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

experience a sense of relief, you will take deeper breaths of the fresh air, and rejoice in the consciousness of your own health. But, at the same time, by the contemplation of these sufferings you will realise your own insignificance, and you will go to the bastions calmly and without hesitation.⁠ ⁠…

“What matters the death and suffering of so insignificant a worm as I, compared to so many deaths, so much suffering?” But the sight of the clear sky, the brilliant sun, the beautiful town, the open church, and the soldiers moving in all directions, will soon bring your spirit back to its normal state of frivolity, its petty cares and absorption in the present. You may meet the funeral procession of an officer as it leaves the church, the pink coffin accompanied by waving banners and music, and the sound of firing from the bastions may reach your ears. But these things will not bring back your former thoughts. The funeral will seem a very beautiful military pageant; the sounds very beautiful warlike sounds; and neither to these sights nor to these sounds will you attach that clear and personal sense of suffering and death which came to you in the hospital.

Passing the church and the barricade, you enter that part of the town where the everyday life is most active. On both sides hang the signboards30 of shops and restaurants. Tradesmen, women with bonnets or kerchiefs on their heads, dandified officers: all speaks of the firmness, self-confidence, and security of the inhabitants.

If you care to hear the conversation of army and navy officers enter the restaurant on the right. There you are sure to hear talk about last night, about Fanny, about that affair of the 24th,31 how dear and badly served the cutlets are, and how such and such comrades have been killed.

“Things were confoundedly bad at our place today!” says, in a bass voice, a fair, beardless little naval officer with a green knitted scarf.

“Where’s that?” asks another.

“Oh, in the Fourth Bastion,” answers the young officer, and at the words “Fourth Bastion,” you will certainly look more attentively, and even with some respect, at this fair-complexioned officer. The excessive freedom of his manner, his gesticulations, and his loud voice and laugh, which before had seemed to you impudent, now appear to indicate that peculiarly combative frame of mind noticeable in some young men after they have been in danger; but still you expect him to tell how bad it was in the Fourth Bastion because of the bombs and bullets. Not at all! it was bad because of the mud. “One can scarcely get to the battery,” he continues, pointing to his boots, which are muddy even above the calves. “And I have lost my best gunner,” says another, “hit right in the forehead.” “Who’s that? Mitúhin?” “No⁠ ⁠… but am I ever to have my veal? You rascal!” he adds, addressing the waiter. “Not Mitúhin but Abrámof⁠—such a fine fellow! He was out in six sallies.”

At another corner of the table, with plates of cutlets and peas before them, and a bottle of sour Crimean wine called “Bordeaux,” sit two infantry officers. One of them, a young man with a red collar and two little stars on his cloak, is talking to the other, who has a black collar and no stars, about the Alma affair. The former has already been drinking, and by the pauses he makes, by the indecision in his face⁠—expressing his doubt of being believed⁠—and especially by the fact that his own part in the story is too important, and the affair is too dreadful, one sees that he is diverging considerably from the strict truth. But you do not care much for stories of this kind, which will long be current all over Russia; you want to get quickly to the bastions, especially to that Fourth Bastion about which you have been told so many and such different tales. When anyone says, “I am going to the Fourth Bastion,” a slight agitation or a too marked indifference is always noticeable in him; if men are joking they say, “You should be sent to the Fourth Bastion.” When you meet someone carried on a stretcher, and ask, “Where from?” the answer usually is, “From the Fourth Bastion.” Two quite different opinions are current concerning this terrible bastion:32 that of those who have never been there, and who are convinced it is a certain grave for anyone who goes there, and that of those who, like the fair-complexioned midshipman, live there, and who, when speaking of the Fourth Bastion, will tell you whether it is dry or muddy, and whether it is cold or warm in the dugouts, and so forth.

During the half-hour you spent in the restaurant, the weather has changed. The mist that spread over the sea has gathered into dull, grey, moist clouds which hide the sun, and a kind of dismal sleet showers down and wets the roofs, the pavements, and the soldiers’ overcoats.

Passing another barricade, you go through some doors to the right and up a broad street. Beyond this barricade the houses on both sides of the street are unoccupied: there are no signboards, the doors are boarded up, the windows smashed; here a corner of the walls is knocked down, and there a roof is broken in. The buildings look like old veterans who have borne much sorrow and privation; they even seem to gaze proudly and somewhat contemptuously at you. On the road you stumble over cannonballs that lie about, and into holes, full of water, made in the stony ground by bombs. You meet and overtake detachments of soldiers, Cossacks, officers, and occasionally a woman or a child⁠—only it will not be a woman wearing a bonnet, but a sailor’s wife wearing an old cloak and soldier’s boots. Farther along the same street, after you have descended a little slope, you will notice that there are