Mélnikov rose without heeding him, approached the black figure, and for a long time stood beside it just as indifferent and immovable.

‘That’s the powder-master, your Honour!’ he said when he returned. ‘The vault has been knocked in by a bomb, so the infantry are carrying earth there.’

Now and then a bomb seemed to fly straight at the door of the bomb-proof. Then Volódya pressed behind the corner, but soon crept out again looking up to see if another was coming that way. Though Vlang from inside the bomb-proof again and again entreated him to come in, Volódya sat at the threshold for about three hours, finding a kind of pleasure in tempting fate and watching the flying bombs. By the end of the evening he knew how many guns were firing, from which positions, and where their shots fell.

XXIII

THE next morning, 27 August, Volódya, fresh and vigorous after ten hours’ sleep, stepped across the threshold of the bombproof. Vlang too came out, but at the first sound of a bullet rushed wildly back to the entrance, pushing his way through the crowd with his head amid the general laughter of the soldiers, most of whom had also come out into the fresh air.

Vlang, the old sergeant, and a few others only came out into the trench at rare intervals, but the rest could not be kept inside: they all crept out of the stuffy bomb-proof into the fresh morning air and in spite of the firing, which continued as violently as on the day before, settled themselves – some by the threshold of the bomb-proof and some under the breastwork. Mélnikov had been strolling about from battery to battery since early dawn, looking calmly upwards.

Near the threshold sat two old soldiers and one young curly-haired one, a Jew transferred to the battery from an infantry regiment. This latter had picked up one of the bullets that were lying about, and after flattening it out on a stone with the fragment of a bomb, was now carving out a cross like the Order of St George. The others sat talking and watching his work. The cross was really turning out very well.

‘I say,’ said one of them, ‘if we stay here much longer we shall all have served our time and get discharged when there’s peace.’

‘You’re right. Why I had only four years left to serve, and I’ve been five months already in Sevastopol.’

‘That won’t be reckoned specially towards our discharge, it seems,’ said another.

At that moment a cannon-ball flew over the heads of the speakers and fell a couple of feet from Mélnikov, who was coming towards them through the trench.

‘That one nearly killed Mélnikov,’ said one of them.

‘It won’t kill me,’ said Mélnikov.

‘Then I present you with this cross for your courage,’ said the young soldier, giving him the cross he had made.

‘… No, my lad, a month’s service here counts as a year for everything – that was said in the proclamation,’ continued one of the soldiers.

‘You may say what you like, but when we have peace we’re sure to have an Imperial review at Warsaw, and then if we don’t all get our discharge we shall be put on the permanent reserve.’

Just then a shrieking, glancing rifle-bullet flew just over the speakers’ heads and struck a stone.

‘Look out, or you’ll be getting your discharge in full before to-night,’ said one of the soldiers.

They all laughed.

And not only before night, but before two hours had passed, two of them had got their discharge in full and five more were wounded, but the rest went on joking just the same.

By the morning the two mortars had really been put into such a condition that they could be fired, and at ten o’clock Volódya called out his company and marched with it to the battery, in accordance with the order he had received from the commander of the bastion.

Not a trace of the fear noticeable the day before remained among the men as soon as they were actively engaged. Only Vlang could not master himself, but hid and ducked in the same old way, and Vásin lost some of his composure, fidgeted, and kept dodging. Volódya was in ecstasies, the thought of danger never entered his head. Joy at fulfilling his duty, at finding that not only was he no coward but that he was even quite brave, the sense of commanding and being in the presence of twenty men who were he knew watching him with curiosity, made him quite valiant. He was even vain of his courage and showed off before the soldiers, climbing out onto the banquette and unfastening his cloak on purpose to be more conspicuous. The commander of the bastion making the round of his ‘household’ as he expressed it, accustomed as he had grown during the last eight months to courage of all kinds, could not help admiring this handsome lad, with his coat unbuttoned showing a red shirt fitting close to his delicate white neck, who with flushed face and shining eyes clapped his hands, gave the order, ‘One – two!’ in ringing tones, and ran gaily onto the breastwork to see where his bombs were falling. At half-past eleven the firing slackened on both sides, and at twelve o’clock precisely the storming of the Malákhov Redoubt, and of the Second, Third (the Redan), and Fifth Bastions, began.

