THE COWARD
The war worries me very much. I clearly see it dragging on, and when it will end it is hard to predict. Our soldiers are still the same splendid soldiers they always have been, but the enemy, it seems, is by no means as weak as we had thought him to be. It is now four months since war was declared, and still we have not gained any decisive victory. Yet every day carries off hundreds of lives. I do not know whether it is because my nerves are like that, but the casualty lists affect me much more strongly than they do those around me. A man calmly reads: "Casualties on our side insignificant, such and such officers wounded, among the lower ranks 50 men killed, 100 wounded," and is glad that they are so few, but when I read such a report it immediately brings a whole bloody picture to my mind. Fifty killed and a hundred maimed-and that is called insignificant! Why are we shocked when the papers report a murder involving the lives of only a few people? Why does the sight of bullet-riddled corpses strewing the battle-field horrify us less than the spectacle of a home despoiled by a murderer? Why is it that the Tiligulskaya embankment disaster, which took toll of a score or so of lives, caused a sensation throughout Russia, whereas outpost skirmishes involving "insignificant" losses of the same number of lives barely attract attention?
Lvov, a medical student of my acquaintance, with whom I often have arguments about the war, told me the other day, "Well, Mr. Pacifist, we shall see how those humane convictions of yours will look in practice when you are taken into the army and made to shoot at other men."
"They won't take me into the army, Vasily, because I'm enrolled in the militia."
"But if the war drags on they will start drawing on the militia. Don't you worry, your turn will come, too."
My heart sank. How is it that that thought had never occurred to me before? They certainly would start on the militia, for that matter. "If the war drags on" . .. yes, it probably would. In any case, if this war does not last long, another one will be started. Why not wage war? Why not perform great deeds? I believe that this war is but the prelude to future wars, from which there is no escape either for myself, my little brother or my sister's baby. My turn will come very soon.
Where will your "I" be then? You protest against war with all your being, but war nevertheless will make you shoulder a rifle and go out to kill and be killed. It's impossible! I, a mild, good-natured young man, who up till now had known only his books, the lecture room, his family and a few close friends, who had been planning in a year or two to begin a new labour, a labour of love and truth; I, moreover, who was accustomed to keep an open mind about the world, accustomed to have it always before me, who thought I understood the evil in it everywhere, and so was able to avoid it-I see the whole edifice of my serenity destroyed, and myself huddling on the very shirt whose rents and stains I had just been examining. And no intellectual development, no awareness of myself and the world, no spiritual freedom can give me wretched physical freedom-freedom to dispose of my own body.
Lvov chuckles when I begin to air my protests against war.
"Don't take things so seriously, my dear fellow, you'll find life easier," he says. "Do you think I like this slaughter? Apart from it being a calamity to everyone I have a personal grudge against it, because it doesn't give me a chance to finish my education. They'll speed up the course and rush us off to amputate arms and legs. But I don't go in for idle speculation on the horrors of war, because no amount of thinking on my part will help do away with it. The best thing really is not to think about it and just go on with your business. And if they do send me to treat the wounded, I'll go and do it. You can't help it, you've got to make a sacrifice at such a time. By the way, do you know that Masha is going out as a nurse?"
"Is she?"
"She made up her mind the day before yesterday, and today she went to practise dressing. I did nothing to dissuade her; I only asked her what she was going to do about her studies. I'll finish them afterwards if I'm still alive,' she says. There's no harm in my sister going, it will do her good."
"What about Kuzma?"
"Kuzma says nothing, he goes about looking as dismal as a funeral, and has dropped his studies altogether. I'm glad for his sake that my sister is going away; the man is just eating his heart out, he follows her about like a shadow, a lost soul. That's what love does!" Vasily Lvov shook his head. "Now, too, he has run off to meet her, as if she has never walked home by herself!"
"I don't think it's right, him living with you, Vasily." "Of course, it isn't, but who could have foreseen this? The flat is too big for me and my sister-there's a spare room, so why not let it to a nice man?-I thought. And that nice man goes and falls madly in love. To tell you the truth, I'm annoyed with her, too. What's wrong with Kuzma? Isn't he as good as she is? He's a nice, kind-hearted chap, and no fool either. But he might not exist for all the notice she takes of him. However, you better get out of my room, I'm busy. If you want to see my sister and Kuzma you'd better wait in the dining-room, they'll soon be here."
