‘What of them? Well, though it’s true they don’t change their shirts for ten days at a time, they are heroes all the same — wonderful fellows.’
Just then an infantry officer entered the room.
‘I … I have orders . . . may I see the Gen … his Excellency? I have come with a message from General N.,’ he said with a timid bow.
Kalugin rose and without returning the officer’s greeting asked with an offensive, affected, official smile if he would not have the goodness to wait; and without asking him to sit down or taking any further notice of him he turned to Galtsin and began talking French, so that the poor officer left alone in the middle of the room did not in the least know what to do with himself.
‘It is a matter of the utmost urgency, sir,’ he said after a short silence.
‘Ah! Well then, please come with me,’ said Kalugin, putting on his cloak and accompanying the officer to the door.
‘Eh bien, messieurs, je crois que cela chauffer a cette mat,’1 said Kalugin when he returned from the General’s.
‘Ah! What is it — a sortie?’ asked the others.
1 ‘Well, gentlemen, I think there will be warm work to-night.’ ‘That I don’t know. You will see for yourselves,’ replied Kalugin with a mysterious smile.
‘And my commander is at the bastion, so I suppose I must go too,’ said Praskukhin, buckling on his sabre.
No one replied, it was his business to know whether he had to go or not.
Praskukhin and Neferdov left to go to their appointed posts.
‘Good-bye gentlemen. Au revolt! We’ll meet again before the night is over,’ shouted Kalugin from the window as Praskukhin and Neferdov, stooping on their Cossack saddles, trotted past. The tramp of their Cossack horses soon died away in the dark street.
‘Non, dites-moi, est-ce qu’il y aura veritablement quelque chose cette nuit ?’1 said Galtsin as he lounged in the window-sill beside Kalugin and watched the bombs that rose above the bastions.
‘I can tell you, you see . . . you have been to the bastions?’ (Galtsin nodded, though he had only been once to the Fourth Bastion). ‘You remember just in front of our lunette there is a trench,’ — and Kalugin, with the air of one who without being a specialist considers his military judgement very sound, began, in a rather confused way and misusing the technical terms, to explain the position of the enemy, and of our own works, and the plan of the intended action.
‘But I say, they’re banging away at the lodgements! Oho! I wonder if that’s ours or his? . . . Now it’s burst,’ said they as they lounged on the window-sill looking at the fiery trails of the bombs crossing one another in the air, at flashes that for a moment lit up the dark sky, at puffs of white smoke, and listened to the more and more rapid reports of the firing.
‘Quel charmant coup d’ail! a?’2 said Kalugin, drawing his guest’s attention to the really beautiful sight. ‘Do
1 ‘No, tell me, will there really be anything to-night?’
2 ‘What a charming sight, eh?’ you know, you sometimes can’t distinguish a bomb from a star.’
‘Yes, I thought that was a star just now and then saw it fall . . . there! it’s burst. And that big star — what do you call it? — looks just like a bomb.’
‘Do you know I am so used to these bombs that I am sure when I’m back in Russia I shall fancy I see bombs every starlight night — one gets so used to them.’
‘But hadn’t I better go with this sortie?’ said Prince Galtsin after a moment’s pause.
‘Humbug, my dear fellow! Don’t think of such a thing. Besides, I won’t let you,’ answered Kalugin. ‘You will have plenty of opportunities later on.’
‘Really? You think I need not go, eh?’
At that moment, from the direction in which these gentlemen were looking, amid the boom of the cannon came the terrible rattle of musketry, and thousands of little fires flaming up in quick succession flashed all along the line.
‘There! Now it’s the real thing!’ said Kalugin. 6I can’t keep cool when I hear the noise of muskets. It seems to seize one’s very soul, you know. There’s an hurrah!’ he added, listening intently to the distant and prolonged roar of hundreds of voices— ‘Ah — ah — ah’ — which came from the bastions.
‘Whose hurrah was it? Theirs or ours?’
‘I don’t know, but it’s hand-to-hand fighting now, for the firing has ceased.’
At that moment an officer followed by a Cossack galloped under the window and alighted from his horse at the porch.
‘Where are you from?’
‘From the bastion. I want the General.’
‘Come along. Well, what’s happened?’
‘The lodgements have been attacked — and occupied. The French brought up tremendous reserves — attacked us — we had only two battalions,’ said the officer, panting. He was the same officer who had been there that evening, but though he was now out of breath he walked to the door with full self-possession.
‘Well, have we retired?’ asked Kalugin.
‘No,’ angrily replied the officer, ‘another battalion came up in time — we drove them back, but the colonel is killed and many officers. I have orders to ask for reinforcements.’
And saying this he went with Kalugin to the General’s, where we shall not follow him.
Five minutes later Kalugin was already on his Cossack horse (again in the semi-Cossack manner which I have noticed that all adjutants, for some reason, seem to consider the proper thing), and rode off at a trot towards the bastion to deliver some orders and await the final result of the affair. Prince Galtsin, under the influence of that oppressive excitement usually produced in a spectator by proximity to an action in which he is not engaged, went out, and began aimlessly pacing up and down the street.
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,1 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
1 Rifles, except some clumsy stutzers, had not been introduced into the Russian army, but were used by the besiegers, who had a still greater advantage in artillery. It is characteristic of Tolst6y that, occupied with men rather than mechanics, he does not in these sketches dwell on this disparity of equipment. 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 Zhvadchevski had invited Sub-Lieutenants Ugrovich and Nepshisetski — 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 Nikita’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 flying, and goes and bur-sts and co-o-vers us with dust. A bit of it nearly hit me and uncle.’
VII
Prince Galtsin 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,