XXIV

ON the North Side of the Roadstead, towards midday, two sailors were standing on the telegraph hill between Inkerman and the Northern entrenchment: one of them, an officer, was looking at Sevastopol through the telescope fixed there. Another officer with a Cossack had just ridden up to the signal-post.

The sun shone brightly high above the Roadstead, and with its warm bright light played on the stationary vessels, the flapping sails, and the rowing boats. A light wind scarcely swayed the withering leaves of the oak-scrub near the telegraph post, filled the sails of the boats, and ruffled the waves. Sevastopol, still the same, with its unfinished church, its column, its quay, its boulevard showing green on the hill, and the elegant building of its library; with its little azure creeks bristling with masts, the picturesque arches of its aqueducts, and with clouds of blue powder-smoke now and then lit up by red flashes from the guns – this same beautiful, festive, proud Sevastopol, surrounded on one side by yellow smoking hills and on the other by the bright blue sea playing in the sunlight – could still be seen on the opposite side of the Roadstead. Above the rim of the sea, along which spread a streak of black smoke from a steamer, drifted long white clouds that portended rain. Along the whole line of entrenchments, especially on the hills to the left, compressed puffs of thick white smoke continually appeared several at a time, accompanied by flashes that sometimes gleamed like lightning even in the noontide light; and these puffs grew larger and assumed various shapes, rising and seeming darker against the sky.

They started now here now there from the hills, from the enemy’s batteries, from the town, and high up in the sky. The noise of the reports never ceased, and mingling with one another they shook the air.

Towards noon the cloudlets of smoke showed less and less often and the air was less shaken by the booming.

‘There now, the Second Bastion doesn’t reply at all!’ said the mounted hussar officer. ‘It’s absolutely knocked to bits. It’s terrible!’

‘Yes, and the Malákhov hardly fires one shot for three of theirs,’ replied the man who was looking through the telescope. ‘It makes me mad that ours are silent. They are firing straight into the Kornílov Battery and it doesn’t reply at all.’

‘But look here, I told you they always stop bombarding at noon. And it’s the same to-day. We’d better go to lunch … they’ll be waiting for us as it is.… There’s nothing to look at now.’

‘Wait a bit! Don’t bother me!’ said the man in possession of the telescope, looking eagerly at Sevastopol.

‘What is it? What?’

‘A movement in the trenches – dense columns advancing.’

‘Yes, one can see it with the naked eye,’ said the sailor. ‘They are advancing in columns. We must give the alarm.’

‘Look! Look! They have left the trenches.’

And one could really see with the naked eye what seemed like dark spots coming down the hill, across the ravine from the French batteries towards our bastions. In front of these spots, dark streaks could already be seen near our lines. From our bastions white cloudlets of firing burst out at different points as if crossing one another. The wind brought a sound of small-arms firing, like rain pelting against window-panes. The dark streaks were moving nearer and nearer right amid the smoke. The sounds of firing grew louder and louder and merged into a prolonged rumbling peal. The smoke, rising more and more often, spread rapidly along the lines and at last merged into one light-purple cloud curling and uncurling, amid which here and there flashes just flickered and dark dots appeared: all the separate sounds blended into one thundering crash.

‘An assault!’ said the officer, growing pale and letting the sailor have the telescope.

Cossacks galloped down the road, officers on horseback passed by, and the commander-in-chief in a carriage accompanied by his suite. On every face there was an expression of painful agitation and expectancy.

‘They can’t have taken it!’ cried the mounted officer.

‘By God, a standard! Look! Look!’ said the officer, panting and moving away from the telescope – ‘A French standard on the Malákhov!’

‘Impossible!’

XXV

THE elder Kozeltsóv, who had found time that night to win back his money and to lose it all again, including the gold pieces sewn in his cuff, was lying towards morning in a heavy, unhealthy, and deep sleep in the Defence Barracks of the Fifth Bastion, when a desperate cry arose, repeated by many voices —

‘The alarm!’

‘Why are you sleeping, Michael Semënich? We are attacked!’ shouted someone.

‘It must be a hoax,’ he said, opening his eyes incredulously.

Then he saw an officer running from one corner of the barracks to the other without any apparent reason and with such a pale face that he realized it all. The thought that they might take him for a coward who did not wish to be with his company at a critical moment upset him terribly, and he rushed full speed to join it. The artillery firing had ceased, but the clatter of musketry was at its height. The bullets did not whistle as single ones do but came in swarms like a flock of autumn birds flying overhead.

