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

days of the siege of Sevastopol are for you no longer beautiful historical legends, but have become realities: the tales of the time when it was not fortified, when there was no army to defend it, when it seemed a physical impossibility to retain it, and there was yet not the slightest idea of abandoning it to the enemy⁠—of the time when Kornílof, that hero worthy of ancient Greece, making his round of the troops, said, “Lads, we will die, but we will not surrender Sevastopol!” and our Russians, incapable of phrase-making, replied, “We will die! Hurrah!” You will clearly recognise in the men you have just left the heroes whose spirits did not flag, but rose, during those dismal days, and who gladly prepared to die.

The evening closes in. The sun, just as it is setting, comes out from behind the grey clouds that covered the sky, and suddenly lights up with ruddy radiance the purple clouds, the greenish waters of the sea with ships and boats rocking on its broad even swell, the white buildings of the town, and the people moving along the streets. The sound of some old valse played by a military band on the boulevard is borne along the water, and seems, in some strange way, answered by the firing from the bastions.

Sevastopol, 25th April, o.s., 1855.

In May 1855 I

Six months have passed since the first cannonball whistled from the bastions of Sevastopol and threw up the earth of the enemy’s entrenchments. Since then bullets, balls, and bombs by the thousand have been flying continually from the bastions to the entrenchments, and from the entrenchments to the bastions, and above them the angel of death has hovered unceasingly.

Thousands of human ambitions have had time to be wounded, thousands to be gratified and to expand, thousands to be lulled to rest in the arms of death. So many pink coffins and linen palls! And yet the same sounds from the bastions fill the air; still the French from their camp look with involuntary trepidation and fear at the yellowy earth of the bastions of Sevastopol, and count the embrasures from which the iron cannon frown fiercely; still the pilot from the elevation of the signal-station watches, as before, through the fixed telescope the bright-coloured figures of the French: their batteries, tents, their columns moving on the green hill, the puffs of smoke that rise from the entrenchments; and still, from many parts of the world, with the same ardour, crowds of different men, with still more different desires, stream to this fatal spot. But the question the diplomatists have not settled still remains unsolved by powder and blood.

II

In the besieged town of Sevastopol a regimental band played on the boulevard near the pavilion, and crowds of women and military men strolled along the paths making holiday. The bright spring sun had risen in the morning above the English entrenchments, had reached the bastions, then the town, the Nicholas Barracks, shining with equal joy on all, and was now sinking towards the distant blue sea, which, rocking in even motion, glittered with silvery light.

A tall infantry officer with a slight stoop, drawing on a presentable though not very white glove, passed out of the gate of one of the small sailors’ houses built on the left side of the Morskáya Street, and, gazing thoughtfully at the ground, ascended the hill towards the boulevard. The expression of his plain face did not reveal great intellectual power, but rather good-nature, common-sense, honesty, and an inclination towards respectability. He was badly built, and seemed a bit shy and awkward in his movements. He wore a nearly new cap, a thin cloak of a rather peculiar lilacky shade, from under which was visible a gold watch-chain, trousers with foot-straps, and clean, shiny calfskin boots. He might have been a German (but that his features indicated his purely Russian origin), or an adjutant, or a regimental quartermaster (but in that case he would have had spurs), or an officer transferred for the campaign from the cavalry or the Guards. He was, in fact, an officer who had exchanged from the cavalry, and as he ascended the hill towards the boulevard, he was thinking of a letter he had received from proprietor of the government of T⁠⸺, and of his great friend, that comrade’s wife, the pale, blue-eyed Natásha. He recalled one part of the letter, where his comrade wrote:⁠—

“When we receive the Invalide,34 Póupka” (so the retired Uhlan called his wife) “rushes headlong into the hall, seizes the paper, and runs with it to a seat in the arbour or the drawing-room (in which, you remember, we spent such jolly winter evenings when your regiment was stationed in our town), and reads of your heroic deeds with an ardour you cannot imagine. She often speaks of you. ‘There now,’ she says, ‘Miháylof is a darling. I am ready to cover him with kisses when I see him. He is fighting on the bastions, and is certain to get a St. George’s Cross, and they’ll write about him in the papers,’ etc., etc., so that I am beginning to be quite jealous of you.”

In another place he wrote: “The papers reach us awfully late, and though there are plenty of rumours, one cannot believe them all. For instance, those young ladies with music you know of were saying yesterday that Napoleon has been captured by our Cossacks and sent to St. Petersburg; but you can guess how much of this I believe. One fresh arrival from Petersburg tells us for certain (he is sent by the Minister on special business, a capital fellow, and now there is no one in the town you can’t think what a resource he is to us), that we have taken Eupatoria, so that the French are cut off from Balaclava, and that we lost 200 in the affair and the French as