Sevastopol

“But it can. I saw him myself.”

“Farewell; I am in a hurry.”

“I am well content,” thought Kalugin, as he returned home; “I have had luck for the first time when on duty. That was a capital engagement, and I am alive and whole. There will be some fine presentations, and I shall certainly get a golden sword. And I deserve it too.”

After reporting to the general all that was necessary, he went to his room, in which sat Prince Galtsin, who had returned long before, and who was reading a book, which he had found on Kalugin's table, while waiting for him.

It was with a wonderful sense of enjoyment that Kalugin found himself at home again, out of all danger, and, having donned his night-shirt and lain down on the sofa, he began to relate to Galtsin the particulars of the affair, communicating them, naturally, from a point of view which made it appear that he, Kalugin, was a very active and valiant officer, to which, in my opinion, it was superfluous to refer, seeing that every one knew it and that no one had any right to doubt it, with the exception, perhaps, of the deceased Captain Praskukhin, who, in spite of the fact that he had considered it a piece of happiness to walk arm in arm with Kalugin, had told a friend, only the evening before, in private, that Kalugin was a very fine man, but that, between you and me, he was terribly averse to going to the bastions.

No sooner had Praskukhin, who had been walking beside Mikhaïloff, taken leave of Kalugin, and, betaking himself to a safer place, had begun to recover his spirits somewhat, than he caught sight of a flash of lightning behind him flaring up vividly, heard the shout of the sentinel, “Mortar!” and the words of the soldiers who were marching behind, “It's flying straight at the bastion!”

Mikhaïloff glanced round. The brilliant point of the bomb seemed to be suspended directly over his head in such a position that it was absolutely impossible to determine its course. But this lasted only for a second. The bomb came faster and faster, nearer and nearer, the sparks of the fuse were already visible, and the fateful whistle was audible, and it descended straight in the middle of the battalion.

“Lie down!” shouted a voice.

Mikhaïloff and Praskukhin threw themselves on the ground. Praskukhin shut his eyes, and only heard the bomb crash against the hard earth somewhere in the vicinity. A second passed, which seemed an hour – and the bomb had not burst. Praskukhin was alarmed; had he felt cowardly for nothing? Perhaps the bomb had fallen at a distance, and it merely seemed to him that the fuse was hissing near him. He opened his eyes, and saw with satisfaction that Mikhaïloff was lying motionless on the earth, at his very feet. But then his eyes encountered for a moment the glowing fuse of the bomb, which was twisting about at a distance of an arshin from him.

A cold horror, which excluded every other thought and feeling, took possession of his whole being. He covered his face with his hands.

Another second passed – a second in which a whole world of thoughts, feelings, hopes, and memories flashed through his mind.

“Which will be killed, Mikhaïloff or I? Or both together? And if it is I, where will it strike? If in the head, then all is over with me; but if in the leg, they will cut it off, and I shall ask them to be sure to give me chloroform, – and I may still remain among the living. But perhaps no one but Mikhaïloff will be killed; then I will relate how we were walking along together, and how he was killed and his blood spurted over me. No, it is nearer to me … it will kill me!”

Then he remembered the twenty rubles which he owed Mikhaïloff, and recalled another debt in Petersburg, which ought to have been paid long ago; the gypsy air which he had sung the previous evening recurred to him. The woman whom he loved appeared to his imagination in a cap with lilac ribbons, a man who had insulted him five years before, and whom he had not paid off for his insult, came to his mind, though inextricably interwoven with these and with a thousand other memories the feeling of the moment – the fear of death – never deserted him for an instant.

“But perhaps it will not burst,” he thought, and, with the decision of despair, he tried to open his eyes. But at that instant, through the crevice of his eyelids, his eyes were smitten with a red fire, and something struck him in the centre of the breast, with a frightful crash; he ran off, he knew not whither, stumbled over his sword, which had got between his legs, and fell over on his side.

