Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

and plum trees, brightly lit up by the sun; on the other, strange upright shadows, and the perpendicular stones of the cemetery, and long poles, with balls and many coloured flags attached to their ends. (These marked the graves of the dzhigits.)

The troops were drawn up outside the gates.

A moment later, dragoons, Cossacks, and infantry spread with evident joy through the crooked lanes, and in an instant the empty village was animated again. There crashed a roof: an axe rings against the hard wood of a door that is being forced open: here a stack of hay, a fence, a hut, is set on fire, and a pillar of thick smoke rises up in the clear air. Here is a Cossack dragging along a sack of flour and a carpet; there a soldier, with a delighted look on his face, brings a tin basin and some rag out of a hut; another with outstretched arms is trying to catch two hens that are struggling and cackling beside a fence: a third has somewhere discovered an enormous pot of milk and, after drinking some of it, throws the rest onto the ground amid loud laughter.

The battalion with which I had come from Fort N⁠⸺ was also in the aoul. The Captain sat on the roof of a hut and sent thin whiffs of cheap tobacco smoke through his short pipe, with such an expression of indifference on his face that on seeing him I forgot that I was in a hostile aoul, and felt quite at home.

“Ah, you are here too?” he said when he noticed me.

The tall figure of Lieutenant Rosenkranz flitted here and there in the village. He unceasingly gave orders, and appeared exceedingly engrossed in his task. I saw him come with a triumphant air out of a hut, followed by two soldiers leading an old Tartar. The old man, whose only clothing consisted of a mottled tunic all in rags and patchwork trousers, was so frail that his arms, tightly-bound behind his bent back, seemed scarcely to hold to his shoulders, and he could hardly drag his bare crooked legs along. His face, and even part of his shaven head, were deeply furrowed. His wry toothless mouth kept moving beneath his short-cut moustache and beard, as if he were chewing something; but in his red lashless eyes there still sparkled a gleam, and they clearly expressed an old man’s indifference to life.

Rosenkranz, through an interpreter, asked him why he had not gone away with the others.

“Where should I go?” he answered, looking quietly away.

“Where the others have gone,” someone remarked.

“The braves have gone to fight the Russians, but I am an old man.”

“Are you not afraid of the Russians?”

“What will the Russians do to me? I am old,” he repeated, again glancing carelessly round the circle that had formed about him.

Later, as I was returning, I saw that old man bareheaded, with his arms tied, being jolted along behind the saddle of a Cossack, and he was looking round with the same expression of indifference on his face. He was wanted for the exchange of prisoners.

I climbed onto the roof and sat down beside the Captain.

“There don’t seem to have been many of the enemy,” I said, wishing to know his opinion of the action that had taken place.

“The enemy?” he repeated with surprise. “The enemy was not there at all! Do you call that the enemy?⁠ ⁠… Wait till the evening, when we go back, and you will see how they will speed us on our way: what a lot of them will pour out from there,” he said, pointing to a thicket that we had passed in the morning. “What is that?” I asked anxiously, interrupting the Captain and pointing to a group of Don Cossacks, who had collected round something not far from us.

A sound of something like a child’s cry came from there, and the words “Stop⁠ ⁠… don’t hack it⁠ ⁠… they’ll see⁠ ⁠… Have you a knife, Evstigneich?⁠ ⁠… Lend a knife⁠ ⁠…”

“They are up to something, the scoundrels⁠ ⁠…” calmly replied the Captain.

But at that moment the young ensign, his bonny face flushed and frightened, came suddenly running from behind a corner, and rushed, waving his arms, towards the Cossacks.

“Don’t touch it! Don’t kill it!” he cried in a childish voice.

Seeing the officer, the Cossacks stepped apart, and released a little white kid. The young ensign was quite abashed, muttered something, and stopped before us with a confused face.

Seeing the Captain and me on the roof, he blushed still more, and ran leaping towards us.

“I thought they were going to kill a child,” he said with a bashful smile.

X

The General went ahead with the cavalry. The battalion with which I had come from Fort N⁠⸺ remained in the rearguard. Captain Hlopov’s and Lieutenant Rosenkranz’s battalions retired together.

The Captain’s prophecy was quite correct. No sooner had we entered the narrow thicket which he had mentioned, than on both sides of us we caught glimpses of hillsmen, mounted and on foot, and so near were they that I could distinctly see how some of them ran stooping, rifle in hand, from behind one tree to another.

The Captain took off his cap and piously crossed himself, some of the older soldiers did the same. From the wood were heard war-cries, and the words “Iay giaour.” “Urus! iay!” Dry short rifle-shots, fast following one another, whizzed on both sides of us. Our men answered silently with a running fire, and only now and then remarks, like the following, were made in the ranks: “See where he5 fires from. It’s all right for him inside the wood. We ought to use the cannons,” and so forth.

Our ordnance was brought out and, after some grapeshot had been fired, the enemy seemed to grow weaker; but a moment later, and at every step taken by our troops, the enemy’s fire again grew hotter, and the shouting louder.

We