He sighed deeply and moved a few steps away from his brother.
‘O Lord! Shall I really be killed — just I? Lord, have mercy on me!’ he whispered, and made the sign of the cross.
‘Well, Volodya, come on!’ said the elder brother when the trap had driven on to the bridge. ‘Did you see the bomb?’
On the bridge they met carts loaded with wounded men, with gabions, and one with furniture driven by a woman. No one stopped them at the farther side.
Keeping instinctively under the wall of the Nicholas Battery and listening to the bombs that here were bursting overhead, and to the howling of the falling fragments, the brothers came silently to that Part of the battery where the icon hangs. Here they heard that the Fifth Light Artillery, to which Volodya was appointed, was stationed at the Korabelnaya1 and they decided that Volodya, in spite of the danger, should spend the night with his elder brother at the Fifth Bastion and go from there to his battery next morning. After turning into a corridor and stepping across the legs of the soldiers who lay sleeping all along the wall of the battery they at last reached the Ambulance Station.
XI
On entering the first room, full of beds on which lay wounded men and permeated by a horribly disgusting hospital smell, they met two Sisters of Mercy just going out.
One, a woman of fifty, with black eyes and a stern expression, was carrying bandages and lint and giving orders to a young lad, a medical assistant, who was following her. The other, a very pretty girl of about twenty whose pale, delicate, fair face looked from under her white cap with a peculiarly sweet helplessness, was walking by the side of the older woman with her hands in her apron pockets, and seemed afraid of being left behind.
Kozeltsov asked them if they knew where Martsov was, whose leg had been torn off the day before.
1 The Korabelnaya was a suburb of Sevastopol lying to the east of the South Bay and to the south of the Roadstead. Like the ‘North Side’ it was connected with Sevastopol by a floating bridge. (See map.) ‘He is of the P — regiment, I think?’ asked the elder. ‘Is he a relation of yours?’
‘No, just a comrade.’
‘Take them to him,’ she said to the young sister in French. ‘It is this way,’ and she herself went up to one of the patients, followed by the assistant.
‘Come along, what are you looking at?’ said Kozeltsov to Volodya, who stood with raised eyebrows and a look of suffering on his face, unable to tear his eyes from the wounded. ‘Come now!’
Volodya followed his brother but still kept looking back and repeating unconsciously, ‘O, my God! My God!’
‘I suppose he has not been here long?’ the sister remarked to Kozeltsov, indicating Volodya, who followed them along the corridor with exclamations and sighs.
‘He has only just come.’
The pretty sister looked as Volodya and suddenly began to cry.
‘My God! My God! When will it all end?’ she said in a despairing voice.
They entered the officers’ ward. Martsov was lying on his back, his sinewy arms bare to the elbow thrown back behind his head, and on his yellow face the expression of one who has clenched his teeth to prevent himself from screaming with pain. His sound leg with a stocking on showed from under the blanket and one could see the toes moving spasmodically.
‘Well, how are you?’ asked the sister, raising his slightly bald head with her slender delicate fingers (on one of which Volodya noticed a gold ring) and arranging his pillow.
‘In pain of course!’ he answered angrily. ‘That’ll do — the pillow’s all right!’ and the toes in the stocking moved still faster. ‘How d’you do? What’s your name?’ . . . ‘Excuse me,’ he added, when Kozeltsov had told him. ‘Ah yes, I beg your pardon. One forgets everything here. Why, we lived together,’ he remarked without any sign of pleasure, and looked inquiringly at Volodya.
‘This is my brother, arrived to-day from Petersburg.’
‘H’m! And I have got my discharge!’ said the wounded man, frowning. ‘Oh, how it hurts! If only it would be over quicker!’
He drew up his leg and, moving his toes still more rapidly, covered his face with his hands.
‘He must be left alone,’ said the sister in a whisper while tears filled her eyes. ‘He is very ill.’
While still on the North Side the brothers had agreed to go to the Fifth Bastion together, but as they passed out of the Nicholas Battery it was as if they had agreed not to run unnecessary risks and for each to go his own way.
