The Reminiscences of Private Ivanov

THE REMINISCENCES OF PRIVATE IVANOV

I arrived in Kishinev on the fourth of May eighteen hundred and seventy-seven, and within half an hour learned that the 56th Infantry Division was passing through the town. As I had come with the intention of joining some regiment and going to the war, the seventh of May already found me standing in the street at four o'clock in the morning among the grey ranks lined up outside the billet of the colonel of the 222nd Starobelsky Infantry Regiment. I had on a greatcoat with red shoulder-straps and blue tabs, and a cap with a blue band; across my back was a pack, at my belt a cartridge pouch, in my hand a heavy rifle.

The band struck up, and the colours were carried out of the colonel's lodgings. A command rang out; the regiment noiselessly presented arms. Then a terrific uproar arose: the colonel shouted a command, and this was taken up by the battalion and company commanders and the platoon NCO's. The result was a confused and to me quite unintelligible movement of greatcoats, which ended in the regiment stretching out in a long column and swinging off to the sounds of the regimental band, which blared out a gay march. I marched along, too, trying to keep in step with my neighbour. The pack pulled backwards, the heavy pouches forwards, the rifle kept slipping off my shoulder, and the collar of the greatcoat chafed my neck; but despite all these little discomforts, the music, the orderly heavy movement of the column, the fresh early morning air, and the sight of the bristling bayonets and grim suntanned faces attuned one's soul to a calm and steadfast mood.

Despite the early hour people stood about in crowds outside the houses, and half-dressed figures looked out of the windows. We marched down a long straight street, past the market-place, where the Moldavians on their ox-waggons were already beginning to arrive; the street climbed uphill and ran into the town cemetery. The morning was cold, bleak, and the trees in the cemetery loomed through a mist; the tops of the gravestones could be seen peeping from behind the gates and the wall. We skirted the cemetery, which we left on our right. It seemed to me to be looking at us perplexedly through the mist. "Why must you thousands go thousands of miles to die in foreign fields when you can die here, die peacefully and repose your bodies under my wooden crosses and stone slabs? Stay!"

But we did not stay. Some unknown secret force drew us on, a force than which there is no stronger in human life. Each one separately would have gone home, but the entire mass went forward, actuated not by a sense of discipline, not by the realization of a just cause, not by a feeling of hatred towards an unknown enemy, not by fear of punishment, but by that mysterious and unconscious force which, for a long time to come yet, will lead humanity on to bloody slaughter--the cardinal cause of all human ills and suffering.

Beyond the cemetery there lay a broad deep valley, which lost itself in the mist. It was raining harder; here and there, far far away, the clouds parted and gave passage to the sunbeams; the slanting sheets of rain then took on a silvery sparkle. The mists crept up the green slopes of the valley; through them one could discern the long strung-out column of troops marching ahead of us. Now and again the bayonets gleamed; the gun, coming into the sunshine, glowed briefly like a bright star, then faded. Sometimes the clouds closed in and it grew darker; the rain came down faster. An hour after we had marched out I felt a trickle of water running down my back.

The first day's march was not a long one: from Kishinev to the village of Gaureni was only eighteen versts. But unaccustomed as I was to carrying a load of twenty to twenty-five pounds, I could hardly sit down at first when we reached the cottage we had been billeted to; I leaned against the wall with my pack and stood like that for about ten minutes in full kit with the rifle in my hand. One of the soldiers who went to the kitchen for his dinner had pity on me and took my mess-tin, but when he came back he found me fast asleep. I woke up at four in the morning, roused by the jarring bugle sounding the assembly, and within five minutes I was marching again along a muddy clayey road under a drizzly rain that seemed to be pouring out of a fine sieve. In front of me moved a grey back with a brown leather pack slung across it, a rattling mess-tin and a rifle on the shoulder; on either side and behind me moved similar grey figures. The first few days I could not distinguish one from the other. The 222nd Infantry Regiment to which I had been assigned consisted for the most part of Vyatka and Kostroma peasants. All broad-faced, strong in the cheeks, livid brown from the cold; grey smallish eyes, hair and beards of a light colourless hue. Although I remembered some of their names I did not know whom they belonged to. A fortnight later I could not understand how I could possibly have confused two of my neighbours: the one who marched at my side, and the other who marched at the side of the owner of the grey back which I constantly had in front of my eyes. I called them indiscriminately Fyodorov and Zhitkov, and constantly made a mistake, although they did not in the least resemble one another.

beard, and with merry blue eyes. When the officers shouted "singers to the fore!" he led our company in the chorus, singing in a powerful tenor, which rose to the highest of falsettos on the words:

He was a native of the Vladimir gubernia, and had been brought to St. Petersburg as a child. As rarely happens, his city "acquirements" had not spoiled him, but merely given him a polish, teaching him, among other things, to read the newspapers and use all kinds of clever words.

"Of course, Mr. Ivanov," he said to me, "I can have a better judgement of things than Uncle Zhitkov, because St. Petersburg has had its influence on me. In St. Petersburg you have civilization, but in their village it's just ignorance and barbarism. But seeing that he is an elderly person who, you might say, has been through the mill and experienced many of the vicissitudes of fortune, I cannot very well shout at him. He is forty, and I am twenty-three, even though I am the company's corporal."

by trade, and had been on unlimited leave when our army was mobilized. He had had only a few more months to go to receive his honourable discharge, but the war broke out, and Zhitkov went to fight, leaving at home a wife and five small children. Despite his forbidding aspect and perpetual air of gloom, there was something likeable about him, something kind and strong. It astonishes me now how I could have confused those two men, but during the first few days they both looked alike to me: both grey, loaded up, tired, and chilled to the marrow.

It rained steadily throughout the first half of May, and we marched without tents. The endless clayey road climbed uphill and dipped into a gully almost at every mile. The going was very heavy. Clods of earth stuck to our feet, the grey sky hung low, and the drizzling rain poured down upon us. There was no end to it, no hope of being able to dry and warm ourselves when we bivouacked for the night: the Rumanians did not let us into their houses, and in any case they could not accommodate such a mass of men. We passed through the town or village and halted somewhere on a common. "Halt! Pile arms!" And after some hot soup, we lay down right in the mud.

What with the water above us and the water under us, our very bodies seemed to be soaked in it. Shivering, you wrap yourself up in your greatcoat, gradually feeling the damp warmth creeping through your body, and you fall fast asleep until the accursed assembly call. Then once more the grey column, the grey sky, the muddy road and the dismal wet hills and valleys. The men had a hard time of it.

"This rain will never stop," our half-platoon NCO Karpov, an old soldier who had been through the Khiva campaign, said with a sigh. "We are drenched to the skin as it is."

"We'll dry up. The sun will come out and dry us all. We've got a long march ahead of us: we'll dry and get wet again many a time before we get there," one man said, then turning to me, added: "Is the Danube a long way off, Mr. Ivanov?"

"About three more weeks of it."

"Three weeks! With two weeks we've been going. . . . "

"Going to the devil," Zhitkov growled.

"What are you grumbling there, you old devil? None of your scaremongering, now! What do you mean, going to the devil? Why do you say such things?"

"We're not going on a picnic, are we?" Zhitkov snapped back.

"No one says it's a picnic, but we've got to keep the oath we took! Didn't you swear 'To spare nor life nor limb'? Eh? You old fool!" said Karpov.

"What did I say? Am I not going! If we have to die, we'll die, that's all."

"You'd better! Don't let me have any more of your lip!"

Zhitkov said nothing; his face looked gloomier than ever. Besides, no one felt like talking: the going was so difficult. It was slippery and men often fell in the sticky mud. Some hard swearing could be heard in the battalion.

Fyodorov was the only one who kept his spirits up, and he told me story after story about St. Petersburg and the village without ever seeming to tire.

early morning sunshine, and heard cheerful lively voices. Everyone had got up, dried and rested, after a week and a half's heavy marching under the rain without tents. During our halt the tents arrived too. The soldiers began to pitch them at once, and when this was done, with the pegs driven in and the canvas drawn, almost everyone lay down in their shade.

"If they didn't help in the rain, they'll protect us from the sun."

"Yes, we can't have the gentleman spoiling his complexion," Fyodorov said jestingly, winking in my direction.

There were only two officers in our company: Captain Zaikin, the company commander, and subaltern Stebelkov. Our company commander was a plump, good-natured, middle-aged man, Stebelkov a youth, fresh from the military training school. They got on well together; the captain took the subaltern under his wing, and shared his food with him, and, during the rainy weather, even his only raincoat. When the tents were distributed, our officers shared the same tent, and since the officers' tents were roomy, the captain decided to take me in too.

Tired out after a sleepless night (our company had been told off for transport duty the day before and had spent the whole night hauling the baggage train out of the ruts and even dragging it out of an overflowing little river by aid of the "Dubinushka"-a Russian work-song), I had fallen fast asleep after dinner. I was awakened by the company commander's servant who gently touched my shoulder.

"Mr. Ivanov! Mr. Ivanov!" he whispered, as though loath to wake me, but, on the contrary, trying his best not to disturb my sleep.

"What do you want?"

"The company commander sent me for you," he said, and seeing that I was putting on my belt with the bayonet, added: "He said I was to fetch you just as you were."

There was quite a gathering in Zaikin's tent. In addition to the hosts, there were two more officers: the regimental adjutant and the commander of the rifle company Wenzel. In 1877 a battalion consisted not of four companies, as now, but of five; on the march the rifle company brought up the rear, so that their front ranks trod on the heels of our rear ones. I had often been close to the riflemen and heard from them the worst reports about Junior Captain Wenzel. All four sat drinking tea around a packing case that served as a table and had a samovar, tea things and a bottle on it.