"No, Vasily, I have no time either. Good-bye." As soon as I stepped out into the street I saw Masha and Kuzma. They were walking along in silence: Masha in front with an air of studied preoccupation, Kuzma a little to one side and behind, as though he dared not walk next to her, and throwing occasional glances at her out of the tail of his eye. They passed me without seeing me.
I cannot do anything, I cannot think about anything. I have read a report about the third battle of Plevna. The casualties are twelve thousand Russians and Rumanians alone, not counting Turks. Twelve thousand. . . . The figure dances before my eyes in the shape of signs, or stretches in an endless ribbon of corpses lying in a row. Laid shoulder to shoulder they would form a road eight miles long. . . . What is this?
I was told something about Skobelev about him rushing somewhere, attacking something, taking some redoubt or other, or having it taken from him... I don't remember. In all this ghastly business I remember and see only one thing-a heap of corpses, forming a pedestal for mighty deeds to be recorded on the tablets of history. Perhaps that is how it should be-I am no judge; I do not argue about the war, my attitude towards it is the natural impulse of a man shocked by the frightful bloodshed. A bull seeing his own kind butchered before his eyes would probably have a similar feeling. He does not understand what purpose his death will serve, and merely stares at the blood with bulging terror-filled eyes and bellows in a frantic heart-rending voice.
Am I a coward or not?
did not bother me, but it had raised a question: was I not really a coward? Perhaps all my indignation against what everyone considered to be a great cause came merely from a fear for my own skin? What indeed was one unimportant life with such a great cause at stake? And was I capable of risking my life for any cause at all?
Those questions were soon dismissed. I went over my whole life, all those occasions-true, very few-when I had looked danger in the face, and I could not accuse myself of cowardice. I had not been afraid for my life then, and I was not afraid now. Consequently, it was not death that dismayed me. . . .
More battles, more deaths and sufferings. After reading the newspaper I am incapable of turning my hand to anything: the book is filled with rows of prostrate men instead of letters, and the pen is like a weapon inflicting black wounds upon the white paper. If this goes on much longer I should not be surprised if I start having hallucinations. I now have a new care, though, that has somewhat taken my mind off this ever-present depressing thought.
I went to the Lvovs last night and found them having tea. The brother and sister were sitting at the table, while Kuzma was pacing swiftly from corner to corner, holding his swollen face, which was tied up with a handkerchief.
"What's the matter?" I asked him.
He merely waved his hand by way of reply and continued his pacing.
"He had a toothache, and now he's got a big abscess with a swollen cheek," said Masha. "I told him to go and see a doctor, but he wouldn't, and this is the result."
"The doctor will be here soon; I have been for him," said Vasily.
"There was no need to," Kuzma muttered.
"What do you mean, you may have an effusion. And you walk about, although I have asked you to lie down. Do you know what it may lead to?"
"Who cares!" Kuzma muttered.
"Don't be silly, Kuzma Fomich. What do you mean who cares?" Masha said quietly.
The words had a soothing effect upon Kuzma. He even sat down at the table and asked for some tea. Masha poured out a glass and passed it to him. In receiving it from her hands he wore a blissful look so comically incongruous on his swollen face that I could not help smiling. Vasily smiled too. Masha alone looked at Kuzma gravely and compassionately.
The doctor, a bluff jovial man fresh as an apple, arrived. After examining the patient's neck his habitual cheerful expression gave place to a look of concern.
"Let us go into your room; I must examine you properly," he said.
I followed them into Kuzma's room.
The doctor made him get into bed and began to explore the upper part of his chest with careful fingers.
"Well, well, you'll have to stay in bed, my dear sir, and no getting up. Have you any friends who could spare some of their time for you?" the doctor asked.
"I think so," Kuzma answered in a puzzled tone.
"I would ask them," the doctor said, addressing me affably, "to watch by the patient's bedside from this day on, and if anything new develops, to send for me."
stirring her tea with the other hand.
"The doctor has ordered someone to sit with him."
"Why, is there really any danger?" Masha asked, alarmed.
