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

“In my leg,” replies the sailor, and you now notice by the way the folds of the blanket fall that he has lost one leg above the knee. “But the Lord be thanked,” he adds, “I am now getting ready to leave the hospital.”

“And is it long since you were wounded?”

“Well, it’s over five weeks now, your honour.”

“And are you still in pain?”

“No, I’ve no pain now; only when we have bad weather it feels as if the calf were aching, nothing else.”

“And how did it happen that you were wounded?”

“It was at the Fifth Bastion, your honour, during the first bombardment. I trained the gun, and was just stepping across to the next embrasure, when he struck me in the leg. It was just as if I had stumbled into a hole, and I look⁠—and the leg’s gone!”

“Is it possible it did not hurt you then?”

“Nothing to speak of; it was only as if something hot had blown against my leg.”

“Well, and afterwards?”

“And afterwards it was nothing much either, only it did smart when they drew the skin together. The chief thing, your honour, is not to think: if you don’t think, it’s nothing much. It mostly all comes of thinking.”

At this moment a woman in a grey striped dress, with a black kerchief on her head, approaches you and joins in your conversation with the sailor. She begins to tell you about him: of his sufferings, the desperate condition he was in for four weeks; how, when he was wounded, he stopped his stretcher-bearers that he might see a volley from our battery; how the Grand-Dukes had spoken to him and given him twenty-five roubles, and he had told them he would like to return to the battery to teach the youngsters, if he could no longer work himself. As she says this all in a breath, the woman constantly looks from you to the sailor⁠—who, with his face turned from her, is picking lint on his pillow⁠—and her eyes are bright with some peculiar rapture.

“It’s my missus, your honour!” remarks the sailor, with a look that seems to say, “You must excuse her; it’s a woman’s way to say foolish things.”

You begin to understand the defenders of Sevastopol; without knowing why, you begin to feel ashamed of yourself before this man. To show your sympathy and admiration you are tempted to say too much; but the right words do not come, and you are dissatisfied with those that occur to you, so you bow down in silence before this quiet, unconscious greatness and firmness of spirit, that is ashamed to have its worth revealed.

“Well, God grant you a quick recovery,” you say, and you stop in front of another patient, who, lying on the floor, seems to be awaiting death in unendurable agony.

This is a fair-haired man, with a pale and swollen face. He is lying on his back, with his left arm thrown back in a way that shows cruel suffering. He breathes hoarsely and with difficulty through his parched, open mouth; the leaden, blue eyes are turned upwards; the blanket has slipped, and from under it the bandaged remainder of his right arm sticks out.

The oppressive, corpse-like smell strikes you more strongly, and the devouring inner fever burning in all the sufferer’s limbs seems to penetrate through you also.

“Is he unconscious?” you ask the woman, who has followed you and looks at you kindly as at a friend.

“No, he can still hear⁠—but he is very bad,” she adds in a whisper. “I gave him some tea today⁠—though he is a stranger one must have pity⁠—and he could hardly drink it.”

“How do you feel?” you ask him. The wounded man turns his eyes towards you, but neither sees you nor understands, and only says⁠—

“My heart is on fire.”

A little further on you see an old soldier changing his shirt. His face and body are a kind of brick-red, and he is as gaunt as a skeleton. One arm is quite gone, taken right off at the socket. He is sitting up firmly, and has recovered; but you can see by the dull, dead look of his eyes, by the terrible gauntness of his body, and by the wrinkles on his face, that the best part of this man’s life has been wasted by his sufferings.

On a bed on the other side you may see the pale, suffering, delicate face of a woman, her cheeks suffused with a feverish glow.

“That’s the wife of one of our sailors,” says your guide. “She was hit in the leg by a bomb on the 5th;29 she was taking her husband’s dinner to him at the bastion.”

“Have they amputated it?”

“Yes, above the knee.”

Now, if your nerves are strong, go in at the door to the left; it is there they bandage and operate. There you will see doctors with pale, gloomy faces, and arms red with blood up to the elbows, busy by a bed on which lies a wounded man under chloroform. His eyes are open, and he utters, as if in delirium, incoherent, but sometimes simple and pathetic words. The doctors are engaged on the horrible but beneficent work of amputation. You will see the sharp, curved knife enter the healthy white flesh; you will see the wounded man come back to life with terrible heartrending screams and curses. You will see the doctor’s assistant toss the amputated arm into a corner, and you will see, in the same room, another wounded man on a stretcher, watching the operation, and writhing and groaning, not so much with physical pain, as with the mental torture of anticipation. You will see ghastly sights that will rend your soul; you will see war, not with its orderly, beautiful, and brilliant ranks, its music and beating drums, its waving banners, its generals on prancing horses, but war in its real aspect of blood, suffering, and death.⁠ ⁠…

On coming out of this house of pain you will be sure to