“Well, may God go with you. You’ll get your baptism of fire without having to wait for it,” said the battery commander, watching the young ensign’s embarrassed features with a good-natured smile. “But you’d better be off at the double. And to make things more cheerful for you, Vlang will go along with you as NCO.”
— 21 —
Vlang was overjoyed by his assignment. He promptly ran off to get ready and, as soon as he was properly dressed, came back to give Volodya a hand, urging him to take with him his camp bed, his fur greatcoat, his old copies of Fatherland Notes,[47] his spirit coffee-maker and various other possessions he could not possibly need. The captain advised Volodya to read, before he did anything else, the section of the handbook[h] that dealt with the firing of mortars, and to copy out from it immediately the table giving angles of elevation. Volodya set to this task at once, and observed, to his surprise and joy, that although his fear of danger and his even greater fear of proving to be a coward were still causing him some uneasiness, they were almost as nothing compared with the day before. Part of the reason for this lay in the immediacy of the occasion and the activity it involved; but it was also partly (and mainly) due to the fact that fear, like every powerful emotion, is incapable of being sustained at the same high level for any appreciable length of time. In other words, he had already passed the stage of being afraid. At about seven that evening, just as the sun was beginning to dip behind the Nicholas Barracks, the sergeant-major came in to report to him that the men were ready and waiting.
“I’ve given the list of names to Vlanga. He’ll tell you what they are if you ask him, your honour!” he said.
Some twenty artillerymen armed with broadswords at the ready were standing at the side of the house. Volodya approached them, accompanied by the cadet. “Ought I to make a short speech, just say ‘Good health, men’, or not say anything at all?” he wondered. “Oh, why don’t I just say ‘Good health, men’—I’m sure that’s correct.” And, plucking up his courage, he cried, “Good health, men!” The soldiers answered cheerfully: this fresh young voice sounded pleasantly to the ears of each of them. Volodya briskly led the way, and though his heart was hammering inside him as if he had just run several versts at full sprint, his gait was light and his face cheerful. As they approached the Malakhov on their way up the hill, he noticed that Vlang, who had never once lagged behind and who back at barracks had seemed such a valiant fellow, was constantly stepping aside and ducking his head, as though all the shells and cannonballs, which were indeed whistling past with great frequency now, were coming straight in his direction. Some of the soldiers were doing the same, and most of their faces wore an expression which, if it was not one of fear, was at least one of apprehension. Volodya found all this thoroughly reassuring and encouraging.
“So here I am on the Malakhov, and it isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be! I’m able to keep going without ducking, and I’m far less afraid than the others. Does that mean I’m not a coward?” he pondered with delight, and even a certain rapturous self-satisfaction.
This sense of fearlessness and self-satisfaction was, however, soon shaken by the spectacle he stumbled upon in the semidarkness at the Kornilov battery as he was looking for the bastion commander. Four sailors were holding a bloody, coatless and bootless corpse by its arms and legs, preparing to heave it over the parapet. (This was the second day of the bombardment, and already there was no time to gather up the dead bodies that lay on the bastions; instead they were being thrown into the moat so that they did not get in the way of the gun crews.) Volodya froze for a moment as he saw the corpse strike the top of the parapet and then slowly slither down into the fosse; luckily for him, however, the bastion commander happened to come along just then, gave him some orders and supplied him with a guide to take him to the battery and the casemate that had been designated for the gun crews. I shall not relate all the many further horrors, dangers and disenchantments experienced by our hero in the course of that evening; how, instead of the artillery work he had witnessed on Volkovo Polye,[48] which had been characterized by the kind of order and precision he had been hoping to find here, he found two cracked little mortars with no sights, the muzzle of one of which had been crumpled by a cannonball, while the platform of the other had been blown to splinters; how he was unable to get anyone to repair the platform until the morning; how not one of the charges was of the weight specified in the handbook; how two of the soldiers in his unit were wounded and how on at least a couple of dozen occasions he himself came within a hair’s