"I suppose so; otherwise there would be no need for sitting with him. You won't mind nursing him, Masha, will you?"
"Of course not! There, you see, I haven't been to the war yet and I have to start nursing already. Let us go in to him; he must be miserable there all alone."
Kuzma greeted us with a smile as much as his swollen cheek would allow.
"That's nice of you," he said. "I thought you had forgotten me already."
"No, Kuzma Fomich, we can't forget you now-we have to sit up with you. See what disobedience leads to," Masha said with a smile.
"Will you, too?" Kuzma asked timidly.
"Yes, only you've got to obey me."
Kuzma shut his eyes and flushed with pleasure.
"Oh, yes," he suddenly said, turning to me; "please give me the looking-glass, will you-it's lying on the table there."
I handed him a round little looking-glass; Kuzma asked me to play the light on him, and with the aid of the glass he examined his swollen cheek and neck. His face darkened, and although we all three tried our best to divert him, he did not utter a word more the whole evening.
Today I was told definitely that the militia would be called up; I had been expecting it, and so the news was not exactly startling.
I could escape the fate I so much feared by making use of certain influential connections to remain in St. Petersburg while at the same time being in the service. They could "fix me up" here, if only as a clerk. But first of all, I hate having to resort to such methods, and secondly, something within me, something that eludes definition, weighs the pros and cons of my position and forbids me to shirk the army. "It's wrong," the inner voice tells me.
Something I never could have expected has happened.
I came this morning to relieve Masha at Kuzma's bedside. She met me at the door, worn out and pale after a sleepless night and with eyes red from weeping.
"What's the matter, Masha?"
"Not so loud, please," she whispered. "You know, it's all over."
"What's all over? He's not dead, is he?"
"Not yet, but there's no hope. Both doctors-we called in another one, you know. . . . "
Her voice choked with tears.
"Go in and have a look at him. Let's go in."
"Dry your eyes first and drink some water, otherwise you will upset him altogether."
"It doesn't matter. It's not as if he doesn't know. He knew it yesterday when he asked for the looking-glass; he was to have been a doctor himself soon."
under the blanket. His eyes were closed, and he breathed slowly and painfully. He seemed to have grown thinner overnight; his clammy face had a sickly colour.
"What's the matter with him?" I asked in a whisper.
"He'll tell you himself. You stay with him, I can't."
She went out, her face buried in her hands, her body racked by stifled sobs, and I sat down by the bed, waiting for Kuzma to wake up. There was a deathly stillness in the room, broken only by the watch ticking out its quiet little song on the bedside table, and by the sick man's slow heavy breathing. I looked at his face and could not recognize it; not that his features had altered so strongly~ no; but I saw him in quite a new light. I had known Kuzma for a long time, we were chums (although there had been no particular friendship between us), but never had I had cause to enter into his feelings as I did now. I thought of his life, his failures and his joys as if they had been my own. Up till now, in his love for Masha, I had seen mostly the comical side, but I realized now for the first time how keenly that man must have suffered. "Is his condition really dangerous?" I thought. "It can't be; a man can't die of a stupid toothache. Masha is crying over him, but he'll get better and everything will be well."
He opened his eyes and saw me. Without any change of expression, he began to speak slowly, pausing after each word.
"Hullo... so there you are. . . . That's the end of me. . . . Come so suddenly. . . so foolishly. . . ."
"But what's the matter with you, Kuzma, can't you tell me? Perhaps it isn't so bad at all."
"Not so bad, you say? No, my dear chap, it's very bad. The signs are too simple for me to mistake them. Here, have a look!"
Slowly and methodically he turned back the blanket and unbuttoned his shirt. The foul odour of putrefaction assailed me. Beginning from the right side of his neck, over an area the size of one's hand, Kuzma's chest was black as velvet with a slightly livid tinge. It was gangrene.
to quit his strong body. A piece of black dead flesh had been cut out of him and thrown away like a rag, and the doctor had given orders for the great gaping wound left after the operation to be bathed every two hours. Every two hours the two or three of us turn Kuzma over and raise his huge body, uncover the terrible sore and bathe it with a solution of carbolic by means of a rubber tube. It sprays the wound, and Kuzma sometimes finds the strength to smile, because, he says, "it tickles so." Like all people who are seldom ill, he likes to be nursed and tended like a child, and when Masha takes what he calls "the reins" - that is, the rubber tube-into her hands and begins to spray him, he is highly pleased, and says that no one can do it so skilfully as she does, although the tube often shakes in her hands and drenches the whole bed.