"Oh, Mr. Ivanov! Come in, come in!" the captain shouted. "Nikita! A cup, a mug, a glass-whatever you have there! Move over, Wenzel; let him sit down."

"What restless eyes he has and what thin lips!" I thought at the time.

The adjutant proffered his hand without getting up.

"Lukin," he introduced himself briefly.

I felt awkward. The officers were silent; Wenzel sipped his tea with rum; the adjutant puffed at a short pipe; subaltern Stebelkov nodded to me and went on reading a dog-eared translation of some foreign novel, which made the journey in his suitcase from Russia to the Danube and subsequently back to Russia more dog-eared than ever.

"Here you are, Mr. Student! Don't mind me; I'm a simple man. As a matter of fact we're all simple men here. Being an educated man yourself, you must excuse us. Isn't that so?"

Saying which he clasped my hand with a downward sweep of his own huge one, like a bird pouncing on its prey, and pumped it several times, while he gazed at me affectionately with his round, bulging little eyes.

"You are a student?" said Wenzel.

"A former student, sir."

"There is no need for the 'sir. ' Here in this tent you are one of us. Here you are just an intellectual among similar intellectuals," he said quietly.

"Intellectual is right!" shouted Zaikin. "A student! I love students, although they are rebels. I would have been a student myself but for a twist of fate."

"What twist of fate was that, Zaikin?" the adjutant asked.

"I just couldn't cram up. As regards mathematics I'd pass muster at a pinch, but as for the rest, it just wouldn't work. Literature, you know. . . . Spelling. . . . I didn't even learn to write properly in the military school. Upon my word!"

"That's a fact, Mr. Student," the adjutant said between two huge puffs of smoke. "The captain manages to make six spelling mistakes in a word of five letters." He burst out laughing.

"Now, now, auntie, don't tell any lies!" Zaikin protested. "Calls himself an adjutant, too-why, he can't spell his own name, the dunce!" The adjutant laughed still louder; subaltern Stebelkov, who had been sipping his tea, spluttered over his novel and blew out one of the two candles that lit up the tent; I could not help laughing, too. Captain Zaikin

"So it was literature. Captain?" he said in the same quiet voice.

"Yes, literature. And all the rest of it, of course. You know, like that chap who got through his geography as far as Equator, and his history as far as Era. But that's nonsense, of course. That's not the point. I just had monty to burn and went the pace. I was a rip, you know, ever since I was a boy. The tricks I was up to! You know how the song goes: 'The lad had his fling while the money lasted, and when that was gone his life was blasted. ' I joined this army regiment as a cadet; they sent me to a military school, which I just managed to finish by the skin of my teeth, and now I've been pegging away at it here for over ten years. Now we're going for the Turks. Let's drink it neat, gentlemen. Why spoil it with tea? Gentlemen 'cannon-fodder,' I give you the toast."

"Chair a canon," Wenzel murmured.

"Have it your way, the French way. Our captain's a smart chap, Ivanov: he knows languages and spouts German poetry by heart. Look here, young man! I've called you here to offer you to move over to my tent. It must be crowded and nasty there with the soldiers, six of you in a tent. Insects. You'll find it better here."

"Thank you, but I must refuse."

"Why? Nonsense! Nikita! Lug his pack over here! Which is your tent, the second?"

"Second on the right. If you don't mind, though, I'd prefer to stay there. I have to be with the soldiers most of the time. I'd rather stay there altogether."

The captain regarded me closely, as if trying to read my mind. After a moment's thought, he said:

"You want to be friends with them?" "Yes, if that is possible."

"You are right. Stay there. You have my respect." He seized my hand in his great paw and began pumping it vigorously.

Shortly afterwards I took my leave of the officers and left their tent. Night was falling; the men had put on their greatcoats in preparation for the evening roll-call. The companies lined up so that each battalion formed a closed square with the tents and piled arms inside it. On account of the day's halt the whole division had assembled. The drums beat the retreat, and from somewhere far away sounded the words of command for prayers.

Twelve thousand men bared their heads. "Our Father which art in heaven," our company began. The company next to us began chanting too. Sixty choirs of two hundred men each began singing each on its own. Despite the discord, the prayer sounded moving and solemn. Gradually the choirs died down; at last, far away, in a battalion standing at the end of the camp, the last company sang: "For thine is the kingdom. . . ." The drums beat a tattoo.

"Turn in!"

and the distant camp-fires, and listening to the faint hum of the multitudinous camp. In the tent next to ours someone was telling a fairy tale, endlessly repeating the words "so then."

"So then up comes the prince and begins to tell his wife off. So then. . . . Are you sleeping, Lyutikov? All right, sleep, God bless you. O Heavenly Father. . ." the storyteller whispered and fell silent.

From the officers' tent, too, came a murmur of conversation. The huge distorted shadows of the officers sitting in the tent moved across the canvas, which was lit up from within. Once in a while there came a burst of laughter: that was the adjutant guffawing. A sentry with a rifle walked up and down; at the artillery's bivouac a little way off stood another sentry with drawn sword. From the horse lines every now and then came the stamp of hoofs and the snort of horses, who could be heard peacefully chewing their oats with the same kindly munching sound which I had often heard at home at some wayside inn on a similarly quiet starry night. The seven stars of the Great Bear shone low over the horizon, much lower than at home. Looking at the North Star, I thought that there, in that very direction, lay St. Petersburg, where I had left my mother, my friends, all that was dear to me. Familiar constellations shone overhead; the Milky Way was not just a blurred glimmer, but shone with a bright solemnly placid streak of light. In the south two large stars of some unfamiliar constellation not visible to us at home glowed with a red and greenish light. The thought struck me: "When we go farther beyond the Danube, beyond the Balkans, to Constantinople, will I see other new stars? What stars are they?"

I wasn't sleepy; I got up and wandered about over the damp grass between our battalion and the artillery. A dark figure drew level with me; I guessed by the clank of his sabre that it was an officer, and I stood at attention. The officer came up to me. It was Wenzel.

"You can't sleep, Ivanov?" he asked in his soft quiet voice.

"No, sir."

"My name is Wenzel. . . . I can't sleep either. I sat with your commander until I got fed up: they started playing cards, and they're all drunk. Ah, what a night!"

He walked at my side; on reaching the end of the line we turned back and walked up and down for a while saying nothing. Wenzel broke the silence.

"Tell me, did you join up of your own free will?"

"Yes."

"What made you do it?"

"What shall I say?" I answered, not wishing to go into details. "Most of all, of course, it was a desire to see and experience things."

"And probably to study the people in the person of its representative-the soldier?" said Wenzel.

It was dark and I could not see the expression of his face, but I caught the irony in his voice.

"Study, no! Who can think of study when your only thought is to hold out till the next halt and go to sleep!"

"Joking aside, though. Tell me why didn't you move over to your commander's tent? Do you mean to say you value the opinions of these peasants?"

"Of course, I value the opinion of everyone whom I have no reason to hold in disrespect."

"I have no reason to disbelieve you. Yes, it has become the latest fashion these days. Even literature elevates the muzhik and makes a sort of pearl of creation out of him."

"Who speaks about a pearl of creation, Wenzel! Good enough if he were simply recognized as a human being."

"Get on with you, using such pitiful words! Who doesn't recognize him? A human being?-very well, let him be a human being; what kind of human being-is another question. Let us talk about something else."

"spouting poetry" also turned out to be correct: when we began speaking about the French, Wenzel, after railing at the naturalists, passed on to the forties and the thirties and even recited Alfred de Mussel's Nuit de decembre with great feeling. He recited it well: simply and expressively, with a good French pronunciation. He paused when he had finished, then added:

"Yes, it's good; but all the French together are not worth a dozen lines of Schiller, Goethe or Shakespeare."

He had been in charge of the regimental library before taking over command of the company, and closely followed Russian literature too. In speaking of it, he severely condemned what he called the "boorish trend." The remark brought the conversation back to the former subject. Wenzel argued heatedly.

"When, almost a boy, I joined the regiment, I did not think the way I am talking to you now. I tried to act by means of the spoken word, tried to gain moral influence. But after a year of it, they wore me out. All that remained of the so-called good books on contact with reality proved to be sentimental nonsense. And now I think that the only way of making yourself understood is this!"

He made a gesture, but it was so dark that I could not make it out.

"What is that, Wenzel?"

"The fist!" he snapped. "Good night, it's time to go to bed."

I saluted and went to my tent. I felt both pained and disgusted.

"Are you sleeping, Ivanov?"

"No."

"Walking with Wenzel?"

"Yes."

"How's he with you? Good-tempered?"

"Well yes, rather friendly, I should say."

"That just shows you! One gentleman to another. Not the way he treats us."

"Why, does he show his temper?"

"Something awful! The men's jaws in the second rifle company take nasty cracks. He's a brute!"

in a sound sleep.

The rains were followed by hot weather. Round about that time we struck off the country track, where our feet stuck in the mire, and emerged on to the highroad leading from Jassy to Bucharest. The first leg of the road march from Tecuci to Berlad will remain for ever in the memories of those who made it. It was ninety-five degrees in the shade; the march was forty-eight versts. The air was still; a fine limestone dust, raised by thousands of feet, hung over the road; it got into your nose and mouth, powdered your hair and disguised its colour; mingling with sweat it covered all faces with dirt and made men look like Negroes. For some reason we marched not in our shirts, but in uniforms. The sun heated the black cloth and beat down mercilessly on your head through the black cap; you could feel the scorching road metal through the soles of your boots. As luck would have it, the wells were few and far between, and most of them had so little water in them that the head of our column (the whole division was on the march) exhausted it, and all that we had after a terrible crush round the wells, was a thick clayey fluid more like mud than water. When there was not enough of it, men dropped in their tracks. Nearly ninety men dropped in the road that day in our battalion alone. Three died from sunstroke.