breadth of death. He was fortunate in having been given a helper, an immensely tall naval gunner who had been handling these mortars ever since the beginning of the siege. The gunner managed to persuade Volodya that they could still be made to work, showed him round the whole bastion in the darkness by the light of a lantern, as if this were his kitchen garden, and promised to have everything in proper working order by the following morning. The casemate to which Volodya’s guide took him was an oblong pit excavated in the stony soil some two cubic sazhens[49] in dimension, and covered by large oak beams. It was here that Volodya and all his men were to accommodate themselves. Vlang, the moment he caught sight of the low entrance to the casemate, rushed through it before all the others, barely missed bruising himself on the stone floor and then hid himself away in a corner, from which he did not emerge. Volodya, on the other hand, waiting until all the soldiers had found places for themselves on the floor along the walls and some of them had lit their pipes, set up his bed in a corner, lighted a candle, lit a cigarette from it and lay down to smoke. Above the casemate there was a constant rumble of gunfire, none of it particularly loud, with the exception of a single cannon which was very near at hand and which, every time it fired, shook the casemate so violently that earth came showering down from the ceiling. In the casemate itself it was quiet: the only sounds were made by the men, still wary of the new officer, exchanging the odd remark from time to time, asking someone to move aside, or someone else for a light; by a rat, scrabbling somewhere between the stones; or by Vlang, who had not yet mastered himself and was looking wildly around him, every so often uttering a loud sigh. As he lay there on his bed in that crowded corner lit by a single candle, Volodya experienced the cosy sensation he had had as a child, when during games of hide-and-seek he had crept into a cupboard or under his mother’s skirts and, almost without daring to breathe, had listened, felt a fear of the dark and yet strangely enjoyed himself. He had a slight sense of nervous glee.
— 22 —
After some ten minutes or so, the soldiers regained a little of their self-confidence and began talking to one another. Nearest the officer’s bed and candle sat the two most important men, both artillery NCOs. One of them was old and grey-haired, and was wearing the ribbons of practically every medal and cross there was, with the exception of the St George Cross; the other was young, a Kantonist,[50] and was smoking cigarettes he had rolled by hand. The drummer, as ever, had taken upon himself the duty of serving the officer. The lance-corporals and recipients of the St George Cross also sat fairly well inside, while in the shadows near the entrance huddled the “obedient ones.” It was among these that the conversation began. What sparked it off was the noise made by someone tumbling unceremoniously into the casemate.
“Hullo, mate, fed up with being out of doors? Or are the girls giving you trouble?” said one voice.
“They never played tunes like that in the village where I come from,” said the man who had entered the casemate, laughing.
“He’s not too keen on shells, is our Vasin,” quipped one of the men from the “elite” corner.
“Well, I mean, if it’s serving a good purpose, that’s one thing,” Vasin’s slow voice said. Whenever he spoke, all the others were silent. “On the twenty-fourth they were blazing away at us fit to burst; but now we’re being blown to kingdom come for a load of shit, and we don’t even get so much as a thank-you from the higher-ups!”
At these words of Vasi
n’s everyone burst out laughing.
“What about Melnikov? I bet he’s still out there,” someone said.
“Get him in here,” said the old NCO. “The enemy’s killing men for nothing today, and that’s a fact.”
“Who’s Melnikov?” asked Volodya.
“Oh, he’s one of our soldiers, your honour, who’s not very bright. He isn’t scared of anything, and now he just wanders around outside all the time. You want to see him; he looks just like a bear.”
“He has some magic charm he says he knows,” said Vasin’s lugubrious voice from the other corner.
Melnikov entered the casemate. He was corpulent (a characteristic extremely rare among the common soldiery), with red hair and a ruddy complexion, an enormous protruding forehead, and bulging, clear blue eyes.
“Aren’t you afraid of being blown up by a shell?” Volodya asked him.
“Why should I be, sir?” Melnikov replied, shrugging his shoulders and scratching himself. “I know it won’t be a shell that gets me.”
“Perhaps you’d like to live here, then?”
“Of course I would, sir. It’s wonderful here!” he said, bursting into sudden peals of laughter.
“Aha, they ought to take you on a sortie! Do you want me to have a word with the general?” said Volodya, though he did not know a single general here.