What a change in their relations! Masha, who had been something unattainable to him, something he had not even dared to look at, and who had hardly taken any notice of him, was now often to be found weeping quietly at his bedside when he slept, and nursing him tenderly, while he calmly accepted her attentions as a matter of course, and spoke to her as a father to his little daughter.
Sometimes he surfers very much. His wound burns, and he runs a high fever. At such moments odd thoughts come into my head. I see Kuzma as a mere unit, one of those who go to make up the tens of thousands reported in dispatches. His illness and sufferings are the measure by which I try to gauge the evil caused by the war. How much pain and anguish was here in a single room, a single bed, a single breast-and all this but a drop in the ocean of suffering and sorrow experienced by the vast mass of human beings, who are sent forward, drawn back, and strewn over the fields in heaps of bodies, dead and bleeding, groaning and squirming.
I am utterly worn out by lack of sleep and by depressing thoughts. I must ask Vasily or Masha to sit up for me while I take a nap for at least a couple of hours.
I slept like the dead on the little sofa, and woke up to find somebody shaking me by the shoulder.
"Get up!" said Masha. I jumped up and looked about dazedly. Masha was whispering something to me in a quick panicky voice.
"Patches, new patches!" I made out at last.
"What patches, where?"
"Oh, my God, he doesn't understand! There are new patches on Kuzma. I've sent for the doctor."
"Perhaps it's nothing," I said with the apathy of a man just roused from sleep.
"Nothing? Just have a look!"
Kuzma lay sprawling in a heavy restless sleep, tossing his head from side to side with an occasional low moan. His chest was uncovered, and an inch below the bandaged wound I saw two new black patches. The gangrene had penetrated deeper under the skin, spread under it and come out in two places. Although I had entertained little hope of Kuzma recovering, the sight of those sinister new signs chased the blood from my face.
Masha sat in a corner of the room with her hands in her lap, looking at me with eyes full of despair.
"You mustn't give way to despair, Masha. The doctor will come and have a look; there may still be some hope. We may still pull him through."
"We shan't, he'll die," she whispered.
"Well, if we don't, he'll die," I answered just as quietly. "It'll be a hard blow to all of us, of course, but you mustn't take on like that-you look half dead yourself these last few days."
"Do you know what torture I have been suffering these days? I can't account for it myself really. I didn't love him, you know, and even now I don't think 1 love him as much as he loves me, but if he dies it will break my heart. I shall always be thinking of his intent gaze, his constant silence in my company, although he could speak well and liked to talk. I shall always reproach myself in my heart for not having pitied him, for not having appreciated his mind, his heart, his affection. It may sound funny to you, but I am now constantly tormented by the thought that if I had loved him things would be quite different now, everything would have turned out differently, and this terrible ridiculous illness might not have happened. I keep on thinking about it, trying to find excuses for myself, but deep down in my heart something keeps repeating: it's your fault, your fault. . . ."
At this point I glanced at the sick man, fearing that our whispering would wake him, and I saw a change in his countenance. He was awake and had heard what Masha had said, but did not want to show it. His lips quivered, his cheeks flushed and his whole face was radiant, like a damp desolate meadow when the lowering clouds hanging over it part for a moment to let the sun shine out. He must have forgotten both his illness and his fear of death; one feeling overflowed his heart and brought two tears welling up from under his closed quivering eyelids. Masha stared at him for several moments with a startled kind of look, then she blushed, and with a tender expression on her face she bent over the poor dying man and kissed him. At that he opened his eyes. "My God, how I want to live!" he murmured. And suddenly low sobbing sounds were heard in the room, sounds that struck strangely upon my ear, for never had I heard that man weep before.
the fear of death and physical suffering Kuzma was experiencing such emotions that he would scarcely have exchanged these sublime minutes of the present for any others in his life. This is quite a different thing! Death is always death, but it is one thing to die among near and loving ones, and another to lie in the mud and your own blood, waiting for them to come and finish you off, or for the guns to come rolling down and crush you like a worm. . . .