I bore the torture fairly well in comparison with others. It may have been because our regiment was recruited mostly from northerners, whereas I had been used to the heat of the steppes ever since a child; or some other cause may have been at work here. I had noticed that the common soldiers are apt to feel physical suffering more keenly than soldiers from the so-called privileged classes (I am speaking only of those who went to war of their own free will). For them, the common soldiers, physical distress was a real calamity, capable of making men acutely miserable. But those men who had enlisted voluntarily, although suffering physically worse than the common soldier, owing to their more delicate breeding, their comparatively weaker physique, and so on, enjoyed greater mental serenity. Their equanimity could not be disturbed by wayworn bleeding feet, the insufferable heat, and deadly fatigue. Never had I enjoyed such mental calm, never had I been at such peace with myself and the world at large as when I experienced these hardships and went out to kill men under flying bullets. This may sound queer and crazy, but I am writing only the truth.

However that may be, when others were dropping in the roadway I was in calm possession of my senses. In Tecuci I had provided myself with a huge gourd holding at least four bottles. I had filled it more than once during the march; half of that water I poured into myself, the rest I shared among my neighbours. A man would struggle on, but in the end succumb to the heat: his legs would begin to bend at the knees and he would stagger like a drunken man; through the layer of dirt and dust you could see his face going livid, and his hand convulsively gripping the rifle. A mouthful or two of water revives him for several minutes, but in the end he drops senseless on the hard dusty road. "Orderly!" hoarse voices shout. The duty of the orderly is to drag the fallen man to the roadside and render him assistance; but the orderly himself is in the same plight. The ditches on both sides of the road are strewn with sprawling bodies. Fyodorov and Zhitkov walked next to me, and although they were obviously suffering they bore up in manly fashion. The heat affected them in a curious way, reversed to their natures: Fyodorov was silent and only sighed painfully every now and then, his fine eyes, now inflamed by the dust, glancing piteously a!: Uncle Zhitkov, who was swearing and philosophizing. "Look at 'em dropping! Careful with that bayonet, damn you!" he shouted angrily, stepping aside to avoid the bayonet of a falling soldier, the point of which nearly got into his eye. "God Almighty! What have we done to rouse Thy wrath? If it wasn't for that brute I think I'd drop myself."

"What brute is that?" I asked.

"Captain Nemtsev. He's on duty today; marching behind us. Better keep going unless you want him to manhandle you. You'll be all bruises by the time he's finished with you."

I had known that the soldiers had changed Wenzel's name to "Nemtsev." It sounded similar, and Russian too. ( Nemtsev-a Russian word meaning "German."-Trans.)

I left the ranks. At the side of the road the going was easier: there was less dust and jostling. Many men were walking at the roadsides: no one thought about keeping proper marching order that wretched day. I gradually dropped behind my company and found myself at the rear of the column.

Wenzel, utterly exhausted, caught up with me, panting but excited.

"How do you like it?" he said in a hoarse voice. "Let us walk at the side. I am completely fagged out."

"Do you want some water?"

He took several large gulps out of my gourd.

"Thanks, I feel better. What a day!"

We walked along together for a while in silence.

"By the way," he said, "you didn't move over to Zaikin's after all?"

"No."

"That's silly. Excuse me for being blunt. Good-bye; I must get back to the tail of the column. Too many of these delicate creatures are dropping."

After advancing several steps I turned my head and saw Wenzel bending over a fallen soldier and pulling him by the shoulder.

"Get up, you canaille! Get up!"

His lips were whispering something.

"Get up! Get up this minute! What! You won't? Then take that, take that, take that!"

Wenzel seized his sabre scabbard and rained blows with it on the unfortunate man's weary weighted back. I could not stand it and went up to him.

"Wenzel!"

"Get up!" The hand with the sabre was lifted for another blow, but I gripped it before it could come down.

"For God's sake, Wenzel, leave the man be!"

He turned to me an infuriated face. With eyes blazing and mouth twisted convulsively, he looked terrible. He wrenched his arm free with a fierce movement. I thought that my effrontery would bring a storm of anger down upon my head (seizing an officer by the hand was sheer insolence), but he kept his temper.

"Look here, Ivanov, never do that again! If some rude upstart had been in my place, someone like Shchurov or Timofeyev, you would have paid dear for that joke of yours. You mustn't forget that you are a private and are liable to be summarily shot for things like that."

"I don't care. I couldn't look on without taking the man's part."

"That does you credit. But your tender feelings are misplaced. How else can you treat these. . . . " (His face expressed contempt, nay more-something akin to hatred.)

"Of all these dozens who have dropped like old women there are probably only a few who are really exhausted by the heat. I am not doing it out of cruelty-it isn't in me. You've got to maintain discipline. If they could be talked to I would have tried persuasion. But the word means nothing to them. The only thing they feel is physical pain."

I did not stay to hear any more, and hastened off to catch up with my company. I overtook Fyodorov and Zhitkov when our battalion had been turned off the road into a field and commanded to halt.

"What were you talking with Captain Wenzel about?" asked Fyodorov, as I dropped beside him utterly exhausted before I had barely piled my rifle.

"Talking!" Zhitkov growled. "Do you call that talking? He caught hold of his hand. Take my advice, sir, you be careful with Nemtsev. The fact that he likes to talk to you doesn't mean anything. He'll be the ruin of you!"

Late that evening we reached Fokshani, passed through the dark silent and dusty little town and came into a field. The battalions bivouacked in the pitch dark, and the worn-out men fell asleep at once; hardly anyone ate the "dinner" which had been prepared for them. The soldier's meal is always "dinner," no matter whether it happens early in the morning, in the daytime or at night. The rest straggled in all through the night. At dawn we marched out again, comforting ourselves with the thought that after the next march a day's halt would be called.

removed the fatigue of the previous day, and the men walk along almost sleeping. I have had that happen to me several times, so much so that when we halted for a rest I could not believe that we had done ten versts, and I did not remember a single spot of the way we had travelled. It is only when the halt order is given and the column draws up and reforms for the occasion do you wake up and think with pleasure of the full hour's rest in which you can disburden, boil yourself some water in your mess-tin and lie at ease, drinking hot tea. As soon as the rifles are piled and the kits thrown off, most of the men start collecting fuel-usually the dry stalks of last year's maize. Two bayonets are stuck into the ground and a ramrod laid across them, from which two or three mess-tins are suspended. The dry crumbly stalks burn with a bright merry flame; the fire is always built on the windward side; the flames lick the smoky tins, and within ten minutes the water in them is boiling merrily. The tea is thrown straight into the tin and boiled to a strong almost black brew, which is drunk for the most part without sugar, as the authorities, while issuing a lot of tea (the men sometimes smoked it when tobacco was short), issued very little sugar, and tea was drunk in vast amounts. The mess-tin, containing seven glasses, was the usual portion for one man.

It may seem strange that I enlarge on all these trivial details. But a soldier's life on the march is so hard, so full of privations and suffering, and with so little hope for a happy issue in prospect, that even a small thing like tea or other similar little luxury was a great joy to him. One should have seen the grave pleased faces of those grim, rough, weather-beaten soldiers, young and old-true, there was no one among us over forty-as they fed the fire under the tins with bits of sticks and stalks, like children, tending it carefully, and advising one another:

"Shove it in here, on the edge, Lyutikov! That's right. That's done the trick. We'll soon have it boiling."

Tea, and occasionally-in cold and rainy weather-a glass of vodka and a pipe of tobacco-that was the soldier's sole delight, not counting, of course, all-healing sleep, which brings forgetfulness of physical distress and of thoughts of the dark and dismal future. Tobacco played no small part among these blessings of life, stimulating and sustaining as it did the men's overwrought nerves. The hard-packed pipe made the round of a dozen men and returned to its owner, who took a last puff at it before knocking out the dottle and solemnly putting the pipe away in the top of his boot. I remember how upset I was at having my pipe lost by a comrade to whom I had given it to have a smoke, and how upset and ashamed he was himself. Anyone would think he had lost a fortune that had been entrusted to him.

standard, and some of the officers, who had not gone to sleep. You lie on the ground with the kit under your head in a state between sleep and wakefulness; the hot sun beats down on your face and neck, the pestering flies crawl over you and do not let you fall asleep. Dreams mingle with reality; not so long ago you had been living a life so utterly unlike this one, that it seems to you, in this semi-conscious state of drowsiness, as if you will awake at any moment to find yourself at home amid familiar surroundings, while this steppe, this bare earth with prickles instead of grass, this merciless sun and dry wind, this thousand of men oddly clad in white dust-covered shirts, and these rifles standing in piles, will all disappear. It is all like a queer distressing dream. . . .

"Reveille!" rings out the harsh drawn-out command issued by Major Chernoglazov, our bearded little battalion commander.

The prostrate crowd of white shirts begins to stir; grunting and stretching, the men get up, put on their cartridge pouches and kits and fall into line.

"To arms!"

We take our rifles from the stack. I still remember my rifle No. 18635 with a butt-stock slightly darker than the others and with a long scratch running down the dark varnish. Another command-and the battalion, stringing out, turns off on to the road. The commander's bay horse Barbarian is led by the bridle at the head of the column; prancing, his neck arched, he paws the ground; the major mounts him only on rare occasions, and is constantly to be found marching at the head of the battalion behind Barbarian with the steady stride of the true infantryman. He is showing the men that their officers are "doing their bit" too, and the men like him for it. He is always cool and unruffled, never jokes or smiles; he is the first to get up in the morning and the last to turn in in the evening; he treats the men firmly and without familiarity, and never uses his fists or shouts without reason. They say that if not for the major, Wenzel would have done still worse things.

is no dust; the sky clouds over and heavy raindrops come down in fitful spatters. We look up at the sky and hold our hands out to see whether it is raining. Even yesterday's stragglers have cheered up; we haven't far to go, only about ten versts or so, and then rest, the longed-for rest, not for the duration of one brief night, but for a night, a whole day and another night. The heartened men are moved to sing; Fyodorov, among the leaders, is singing away for all he is worth; one can hear the famous song:

After reaching the line about the treacherous bullet that pierced the royal hat, he switches over to a senseless ribald song, very popular among the soldiers, concerning a certain Liza, who went to the woods and found a black beetle, and what came of it. This is followed by another historical song about Tsar Peter being called before the Senate. The crowning stroke is the home-made song of our regiment:

When the Tsar comes on his steed, 'tis a splendid sight

indeed.

cap to toes.