“Of course I do, sir!”
And Melnikov dived for cover behind the other men.
“Let’s have a game of ‘noses’, lads! Who’s got a pack of cards?” his voice could be heard hurriedly asking.
And indeed a game of cards was soon under way in the corner by the entrance—the sounds of laughter, the slapping of noses with the pack of cards and the calling of trumps could be heard. Volodya had tea made with the samovar with which the drummer had provided him; he offered some to the NCOs, joking and talking with them in an effort to make himself popular, and delighted with the respect they showed him. The common soldiers, too, when they saw that the “master” was “on the level,” started to enter into conversation with him. One man aired his view that the state of siege in Sebastopol could not last much longer, and said a reliable friend of his in the navy had told him that Constantine, the Tsar’s brother, would soon be coming to our rescue with the aid of the American fleet; the same friend had also said that there was soon to be a two-week long ceasefire in order to let everyone have a rest, and that if anyone did any firing they would receive a fine of seventy-five copecks per round.
Vasin, who as Volodya had now had time to observe, was a small, side-whiskered man with large, good-natured eyes, told first amid universal silence, and then to the accompaniment of laughter, how when he had arrived home on leave everyone had initially been delighted to see him; subsequently, however, his father had begun sending him out into the fields to work, and his wife had kept being asked for by the chief forester’s lieutenant, who would send his droshky over to their house in order to collect her. Volodya found all this hugely entertaining. Not only did he not feel the slightest twinge of fear or distaste associated with the crowding and foul smell in the casemate, he felt positively lighthearted, and thought it all most agreeable.
Many of the soldiers were already snoring. Vlang, too, had stretched out on the floor, and the old NCO, having spread out his greatcoat to lie on, was crossing himself and muttering his bedtime prayers, when Volodya suddenly conceived a desire to get out of the casemate and see what was going on outside.
“Legs in!” the soldiers shouted to one another, as soon as he stood up; and legs were drawn in to let him pass.
Vlang, who had appeared to be asleep, suddenly raised his head and grabbed the side of Volodya’s greatcoat.
“No, please don’t go out there, how can you even think of it?” he said, in a tearful, wheedling tone of voice. “Listen, you don’t know what it’s like yet; there’s constant firing out there; you’re better in here . . . ”
In spite of Vlang’s pleading, Volodya managed to struggle his way out of the casemate and sat down on the step outside, where he found Melnikov changing his boots.
The air was clean and fresh—especially after the casemate; the night was clear and quiet. Behind the rolling of the gunfire could be heard the sound made by the wheels of carts which were delivering loads of gabions, and the voices of the men working in the powder magazine. High above their heads stretched the starry heavens, perpetually criss-crossed by the fiery trails of shells; to their left, a small, narrow opening led into another casemate, and in it one could see the legs of the sailors who lived there, and hear their drunken voices. In the foreground loomed the elevation of the powder magazine, around which flitted the shadowy figures of stooping men, and on the very top of which, under the hail of shells and bullets that constantly whistled by this spot, stood a tall, black-coated figure, who, hands in pockets, was trampling down the earth the other men were carrying in sacks. Shells frequently hurtled past and exploded in the close vicinity of the magazine. The soldiers who were carrying the sacks would duck down or jump aside; but the black figure never once moved from the spot and calmly went on trampling down the earth, maintaining a steady posture.
“Who’s this fellow in black?” Volodya asked Melnikov.
“No idea, sir; I’ll go and take a look.”
“No, don’t go, there’s no need for you to.”
But Melnikov, who was not listening to him, stood up, went over to the man in black and spent some considerable time standing beside him, likewise indifferent and immovable.
“He’s the powder storesman, your honour,” he said, when he came back. “The magazine was holed by a shell, so the infantrymen are bringing in earth to repair the damage.”
Every so often a shell would seem to head straight for the casemate.
At such moments Volodya would duck around the corner and then poke his nose out again, looking up at the sky to see if any more shells were headed their way. Although Vlang came out of the casemate several times, begging him to go back inside, Volodya continued to sit on the step for about another three hours, finding this test of fortune and observation of shell trajectories strangely enjoyable. By the end of the evening he knew the positions of a good number of the enemy guns and was able to predict where their shells would land.