"Frankly speaking," the doctor said to me as he put on his coat and galoshes in the hall, "under hospital treatment in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred such patients die. My only hope is that careful nursing and the patient's excellent spirits and eager desire to get well will pull him through."
"Every sick person wishes to get well, doctor." "Naturally, but your friend has certain intensifying motives," the doctor said with a smile. "Well then, we'll perform an operation this evening-we'll make a new incision for the drainage tubes, so as to give the water better play, and hope for the best."
He shook my hand, buttoned up his bearskin coat, and went off on his round of visits. In the evening he came with his instruments.
"Perhaps you would like to do the operation for the sake of practice, my future colleague?" he said to Lvov.
Kuzma grip the edge of the bed and grit his teeth with pain.
"Now then, don't be a woman," Lvov said gloomily, inserting the drainage tube into the new incision. "Does it hurt you very much?" Masha asked kindly. "Not very much, my dear; I've gone so weak, I'm so worn out."
The wound was dressed, and Kuzma was given some wine, after which he calmed down. The doctor went away. Lvov went into his room to study, and Masha and I started to tidy up the room.
"Tuck in the blanket," Kuzma said in a toneless voice. "There's a draught."
I began to straighten his pillow and the blanket according to his own directions; he was hard to please, and kept assuring me that there was a little opening somewhere near his left elbow through which he could feel the draught. I tried to tuck in the blanket as best I could, but despite all my efforts, he still felt the cold now in his side, now in his feet.
"How awkward you are," he grumbled. "It's blowing in my back again. Let her do it."
He glanced at Masha, and I realized only too clearly why I could not please him.
Masha put down the bottle of medicine she was holding and went up to the bed.
"Shall I do it?"
"Please. . . . That's good. . . now it's warm!"
"Are you going home?" Masha asked me.
"No, I've had a good sleep and can sit up now. If I'm not wanted, though, I can go."
"Please don't, let us have a little talk at least. My brother is always poring over his books, and I feel so bad, so miserable, sitting alone here with Kuzma when he sleeps, and thinking about him dying!"
"You must be brave, Masha. A nurse is not allowed to cry and have gloomy thoughts."
"I won't cry when I'm a nurse. After all, it will be easier to nurse the wounded than such a close friend."
"You are going then, after all?"
"Yes, of course. I'll go all the same, whether he gets well or dies. I've got used to the idea now and I can't give it up. I want to be doing something good, to leave myself a memory of good bright days."
"Ah, Masha, I'm afraid you won't see anything bright in the war."
"Why not? I'll work-isn't that something bright? I want to do my bit, no matter how little it is."
"Do your bit? Why, doesn't it horrify you? Can this be you, telling me that?"
"It is. Who told you that I love war? Only. . . how shall I put it?-war is an evil; you, and I, and many others think the same; but the trouble is it's inevitable; love it or not, you have to put up with it, and if you don't go and fight, they'll take someone else, and just the same it means a human being crippled or worn out by gruelling marches. I'm afraid you don't understand me-I'm not able to express myself properly. The thing is this: the war, in my opinion, is a common sorrow, a suffering, and although it may be all right to evade it, I don't like it."
I was silent. Masha's words had clearly expressed my own vague aversion to the idea of shirking the war. I myself felt what she was feeling and thinking, only I thought
"Now you're thinking all the time how to try and remain here if they take you into the army," she continued. "My brother told me about it. You know, I like you very much, you are a good man, but I don't like this trait in you."
"I can't help it, Masha. We have different views. Why should I be made to answer for this war? I didn't start it, did I?"
"Neither did those who have died and are now dying at it. They wouldn't have gone either if they could help it, but they couldn't, whereas you can. They are going to fight, but you will remain in St. Petersburg, safe, well, and happy, just because you know people who will be sorry to see a friend of theirs going to the war. It's not for me to judge whether that is right or wrong-but I simply don't like it."
She gave her curly head a vigorous toss and said no more.
"Atten-shun! Form fours! Present arms!"
And I had stood at attention, I had formed fours, and had let my rifle down with a bang. After a while, when I will have sufficiently mastered the art of forming fours, I shall be allotted to an outgoing party; we shall be entrained, transported and distributed to different regiments to replace those who have been killed.
