And the officer rode off at a fast trot.
Volodya suddenly felt terribly afraid: he kept thinking that at any moment a cannonball or a shell-splinter might come hurtling over and blow his head off. The dank gloom, all the sounds—especially the querulous plashing of the waves—everything seemed to be telling him that he should go no further, that no good lay in store for him here, that his feet would never again tread Russian soil once he had crossed to the other side of the bay, that he should turn back at once and run away somewhere, as far away as possible from this terrible place of death. “But perhaps it’s too late for that now, perhaps it’s all been decided already,” he thought, and he shivered, partly at this thought, and partly because the water had penetrated his boots and his feet were getting wet.
Volodya sighed deeply and left his brother’s side, stopping a short distance away.
“Lord, am I really going to be killed—I, of all people? Lord, have mercy upon me!” he said in a whisper, and he crossed himself.
“Well, let’s be off, Volodya,” said his older brother, as the waggon rolled on to the bridge. “Did you see that shell?”
On the bridge the brothers met waggons full of wounded men; there were others carrying gabions, and one was laden with furniture and was being driven by a woman. When they reached the other side, no one tried to stop them. Edging their way by instinct along the wall of the Nicholas battery, listening as they went to the sounds of the shells that were already beginning to burst above their heads now, and to the roar of the fragments as they hurtled earthwards, they reached the place on the battery where the icon was kept. Here they learned that the 5th light battery, to which Volodya had been assigned, was stationed on the Korabelnaya.[44] They decided to ignore the risk and go straight to the 5th bastion together; there they would sleep the night at the older brother’s quarters and would continue their journey to the unit on the following day. Entering a corridor and picking their way over the legs of the sleeping soldiers who lay along the entire length of the battery wall, they finally arrived at the dressing station.
— 11 —
As they entered the first ward, which was furnished with camp beds on which the wounded lay and was steeped in the loathsome, cloying miasma of hospitals, they met two Sisters of Mercy coming towards them.
One of these women, who was aged about fifty, with black eyes and a severe facial expression, was holding a pile of lint and bandages in her arms and giving instructions to a young lad, an apothecary assistant, who was following behind her; the other, an extremely pretty girl of around twenty, with a pale, delicate, fair-complexioned face that was somehow lent an especial sweetness and helplessness by the white nurse’s headdress that surrounded it, was walking by the older woman’s side, apparently afraid of being left behind, her hands in the pockets of her apron and her eyes directed at the ground.
Kozeltsov addressed them with a question: did they know where Martsov was, the man who had had his leg blown off the day previously?
“Do you mean the patient from the P—— Regiment?” the older woman asked. “Are you related to him, then?”
“No, ma’am, I’m a friend of his.”
“Hm! Very well, take them to see him,” she said to the young nurse, in French. “He’s through there.” And with that, she and the apothecary assistant went off to tend to another of the wounded men.
“Come on, what are you staring at?” said Kozeltsov to Volodya, who was looking at the wounded soldiers with a wide-eyed, agonized expression on his face, unable to tear himself away. “Let’s go.”
Volodya went off with his brother, but continued to gaze around him all the while, repeating to himself without being aware of it: “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
“I suppose he hasn’t been out here very long?” said the nurse to Kozeltsov, indicating Volodya who was following them along the corridor, sighing and groaning to himself.
“He’s only just arrived.”
The pretty nurse took a look at Volodya and suddenly burst into tears.
“Oh God, God!” she cried, with despair in her voice. “When is all this going to stop?”
They entered the officers’ ward. Martsov was lying on his back, his sinewy arms, bare to the elbows, thrown up behind his head, and his yellowish face displaying the expression of one who is clenching his teeth so as not to cry out in pain. His undamaged leg, clad in a sock, was protruding from under the blanket, and one could see that its toes were twitching convulsively.
“Well, and how are you today?” asked the nurse, as with her delicate fingers, on one of which Volodya observed a gold ring, she raised the wounded man’s slightly balding head and straightened his pillow for him. “Here are some friends of yours who’ve come to see you.”