And our rifle exercise gives the Tsar a nice surprise.

The battalion commander with a voice as loud as

thunder

drill and drill. On his horse he sat all day, prouder than a popinjay.

And fifty more couplets in the same vein. "Fyodorov," I once asked him, "why do you sing that drivel about Liza?" I named several more songs, ridiculous and cynical to such a degree that their very cynicism was rendered meaningless and took the shape of absolutely senseless sounds.

"Oh, it's just a habit, sir. That's not singing. It's just sort of yelling for chest exercise. And it helps you to step out livelier."

When the singers grow tired, the musicians strike up. It is much easier to walk to the rhythmic tune of a loud and for the most part rollicking march; everyone, no matter how tired, braces himself and steps out with a swaggering air, keeping in step with the others; the battalion is hardly recognizable. I remember once marching to the music and covering over six versts in an hour without feeling tired; but when the exhausted musicians stopped playing and the stimulation of the music had disappeared, I felt as if I would drop at any moment, and would probably have done so had not a halt been called.

Some five versts' distance after the halt we came up against an obstacle. We were passing through the valley of a small river; on one side were hills, on the other a narrow and fairly high railway embankment. The recent rains had flooded the valley, forming a large puddle in our path about two hundred feet wide. The railway track rose above it like a dam, and we had to pass over it. The railway guard allowed the first battalion to pass, and then declared that we would have to wait, as a train would be going through in five minutes. We had halted and just piled our rifles when the familiar carriage of the brigadier-general made its appearance.

Our brigadier-general was a gallant soldier. I had never met anyone either on the operatic stage or in any church choir with vocal cords to match those that he possessed. His booming bass shook the air like a trumpet blast, and his big burly figure with its fat red head, huge iron-grey whiskers fluttering in the wind, and thick black eyebrows over coal-black glittering little eyes, when he sat his horse and commanded the brigade, was impressive to a degree. One day, during some military exercises on the Khodynka field in Moscow, he had cut such a fine martial figure that an old gentleman standing in the crowd of bystanders was utterly delighted and had cried out aloud: "That's a war horse! That's the kind of men we need!" The nickname War Horse had stuck to the general ever since.

He dreamed of deeds of valour. Several small volumes of military history accompanied him throughout the campaign. His favourite conversation with the officers was criticism of Napoleon's campaigns. Naturally, I knew this only by hearsay, as I had seldom seen our general; for the most part he overtook us in the middle of the march in his carriage, drawn by a fine troika, arrived at the halting-place, occupied lodgings there till late in the morning and overtook us again during the day. Every time he did so the soldiers noted the degree of lividness of his countenance, and the hoarseness of his terrific voice when he shouted to us:

"How do you do, Starobeltsy!"

The soldiers answered him with the usual chorused greeting, to which they added: "The War Horse is going to have a hair of the dog!"

And the general would drive on, sometimes without consequences, and sometimes giving one or another company commander a thunderous wigging.

Seeing the halted battalion, the general flew up and jumped out of the carriage as fast as his corpulence would allow him. The major hastened up to him.

"What's the matter? Why have you stopped? Who gave you permission?"

"The road is flooded. Your Excellency, and a train will soon be passing."

"Road flooded? A train? Nonsense! You're making softies out of the men! Bunch of old washer-women! You're disobeying orders! I'll put you under arrest, sir!" "Your Excellency. . . . " "None of your talk!"

The general's glaring eyes travelled round and alighted on another victim.

"What's that? Why isn't the commander of the 2nd Rifle Company in his place? Captain Wenzel, come here!" Wenzel went up. He received the full blast of the general's wrath. I heard him raise his voice, trying to say something, but the general shouted him down. Wenzel must have said something disrespectful, because the general roared:

"Arguing?! Insolence! Silence! Take his sabre off. Put him under arrest! Example to others. Scared by a puddle! Come on, boys! The Suvorov way!"

"Follow me, boys! The Suvorov way!" he repeated, and entered the water in his patent-leather Wellingtons. The major looked back with a scowling face and followed at the general's side. The battalion took off in his wake. The water at first was knee-deep, but then it rose to the waist and kept rising; the tall general strode along easily, but the little major was already floundering and threshing his arms about. The soldiers jostled each other, slithered about on the muddy bottom, and veered from side to side like a flock of sheep being driven across a river. The company commanders and the battalion adjutant, being on horseback, could have ridden comfortably through the puddle, but seeing the example the general was setting, they dismounted on reaching it, and leading the horses by their bridles, stepped into the muddy water churned up by hundreds of feet. Our company, which had the tallest men in the battalion, crossed fairly comfortably, but the 8th Company of short men following us floundered in the puddle almost up to their ears; some of them had swallowed water and clutched at us, gasping. One little fellow, a Gypsy, with a face as white as a sheet and dilated black eyes, threw his rifle away and clutched Zhitkov round the neck with both arms. Luckily for him someone caught the rifle before it could sink. After about twenty-five yards the puddle grew shallower, and everyone scrambled out, pushing and swearing. Many of our men were laughing, but those of the 8th Company were in no laughing mood: the faces of many of them were blue, but not only from the cold. The riflemen were pressing forward from behind them.

"Come on there, toddlers!" they shouted. "Mind you don't drown!"

"It's all right for you, you haven't even wetted your whiskers!" those of the 8th retorted. "Thinks himself a hero, he does! A fellow can drown here easy as can be."

"You should have hopped into my mess-tin. I'd have carried you across dry."

"It's a pity I didn't think of it, old chap," the little soldier answered his chaffing mates good-humouredly.

The culprit of all that commotion had meanwhile pulled his feet out of the viscid mud, and now stood on the bank, a majestic figure, surveying the mass of men floundering in the water. He was wet to the skin and even to the tips of his long whiskers. The water trickled down his clothes, and the patent-leather tops of his boots, filled with water, were distended. Yet he shouted encouragement to the soldiers:

"Forward, lads! The Suvorov way!"

The wet officers, with sullen faces, huddled round him. Wenzel was there, too, stripped of his sabre, his face distorted. The general's coachman, after walking up and down the bank, poking the handle of his whip in the water, had clambered back on to the box and safely crossed the puddle a little to one side of us, the water there barely reaching the hub of the wheels.

"That is where we should have crossed, Your Excellency," the major said. "May the men be permitted to dry themselves?"

"Certainly, certainly. Major," the general said, now appeased. The cold water had cooled his ardour. He got into his carriage, sat down, then stood up again and shouted at the top of his terrific voice:

"Thanks, Starobeltsy! Good lads!"

The men answered in a straggly chorus, and the wet general rode off.

The sun was still high in the sky, and we had only five more versts to go; the major called a long halt. We undressed, kindled camp-fires, and dried our clothes, boots and kits, and within two hours had started off again, recollecting our recent bath with laughter.

"The War Horse had Wenzel put under arrest, though!" Fyodorov said.

"Never mind, a couple of days behind the money-box will only do him good," one of the riflemen marching behind spoke up.

"What's he done to you?"

"Nothing. But the whole company will breathe easier. At least we'll be rid of him for a couple of days. It's as much as anyone can stand."

"Patience, Cossack, and you'll be an ataman one day."

"Patience, yes, but we'll be atamans in the next world, I'm afraid," Zhitkov said in his usual gloomy tone. "Especially if a Turk gets you."

"Don't be down-hearted, Dad. You just think: here are we walking nice and dry while the War Horse is trundling along wet," Fyodorov said amid laughter.

We were marching alongside the railway track all the time; trains filled with men, horses and munitions kept overtaking us. The soldiers gazed with envy at the goods waggons as they sped past with their loads of horses looking out through the open doors.

"Horses have all the honour these days! And we have to walk!"

"A horse is a stupid animal, it will lose flesh," declared Karpov. "That's what you're a man for, to take proper care of yourself."

Once, during a halt, a Cossack came galloping up with an important message. Our officers lined us up in our white shirts without our kits or rifles. None of us knew what it was all about. The officers inspected the men, Wenzel, as usual, shouting and swearing, tugging at belts that had not been put on properly, and ordering men with a kick to put their shirts straight. Then we were marched down to the railway track and after a good deal of parading, the regiment was strung out along the track in two ranks. The white line of shirts ran out for over half a mile.

"Boys!" shouted the major. "His Majesty the Tsar is riding past!"

And we all began waiting for the Tsar. Our division was a rather remote one, stationed a long way from St. Petersburg and Moscow. Probably no more than one man out of ten of us had ever seen the Tsar, and everyone looked forward eagerly to the royal train. Half an hour passed, but no train appeared; the men were allowed to sit down. They began to talk, telling stories.

"I wonder if he'll stop?" someone said.

"Don't be silly! Can you see him stopping for every blessed regiment? Be content if he just looks at us out of the window."

"We won't even be able to make out who's who: there are so many generals travelling with him."

"I'll make him out all right! I saw him that near, at Khodynka the year before last," one soldier said, holding his hand out by way of illustrating how closely he had seen the Tsar.

