It was Indian summer, the last days of a hot, golden autumn. During the day, the doctors and officers opened the windows, killed the flies that crawled in black swarms over the windowsills and low, white-papered ceilings, and, unbuttoning their tunics and field shirts, dripping with sweat, burned their tongues on hot cabbage soup or tea, and in the evenings squatted in front of the open stove, blowing on the dying coals under the damp firewood that refused to burn, and, their eyes tearful from the smoke, cursed their orderlies, who did not know how to heat a stove in human fashion.
It was a quiet night. Gordon and Zhivago lay facing each other on benches against the two opposite walls. Between them was the dinner table and a long, narrow window stretching from wall to wall. The room was overheated and filled with tobacco smoke. They opened the two end casements and breathed in the autumnal freshness of the night, which covered the glass with sweat.
As usual, they were talking, just as they had all those days and nights. As always, there was a pink glow on the horizon in the direction of the front, and when, into the steady growl of gunfire, which never ceased for a moment, there fell deeper, separately distinct and weighty blows, which seemed to shift the ground in the distance slightly to one side, Zhivago broke off the conversation out of respect for the sound, held the pause, and said: “That’s Bertha, a German sixteen-incher, there’s a ton of weight in the little thing,” and then went on with the conversation, forgetting what they had been talking about.
“What’s that smell all the time in the village?” asked Gordon. “I noticed it the first day. Such a sickly sweet, cloying smell. Like mice.”
“Ah, I know what you mean. It’s hemp. There are a lot of hemp fields here. Hemp by itself gives off an oppressive and obnoxious smell of carrion. Besides, in a zone of military action, when men are killed in a hemp field, they go unnoticed for a long time and begin to rot. There’s a putrid smell all over the place, it’s only natural. Another Bertha. Hear it?”
In the course of those days they discussed everything in the world. Gordon knew his friend’s thoughts about the war and the spirit of the time. Yuri Andreevich told him how hard it was to get used to the bloody logic of mutual destruction, to the sight of the wounded, especially to the horrors of some modern wounds, to the mutilated survivors that present-day technology turned into hunks of disfigured flesh.
Each day Gordon landed somewhere as he accompanied Zhivago, and thanks to him he saw something. He was, of course, aware of the immorality of gazing idly at other men’s courage and at how some, with an inhuman effort of will, overcame the fear of death, with great sacrifice and at great risk. But an inactive and inconsequential sighing over it seemed to him in no way more moral. He considered that you ought to behave honestly and naturally according to the situation life puts you in.
That one can faint at the sight of the wounded he proved to himself when he went to a mobile Red Cross unit that was working to the west of them at a first-aid field station almost on the front line.
They came to the edge of a big wood half cut down by artillery fire. Smashed and twisted gun carriages lay upside down among the broken and trampled underbrush. A riding horse was tied to a tree. Further in was the wooden house of the forest service with half its roof blown off. The first-aid station was set up in the forestry office and in two big gray tents across the road from it, in the middle of the wood.
“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” said Zhivago. “Our trenches are very close by, a mile or so, and our batteries are over there behind the wood. Do you hear what’s going on? Don’t play the hero, please—I won’t believe you. Your heart’s in your boots right now, and that’s only natural. The situation may change any moment. Shells will start flying here.”
On the ground by the forest road, spreading their legs in heavy boots, dusty and weary young soldiers lay on their stomachs or backs, their field shirts soaked with sweat on their chests and shoulder blades—the survivors of a greatly diminished detachment. They had been taken out of a battle that had been going on for four days and sent to the rear for a brief respite. The soldiers lay as if made of stone, they had no strength to smile or curse, and not one of them turned his head when from the road deep in the wood came the rumble of several quickly approaching carts. These were springless machine-gun carts coming at a trot, bouncing up and down, breaking the bones and spilling the guts of the wretched wounded men they were bringing to the dressing station, where they would be given first aid, bandaged up, and, in certain especially urgent cases, hastily operated on. Half an hour earlier, during a brief lull in the firing, they had been carried off the field beyond the trenches in appalling numbers. A good half of them were unconscious.
When they drew up to the porch of the office, orderlies came down with stretchers and started unloading the carts. Holding the lower flaps with her hands, a nurse peeked out of one of the tents. It was not her shift. She was free. In the wood behind the tent, two men were yelling loudly at each other. The fresh, tall wood resounded with the echoes of their argument, but the words could not be heard. When the wounded were brought, the arguers came out to the road and went towards the office. A hotheaded little officer was shouting at a doctor from the mobile unit, trying to find out from him where they had moved the artillery park formerly stationed there in the wood. The doctor knew nothing, it was not his concern. He begged the officer to leave him alone and not shout, because wounded men had been brought and he had work to do, but the little officer would not calm down and berated the Red Cross, and the artillery department, and everybody in the world. Zhivago went up to the doctor. They greeted each other and went to the forestry house. The officer, still cursing loudly with a slight Tartar accent, untied the horse from the tree, jumped onto it, and galloped down the road into the wood. And the nurse went on looking, looking …
Suddenly her face became distorted with horror.
“What are you doing? You’re out of your minds!” she cried to two lightly wounded men, who, with no external help, were walking between the stretchers to the dressing station, and, running out of the tent, she rushed towards them.
An unfortunate man, especially horribly and hideously mutilated, was being carried on a stretcher. The bottom of an exploded shell, which had split his face open, turning his tongue and teeth into a bloody gruel, but without killing him, was lodged between his jawbones in place of his torn-out cheek. In a thin little voice, resembling nothing human, the mangled man kept uttering short, broken moans, which no one could fail to understand as a plea to finish him off quickly and end his inconceivably prolonged suffering.
The nurse imagined that, under the influence of his moaning, the lightly wounded men walking beside him were about to pull this horrible iron splinter out of his cheek with their bare hands.
“No, you can’t do that! A surgeon will do it with special instruments. If it gets that far. (God, God, take him, don’t make me doubt Your existence!)”
The next moment, as he was being carried up the porch, the mutilated man cried out, shuddered all over, and gave up the ghost.
The mutilated man who had just died was Reserve Private Gimazetdin; the officer shouting in the wood was his son, Lieutenant Galiullin; the nurse was Lara; Gordon and Zhivago were the witnesses. They were all there, all side by side, and some did not recognize each other, while others had never known each other, and some things remained forever unascertained, while others waited till the next occasion, till a new meeting, to be revealed.
11
In this sector the villages had been preserved in some miraculous way. They made up an inexplicably intact island in the midst of a sea of destruction. Gordon and Zhivago were returning home in the evening. The sun was setting. In one of the villages they rode past, a young Cossack, to the unanimous guffawing of those around him, was making an old gray-bearded Jew in a long overcoat catch a five-kopeck copper coin he tossed in the air. The old man invariably failed to catch it. The coin, falling through his pathetically spread hands, fell in the mud. The old man bent down to pick it up, the Cossack slapped his behind, those standing around held their sides and moaned with laughter. This constituted the whole amusement. So far it was inoffensive, but no one could guarantee that it would not take a more serious turn. His old woman would come running from a cottage across the road, shouting and reaching her arms out to him, and each time would disappear again in fright. Two little girls looked at their grandfather through the window and wept.