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

clear tones, probably saying farewell to them.

No one likes to look at a wounded man during an action, and, instinctively hurrying to end this scene, I ordered him to be taken quickly to the ambulance, and returned to the guns. But after a few minutes I was told that Velenchuk was asking for me, and I went up to the cart.

The wounded man lay at the bottom of the cart holding on to the sides with both hands. His broad healthy face had completely changed during those few moments; he seemed to have grown thinner and years older, his lips were thin and pale, and pressed together with an evident strain. The hasty and dull expression of his glance was replaced by a kind of bright clear radiance, and on the bloody forehead and nose already lay the impress of death. Though the least movement caused him excruciating pain, he nevertheless asked to have a small cherez13 with money taken from his left leg.

The sight of his bare, white, healthy leg, when his jackboot had been taken off and the purse untied, produced on me a terribly sad feeling.

“Here are three rubles and a half,” he said, as I took the purse: “you’ll take care of them.”

The cart was starting, but he stopped it.

“I was making a cloak for Lieutenant Sulimovsky. He gave me two rubles. I bought buttons for one and a half, and half a ruble is in my bag with the buttons. Please let him have it.”

“All right! all right!” said I. “Get well again, old fellow.”

He did not answer; the cart started, and he again began to groan and cry out in a terrible, heartrending voice. It was as if, having done with the business of this life, he did not think it necessary to restrain himself, and considered it permissible to allow himself this relief.

IX

“Where are you off to? Come back! Where are you going?” I shouted to the recruit, who, with his reserve linstock under his arm and a stick of some sort in his hand, was, in the coolest manner, following the cart that bore the wounded man.

But the recruit only looked at me lazily, muttered something or other, and continued his way, so that I had to send a soldier to bring him back. He took off his red cap and looked at me with a stupid smile.

“Where were you going?” I asked.

“To the camp.”

“Why?”

“Why?⁠ ⁠… Velenchuk is wounded,” he said, again smiling.

“What’s that to you? You must stay here.”

He looked at me with surprise, then turned quietly round, put on his cap, and went back to his place.

The affair in general was successful. The Cossacks, as we heard, had made a fine charge and brought back three dead Tartars;14 the infantry had provided itself with firewood, and had only half a dozen men wounded; the artillery had lost only Velenchuk and two horses. For that, two miles of forest had been cut down, and the place so cleared as to be unrecognizable. Instead of the thick outskirts of the forest you saw before you a large plain covered with smoking fires, and cavalry and infantry marching back to camp.

Though the enemy continued to pursue us with artillery and small-arm fire up to the cemetery by the little river we had crossed in the morning, the retirement was successfully accomplished. I was already beginning to dream of the cabbage-soup and mutton ribs with buckwheat that were awaiting me in the camp, when a message came from the General ordering a redoubt to be constructed by the river, and the 3rd battalion of the K⁠⸺ Regiment and the platoon of the 4th Battery to remain there till next day.

The carts with the wood and the wounded, the Cossacks, the artillery, the infantry with muskets and faggots on their shoulders, all passed us with noise and songs. Every face expressed animation and pleasure, caused by the escape from danger and the hope of rest. Only we and the 3rd battalion had to postpone these pleasant feelings till tomorrow.

X

While we of the artillery were busy with the guns⁠—parking the limbers and the ammunition wagons, and arranging the picket-ropes⁠—the infantry had already piled their muskets, made up campfires, built little huts of branches and maize straw, and begun boiling their buckwheat.

The twilight had set in. Bluish white clouds crept over the sky. The mist, turning into fine dank drizzle, wetted the earth and the soldiers’ cloaks; the horizon narrowed, and all the surroundings assumed a gloomier hue. The damp I felt through my boots and on my neck, the ceaseless movement and talk in which I took no part, the sticky mud on which my feet kept slipping, and my empty stomach, all combined to put me into the dreariest, most unpleasant frame of mind after the physical and moral weariness of the day. I could not get Velenchuk out of my head. The whole simple story of his soldier-life depicted itself persistently in my imagination.

His last moments were as clear and calm as his whole life had been. He had lived too honestly and been too artless for his simple faith in a future heavenly life to be shaken at the decisive moment.

“Your honour!” said Nikolayev, coming up to me, “the Captain asks you to come and have tea with him.”

Having scrambled through, as best I could, between the piles of arms and the campfires, I followed Nikolayev to where Bolhov was, thinking with pleasure of a tumbler of hot tea, and a cheerful conversation which would disperse my gloomy thoughts.

“Have you found him?” I heard Bolhov’s voice say from inside a maize-hut in which a light was burning.

“I’ve brought him, y’r honour,” answered Nikolayev’s bass voice.

Inside the hut Bolhov was sitting on a dry mantle, with unbuttoned coat and no cap. A samovar stood boiling by his side, and on a drum were light refreshments. A bayonet holding a