Short Fiction, Leonid Andreyev [good e books to read .TXT] 📗

of Sashenka’s she is very proud and pleased, but I wonder if Andrei Vasilevitch himself is proud and pleased?

15th November.

I must relieve my mind about this, come what may. No matter how many cigarettes I buy nowadays, I never seem to have any. No one besides myself smokes at home, so Sasha takes them to her wounded, no doubt. I can’t lock up my drawers from her, can I? At the merest hint today, she retorted, “You can go without smoking yourself, but I will take cigarettes to the wounded!” And she looked at me in such an uncanny way. It was not love, but hate I saw reflected in those dear eyes of hers. I grew cold all over, and a feeling of despair settled on my heart. I might have been sitting in the trenches on a damp day and some confounded German aiming at me. I shall buy two thousand cigarettes tomorrow and put them in every visible place to show her that I’m not mean. She ought to have understood that it was not a question of meanness. Ah, Sashenka, Sashenka!

19th November.

I often visit our hospital. It is now being supported by the town, and occupies two stories in our building. I suffer needless torments by the sight of the wounded⁠—men who have lost an arm or a leg, or their sight. The effect produced after a couple of hours in their presence is indescribable. You feel perfectly unstrung, particularly after the arrival of a batch of “fresh ones,” as the nurses call them. I can’t help going, or people would think me a brute, so I suffer and conform to public opinion.

A certain reservist, no longer a young man, made a great impression on me. He told me that when he first went out to the front, he resolved not to take life, and to be on the safe side, in a bayonet attack on a German trench he threw away his rifle as they charged forward⁠—a most excellent thing to do it seemed⁠—but when, together with his fellows, he stepped over the fatal barrier, such a feeling of fury came over him, that he dug his teeth into some German’s throat. Now he rages at night, and digs his teeth into his pillow as if it were a German’s throat, and there he lies tearing and screaming.

Great God, supposing such a thing were to have happened to me! I was nearly brought to the condition of digging my teeth into someone the other night, when I lay awake thinking of the war and the Germans who had started it; I grew so terrified at the possibilities in me, at Sashenka’s empty bed (Sashenka is on night duty at the hospital), at mother’s ghostly face, at the futile destruction, that I dressed hastily and went in to Sashenka. (The hospital being in our own building made it an easy thing to do.) Sashenka was not surprised at this nocturnal visit; she just asked me to be quiet, and brought me a cup of tea from somewhere, and smiled. There was a gentle moaning; the lamps were low, and feeble voices called “Nurse! Nurse!” Sashenka led me over to the man who bites and tears an imaginary German. The poor man, his head completely bandaged, was squeezing his blanket with both hands, “Strangling someone,” Sashenka said. She gave him a drink of water, and he seemed to grow quiet after that, and lay with his hands folded as innocently as a child.

I remained in the hospital until daybreak, but I could not go to sleep for a long time when I got home. I wept aloud from sheer pity. The thought of the man’s bandaged head and pale hands depressed me deeply.

I wonder if Sashenka was right, after all? Was it meanness that made me regret the cigarettes? My God! I could have gone down on my knees before that wounded man, and for the pleasure of having him ask me for a cigarette, I could have torn out my own heart! How short a man’s memory is!

17th December.

By the same post we received four letters from Pavel. He is alive and well, and in Prussia once more. Needless to say, both mother and Sashenka and I were beside ourselves with joy. How absurd it seems! Pavel might have been killed a hundred times since his last letter, and yet there we were rejoicing over a piece of crumpled paper and a few faint pencil strokes as though Pavel himself stood before us. Among other things, this is what he writes, “What else can I tell you, my dear Sashenka? Everything here is so interesting. You look at the moving mass of men in the snow and twilight, and think.⁠ ⁠… Snow⁠ ⁠… fields⁠ ⁠… Germany⁠ ⁠… great events⁠ ⁠… a great war⁠ ⁠… and this is the war, and I am part of it. An officer comes back from the firing lines, soaking wet, his coat and hood covered with snow. He takes off his coat and tries to warm himself with a cup of tea, and you think again, ‘This then is the great war, and this is the great Russian army!’ In the most trifling little act you see something of the passing greatness. The military operations on our front have been slow. The cold and the snow seems to have made everything heavy to move, especially the men. There is not much life in us, wrapped up as we are, and the hardest time is yet to come! I am having tea in the officers’ mess just now, in a real glass with a stand. I am writing this letter, but the telephone may ring at any moment, and everything will change as in a dream. Our battery may have to be moved half a mile to right or left or forward, and then will come digging in the hard, cold soil to have a dugout ready by nightfall