‘But how will you find it, Volodya?’ said the elder. ‘Look here! Nikolaev shall take you to the Korabelnaya and I’ll go on alone and come to you tomorrow.’
Nothing more was said at this last Parting between the brothers.
XII
The thunder of the cannonade continued with unabated violence. Ekaterina Street, down which Volodya walked followed by the silent Nikolaev, was quiet and deserted. All he could distinguish in the dark was the broad street with its large white houses, many of them in ruins, and the stone pavement along which he was walking. Now and then he met soldiers and officers. As he was passing by the left side of the Admiralty Building, a bright light inside showed him the acacias planted along the side-walk of the streets with green stakes to support them and sickly, dusty leaves. He distinctly heard his own footsteps and those of Nikolaev, who followed him breathing heavily.
He was not thinking of anything: the pretty Sister of Mercy, Martsov’s foot with the toes moving in the stocking, the darkness, the bombs, and different images of death, floated dimly before his imagination. His whole young impressionable soul was weighed down and crushed by a sense of loneliness and of the general indifference shown to his fate in these dangerous surroundings. T shall be killed, I shall suffer, endure torments, and no one will shed a tear!’ And all this instead of the heroic life abounding in energy and sympathy of which he had had such glorious dreams. The bombs whistled and burst nearer and nearer. Nikolaev sighed more and more often, but did not speak. As they were crossing the bridge that led to the Korabelnaya he saw a whistling something fall and disappear into the water near by, lighting the purple waves to a flaming red for a second and then come splashing up again.
‘Just look! Not quenched!’ said Nikolaev in a hoarse voice.
‘No,’ answered Volodya in an involuntarily high-pitched plaintive tone which surprised him.
They met wounded men carried on stretchers and more carts loaded with gabions. In the Korabelnaya they met a regiment, and men on horseback rode past. One of these was an officer followed by a Cossack. He was riding at a trot, but seeing Volodya he reined up his horse, looked in his face, turned away, and rode on, touching his horse with the whip.
‘Alone, alone! No one cares whether I live or not,’ thought the lad, and felt inclined to cry in real earnest.
Having gone up the hill past a high white wall he came into a street of small shattered houses, continually lit up by the bombs. A dishevelled, tipsy woman, coming out of a gate with a sailor, knocked up against Volodya. ‘Because if he’sh an on’ble man,’ she muttered— ‘pardon y’r exshensh offisher!’
The poor lad’s heart ached more and more. On the dark horizon the lightnings flashed oftener and oftener and the bombs whistled and exploded more and more frequently around them. Nikolaev sighed and suddenly began to speak in what seemed to Volodya a lifeless tone.
‘There now, and we were in such a hurry to leave home! “We must go! We must go!” Fine place to hurry to! [Wise gentlemen when they are the least bit wounded lie up quietly in ‘orspital. It’s so nice, what better can you want?]’
‘Well, but if my brother had recovered his health,’ answered Volodya, hoping by conversation to disperse the dreadful feeling that had seized him.
‘Health indeed! Where’s his health, when he’s quite ill? Even them as is really well had best lie in ‘orspital these times. Not much pleasure to be got. All you get is a leg or an arm carried off. It’s done before you know where you are! It’s horrible enough even here in the town, but what’s it like at the baksions! You say all the prayers you know when you’re going there. See how the beastly thing twangs past you!’ he added, listening to the buzzing of a flying fragment.
‘Now,’ he continued, ‘I’m to show y’r honour the way. Our business is o’ course to obey orders: what’s ordered has to be done. But the trap’s been left with some private or other, and the bundle’s untied. . . . “Go, go!” but if something’s lost, why Nikolaev answers for it!’
A few more steps brought them to a square. Nikolaev did not speak but kept sighing. Then he said suddenly:
‘There, y’r honour, there’s where your antillaries stationed. Ask the sentinel, he’ll show you.’ A few steps farther on Volodya no longer heard Nikolaev sighing behind him. He suddenly