The whole place where his battalion had been stationed the day before was hidden in smoke, and enemy shouts and exclamations could be heard. As he went he met crowds of wounded and unwounded soldiers. Having run another thirty paces he saw his own company pressed to the wall.

‘The Schwartz Redoubt is taken!’ said a young officer, whose teeth were chattering. ‘All is lost!’

‘Nonsense!’ said Kozeltsóv angrily, and [wishing to rouse himself by a gesture] he drew his blunt little iron sword and cried:

‘Forward, lads! Hurrah!’

His voice sounded loud and clear and roused Kozeltsóv himself. He ran forward along the traverse, and about fifty soldiers ran shouting after him. From the traverse he ran out into the open ground. The bullets fell just like hailstones. Two hit him, but where, and what they had done – bruised him or wounded him – he had no time to determine. Before him through the smoke he could already see blue coats and red trousers, and hear shouts that were not Russian. One Frenchman stood on the breastwork waving his cap and shouting something. Kozeltsóv felt sure he would be killed, and this increased his courage. He ran on and on. Several soldiers outran him, others appeared from somewhere else and also ran. The blue uniforms were always at the same distance from him, running back to their trenches, but there were dead and wounded on the ground under his feet. When he had run to the outer ditch, everything became blurred in Kozeltsóv’s eyes and he felt a pain in his chest.

Half an hour later he was lying on a stretcher near the Nicholas Barracks and knew that he was wounded, but felt hardly any pain. He only wished for something cool to drink, and to lie more comfortably.

A plump little doctor with large black whiskers came up to him and unbuttoned his cloak. Kozeltsóv looked over his chin to see the doctor’s face and what he was doing to his wound, but he still felt no pain. The doctor covered the wound with the shirt, wiped his fingers on the skirt of his cloak and silently, without looking at the wounded man, passed on to another patient. Kozeltsóv unconsciously watched what was going on around him and, remembering what had happened at the Fifth Bastion with exceedingly joyful self-satisfaction, felt that he had performed his duty well – that for the first time in the whole of his service he had acted as well as it was possible to act, and that he had nothing to reproach himself with. The doctor, bandaging another man, pointed to Kozeltsóv and said something to a priest with a large red beard, who stood near by with a cross.

‘Am I dying?’ asked Kozeltsóv when the priest approached him.

The priest did not reply, but said a prayer and held a cross to the wounded man’s lips.

Death did not frighten Kozeltsóv. He took the cross with his weak hands, pressed it to his lips, and began to weep.

‘Were the French driven back?’ he asked the priest firmly.

‘The victory is ours at all points,’ answered the latter to console the wounded man, concealing from him the fact that a French standard was already waving from the Malákhov Redoubt.

‘Thank God!’ exclaimed the dying man, not feeling the tears that ran down his cheeks, [and experiencing inexpressible delight at the consciousness of having performed a heroic deed.]

The thought of his brother flashed through his brain. ‘God grant him as good a fate!’ thought he.

XXVI

BUT a different fate awaited Volódya. He was listening to a tale Vásin was telling when he heard the cry ‘The French are coming!’ The blood suddenly rushed to his heart and he felt his cheeks grow cold and pale. He remained immovable for a moment, but glancing round saw the soldiers fastening their uniforms and crawling out one after the other fairly coolly. One of them – Mélnikov probably – even joked, saying, ‘Take them some bread and salt.’¹²

Volódya, and Vlang who followed him like a shadow, climbed out of the bomb-proof and ran to the battery. There was no artillery firing at all from either side. The coolness of the soldiers did less to rouse Volódya than the pitiful cowardice of the cadet. ‘Can I possibly be like him?’ he thought, and ran gaily to the breastwork where his mortars stood. He could plainly see the French running straight towards him across the open ground, and crowds of them moving in the nearer trenches, their bayonets glittering in the sunshine. One short, broad-shouldered fellow in a Zouave uniform was running in front, sword in hand, jumping across the pits.

‘Fire case-shot!’ cried Volódya, running back from the banquette, but the soldiers had already arranged matters without him and the metallic ring of the discharged case-shot whistled over his head first from one mortar and then from the other. ‘One – two!’ ordered Volódya, running the distance between the two mortars and quite forgetting the danger. From one side and near at hand was heard the clatter of the musketry of our supports, and excited cries.