“I’m in pain, of course,” said the patient, testily. “Leave me alone, I’m all right!” And with that, the toes in the sock began to move even faster. “Hallo! I’m sorry, but can you tell me your name again?” he said, addressing Kozeltsov. “I know it’s bad of me, but a man forgets everything in here,” he said, when the other had told him his surname. “We used to share the same quarters, didn’t we?” he added without any evident pleasure, casting an enquiring look in Volodya’s direction.
“This is my brother, he only arrived from St Petersburg today.”
“Hm! Well, I’ve earned a full discharge,” he said, screwing his features into a grimace. “God, how it hurts! . . . I wish it could all be over.”
He gave his leg a jerk and covered his face with his hands, muttering something.
“You’d better leave now,” said the nurse in a low voice; there were tears in her eyes. “He’s in a very bad way.”
While they were still back on the North Side, the brothers had agreed to go to the 5th bastion together; but on emerging from the Nicholas battery they came, as it were, to a tacit agreement that neither should expose himself to unnecessary danger, and that each should travel separately.
“All that worries me is how you’re ever going to find the place on your own,” said the older brother. “I suppose Nikolayev can take you to the Korabelnaya, and I’ll make my way alone and join you tomorrow.”
These were the last words to be spoken between the two brothers during this, their final farewell.
— 12 —
The thunder of the cannon continued as loudly as ever, but Catherine Street, along which Volodya was making his way, followed by a taciturn Nikolayev, was completely empty and quiet. In the gloom all he could see was the broad thoroughfare with, on either side, the white walls of large houses that had been reduced to rubble in many places, and the stone pavement along which he was walking. From time to time he met soldiers and officers. As he was passing along the left-hand side of the street, near the Admiralty building, he caught sight, by the glow of a bright lamp which was shining behind the wall, of the acacia shrubs that had been planted along the pavement, with their green supports and tired, dusty leaves. He could hear every sound quite distinctly: his own footsteps and those of Nikolayev, following behind him, and Nikolayev’s stertorous breathing. He was thinking about nothing in particular: the pretty nurse, Martsov’s leg and the toes moving inside the sock, the gloom, the shells and the various manifestations of death all moved dimly through his imagination. His young, impressionable soul ached and shrank in the consciousness of his own isolation, and of the fact that no one else seemed to care what happened to him in this hour of danger. “I’ll suffer in agony, I’ll be killed—and no one will shed a tear!” he reflected. All this was a long way from the heroic life, filled with compassion and vitality, about which he had had such beautiful dreams. The shells came whistling and exploding nearer and nearer; Nikolayev’s sighs grew more frequent, but still he uttered no word. As they were crossing the Maly Korabelny bridge, he saw a bright object hurtle past him into the bay, whistling as it went. For a second it lit the lilac-coloured waves, disappeared from view, and then rose out of the sea again in a column of spray.
“Look
, sir, that one’s still alight!” said Nikolayev.
“Yes,” he answered, astonished at the thin, reedy little voice in which he heard himself speaking.
They met stretcher parties ferrying wounded men, and more waggons laden with gabions; on the Korabelnaya they encountered a regiment; men on horseback were riding past. One of these was an officer, accompanied by a Cossack. The officer was riding at a fast trot, but catching sight of Volodya he brought his horse to a standstill beside him, looked searchingly into his face, turned away again and then rode off, delivering a smack of his whip to the horse’s flanks. “I’m alone, I’m alone! No one could care less whether I exist or not,” thought the poor boy in horror, and he genuinely felt like bursting into tears.
Continuing uphill past a high, white wall, he entered a street of small, devastated houses which were continuously illuminated by the flashes of exploding shells. A drunken, tormented-looking woman who was emerging from a gateway in the company of a sailor stumbled against Volodya, muttering: “ . . . because if he’d been a decent sort of fellow, a gentleman . . . Oh, pardon me; officer, your honour!”
The aching in the poor boy’s heart was getting worse and worse; the lightnings on the black horizon were growing ever more frequent, as were the whistling and explosions of the shells around him.
Nikolayev gave a deep sigh and suddenly began to say, in a voice that to Volodya sounded as though it were coming from beyond the grave: “Such a hurry he was in to get here. Travelling and travelling. A fine place to hurry to. When the clever gentlemen, the ones who have any brains, go to hospital as soon as they’re the slightest bit wounded and stay there. That’s the only way to manage, if you ask me.”