At last, after a two hours' wait, a wisp of smoke appeared in the distance. The regiment lined up. A service train with a kitchen passed first. The cooks and kitchen-boys in white caps looked out at us from the windows and laughed for some reason or other. Some five hundred yards behind it came the royal train; seeing the regiment lined up along the track the engine-driver slowed down, and the carriages rolled past slowly before the eager staring eyes fixed upon the windows. But the windows were curtained off, and the Cossack and officer standing on the platform of the last carriage were the only people in the train whom we saw. We looked at the rapidly retreating train, stood there for another two or three minutes, then returned to our bivouac. The men were disappointed and expressed their chagrin.

"God knows when we'll see him now!" But we saw him before long. At Ploesti we were told that the Tsar was going to review us in that town.

We marched past him just as we were, in the same dirty white shirts and trousers, the same dusty rust-coloured boots, and with the same staggering load of kit, biscuit bags, and bottles dangling from strings. The soldier had nothing dashing, swaggering or heroic about him; he looked more like an ordinary muzhik than anything, and only the rifle and the cartridge-pouch that he carried indicated that that muzhik was going to the war. We had been drawn up in a narrow column of four men abreast, otherwise we could not have passed through the narrow streets of the town. I marched on the outside, trying hard not to fall out of step, and thinking that if the Tsar and his retinue stood on my side I would pass before his eyes and very close to him. Glancing at Zhitkov, who was marching along next to me, his habitually gloomy face looking somewhat excited, I felt that some of the general excitement was communicating itself to me too, and that my heart began to beat faster. It suddenly struck me that everything depended on the way the Tsar would look at us. Eventually, when I came under fire for the first time, I experienced a similar kind of feeling.

wings which were bearing me onward to where the music rang out and deafening cheers shook the air. I do not remember the streets through which we passed, or whether there were any people in the streets looking at us; all I remember was the excitement that gripped my heart together with a realization of the terrible power of the mass to which I belonged and which was sweeping me along with it. I felt that there was nothing impossible for that mass, that the torrent with which I was being borne along and of which I formed a part, knew no obstacles, that it would break down, crush and destroy everything that stood in its path. And everyone was thinking that the man before whom that torrent would sweep past, could, by a single word, a single gesture, alter its course, turn it back, or fling it forward once more against terrible barriers; and everyone sought in the word of that one man, in the movement of his hand, that unknown force that was leading us to our death. "You are leading us," everyone thought, "we are placing our lives in your hands; look at us and rest assured that we are prepared to die."

And he knew that we were prepared to die. He saw the ranks of men, grim and terrible in their purpose, passing before him almost at a run, men of his own poor country, rough, poorly clad soldiers. He felt that they were all going forward to meet their death calmly and free of responsibility. He sat upon a grey horse that stood motionless with ears pricked to the music and the wild shouts of ecstasy. Around him stood his magnificent retinue; but I remember none of that brilliant troop of horsemen except that one figure on the grey horse in simple uniform and white cap. I remember the pale, worn face, troubled by the weight of the decision that had been taken. I remember the tears that poured down his face and fell upon the dark cloth of his uniform in bright shining drops; I remember the convulsive movement of his hand that held the bridle, and the quivering lips that murmured something, probably a greeting to the thousands of doomed young lives for whom he was weeping. All this appeared and vanished as in a flicker of lightning, during which I ran past him, breathless, not from running, but from sheer delirious ecstasy, in one hand my rifle raised aloft, in the other waving my cap over my head and shouting "hurrah!" with all the strength of my lungs, my own voice drowned in the deafening uproar.

It was all over in a flash. Dusty streets, flooded in blazing sunshine, thirsty soldiers worn out by the excitement, the heat and the quick run of nearly a mile, the shouts of the officers demanding that everyone should march in line and in step-that was all I saw and heard five minutes later. And when, after marching another mile through the stuffy town, we came to a common assigned to us for our bivouac, I flung myself down on the ground utterly exhausted in body and soul.

Gruelling marches, dust, heat, fatigue, blistered feet, brief rests during the day, the sleep of the dead at night, the hateful bugle rousing you from it at peep of dawn. And nothing but fields and fields, so unlike our native ones, covered with tall green maize loudly rustling its long silky leaves, or with rich wheat that was beginning to turn yellow.

Men spoke rarely and reluctantly about the future. They had only a dim idea of what they were going to fight for, although we stood outside Kishinev for six months, preparing to take the field; during that time the meaning of the forthcoming war could have been explained to them, but evidently that was not considered necessary. I remember a soldier once asking me:

"Will it be long before we reach the land of Bokhara, Mr. Ivanov?"

I thought at first that I had misheard, but when he repeated the question, I answered that the land of Bokhara was about three thousand miles away and that we would hardly ever get there.

"You're talking different now, sir. The clerk told me we'd be there as soon as we crossed the Danube."

"You mean Bulgaria!" I exclaimed.

"What's the difference-Bulgaria or Bokhara, as you call it."

And he fell silent, obviously nettled.

All we knew was that we were going to fight the bashi-bazouks because they had shed so much blood. And we wanted to beat them not so much because of the unknown blood they had shed as because they had disturbed such a mass of people, because, through them, we had had to make this difficult march ("dragging us all these thousands of miles, the dirty heathens!"), and dischargees had had to leave their homes and families, and all of us together had had to go out somewhere and face the bullets and the cannon-balls. We thought of the Turks as troublemakers and rebels, who had to be put down and subdued.

Our domestic affairs-regimental, battalion and company life-occupied us far more than the war. In our company it was quiet and peaceful, but with the riflemen things were going from bad to worse. Wenzel was still at it; feeling ran high, and after one incident, which even now, after the lapse of five years, I cannot recall without deep agitation, this resentment hardened into real hatred.

a pleasant spot: on one side a river, on the other a wood of old oak, probably the pleasure ground of the local inhabitants. It was a fine warm evening; the sun was setting. The regiment halted; the rifles were piled. Zhitkov and I began to pitch our tent. We put up the poles, then Zhitkov drove the pegs in while I held the edge of the canvas.

"Draw it tighter, Ivanov, that's right," Zhitkov said. (He had dropped the formal "sir" with me some days before.)

Just then I heard odd regular splashing sounds behind me. I looked round.

The riflemen were standing at attention, while Wenzel, shouting hoarsely, was smacking one of the men across the face. Pale as death, not daring to dodge the blows, the soldier stood holding his rifle at his foot, his whole body trembling. Wenzel's small slim body twisted with the blows, which he dealt with both hands, now from the right, now from the left. There was a hush all round, broken only by the smacking noises and the hoarse mutterings of the infuriated officer. Everything went dark before my eyes, and I made a movement. Zhitkov understood it, and gave the canvas a hard jerk.

"Hold it, damn you!" he shouted with a foul oath. "Have your arms withered off, or what? What are you gaping at!"

The blows continued to fall. Blood was trickling down the soldier's upper lip and chin. At last he dropped. Wenzel turned away, glared at the company and shouted:

"If anyone else dares to smoke in the ranks I'll give him a worse thrashing, the rascal. Pick him up, wash his ugly mug, and lay him in the tent. Let him come to. Pile arms!" he commanded.

His hands were shaking; they were red and swollen, and covered with blood. He took out a handkerchief, wiped them, and came away from the men, who were piling their arms in a heavy silence. Several of them, muttering among themselves, fussed around the beaten man and picked him up. Wenzel walked away with the nervous gait of an exhausted man; he was pale, and his eyes glittered; the tensed muscles of his face showed that his teeth were clenched. Passing me and meeting my compelling gaze, he smiled an unnatural mocking smile with his thin lips alone, murmured something and passed on.

"The blood-sucker!" Zhitkov said with hatred in his voice. "You are a fine one, too, sir! Asking for trouble! Want to face the firing squad? You wait, he'll get his deserts."

"Do you mean they'll complain?" I said. "Who to?"

"No, they won't complain. We'll be going into action sooner or later. . . ."

And he muttered something half to himself. I was afraid to understand him. Meanwhile Fyodorov, who had gone to have a chat with the riflemen, had returned.

"Just tormenting the men for nothing at all," he said. "That soldier, Matyushkin, was smoking on the march, and when they halted and the command was given to order arms, he held the cigarette between his fingers; he must have forgotten about it, worse for him. And Wenzel caught him.

"The brute!" he added sadly, crawling into the tent which had already been set up. "The cigarette had gone out, too. The poor devil had clean forgotten about it."

glinting rows of brass cannon and green gun-carriages and ammunition waggons. Crowds of officers and soldiers walked about the town.

From the open windows of the dirty little hotels came the sad and lively sounds of Hungarian music, the clatter of plates and noisy talk; the shops were crowded with Russian customers. Our soldiers, the Rumanians, Germans, and Jews shouted to each other, none of them understanding a word; arguments about the exchange of the paper ruble could be heard at every step.

"What have you given me doud galagani (Two coins) domnule!" ( Mister)

"Unde este post?" an officer, armed with a military phrase book, inquired with exaggerated politeness of a Rumanian dandy, whom he accosted with a salute. The Rumanian told him; the officer thumbed through his book, looking for the unintelligible words, and thanked the Rumanian most politely, although he had not understood a thing. "These people here are the damned limit! They have the same priests and churches as we have, mind you, but they've got no ideas about anything! Want a silver ruble?" a soldier with a shirt in his hands yells at the top of his voice at a Rumanian stall-keeper. "For this shirt here? "? Four francs?"

He took out a coin and showed it, and the transaction was concluded to their mutual satisfaction.