Suddenly a wild cry of despair arose on the left. ‘They’re behind us! Behind us!’ repeated several voices. Volódya looked round. About twenty Frenchmen appeared behind him. One of them, a handsome man with a black beard, was in front of the rest, but having run up to within ten paces of the battery he stopped, fired point-blank at Volódya, and then again started running towards him. For a moment Volódya stood petrified, unable to believe his eyes. When he recovered and glanced round he saw French uniforms on the breastwork before him; two Frenchmen were even spiking a cannon some ten paces from him. No one was near but Mélnikov, who had fallen at his side killed by a bullet, and Vlang, who had seized a linstock and was rushing forward with a furious look on his face, rolling his eyes and shouting.

‘Follow me, Vladímir Semënich! … Follow me!’ he cried in a desperate voice, brandishing his linstock at the Frenchmen who had appeared from behind. The furious figure of the cadet perplexed them. Vlang hit the front one on the head, the others involuntarily hesitated, and he ran to the trench where our infantry lay firing at the French, continually looking back and shouting desperately, ‘Come with me, Vladímir Semënich! Why are you stopping? Run!’ Having jumped in, he climbed out again to see what his adored ensign was doing. Something in a cloak lay prostrate where Volódya had stood, and that whole place was occupied by Frenchmen firing at our men.

XXVII

VLANG found his battery at the second line of defence. Of the twenty soldiers belonging to the mortar battery only eight were left.

Towards nine in the evening Vlang crossed over with the battery to the North Side on a steamer crowded with soldiers, cannon, horses, and wounded men. There was no firing anywhere. The stars shone as brightly in the sky as they had done the night before, but the sea was rocked by a strong wind. On the First and Second Bastions flames kept bursting up along the ground, explosions rent the air and lit up strange dark objects and the stones flying in the air around them. Something was burning near the docks and the red glare was reflected on the water. The bridge thronged with people was illuminated by a fire at the Nicholas Battery. A large flame seemed to stand above the water on the distant little headland of the Alexander Battery, lighting up from below the clouds of smoke that hung above it, and quiet, bold lights gleamed over the sea, as they had done yesterday, from the distant enemy fleet, and the fresh wind raised waves in the Roadstead. By the glaring light of the conflagration one could see the masts of our sinking ships as they slowly descended deeper and deeper into the water. There was no talking on board, only words of command given by the captain, the snorting and stamping of the horses on the vessel, and the moaning of the wounded, could be heard above the steam and the regular swish of the parting waters. Vlang, who had had nothing to eat all day, took a piece of bread from his pocket and began munching it, but suddenly remembering Volódya he began to sob so loud that the soldiers near him heard it.

‘Look! He’s eating bread and yet he’s sobbing, is our Vlánga!’ said Vásin.

‘That’s queer!’ said another.

‘Look! Our barrack’s been set on fire too,’ he continued with a sigh. ‘What a lot of the likes of us perished there; and now the Frenchmen have got it for nothing.’

‘At all events we have got off alive, thank God!’ said Vásin.

‘All the same, it’s a shame.’

‘Where’s the shame? D’you think they’ll get a chance of amusing themselves there? See if ours don’t retake it. No matter how many of the likes of us are lost; if the Emperor gives the word, as sure as there’s a God we’ll take it back. You don’t suppose we’ll leave it like that? No fear! There, take the bare walls.… The ‘trenchments are all blown up.… Yes, I daresay.… He’s stuck his flag on the mound, but he’s not shoved himself into the town.… You wait a bit! The real reckoning will come yet – only wait a bit!’ he concluded, admonishing the French.

‘Of course it will!’ said another with conviction.

Along the whole line of the Sevastopol bastions – which for so many months had been seething with such extraordinary life and energy, for so many months had seen heroes relieved by death as they fell one after another, and for so many months had aroused the fear, the hatred, and at last the admiration of the enemy – no one was now to be seen: all was dead, ghastly, terrible. But it was not silent: destruction was still going on. Everywhere on the ground, blasted and strewn around by fresh explosions, lay shattered gun-carriages crushing the corpses of foes and Russians alike, cast-iron cannons thrown with terrific force into holes and half-buried in the earth and silenced for ever, bombs, cannon-balls and more dead bodies; then holes and splintered beams of what had been bomb-proofs, and again silent corpses in grey or blue uniforms. All this still shuddered again and again, and was lit up by the lurid flames of the explosions that continued to shake the air.

