It is impossible for some feeling of heroism and pride not to penetrate your soul at the thought that you, too, are in Sevastopol, and for the blood not to run faster in your veins.
‘Straight past the Kistentin’1 your Honour!’ the old sailor tells you, turning round to verify the direction towards the right in which you are steering.
‘And she’s still got all her guns!’2 says the flaxen-headed boy, examining the ship in passing.
‘Well, of course. She’s a new one. Kornilov lived
1 The vessel, the Constantine.
2 The guns were removed from most of the ships for use on the fortifications.
on her,’ remarks the old seaman, also looking up at the ship.
‘Look where it’s burst!’ the boy says after a long silence, watching a small white cloud of dispersing smoke that has suddenly appeared high above the South Bay accompanied by the sharp sound of a bursting bomb.
‘That’s him firing from the new battery to-day,’ adds the old seaman, calmly spitting on his hand. ‘Now then, pull away Mishka! Let’s get ahead of that long-boat.’ And your skiff travels faster over the broad swell of the roadstead, gets ahead of the heavy long-boat laden with sacks and unsteadily and clumsily rowed by soldiers, and making its way among all sorts of boats moored there, is made fast to the Grafsky landing.
Crowds of grey-clad soldiers, sailors in black, and gaily-dressed women, throng noisily about the quay. Here are women selling buns, Russian peasants with samovars1 are shouting, ‘Hot sbiten!’,2 and here too on the very first steps lie rusty cannon-balls, bombs, grape-shot, and cannon of various sizes. A little farther on is a large open space where some enormous beams are lying, together with gun carriages and sleeping soldiers. Horses, carts, cannon, green ammunition wagons, and stacked muskets, are standing there. Soldiers, sailors, officers, women, children, and tradespeople, are moving about, carts loaded with hay, sacks, and casks, are passing, and now and then a Cossack, a mounted officer, or a general in a vehicle. To the right is a street closed by a barricade on which some small guns are mounted in embrasures and beside which sits a sailor smoking a pipe. To the left is a
1 The samovar, or ‘self-boiler’, is an urn in which water can be boiled and kept hot without any other fire having to be lit.
2 A hot drink made with treacle and lemon, or honey and spice.
handsome building with Roman figures engraved on its frontage and before which soldiers are standing with blood-stained stretchers. Everywhere you will see the unpleasant indications of a war camp. Your first impressions will certainly be most disagreeable: the strange mixture of camp-life and town-life — of a fine town and a dirty bivouac — is not only ugly but looks like horrible disorder: it will even seem to you that every one is scared, in a commotion, and at a loss what to do. But look more closely at the faces of these people moving about around you and you will get a very different impression.
Take for instance this convoy soldier muttering something to himself as he goes to water those three bay horses, and doing it all so quietly that he evidently will not get lost in this motley crowd which does not even exist as far as he is concerned, but will do his job be it what it may — watering horses or hauling guns — as calmly, self-confidently, and unconcernedly as if it were all happening in Tula or Saransk. You will read the same thing on the face of this officer passing by in immaculate white gloves, on the face of the sailor who sits smoking on the barricade, on the faces of the soldiers waiting in the portico of what used to be the Assembly Hall, and on the face of that girl who, afraid of getting her pink dress muddy, is jumping from stone to stone as she crosses the street.
Yes, disenchantment certainly awaits you on entering Sevastopol for the first time. You will look in vain in any of these faces for signs of disquiet, perplexity, or even of enthusiasm, determination, or readiness for death — there is nothing of the kind. What you see are ordinary people quietly occupied with ordinary activities, so that perhaps you may reproach yourself for having felt undue enthusiasm and may doubt the justice of the ideas you had formed of the heroism of the defenders of Sevastopol, based on the tales and descriptions and sights and sounds seen and heard from the North Side. But before yielding to such doubts go to the bastions and see the defenders of Sevastopol at the very place of the defence, or better still go straight into that building opposite which was once the Sevastopol Assembly Rooms and in the portico of which stand soldiers with stretchers. There you will see the defenders of Sevastopol and will see terrible and lamentable, solemn and amusing, but astounding and soul-elevating sights.
You enter the large Assembly Hall. As soon as you open the door you are struck by the sight and smell of forty or fifty amputation and most seriously wounded cases, some in cots but most of them on the floor. Do not trust the feeling that checks you at the threshold, it is a wrong feeling. Go on, do not be ashamed of seeming to have come to look at the sufferers, do not hesitate to go up and speak to them. Sufferers like to see a sympathetic human face, like to speak of their sufferings, and to hear words of love and sympathy. You pass between the rows of beds and look for a face less stern and full of suffering, which you feel you can approach and speak to.
‘Where are you wounded?’ you inquire hesitatingly and timidly of an emaciated old soldier who is sitting up in his cot and following you with a kindly look as if inviting you to approach him. I say ‘inquire timidly’ because, besides strong sympathy, sufferings seem to inspire a dread of offending, as well as a great respect for him who endures them.
‘In the leg,’ the soldier replies, and at the same moment you yourself notice from the fold of his blanket that one leg is missing from above the knee. ‘Now, God be thanked,’ he adds, ‘I am ready to leave the hospital.’
Is it long since you were wounded?’
‘Well, it’s over five weeks now, your Honour.’
‘And are you still in pain?’ ‘No, I’m not in any pain now; only when it’s bad weather I seem to feel a pain in the calf, else it’s all right.’
‘And how did it happen that you were wounded?’
‘It was on the Fifth Bastion, your Honour, at the first bondbarment I trained the gun and was stepping across to the next embrasure, when he hits me in the leg, just as if I had stumbled into a hole. I look — and the leg is gone.’
‘Do you mean to say you felt no pain the first moment?’
‘Nothing much, only as if something hot had shoved against my leg.’
‘And afterwards?’
‘And nothing much afterwards except when they began to draw the skin together, then it did seem to smart. The chief thing, your Honour, is not to think; if you don’t think it’s nothing much. It’s most because of a man thinking.’
At this moment a woman in a grey striped dress and with a black kerchief tied round her head comes up to you and enters into your conversation with the sailor. She begins telling you about him, about his sufferings, the desperate condition he was in for four weeks, and of how when he was wounded he stopped his stretcher-bearers that he might see a volley fired from our battery; and how the Grand Duke spoke to him and gave him twenty-five rubles, and how he had told them he wanted to go back to the bastion to teach the young ones, if he could not himself work any longer. As she says all this in a breath, the woman keeps looking now at you and now at the sailor, who having turned away is picking lint on his pillow as if not listening, and her eyes shine with a peculiar rapture.
‘She’s my missus, your Honour!’ he remarks with a look that seems to say: ‘You must excuse her. It’s a woman’s way to talk nonsense.’ You begin now to understand the defenders of Sevastopol, and for some reason begin to feel ashamed of yourself in the presence of this man. You want to say too much, in order to express your sympathy and admiration, but you can’t find the right words and are dissatisfied with those that occur to you, and so you silently bow your head before this taciturn and unconscious grandeur and firmness of spirit — which is ashamed to have its worth revealed.
‘Well, may God help you to get well soon,’ you say to him, and turn to another patient who is lying on the floor apparently awaiting death in unspeakable torment.
He is a fair-haired man with a puffy pale face. He is lying on his back with his left arm thrown back in a position that indicates cruel suffering. His hoarse breathing comes with difficulty through his parched, open mouth; his leaden blue eyes are rolled upwards, and what remains of