"Make way there, countrymen, a general is coming!" A tall young general in a spruce coat, high boots and a riding whip on a belt slung across his shoulder, passed quickly down the street. Several paces behind him followed his batman, a little Asiatic in a coloured oriental robe and turban, with a huge sabre and a revolver at his belt. Holding his head high and glancing with cheerful indifference at the saluting soldiers who made way for him, the general passed into the hotel. Here, ensconced in a corner of the restaurant, sat Captain Zaikin, Stebelkov and I, consuming a local dish consisting of cayenne and meat. The shabby room, set with little tables, was crowded. The clatter of dishes, the popping of corks, the hum of voices, sober and tipsy, were all drowned out by the band, which sat in a kind of niche adorned with red fustian curtains. There were five musicians: two fiddlers were scraping away with gusto, a cello played the second part in monotonous droning tones, a double-bass roared, and all these instruments together merely formed a background for the fifth musician, a swarthy curly-haired Hungarian, a boy almost, who sat in the front with a curious instrument, an ancient syrinx, like that which Pan and the fauns are pictured with, thrust behind the wide collar of his velvet jacket. It consisted of a row of uneven wooden pipes bound together with the open ends on a level with the player's lips. Twisting his head from side to side, the Hungarian blew into these pipes, from which he produced powerful melodious sounds resembling neither a flute nor a clarinet. He contrived a variety of tricky and difficult passages, shaking and twisting his head all the time; his black greasy hair danced on his head and fell over his forehead; his perspiring face was red and the veins on his neck swollen. Obviously, he was having no easy time of it. Against the discordant background of the string instruments the notes of the panpipe stood out sharply, distinctly and wildly beautiful.

"Sit down, gentlemen!" (this was meant for the rank and file). We finished our meal in silence; Zaikin ordered Rumanian red wine, and after the second bottle, when his face brightened and his nose and cheeks took on a more cheerful hue, he turned to me, saying:

"Look here, young man. . . . You remember the long march, don't you?" "I do, Captain."

"You had a talk with Wenzel then, didn't you?" "I did."

"You seized his hand?" the captain said in an unnaturally grave tone. And when I answered that I had, he let out a long gusty sigh and blinked his eyes worriedly.

"That was a bad thing to do. A silly thing! I'm not blaming you- for it, mind you. You acted nobly... I mean, it was a breach of discipline. . . . Confound it, what nonsense I'm talking! Excuse me please. . . . "

He fell silent, staring at the floor and puffing. I was silent too. He swallowed half a glass, then slapped my knee.

"Promise me you won't do that again. I understand you. It's hard for a new man. But what can you do with him? He's like a mad dog, that Wenzel! But the thing is. . . . "

The captain was obviously at a loss for words, and after another long pause he resorted to the glass again.

"I mean to say. . . he's not a bad chap, really. I can't make out what gets into him. I took a jab at a soldier myself the other day-you probably saw me. Just a light tap. You can't help it when the idiot doesn't understand his own fool-trick-just a lump of wood, you know. . . . But, upon my word, it's all done in a fatherly way. No malice in it really, although I do lose my temper sometimes. But he's made it a system. Hi, you!" he shouted to the Rumanian waiter, "Oste vin negrul Some more wine! He'll have the law on him one day, if not something worse: the men will get mad with him, and as soon as we go into action. . . . It will be a pity, because he's a decent chap, really. A warm-hearted fellow, I should say."

"Oh, come," drawled Stebelkov. "What warm-hearted man will use his fists the way he does."

"You should have seen what that warm-hearted man of yours did recently," I said, and told the captain how Wenzel had beaten the soldier over a cigarette.

"There, that's him all over!" Zaikin puffed, reddening, then resumed again after a pause: "He's not a brute, though. Whose men are best fed? Wenzel's. Whose men are best trained? Wenzel's. In whose unit are there practically no penalties? Whose men are never court-martialled -unless, that is, some soldier has done something outrageous? Again Wenzel's. Really, if it wasn't for that unfortunate weakness of his, his men would make the deuce of a fuss of him."

"Did you ever speak to him about it, Captain?" "I did, and quarrelled with him a dozen times over it. But it's no use. 'It's either an army or a militia!' he says. Makes up stupid phrases like that all the time. 'War,' he says, 'is such a cruelty, that if I am cruel to the soldiers it is a drop in the ocean. They stand on such a low level of development/ he says. Disgusting, really! Yet he's a fine fellow. He doesn't drink, doesn't gamble, knows his business, helps his old father and his sister, and is an excellent comrade! Educated man, too. No one in the regiment comes up to him. And take my word for it, he'll either have the law on him or those out there"-jerking his head towards the window-"will take the law into their own hands. A bad business. So that's how it is, my dear private Ivanov."

He patted me kindly on the shoulder, then slipped his hand into his pocket, drew out his tobacco pouch and began to roll himself a thick cigarette. He put it into a huge amber-tipped cigarette-holder inscribed in niello with the word "Caucasus," stuck it into his mouth and handed the pouch to me in silence. We all three lit up, and the captain proceeded:

"You can't help boxing their ears sometimes. They're like children, really. Do you know Balunov?" Stebelkov suddenly burst out laughing. "What are you laughing at!" the captain grumbled. "He's an old soldier; an old offender, too. He's been serving these twenty years-can't get his discharge because of it. Well, that rascal. . . . You weren't here at the time. Well, somewhere near Kishinev we were coming out of a village one day, and got orders to inspect everyone's emergency pair of boots. I lined the men up and walked behind them to see if the tops of the boots were sticking out of their packs. Balunov's didn't show anything. 'Where are your boots?' I says. 'Inside the kit, sir. ' 'You're a liar!' 'No, sir, I put 'em inside so's to keep 'em dry!' He was so glib, the rascal. Take your kit off, undo it!' Instead of undoing it, he starts pulling the boots out of it by their tops. 'Undo it!' There's no need to, sir, I can pull them out. ' But I made him undo it. And what do you think? He pulled a live little pig out of his kit by the ears! Had its snout tied up with a bit of string, too, so that it didn't squeal. Stood there pulling a respectful face, one hand saluting, the other holding the pig. Stole it from a Moldavian woman, the scoundrel. Well, of course, I fetched him a light cuff."

Stebelkov was holding his sides with laughter.

"Yes, but what with?" he managed to bring out. "The captain hit him with the pig. Oh-ho-ho! He snatched that piglet and laid about with it!"

"Was there really any need to do that. Captain?"

"Oh, come! Man alive, what was I to do then-send him up for court-martial?"

On the night of June the 15th Fyodorov woke me up.

"Hear that, Ivanov?"

"What is it?"

"Shooting. They're crossing the Danube."

I lay listening. A strong wind was blowing, and black scuttling clouds screened the face of the moon; gusts of wind buffeted the railway track, hummed among the tent ropes and whistled shrilly in the stacked rifles. Through these sounds an occasional heavy thud could be heard.

"Someone's getting it," Fyodorov whispered with a sigh. "I wonder if we'll be ordered out? What do you think? Hear 'em blazing away! Sounds like thunder."

"Perhaps it is a thunderstorm?"

"Oh no. It's too regular for that. Hear it? One after another, one after another."

The thunderclaps, indeed, came at regular intervals. I crawled out of the tent and looked in the direction of the firing. There were no gun flashes. Sometimes the straining eye seemed to catch a flash of light from where the guns were firing, but that was only an illusion.

"Here it is, at last!" I thought.

And I tried to imagine what was going on out there in the darkness. In my mind's eye I saw a broad black river with steep banks, quite unlike the real Danube I was afterwards to see. Hundreds of boats were crossing it, and those steady rapid shots were being fired at them. How many of them would survive? A cold shiver ran through my body. "Would you care to be there now?" I could not help asking myself.

I looked at the sleeping camp; all was quiet; the distant thunder of the guns and the booming gusts of wind were punctuated by the peaceful snores of the men. Suddenly I passionately wished that all this should not be, that the march should still drag on, that these peaceful sleepers, and I with them, should not have to go out to where those guns were roaring.

"That's rifle fire," I thought, not knowing that the Danube was thirteen miles away and that those faint sounds were but the morbid creation of a straining ear. Unreal though they were, they set the imagination working, painting ghastly scenes. I fancied I could hear screams and groans, I pictured thousands of men lying prostrate, heard wild hoarse cheers, the rush of a bayonet attack, a carnage. And what if they were repulsed and all this had been in vain?

The dark east was greying; the wind had dropped. The clouds had scattered, and dying stars could be seen here and there in the paling green-tinged sky. Day began to break; some men in the camp woke up, and the others were roused by the sounds of battle. Men spoke quietly, and little was said. The unknown had now come up close: no one knew what the morrow would bring, and no one wanted to think or speak about that morrow.

I fell asleep at dawn and woke up rather late. The guns were still rumbling, and although there was no news from the Danube, rumours each more incredible than the other circulated among us. Some said that our troops had already crossed and were driving the Turks before them, others that the crossing had failed and that whole regiments had been wiped out.

"Some were drowned, some were shot dead," one of the soldiers said.

"You can fib, you can," Karpov cut him short. "I'm not fibbing, it's the truth." "The truth! Who told you?" "What?"

"Where did you get the story from? We all know that there's shooting going on, and that's about all we do know."

"Everyone says so. A Cossack came to the general. . . . " "A Cossack! Did you see him? What does he look like, that Cossack of yours?"

"Just an ordinary Cossack as Cossacks go. . . . " "You've got a long woman's tongue, you have. You'd better shut up. There hasn't been anyone, and nobody knows anything."

I went up to Captain Zaikin. The officers were sitting in full readiness, their revolvers strapped to their belts. The captain, as usual, was red, puffing and blowing, and wiping his neck with a dirty handkerchief. Stebelkov was excited and radiant; for some reason, he had waxed up his little moustache, which had formerly hung limp.