The enemy saw that something incomprehensible was happening in awe-inspiring Sevastopol. The explosions and the deathly stillness on the bastions made them shudder, but under the influence of the strong and firm resistance of that day they did not yet dare to believe that their unflinching foe had disappeared, and they awaited the end of the gloomy night silently, motionless and anxious.

The Sevastopol army, surging and spreading like the sea on a rough dark night, its whole mass anxiously palpitating, slowly swayed through the thick darkness by the bridge over the Roadstead and onto the North Side, away from the place where it was leaving so many brave comrades, from the place saturated with its blood, the place it had held for eleven months against a far stronger foe, but which it was now ordered to abandon without a struggle.

The first effect this command had on every Russian was one of oppressive bewilderment. The next feeling was a fear of pursuit. The men felt helpless as soon as they had left the places where they were accustomed to fight, and crowded anxiously together in the darkness at the entrance to the bridge which was rocked by the strong wind. With bayonets clashing, regiments, vehicles, and militia crowded together and pressed forward to the bay. While mounted officers pushed through with orders, the inhabitants wept, orderlies carrying forbidden luggage entreated, and artillery with rattling wheels hurried to get away. Notwithstanding the diversion resulting from their various and bustling occupations, the instinct of self-preservation and the desire to get away as quickly as possible from this dreadful place of death was present in the soul of each. It was present in the mortally wounded soldier who lay among the five hundred other wounded men on the pavement of the Pávlov Quay praying to God for death; in the militiaman pushing with all his might among the dense crowd to make way for a general who was riding past; in the general who conducted the crossing, firmly restraining the impetuosity of the soldiers; in the sailor who, having got among a moving battalion, was squeezed by the swaying crowd till he could scarcely breathe; in the wounded officer whom four soldiers had been carrying on a stretcher, but stopped by the throng had put down on the ground near the Nicholas Battery; in the artilleryman who having served with the same gun for sixteen years was now, in obedience to an officer’s order quite incomprehensible to him, with the help of his comrades pushing that gun down the steep bank into the Roadstead, and in the sailors of the fleet who, having just scuttled their ships, were briskly rowing away from them in the long-boats. On reaching the North Side and leaving the bridge almost every man took off his cap and crossed himself. But behind this feeling of self-preservation there was another, a deeper feeling, sad and gnawing, akin to remorse, shame, and anger. Almost every soldier looking back at the abandoned town from the North Side, sighed with inexpressible bitterness in his heart and made a menacing gesture towards the enemy.

¹ The last posting-station north of Sevastopol. L. T.

² There were a series of desperate night conflicts on the 9 to 11 May o.s. (21 to 23 May n.s.).

³ A number of Freemasons were involved in the Decembrist mutiny in 1825, when Nicholas I ascended the throne. He was consequently very suspicious of that organization, which at the time of the Crimean War was prohibited in Russia. The inquiry made would therefore be offensive to a loyal and patriotic volunteer.

⁴ Vodka is a spirit distilled from rye. It is the commonest form of strong drink in Russia.

⁵ The Belbék is a river.

⁶ This pontoon bridge was erected during the summer of 1855. At first it was feared that the water was too rough in the Roadstead for a secure bridge to be built, but it served its purpose, and later on even stood the strain put upon it by the retreat of the Russian army to the North Side.

⁷ In addressing anyone in Russian, it is usual to employ the Christian name and patronymic: i.e. to the Christian name (in this case Michael) the father’s Christian name is joined (in this case Semën) with the termination vich (o-vkh or e-vich) which means ‘son of’. The termination is often shortened to ich, and colloquially to ych. Surnames are less used than in English, for the patronymic is suitable for all circumstances of life – both for speaking to and of anyone – except that people on very intimate terms use only the Christian name, or a pet name.

⁸ The Korábelnaya was a suburb of Sevastopol lying to the east of the South Bay and to the south of the Roadstead. Like the ‘North Side’ it was connected with Sevastopol by a floating bridge.

⁹ That is, a medal granted for service in the suppression of the Hungarian rising in 1849, when Nicholas I helped Austria to suppress the insurgent Hungarians.

¹⁰ Referring to the custom of charging the government more than the actual price of supplies, and thereby making an income which was supposed to go for the benefit of the regiment, but part of which frequently remained unaccounted for.

¹¹ The Cantonists, under serfdom, which still prevailed at the time of the Crimean War, were the sons of soldiers, condemned by law and heredity to be soldiers also.

¹² It is a Russian custom to offer bread and salt to new arrivals.