VI
SOLDIERS passed carrying the wounded on stretchers or supporting them under their arms. It was quite dark in the streets, lights could be seen here and there, but only in the hospital windows or where some officers were sitting up. From the bastions still came the thunder of cannon and the rattle of muskets,8 and flashes kept on lighting up the dark sky as before. From time to time the tramp of hoofs could be heard as an orderly galloped past, or the groans of a wounded man, the steps and voices of stretcher-bearers, or the words of some frightened women who had come out onto their porches to watch the cannonade.
Among the spectators were our friend Nikita, the old sailor’s widow with whom he had again made friends, and her ten-year-old daughter.
‘O Lord God! Holy Mary, Mother of God!’ said the old woman, sighing as she looked at the bombs that kept flying across from side to side like balls of fire; ‘What horrors! What horrors! Ah, ah! Oh, oh! Even at the first bondbarment it wasn’t like that. Look now where the cursed thing has burst just over our house in the suburb.’
‘No, that’s further, they keep tumbling into Aunt Irene’s garden,’ said the girl.
‘And where, where, is master now?’ drawled Nikita, who was not quite sober yet. ‘Oh! You don’t know how I love that master of mine! I love him so that if he were killed in a sinful way, which God forbid, then would you believe it, granny, after that I myself don’t know what I wouldn’t do to myself! I don’t! … My master is that sort, there’s only one word for it. Would I change him for such as them there, playing cards? What are they? Ugh! There’s only one word for it!’ concluded Nikita, pointing to the lighted window of his master’s room to which, in the absence of the lieutenant-captain, Cadet Zhvadchévski had invited Sub-Lieutenants Ugróvich and Nepshisétski – the latter suffering from face-ache – and where he was having a spree in honour of a medal he had received.
‘Look at the stars! Look how they’re rolling!’ the little girl broke the silence that followed Nikíta’s words as she stood gazing at the sky. ‘There’s another rolled down. What is it a sign of, mother?’
‘They’ll smash up our hut altogether,’ said the old woman with a sigh, leaving her daughter unanswered.
‘As we went there to-day with uncle, mother,’ the little girl continued in a sing-song tone, becoming loquacious, ‘there was such a b – i – g cannon-ball inside the room close to the cupboard. Must have smashed in through the passage and right into the room! Such a big one – you couldn’t lift it.’
‘Those who had husbands and money all moved away,’ said the old woman, ‘and there’s the hut, all that was left me, and that’s been smashed. Just look at him blazing away! The fiend! … O Lord! O Lord!’
‘And just as we were going out, comes a bomb fly-ing, and goes and bur-sts and co-o-vers us with dust. A bit of it nearly hit me and uncle.’
VII
PRINCE GÁLTSIN met more and more wounded carried on stretchers or walking supported by others who were talking loudly.
‘Up they sprang, friends,’ said the bass voice of a tall soldier with two guns slung from his shoulder, ‘up they sprang, shouting “Allah! Allah!”9 and just climbing one over another. You kill one and another’s there, you couldn’t do anything; no end of ’em —’
But at this point in the story Gáltsin interrupted him.
‘You are from the bastion?’
‘Yes, your Honour.’
‘Well, what happened? Tell me.’
“What happened? Well, your Honour, such a force of ’em poured down on us over the rampart, it was all up. They quite overpowered us, your Honour!’
‘Overpowered?… But you repulsed them?’
‘How could we repulse them when his whole force came on, killed all our men, and no re’forcements were given us?’
The soldier was mistaken, the trench had remained ours; but it is a curious fact which anyone may notice, that a soldier wounded in action always thinks the affair lost and imagines it to have been a very bloody fight.
‘How is that? I was told they had been repulsed,’ said Gáltsin irritably. ‘Perhaps they were driven back after you left? Is it long since you came away?’
‘I am straight from there, your Honour,’ answered the soldier, ‘it is hardly possible. They must have kept the trench, he quite overpowered us.’
‘And aren’t you ashamed to have lost the trench? It’s terrible!’ said Gáltsin, provoked by such indifference.
‘Why, if the strength is on their side …’ muttered the soldier.
‘Ah, your Honour,’ began a soldier from a stretcher which had just come up to them, ‘how could we help giving it up when he had killed almost all our men? If we’d had the strength we wouldn’t have given it up, not on any account. But as it was, what could we do? I stuck one, and then something hits me. Oh, oh-h! Steady, lads, steady! Oh, oh!’ groaned the wounded man.
‘Really, there seem to be too many men returning,’ said Gáltsin, again stopping the tall soldier with the two guns. ‘Why are you retiring? You there, stop!’
The soldier stopped and took off his cap with his left hand.
‘Where are you going, and why?’ shouted Gáltsin severely, ‘you scoun—’
But having come close up to the soldier, Gáltsin noticed that no hand was visible beneath the soldier’s right cuff and that the sleeve was soaked in blood to the elbow.
‘I am wounded, your Honour.’
‘Wounded? How?’
‘Here. Must have been with a bullet,’ said the man, pointing to his arm, ‘but I don’t know what struck my head here,’ and bending his head he showed the matted hair at the back stuck together with blood.
‘And whose is this other gun?’
‘It’s a French rifle I took, your Honour. But I wouldn’t have come away if it weren’t to lead this fellow – he may fall,’ he added, pointing to a soldier who was walking a little in front leaning on his gun and painfully dragging his left leg.
Prince Gáltsin suddenly felt horribly ashamed of his unjust suspicions. He felt himself blushing, turned away, and went to the hospital without either questioning or watching the wounded men any more.
Having with difficulty pushed his way through the porch among the wounded who had come on foot and the bearers who were carrying in the wounded and bringing out the dead, Gáltsin entered the first room, gave a look round, and involuntarily turned back and ran out into the street: it was too terrible.
VIII
THE large, lofty, dark hall, lit up only by the four or five candles with which the doctors examined the wounded, was quite full. Yet the bearers kept bringing in more wounded – laying them side by side on the floor which was already so packed that the unfortunate patients were jostled together, staining one another with their blood – and going to fetch more wounded. The pools of blood visible in the unoccupied spaces, the feverish breathing of several hundred men, and the perspiration of the bearers with the stretchers, filled the air with a peculiar, heavy, thick, fetid mist, in which the candles burnt dimly in different parts of the hall. All sorts of groans, sighs, death-rattles, now and then interrupted by shrill screams, filled the whole room. Sisters with quiet faces, expressing no empty feminine tearful pity, but active practical sympathy, stepped here and there across the wounded with medicines, water, bandages, and lint, flitting among the blood-stained coats and shirts. The doctors, kneeling with rolled-up sleeves beside the wounded, by the light of the candles their assistants held, examined, felt, and probed their wounds, heedless of the terrible groans and entreaties of the sufferers. One doctor sat at a table near the door and at the moment Gáltsin came in was already entering No. 532.