"Look at our subaltern! He has smartened himself up before going into action," the captain said, winking at him. "Ah, Stebelkov, Stebelkov! I'm sorry for you! We'll miss those moustaches in the officers' mess!" he said in a mock-plaintive tone. "Aren't you in a funk?"

"I'll try not to be," Stebelkov answered cheerfully.

"What about you, warrior, aren't you afraid?"

"I don't know myself, Captain," I said. "Is there any news from over there?"

"Nothing. God knows what's going on there," Zaikin said with a painful sigh. "We set out at one o'clock," he added after a pause.

The tent flap was turned back, and adjutant Lukin poked his head in; his face, for once, was pale and grave.

"You here, Ivanov? Orders have been given for you to be sworn in. Not now-when we set out. Captain, have a fifth clip issued to the men."

He declined to come in and sit down, pleading that he was busy, and ran off. I went out too.

By twelve o'clock dinner was ready. The man ate poorly. After dinner the order was given to take the muzzle caps off the rifles, and extra cartridges were handed out. The soldiers prepared for action, going over their kits and throwing away all superfluous articles. They threw out torn shirts and breeches, old boots, brushes, and greasy soldiers' books; some of them, as it now turned out, had carried a mass of unnecessary articles in their kits all the way to the Danube. Among the discarded junk scattered about on the ground I saw a wooden roller used in peacetime for smoothing out straps and belts before parades and reviews, heavy stone jars that once contained pomade, all kinds of boxes and bits of board, and even a shoemaker's last.

"Throw away everything you can, boys! It will be easier in action. You won't need them tomorrow."

"I've been lugging this about for over five hundred versts, and what do I want it for?" a soldier by the name of Lyutikov said, holding up some old garment. "You can't take it with you."

other things.

Before setting out, when the regiment stood ready waiting for the command, several officers and our young regimental chaplain gathered at the head. I and four volunteers from other battalions were called out of the ranks; we had all joined the regiment on the line of march. Leaving our rifles to the care of our neighbours, we stepped forward and stood near the colours; my comrades were deeply agitated, and my heart, too, beat faster than usual.

"Take hold of the standard," said the battalion commander. The standard-bearer leaned it forward; his assistants unsheathed it. The old faded green silk fluttered in the wind. We stood round it, one hand holding the staff, the other raised aloft, and repeated the words of the chaplain, who read out from a sheet of paper the ancient Petrine military oath. I recollected what Karpov had said on our first march. "Where was it?" I thought. After a lengthy enumeration of incidents and places where His Majesty had served, listing marches, offensives, vanguards, rearguards, and sentry-guards, forts, and baggage trains, I heard at last the familiar words: "Nor spare life and limb." We all five repeated them loudly as one man, and looking at the ranks of grim-faced men prepared for battle, I felt that those were not mere words.

We returned to the ranks; the regiment stirred and came into motion; strung out in a long column, we set off towards the Danube at a forced march. The sound of shooting that had come from there was no longer to be heard.

I remember that march as if in a dream-the dust raised by the Cossack regiments who overtook us at a fast trot the rolling steppe dipping down to the Danube, the opposite bank, which could be seen fifteen versts away; the fatigue, the heat, the scramble at the well, which we came across near Zimnitsa; the dirty little town filled with troops; generals waving their caps to us from balconies and cheering, and our cheering back.

"They've crossed, they've crossed!" voices hummed all around us.

"Two hundred killed, five hundred wounded!"

It was already dark when we crossed a narrow channel of the Danube by a small bridge and stepped upon a low sandy island still wet from the recent ebb. I remember the clank of the bayonets of soldiers colliding in the dark, the clatter of the artillery racing to overtake us, the black mass of the broad river, the lights on the opposite bank where we had to cross the next day, and thought of the first battle that that day would bring.

"Better not to think of it, and go to sleep," I decided, and lay down in the damp sand.

The sun stood high when I opened my eyes. The sandy bank was crowded with troops, baggage trains, and parks of artillery; gun emplacements and little ditches for the infantry had already been dug at the water's edge; on the steep bluff across the Danube orchards and vineyards could be made out where our troops were bustling about; beyond them rose the heights, which sharply narrowed the horizon. About two miles to the right the white houses and minarets of Sistovo loomed upon the hillsides. A steamboat with a barge in tow ferried battalion after battalion to the other side. At our bank a little torpedo-boat lay hissing.

"Happy landing, Ivanov!" Fyodorov greeted me.

"Same to you. But we haven't crossed yet, have we?"

"The steamboat will soon come and take us. They say a Turkish monitor is hanging about somewhere; see, they've got this little samovar ready for her," he said, pointing to the torpedo-boat. "The number of casualties, my God!" he proceeded in a changed tone. "They've been bringing them over without a stop___"

And he told me the now familiar details of the battle of Sistovo.

"It's our turn now. When we get over there the Turks will let fly at us. At least, we stood off a bit longer: we're still alive, while those fellows. . . . " He nodded towards a group of soldiers and officers a little way off, standing around some invisible object that lay on the ground. "What is it?"

"Some of our dead brought over from the other side. Go and have a look, it's awful."

I went over to the group. All stood in silence with bared heads, looking at the bodies lying side by side in the sand. Zaikin, Wenzel and Stebelkov were there, too. The captain, with an angry frown, was grunting and puffing; Stebelkov craned his thin neck over the captain's shoulder with a look of naive horror; Wenzel stood deep in thought.

Two bodies lay in the sand. One was that of a strapping handsome guardsman of the Finland Regiment; the half-platoon to which he had belonged had lost half its men during the attack. He had been wounded in the stomach and must have suffered long agony before he died. Suffering had set a delicate seal of something spiritualizing, beautiful, and tenderly wistful upon his face. His eyes were closed, his hands folded on his breast. Had he assumed that pose himself before dying or had his comrades done it for him? He did not inspire horror or revulsion, but merely infinite pity for a life cut off in its full vigour.

Captain Zaikin bent over the dead body, picked up the cap lying next to its head and read the inscription on the inside of the band: "Ivan Zhurenko, Third Platoon."

"He was a Ukrainian, poor devil!" he said softly. I pictured his native land, a hot wind blowing from the steppe, a village on the edge of a ravine, fenced off meadows with willows growing in them, a white clay cottage with red shutters. . . . Who is waiting for you there?

had hit him between the eyes, going through his head and leaving a black gaping wound. He lay just as he had fallen, with dilated, now glazed, eyes, open mouth and a face livid and distorted with fury.

"They've paid off," said Captain Zaikin. "Paid off in full. They need nothing more."

He turned away; the soldiers fell back quickly to make way for him. Stebelkov and I followed him. Wenzel overtook us.

"There, Ivanov," he said. "Did you see that?" "Yes, Wenzel," I answered.

"What did they remind you of?" he asked gloomily. A sudden fury against this wicked man flared up in me, together with a desire to tell him something that would hurt.

"Plenty. Most of all that they were no longer cannon-fodder. They have no need now for drilling and discipline, and no one will torment them for the sake of that discipline. They are not soldiers, subordinates any more!" I said in a trembling voice. "They are men!"

Wenzel's eyes flashed. A sound escaped from his throat, then broke off: he had probably wanted to answer me, but had checked himself again. He walked alongside me with head down, then after a while said, without looking at me:

"Yes, Ivanov, you are right. They are men. Dead men."

We were ferried across the Danube; for several days we stood near Sistovo, waiting for the Turks; then the troops started to move inland. We moved, too. For a long time we were kept moving hither and thither; we were at Tirnovo and not far from Plevna; three weeks had passed and we had not seen any fighting. At last we were assigned to a special detachment whose duty it was to stem the offensive of a large group of the Turkish army. Forty thousand Russians were strung out over a distance of seventy versts; facing them were about a hundred thousand Turks, and it was only due to the cautious tactics of our commander, who did not want to risk the lives of his men and contented himself merely with repulsing the enemy's attacks, as well as to the passivity of the Turkish pasha that we were able to fulfil our task of preventing the Turks from breaking through and cutting off our main army from the Danube.

Our numbers were few, and our line a long one; we therefore seldom had a chance to rest. We made the round of numerous villages, appearing now here now there to anticipate an expected attack; we got into such out-of-the-way corners of Bulgaria that the food transports were unable to find us, and we went hungry, making a two-day ration of biscuits last five days and more. The starving men threshed unripe wheat on spread tent sheets with the aid of sticks, and cooked out of this and sour wild apples an execrable soup without salt (because there was none to be had anywhere) and made themselves ill with it. The battalions dwindled although they had not been in action.

a gutted Turkish village abandoned by its inhabitants. We pitched our camp on a steep mountainside; the village was below in the depth of a valley through which a narrow little river wound its way. Sheer cliffs towered on the other side of the valley. We believed it to be the Turkish side, but there were no Turks anywhere about. We camped on this hill of ours for several days almost without bread and with very little water-we had to go for water far down to a spring gushing from under the cliffs. We were completely cut off from the army and had no idea what was going on in the world. Cossack patrols were posted about fifteen versts in front of us; two or three hundred of them were strung out over twenty versts. There were no Turks there either.

Although we could not discover the enemy our little detachment took every measure of precaution. Day and night we had a dense outpost line around our camp. Owing to the terrain this line was a very long one, and every day several companies were engaged in this inactive but extremely tiresome duty. Inaction, almost constant hunger, and the uncertainty of the situation were having a bad effect on the men.

The regimental field hospitals were filled to overflowing and every day men, exhausted by fever and bloody flux, were forwarded on somewhere to divisional hospital. The companies had only from a half to two-thirds of their full complement. Everyone was gloomy, everyone was eager to go into action. At least it was a way out.