“Thank God! I am only bruised,” was his first thought, and he tried to touch his breast with his hands; but his arms seemed fettered, and pincers were pressing his head. The soldiers flitted before his eyes, and he unconsciously counted them: “One, two, three soldiers; and there is an officer, wrapped up in his cloak,” he thought. Then a flash passed before his eyes, and he thought that something had been fired off; was it the mortars, or the cannon? It must have been the cannon. And there was still another shot; and there were more soldiers; five, six, seven soldiers were passing by him. Then suddenly he felt afraid that they would crush him. He wanted to shout to them that he was bruised; but his mouth was so dry that his tongue clove to his palate and he was tortured by a frightful thirst.

He felt that he was wet about the breast: this sensation of dampness reminded him of water, and he even wanted to drink this, whatever it was. “I must have brought the blood when I fell,” he thought, and, beginning to give way more and more to terror, lest the soldiers who passed should crush him, he collected all his strength, and tried to cry: “Take me with you!” but, instead of this, he groaned so terribly that it frightened him to hear himself. Then more red fires flashed in his eyes – and it seemed to him as though the soldiers were laying stones upon him; the fires danced more and more rarely, the stones which they piled on him oppressed him more and more.

He exerted all his strength, in order to cast off the stones; he stretched himself out, and no longer saw or heard or thought or felt anything. He had been killed on the spot by a splinter of shell, in the middle of the breast.

XIII

Mikhaïloff, on catching sight of the bomb, fell to the earth, and, like Praskukhin, he went over in thought and feeling an incredible amount in those two seconds while the bomb lay there unexploded. He prayed to God mentally, and kept repeating: “Thy will be done!”

“And why did I enter the military service?” he thought at the same time; “and why, again, did I exchange into the infantry, in order to take part in this campaign? Would it not have been better for me to remain in the regiment of Uhlans, in the town of T., and pass the time with my friend Natasha? And now this is what has come of it.”

And he began to count, “One, two, three, four,” guessing that if it burst on the even number, he would live, but if on the uneven number, then he should be killed. “All is over; killed,” he thought, when the bomb burst (he did not remember whether it was on the even or the uneven number), and he felt a blow, and a sharp pain in his head. “Lord, forgive my sins,” he murmured, folding his hands, then rose, and fell back senseless.

His first sensation, when he came to himself, was the blood which was flowing from his nose, and a pain in his head, which had become much less powerful. “It is my soul departing,” he thought. – “What will it be like there? Lord, receive my soul in peace! – But one thing is strange,” he thought, – “and that is that, though dying, I can still hear so plainly the footsteps of the soldiers and the report of the shots.”

“Send some bearers … hey there … the captain is killed!” shouted a voice over his head, which he recognized as the voice of his drummer Ignatieff.

Some one grasped him by the shoulders. He made an effort to open his eyes, and saw overhead the dark blue heavens, the clusters of stars, and two bombs, which were flying over him, one after the other; he saw Ignatieff, the soldiers with the stretcher, the walls of the trench, and all at once he became convinced that he was not yet in the other world.

He had been slightly wounded in the head with a stone. His very first impression was one resembling regret; he had so beautifully and so calmly prepared himself for transit yonder that a return to reality, with its bombs, its trenches, and its blood, produced a disagreeable effect on him; his second impression was an involuntary joy that he was alive, and the third a desire to leave the bastion as speedily as possible. The drummer bound up his commander's head with his handkerchief, and, taking him under the arm, he led him to the place where the bandaging was going on.

“But where am I going, and why?” thought the staff-captain, when he recovered his senses a little. – “It is my duty to remain with my men, – the more so as they will soon be out of range of the shots,” some voice whispered to him.

“Never mind, brother,” he said, pulling his arm away from the obliging drummer. “I will not go to the field-hospital; I will remain with my men.”

And he turned back.