— 23 —
Early on the morning of the following day—the 27th—Volodya, feeling rested and cheerful after ten hours’ sleep, emerged once more on to the step of the casemate. This time, Vlang was about to clamber out after him, but at the first sound of a bullet he rushed back inside, falling head over heels, much to the general amusement of the soldiers, most of whom had ventured out for a while to take a breath of air. Only Vasin, the old artillery NCO and a few of the others made a point of rarely coming out into the open trench; the rest could not be restrained: they all came pouring out of the stinking casemate into the fresh morning air, and in spite of the firing, which was just as intense as it had been the evening before, settled themselves down either in the neighbourhood of the step or beneath the parapet. Melnikov, indeed, had been roaming around the batteries since the crack of dawn, every so often casting a phlegmatic glance up at the sky.
Near the step sat two old soldiers and one young curly-headed one—of the Jewish race, to judge by his appearance. This young soldier had picked up one of the stray bullets that lay scattered about and, having flattened it against a stone by hammering it with a shell-splinter was carving from it a cross in the manner of the St George; as they talked among themselves, the other men watched his work develop. The cross was really turning out very handsomely.
“You know, if we stay here much longer,” one of the older men was saying, “when the war’s over we’ll all get our discharge.”
“That’s right! I only had four years to go until my discharge, and now I’ve been in Sebastopol five months.”
“Just being here doesn’t count for discharge,” said another man.
At that moment a cannonball whistled above the head
s of the conversationalists in close proximity to Melnikov, who was making his way along the trench towards them.
“That one nearly killed Melnikov,” one of the men said.
“No, it didn’t,” Melnikov replied.
“Look, here’s a cross for your bravery,” said the young soldier who had made it, giving it to Melnikov.
“No, my friend, a month in this place counts as a year in the service—there was an imperial decree about it,” one of the older men said, continuing the conversation.
“Well, whichever way you look at it, when this lot’s all over the Tsar’ll hold a review in Warsaw and even if we don’t get our discharge we’ll be put into the reserves.”
Just then a bullet whined, dangerously close, above their heads and struck a stone.
“Watch out, or you’ll be getting your final discharge before the day’s out,” one of the men said.
Everyone laughed.
They did not have to wait for the day to be out; a couple of hours later, two of them had indeed received their “final discharge,” and five of them had been wounded; but the rest of the men went on cracking jokes as though nothing had happened.
The naval gunner was as good as his word: by the following morning the pair of mortars had been restored to a usable condition. At about ten o’clock, following an order from the bastion commander, Volodya summoned his unit together and led it up to the battery.
As soon as the men sprang into action they lost all trace of the fear they had shown on the previous day. Only Vlang was unable to gain control of himself: he kept dodging and ducking as before, and, as a result of watching him, Vasin lost his composure and started to get into a fuss, cowering down every now and then. But Volodya was in a transport of enthusiasm: the thought of danger simply did not enter his mind. His delight in the fact that he was doing his duty well, that not merely was he not a coward but was even brave, his sense of being in command, and the presence of twenty men who, he was aware, were eyeing him with curiosity, had turned him into a swashbuckling warrior. His bravery made him conceited; he played the dandy in front of the other men, climbing up on to the banquette and unfastening his greatcoat to make himself more noticeable. The bastion commander, who in the course of eight months’ service had had time to get used to most forms of bravery, and who happened at that moment to be making the rounds of his “estate,” as he liked to call it, could not help admiring this pretty boy in the unfastened greatcoat, under which a red shirt, whose collar encircled a soft, white neck, was visible, and who, his face and eyes on fire, kept clapping his hands and shouting “Mortar one! Mortar two!” in a resonant, commanding voice, merrily running up on to the parapet to see where his last shell had landed. At half past eleven the firing abated on both sides, and at exactly twelve noon the assault on the 2nd, 3rd and 5th bastions of the Malakhov Hill[51] began.