“What do you mean? After all, my brother’s completely recovered now,” replied Volodya, hoping by means of conversation to dispel the unpleasant feeling that had taken hold of him.
“Recovered! What kind of recovery is it when he’s still as sick as a dog? The ones who’ve really recovered, and the ones who’ve got any sense, those fellows stay in hospital at a time like this. What joy can a man expect out here, eh? He’s more likely to get his arm blown off—that’s all. And he won’t have to wait long before it happens, either. It’s bad enough here in town—it must be purgatory up there on the bastion. You can’t put a foot forward without saying a prayer to yourself. Ach, the devil, listen to it bansheeing away past!” he added, transferring his attention to a shell-fragment that was whistling by close at hand. “Take what he’s done now, for example,” Nikolayev continued. “He’s ordered me to show your honour the way. Of course, I know the score: what I’m told to do, I do. But the point is that he’s gone and left the waggon with some soldier or other, and the bundle isn’t tied up. Get along with you, he says, get along; but if anything goes missing you can bet your boots it’ll be Nikolayev who takes the blame.”
Continuing a few paces further, they emerged on to a square. Nikolayev sighed and said nothing.
“That’s your artillery over there, your honour,” he said, suddenly. “Ask the sentry: he’ll show you where to go.”
When Volodya had gone a few yards and no longer heard the sounds of Nikolayev’s sighing behind him, he suddenly felt completely and utterly alone. This consciousness of his own isolation and of the danger he was in—in the jaws of death, he thought—lay on his heart like some cold and unspeakably heavy stone. He stood still in the middle of the square and looked round to see if anyone was watching him, clutched at his head and thought out loud, with a sense of horror: “Lord! Am I really a coward—a base, vile, worthless coward? Am I really incapable of dying an honourable death for the fatherland and for the Tsar, for whom so recently I dreamed with joy of dying? Yes! I’m a wretched, pathetic creature!” And with a genuine sense of despair and disenchantment with himself he asked the sentry which was the house of the battery commander, and walked up to it.
— 13 —
The battery commander had his quarters in a small, two-storeyed house which one entered from the yard; the sentry pointed the building out to Volodya. In one of the windows, which had been pasted over with strips of paper, the dim light of a candle burned. An orderly was sitting in the porch, smoking his pipe. He went inside to announce Volodya’s arrival, then came back and showed Volodya into one of the rooms. The room contained a writing-table piled high with official documents, placed between two of the windows and underneath a broken mirror; there were one or two chairs and an iron bedstead with a mattress and clean linen, with a small hanging on the wall beside it.
In the doorway stood a handsome man with a large moustache—a sergeant-major; at his side he wore a broadsword, and he was dressed in a military greatcoat that displayed the ribbons of the St George Cross and the Hungarian Medal. In the middle of the room a short staff officer, aged about forty, was strolling to and fro; one of his cheeks was swollen and tied up in a handkerchief, and he was wearing a thin, shabby old greatcoat.
“Ensign Kozeltsov II, attached to the 5th light battery, reporting for duty, sir,” said Volodya, trotting out the phrase he had learnt at cadet corps, as he entered the room.
The battery commander drily returned his bow and, without offering his hand, asked him to sit down.
Volodya sat down shyly on a chair beside the writing-table and began to toy with a pair of scissors that had somehow found their way into his hands; the battery commander, meanwhile, his hands clasped together behind his back and his head lowered, cast only an occasional glance at the hands that were twiddling the scissors and, without once saying a word, continued to stroll about the room with the air of one who is in the process of remembering something.
The battery commander was a rather stout little man; on the crown of his head he had a large bald patch; he had a thick moustache which he had allowed to grow straight and which covered his mouth, and large, pleasant eyes. His hands were well proportioned, clean and plump; as he strolled about with confidence and a certain foppish air, his almost bow-legged gait advertised the fact that the battery commander was not a timid sort of fellow.
“Yes,” he said, coming to a halt beside the sergeant-major. “We’d better give those ammunition horses a bit more fodder, otherwise they’ll be no good for anything. What do you think?”