Ah well, what's the difference. It's all over; I don't belong to myself any more, I am swimming with the stream; the best thing now is not to think, not to reason, but to take life as it comes, without criticism, except perhaps for a howl when it hurts you.
I have been put up in a special compartment of the barracks set apart for the privileged; it has cots in it instead of bunks, but otherwise it is pretty dirty. The unprivileged recruits are much worse off. Until they are assigned to their regiments they live in a vast shed that was once a riding-hall; it had been divided into two storeys by double-tiered berths, the ground covered with straw, and the whole placed at the disposal of its temporary occupants to make the best they could of it. The snow and mud in the centre aisle which everyone keeps bringing in on his feet from outside got mixed with the straw and forms a filthy mess; the straw litter on the sides of the aisle is none too clean either. Several hundred men stand, sit and lie about on it in groups consisting of natives from the same town or district-a real ethnographic exhibition. I found some men from my own district, too. Tall ungainly Ukrainians in new and astrakhan caps lay together in a silent huddle, There were about ten of them.
"How do you do, brothers."
"How do you do."
"Been long from home?"
"About a fortnight. And who may you be?" one of them asked me.
I gave my name. It appeared that they had all heard of it. They brightened up a bit on meeting a fellow countryman and grew more talkative.
"Feeling lonesome?" I asked.
"I should say so! Lonesome isn't the word. At least, if only the grub was decent, it wouldn't be so bad, but it's filthy."
"Where are they going to send you?"
"God knows! Against the Turk, I suppose."
"Do you want to go to the war?"
"What haven't I seen there?"
I began asking about our town, and memories of home loosened the men's tongues. Stories were told about a recent wedding, to pay for which a team of oxen had been sold, and how soon afterwards the young bridegroom had been called up; about the bailiff-"a hundred horsed devils in his throat"; about how scarce land was getting, and how several hundred people had quitted Markovka that year to go out to the Amur. The conversation kept strictly to the subject of the past, not a word being said about the future, about the hardships, dangers and sufferings that lay in store for us all. No one was interested in the Turks, or in the Bulgarians, or in the cause for which he was going out to die.
A tipsy young soldier of the local detachment, who was passing by, stopped, and when I went on speaking again about the war, declared authoritatively: "Those Turks ought to be taught a good lesson."
"Ought they?" I asked, smiling despite myself at the simple assurance.
"Yessir, the very name of the damned heathens ought to be wiped out. They're a lot of dirty rebels, and we've got to suffer through them! If they had behaved decently, I'd be home now, safe and sound with my parents. As it is, they make mischief and we have all the worry. That's how it is, you can take it from me. Let's have a smoke, sir!" he broke off abruptly, coming stiffly to attention with his hand to his cap.
I gave him a cigarette, took leave of my fellow townsfolk, and went home, as I was now off duty.
"They make mischief and we have all the worry," the tipsy voice still rang in my ears. Short and anything but clear, yet what more could one say?
At the Lvovs' the air is thick with misery. Kuzma is in a very bad state, although his wound has cleared; he is running a terribly high temperature, and is raving and moaning. All these days while I had been arranging my service affairs and was occupied with drills the brother and sister had not left his side. Now that they know I am going, the sister has grown still sadder and the brother gloomier.
"In uniform already!" he greeted me gruffly when I came into his room, which was filled with tobacco smoke and littered with books. "Ah, you people, people. . . ."
"What kind of people, Vasily?"
"You don't let me get on with my studies-that's what. I hardly have any time as it is, they'll send me to fight before I can finish my education; there's such a lot I shall miss learning; and on top of it all, here's you and Kuzma."
"Kuzma is dying, granted, but where do I come in?"
"But aren't you dying, too? If they don't kill you, you'll either go mad or blow your brains out. Don't I know you, and haven't there been examples?"
"What examples? What do you know about it? Tell me, Vasily!"
"Leave me alone. Catch me rubbing it in! It's bad for you. Besides, I don't know anything-I just said it like that."
But I kept at him until I made him tell me his "example."