“You had better have your wound properly attended to, Your Honor,” said Ignatieff. “In the heat of the moment, it seems as if it were a trifle; but it will be the worse if not attended to. There is some inflammation rising there … really, now, Your Honor.”

Mikhaïloff paused for a moment in indecision, and would have followed Ignatieff's advice, in all probability, had he not called to mind how many severely wounded men there must needs be at the field-hospital. “Perhaps the doctor will smile at my scratch,” thought the staff-captain, and he returned with decision to his men, wholly regardless of the drummer's admonitions.

“And where is Officer Praskukhin, who was walking with me?” he asked the lieutenant, who was leading the corps when they met.

“I don't know – killed, probably,” replied the lieutenant, reluctantly.

“How is it that you do not know whether he was killed or wounded? He was walking with us. And why have you not carried him with you?”

“How could it be done, brother, when the place was so hot for us!”

“Ah, how could you do such a thing, Mikhaïl Ivánowitch!” said Mikhaïloff, angrily. – “How could you abandon him if he was alive; and if he was dead, you should still have brought away his body.”

“How could he be alive when, as I tell you, I went up to him and saw!” returned the lieutenant. – “As you like, however! Only, his own men might carry him off. Here, you dogs! the cannonade has abated,” he added…

Mikhaïloff sat down, and clasped his head, which the motion caused to pain him terribly.

“Yes, I must go and get him, without fail; perhaps he is still alive,” said Mikhaïloff. “It is our duty, Mikhaïl Ivánowitch!”

Mikhaïl Ivánowitch made no reply.

“He did not take him at the time, and now the soldiers must be sent alone – and how can they be sent? their lives may be sacrificed in vain, under that hot fire,” thought Mikhaïloff.

“Children! we must go back – and get the officer who was wounded there in the ditch,” he said, in not too loud and commanding a tone, for he felt how unpleasant it would be to the soldiers to obey his order, – and, in fact, as he did not address any one in particular by name, no one set out to fulfil it.

“It is quite possible that he is already dead, and it is not worth while to subject the men to unnecessary danger; I alone am to blame for not having seen to it. I will go myself and learn whether he is alive. It is my duty,” said Mikhaïloff to himself.

“Mikhaïl Ivánowitch! Lead the men forward, and I will overtake you,” he said, and, pulling up his cloak with one hand, and with the other constantly touching the image of Saint Mitrofaniy, in which he cherished a special faith, he set off on a run along the trench.

Having convinced himself that Praskukhin was dead, he dragged himself back, panting, and supporting with his hand the loosened bandage and his head, which began to pain him severely. The battalion had already reached the foot of the hill, and a place almost out of range of shots, when Mikhaïloff overtook it. I say, almost out of range, because some stray bombs struck here and there.

“At all events, I must go to the hospital to-morrow, and put down my name,” thought the staff-captain, as the medical student assisting the doctors bound his wound.

XIV

Hundreds of bodies, freshly smeared with blood, of men who two hours previous had been filled with divers lofty or petty hopes and desires, now lay, with stiffened limbs, in the dewy, flowery valley which separated the bastion from the trench, and on the level floor of the chapel for the dead in Sevastopol; hundreds of men crawled, twisted, and groaned, with curses and prayers on their parched lips, some amid the corpses in the flower-strewn vale, others on stretchers, on cots, and on the blood-stained floor of the hospital.

And still, as on the days preceding, the dawn glowed, over Sapun Mountain, the twinkling stars paled, the white mist spread abroad from the dark sounding sea, the red glow illuminated the east, long crimson cloudlets darted across the blue horizon; and still, as on days preceding, the powerful, all-beautiful sun rose up, giving promise of joy, love, and happiness to all who dwell in the world.

XV

On the following day, the band of the chasseurs was playing again on the boulevard, and again officers, cadets, soldiers, and young women were promenading in festive guise about the pavilion and through the low-hanging alleys of fragrant white acacias in bloom.