At last it came. A Cossack messenger came galloping in with news from the Cossack patrol commander reporting that the Turks were advancing, and that he had been obliged to draw in his units and fall back five versts. It afterwards transpired that the Turks had drawn back without any intention of continuing the offensive, and that we could have stayed where we were without fear, all the more that we had received no orders to go into attack. But the general who was then in command of our force-he had only recently arrived from St. Petersburg-felt the same way as all his men did. And the men found it insufferable to sit doing nothing or to spend days on end looking out for an invisible and, as everyone believed, non-existent enemy, eating bad food and waiting for one's turn to fall ill. And so the general ordered an attack.

Never had we marched so briskly and cheerfully, not counting the day we had marched past the Tsar.

We moved through a valley, passing deserted Turkish and Bulgarian villages one after another. In the narrow lanes, which were fenced off by tall wattles higher than a man, we did not meet man, cattle nor dog; the only signs of life were the hens that flew up, clucking, on to the wattle fences and the roofs at our approach, and geese that rose heavily into the air, screeching, and tried to fly away. Branches laden with ripe clustering plums of all varieties peeped out of the little gardens. At the last village, within five versts of where the Turks were supposed to be, we were allowed half an hour's rest. During that time the soldiers shook down a multitude of plums, and filled their bellies and haversacks with them. Some-not many, it is true-went to the trouble of catching and killing hens and geese, which they plucked and took along with them. I thought of how the same soldiers, before the crossing at Sistovo, had thrown all their things out of their packs in expectation of going into battle. (I mentioned the fact to Zhitkov, who was plucking a huge goose.

"Ah, well, though we haven't been in action, we've got used to waiting. Seems as if you're just going to keep on staying out of it. And if you do get into the thick of it, there's no harm in having a supply. If you are not killed, a bite of something will come in handy."

"Are you scared?" I could not help asking him.

"Perhaps there won't be anything," he said after a pause, intent on plucking the remaining white down. "And if there is?"

"If there is, you have to go whether you're frightened or not. They don't ask us fellows. Let's have your knife: it's a fine knife you have." I gave him my big hunting knife. He cut the goose down the middle and offered me a half. "Take it, it may come in handy. As for being scared or not, I wouldn't worry about that if I were you, sir. It's all God's will. There's no getting away from it."

"Especially if it's a bullet flying at you or a shell, say," interposed Fyodorov, who was lying near by. "If you ask me, sir, there's more danger in running away. You see, a bullet flies on a trajectory like this" (he used his finger for illustration), "and those in the rear get it hottest of all!"

"Yes," I said, "especially with the Turks. They say they aim high."

"You know a lot, smart fellow!" Zhitkov said to Fyodorov. "They'll show you trajectories out there! I daresay it's better to be in front, though," he added by afterthought.

"Where our officers are. Ours will be in the lead too," said Fyodorov.

"That they will. They're no cowards. Nemtsev will be in front too."

"What do you say. Uncle Zhitkov," asked Fyodorov, "will he be killed today or not?"

Zhitkov dropped his eyes.

"What do you mean?" he said.

"Oh, don't pretend! Didn't you see him? He's all keyed up."

"You're talking nonsense," he muttered.

"What did men say before the Danube?" said Fyodorov.

"Before the Danube! Men in a temper will say anything.

Naturally, they're only flesh and blood. But they're not criminals, are they?" Zhitkov said, turning round and looking Fyodorov squarely in the eye. "They're Godfearing people, aren't they? Don't they know what they are in for! Who knows but that they may have to answer to their Maker today. Fancy thinking of such things! Before the Danube! Why, before the Danube I told the gentleman here the same thing myself" (nodding towards me). "It's a "

He rummaged in his boot top for his tobacco-pouch, grumbling all the time while he filled his pipe and lit it. Then, putting the pouch away again, he sat back more comfortably with his knees clasped in his hands, and fell to brooding.

Half an hour later we moved out of the village and began to climb uphill, leaving the valley below us. Beyond the height which we had to cross were the Turks. We crested the hill; before us lay a wide undulating stretch of land that gradually fell away; it was covered with wheat fields and maize fields and immense thickets of elms and cornels. In two places the minarets of villages hidden between the green hills stood out whitely. We were to capture the village on the right; beyond it, a pale streak along the skyline, lay the highroad which had previously been occupied by our Cossacks. Presently all this disappeared as we entered a dense thicket broken here and there by open glades.

I hardly remember the beginning of the battle. When we came out into the open on the hill crest, where the Turks could clearly see our companies forming and scattering as they emerged from the undergrowth, a solitary gunshot rang out. The men started; all eyes were fixed on the white puff of spreading smoke that rolled off the hillock. At the same instant the sharp jarring sound of the approaching shell, which seemed to be flying over our very heads, made us all duck. The shell flew over us and hit the ground near the company that was moving behind us; I remember the dull thud of its explosion, followed immediately by a piteous cry. A sergeant major had had his leg torn off by a splinter. I learned that afterwards; at the moment I could not grasp what that cry meant-my ear had caught it, but not my mind. Everything merged into that vague feeling, hardly to be expressed in words, which grips a man when he first comes under fire. They say there is not a man who is not afraid in battle; every straightforward and honest man, when asked if he was afraid, will answer: yes. It was not that physical fear which seizes a man who meets robbers at night in a dark deserted street; it was a full clear consciousness of the inevitability and proximity of death. And, strange and crazy though it may sound, this knowledge did not stop men, did not make them think of running away, but egged them on. No bloodthirsty instincts were aroused, no desire to go forward in order to kill somebody. There was just an irresistible urge to go forward at all cost, while the thought of what one would have to do during the battle could be expressed in the words: "I have to die," rather than "I have to kill."

While we were crossing the clearing the Turks managed to fire several shots. Between us lay a large thicket which rose gradually to the village. We entered the undergrowth. All was silence.

to each other from time to time so as not to lose touch. Our company for the time being kept together. A deep silence reigned in the forest.

And then came the first rifle shot, a quiet sound like the tap of a woodcutter's axe. The Turks began to shoot at random. The bullets whistled high overhead in varying tones, and spattered through the bushes, tearing off branches, but doing no harm. The tapping of the woodcutter's axe came faster until it merged into a steady crackle; separate screeches and whistlings were no longer distinguishable; the whole air was whistling and whining. We hurried forward; all the men around me, myself included, were unharmed. I was rather surprised.

Suddenly we emerged from the undergrowth. The path dropped away into a deep ravine in which flowed a brook. The men rested for a minute and drank their fill of water. From here the companies went different ways in order to outflank the Turks; our company was left in reserve in the ravine. The riflemen had to move straight on, and after passing through the undergrowth, attack the village. The Turks still kept up a running fire, but the shooting now was much louder.

Crossing to the other side of the ravine, Wenzel lined his -company up. He said something to the men which I could not hear.

"We'll do our best, sir!" voices rose in reply. I looked up at him; he was pale, and, as I thought, sad, but fairly cool. Catching sight of Zaikin and Stebelkov, he waved his handkerchief to them, then began searching for something with his eyes among our crowd. I guessed that he wanted to say good-bye to me, and I stood so that he could see me. Wenzel smiled, nodded to me several times and commanded his company to join the skirmish line. They scattered right and left in groups of four, strung out in a long line, and immediately disappeared in the bushes-all except one man, who suddenly bounded forward, threw his arms up and collapsed. Two of our men dashed out of the ravine and brought the body in. Half an hour dragged by in an agony of suspense. The fighting grew heavier. The rifle fire had now merged into a continuous deadly whine. Guns spoke up on the right flank. Bleeding men, walking and crawling, began to appear out of the undergrowth; at first there were few of them, but their numbers increased with every minute. Our men helped them down the side of the ravine, gave them water and made them as comfortable as they could until the stretcher-bearers arrived. A soldier with a shattered wrist and a face blue from loss of blood and pain, came down himself and sat by the brook, groaning dreadfully and rolling up his eyes. The men bound his arm up and laid him down on a greatcoat; the bleeding stopped. He was feverish; his lips quivered and convulsive sobs shook his body. "My God, brothers! My God!" "Many killed?"

"Masses of 'em, all over the place-it's terrible." "Is the company commander alive?" "Yes. If not for him they'd have beaten us off. But with him they'll do it," the wounded man said in a faint voice. "He led us three times; every time we were beaten back. He led us again. They're sitting in a gully, raking us with bullets, simply raking. . . . No fear!" the wounded man suddenly shouted fiercely, getting up and waving his bad arm. "No you won't, damn you!"

He rolled his eyes in a frenzy, shouted out a coarse terrible oath, then fainted away.

Lukin appeared on the brow of the ravine. "Captain Zaikin!" he yelled in a voice not like his own. "Lead your men forward!"

Smoke, a din, groans, wild cheers. The smell of blood and gunpowder. Strange-looking men with white faces shrouded in smoke. A savage inhuman scramble. Thank God such moments are but dimly recollected, as if through a haze.

When we came up Wenzel was leading his company against the Turks for the fifth time under a deadly hail of lead. This time the infantry broke into the village. Few of the Turks who had been defending it at this point succeeded in escaping. The 2nd Rifle Company had lost fifty-two men out of a hundred odd in two hours of fighting. Our company, which had not been in action long, lost several men.

We did not stay at the captured positions, although the Turks had been dislodged everywhere. When our general saw battalion after battalion of them moving out of the village, together with masses of cavalry and long lines of guns, he stood aghast. Evidently the Turks had not been aware of our numbers, for we had been hidden in the undergrowth; had they known that they had been driven out of the rutted roads, gullies and wattle fences surrounding the village by only fourteen companies, they would have come back and crushed us. They had thrice our numbers.

"Have you seen Wenzel?" he asked me.

"Not yet."

"Go to his tent and call him to join us. The man is taking on something dreadful. 'Fifty-two! Fifty-two!' he keeps on repeating. Go and fetch him."

1882