"A wounded artillery officer told me the story. They marched out from Kishinev in April, soon after war was declared. It had been raining steadily and the roads were washed away; the mud was so deep that the guns and gun-carriages were up to the hubs in it; it got so bad that the horses gave in, and the men had to pull the ordnance out by ropes. During the second stage of the march the road was terrible: twelve hills over a distance of as many miles, with nothing but swamp between. They got stuck. It was pouring, everyone was drenched to the skin, hungry, and played out, but they had to go on pulling. Of course, a man pulled till he pitched into the mud face down, completely exhausted. At last they came to a place that was so bogged down it was impossible to move a step, but they still went on straining! 'It makes me shudder to think of it!' the officer said. Their surgeon was a young chap, a recent graduate; suffering from nerves. He cried: 1 can't stand the sight of this,' he says, 'I'm going ahead. ' And he rode forward. The soldiers cut a mass of branches, enough to build a dam with, and pushed forward again. They dragged the battery to the top of the hill, and saw the surgeon hanging from a tree. There's your example. The man just couldn't bear the sight of all that suffering, so how are you going to stand it?"
"But it's easier to stand the suffering than to kill yourself like that surgeon did, isn't it?"
"Well, I don't see what good there is in being harnessed to a gun-carriage."
"Your conscience won't torment you, Vasily."
"That's too subtle for me, my dear fellow. You'd better have that out with my sister-she's good at that kind of thing. She can pick Anna Karenina to pieces for you, discuss Dostoyevsky, and all that. As for this idea, I daresay it has been dealt with in some novel or other. Good-bye, philosopher!"
"Where are you off to?"
"To Vyborgskaya, the clinic."
I went into Kuzma's room. He was awake and feeling better than usual, as Masha, his constant bedside watcher, told me. He had not seen me in uniform yet, and was disagreeably surprised.
"Are they leaving you here or sending you away to the army?" he asked me.
"Sending me away; why, don't you know?"
He was silent.
"I knew, but I had forgotten. My head and memory are not up to much lately. . . . So you are going then. Good."
"You, too, Kuzma!"
"What about 'me too'? Am I not right? What have you done to deserve a pardon? Go and die! Better men than you, harder workers, are going too. Put my pillow straight, will you. . . that's right."
"That's quite true, Kuzma, but am I not going, too? Is it just for my own sake that I am protesting? If that were so, I would remain here without more ado-it could easily be arranged. I am not doing it; I am needed, and so I am going. I don't see though why I can't be allowed to have my own views on the subject."
Kuzma lay staring fixedly at the ceiling as if he had not heard me. At last he slowly turned his head towards me.
"I didn't really mean it," he murmured. "I am worn out and irritable, and really I don't know why I'm trying to find fault with everybody. I've become so peevish; I suppose my time will soon be up."
"Nonsense, Kuzma. Cheer up. Your wound has cleared and is healing, and everything is turning out for the best. You should be talking about life now, not death."
Masha turned her big sad eyes upon me, and I suddenly recalled what she had told me a fortnight ago: "No, he won't get better, he'll die."
"What if I suddenly did get well? Wouldn't that be good!" Kuzma said with a wan smile. "They'd send you away to fight, and Masha and I would go, too: she as a nurse, I as a doctor. And I'll fuss around you when you're wounded like you are fussing around me."
"Now that'll do, Kuzma," said Masha. "Too much talking is bad for you. Besides, your torture hour has come again."
collar-bone that glistened with a pearly lustre, on the vein passing through the whole wound and lying clean and free, as if this were not a wound in a living body, but an anatomised subject, I thought of other wounds, far more frightful both in quality and appalling quantity, inflicted not by blind senseless chance, but by the deliberate acts of men.
I do not mention a word in this notebook about what is going on at home and what I am suffering. The tears with which my mother greets me when I come and go, the oppressive silence that reigns at table when I am there, the kind attentions of my brothers and sisters-all this is very painful to see and hear, still more to write about. The thought that within a week you will have to give up all that is dearest to you in the world brings the tears to your eyes.