“Oh, I’m sure we could give them a bit extra, your honour! Oats are getting cheaper all the time just now,” the sergeant-major replied, with a motion of his fingers, which he was keeping in line with the seam of his trousers, but which in the normal course of events he evidently liked to use in order to assist the conversation by means of gestures. “By the way, your honour, I had a note from our forager, Franshchuk, who’s up at the waggon train; he says we really ought to buy some axles there; apparently they’re very cheap. Will you give him the go-ahead?”
“Yes, tell him to buy some. He’s got money, hasn’t he?” And the battery commander began to stroll about the room again. “Where’s your kit?” he suddenly asked Volodya, coming to a halt in front of him.
So overwhelmed had poor Volodya been by the thought that he was a coward that he now tended to detect contempt in every word and glance that came his way. He had the impression that the battery commander had already fathomed his secret and was out to tease him. Covered in confusion, he replied that his kit was on the Grafskaya, and that his brother had said he would deliver it to him the following day.
But the lieutenant-colonel did not bother to hear him out and, turning to the sergeant-major, asked: “Where are we going to put this ensign?”
“Ensign, sir?” said the sergeant-major, causing Volodya still further embarrassment by the cursory glance with which he looked him up and down, a glance which seemed to enquire: “What sort of an ensign is this, and is it worth putting him anywhere?” “There’s room for him downstairs, in the lieutenant-captain’s quarters, your honour,” he continued, after a moment’s thought. “The lieutenant-captain’s in the bastion just now, so his bed’s not in use.”
“Well, there you are, will that do
for now?” said the battery commander. “I expect you’re tired. We’ll find you some better quarters tomorrow.”
Volodya got up and bowed.
“Would you like some tea?” the battery commander asked, as Volodya was already on his way towards the door. “I can provide you with a samovar.”
Volodya bowed and went out. The colonel’s orderly led him downstairs and showed him into a bare, dirty room that was strewn with various items of lumber and contained an iron bedstead and mattress with no sheets or blanket. A man in a pink shirt was asleep on the bed, covered by a greatcoat.
For a moment, Volodya thought the man was a common soldier.
“Pyotr Nikolaich!” said the orderly, giving the sleeping man’s shoulder a hefty nudge. “There’s an ensign supposed to be sleeping here . . . This is one of our cadets,” he added, turning to Volodya.
“Oh, please don’t let me disturb you!” said Volodya; but the cadet, a tall, thickset young man with a handsome but thoroughly unintelligent face, got up off the bed, threw on his greatcoat and, evidently still not properly awake, left the room.
“It’s all right, I’ll sleep outside,” he muttered.
— 14 —
When he was at last left alone with his thoughts, Volodya’s first sensation was one of revulsion at the chaotic, cheerless state of his own mind. He wanted to fall asleep and forget about everything around him—including himself. He snuffed out the candle, lay down on the bed and, loosening his coat, used it to cover himself, pulling it up over his head in order to alleviate the fear of darkness from which he had suffered ever since he was a child. Then, however, he suddenly had the thought that a shell might come flying over, land on the roof and kill him. He began to listen; directly above his head he could hear the footsteps of the battery commander.
“Oh well,” he thought; “if a shell does hit the house it’ll be those who are upstairs that are killed first. At least I won’t be the only one.” This thought calmed him somewhat, and he began to nod off to sleep. “But what if the French take Sebastopol tonight and come bursting in here? What will I defend myself with?” He got up again and paced about the room. His fear of this real danger had driven away his superstitious fear of the dark. The room contained no serviceable blunt objects beyond a samovar and a saddle. “I’m hopeless, I’m a coward, a despicable coward!” he suddenly thought, and once more experienced a painful sensation of self-contempt, even self-disgust. He lay down again and tried not to think. Then the impressions of the day that had passed began to flood into his brain, mingling with the incessant detonations of the bombardment that made the glass in the room’s single window rattle, and again reminded him of the danger he was in: he dreamt, now of wounded men and blood, now of shells and shell-fragments that burst into the room, now of the pretty nurse bandaging his wounds and weeping over him as he lay dying, now of his mother seeing him off in the local town and praying with all her heart before a miracle-working icon—and again found that he could not sleep. But suddenly the thought of a benevolent, almighty God, who could bring all things about and who heard every prayer, came clearly to his mind. He got down on his knees, made the sign of the cross over himself, and placed his hands together as he had been taught to do as a child. This gesture instantly gave him a long-missed sense of relief.