And now at last comes the parting. Our unit is leaving by railway first thing tomorrow morning. I was given leave to spend my last night at home; and now I am sitting alone in my room for the last time! The last time! Does anyone, who has not experienced that last time, know all the bitterness of those two words? For the last time my family have met and said good night, for the last time I have come into this little room and sat down at the desk, illumined by the familiar low lamp and littered with books and paper. For a whole month I had not touched them. I pick up the work I had begun and examine it for the last time. Broken off, it lies there dead, still-born, senseless. Instead of finishing it, you are going with thousands of your kind to the world's end because history requires your physical powers. As for your mental powers, you may forget them-no one wants them. What matter that you have cultivated them for years, planned to apply them somewhere or other? Some immense organism you know not of, but of which you form an insignificant part, has decided to cut you off and throw you away. And what can you do against such a desire, you-- "a toe off the foot"?
But enough of this. I must try and get some sleep; tomorrow I must be up very early.
I asked that no one should go to see me off. It would only mean more tears. But when I was sitting in the packed railway carriage I felt so unutterably lonely that I would have given anything in the world to have been able to be with someone near, if only for a minute or two. At last came the time for departure, but our train did not move. It was being held up. Half an hour went by, then an hour, and an hour and a half, but we were still standing. In that hour and a half I could have been home and back again. Perhaps someone will come after all. . . . No, they all believe I had left long ago; they would hardly count on this delay. You never know, though..., And I looked in the direction from where I could expect someone to come. Never had time dragged so drearily.
moment the train would start, and I would see no one any more.
But I did. The Lvovs, brother and sister, came up to my carriage almost at a run; I was awfully glad to see them. I don't remember what I told them, or what they told me apart from the single phrase, "Kuzma is dead."
Here the entries in the notebook end. A wide snowy field. All round are white mounds with white hoarfrosted trees on them. The sky is overcast and low; the thaw can be felt in the air. The crackle of rifles and the steady pounding of guns can be heard; smoke covers one of the mounds and creeps down into the field. Through it can be discerned a dark moving mass, which, on closer inspection, resolves itself into separate black dots. Many of those dots are already motionless, but the others keep moving forward, although they are still a long way from their goal-to be distinguished only by the mass of smoke that pours from it-and although their numbers are dwindling every moment.
The reserve battalion, lying in the snow rifles in hand, watched the movement of the black mass with all its thousand eyes.
"There they go, boys! Ah, they won't make it!"
"What are they keeping us here for? They'd take it in no time if we gave them a hand."
"You're sick of life, I see," an elderly soldier said gloomily. "Lie where you've been put, and thank God you're safe and sound."
"Don't you worry, Dad, we'll ail be safe and sound," answered a young soldier with a merry face. "I've been in four fights, and nothing's happened to me! You funk it a bit at first, but afterwards-you'd be surprised! I bet you are saying your prayers, sir, now aren't you?"
The last words were addressed to a lean soldier with a black little beard who was lying next to him.
"What do you want?" the latter said.
"Cheer up, sir!"
"Who told you I need cheering up, my dear man!"
"In case of anything, you stick to me, sir. I've been through it, I know. The gentleman's a sport, though, he won't turn tail. He's not like that other volunteer we once had. D'you know what he did when we went into action just like now and the bullets started whizzing round us? He chucked away his bag and pack and his rifle, and ran for dear life, but a bullet got him in the back. That will never do-breaking the oath, you know."
"Don't you worry, I won't run away," the "gentleman" answered quietly. "You can't run away from a bullet."
"That's just it! She won't stand any nonsense. . . . Goodness, me! If they haven't stopped!"
The black mass had halted in wreaths of smoke.
"Ekh, they're blazing away at 'em, they'll fall back in a minute. . . . No, they're moving forward. Daze my eyes! Keep it up, come on! My God, look at the wounded dropping! And no one picking them up."
"A bullet! A bullet!" a murmur arose.
Indeed, something swished through the air. It was a stray bullet that had flown over the reserve lines. It was followed by a second and a third.
"Stretcher!" someone shouted.
The stray bullet had found its billet. Four soldiers rushed over to the wounded man with a stretcher. Suddenly the small figures of men and horses appeared on one of the hillsides a little to one side of the point of attack, and a thick round puff of smoke, as white as snow, flew out from there at once.
"They're aiming at us, the swine!" shouted the merry young soldier.
"gentleman" sprawling next to him with his arms thrown out and his neck twisted in an unnatural manner. Another stray bullet had pierced a gaping black hole over his right eye.
1879