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

for nothing. But as it was what could one do? I stuck one, and then something hits me. Oh, oh⁠—h! steady, lads, steady! Oh, oh!” groaned the wounded man.

“Really, there seem too many men returning,” said Gáltsin, again stopping the same tall soldier with the two guns. “Why are you retiring? You there, stop!”

The soldier stopped, and took off his cap with his left hand.

“Where are you going, and why?” shouted Gáltsin severely; “you scoun⁠—”

But having come close up to the soldier, Gáltsin noticed that no hand was visible beneath the soldier’s right cuff, and that the sleeve was soaked in blood to the elbow.

“I am wounded, y’r honour.”

“Wounded? How?”

“Here⁠—must ’a’ been with a bullet,” said the man, pointing to his arm, “but I don’t know what struck my head here,” and bending his head, he showed the matted hair at the back stuck together with blood.

“And whose is this other gun?”

“It’s a French rifle I took, y’r honour! But I’d not have come away if it weren’t to lead this fellow⁠—he may fall,” he added, pointing to a soldier who was walking a little in front, leaning on his gun, and painfully dragging his left leg.

Prince Gáltsin suddenly felt horribly ashamed of his unjust suspicions. He felt himself blushing, turned away and, neither questioning nor watching the wounded men any more, he went to the hospital.

Having pushed his way with difficulty through the porch among the wounded who had come on foot and the bearers who were carrying in the wounded and bringing out the dead, Gáltsin entered the first room, gave a look round, and involuntarily turned back and ran out into the street: it was too terrible!

VIII

The large, lofty, dark hall, lit only by the four or five candles with which the doctors examined the wounded, was literally filled. The bearers kept bringing in fresh men, laying them side by side on the floor (which was already so crowded that the unfortunates jostled one another and were soaked with each other’s blood), and going to fetch more wounded. The pools of blood visible in the unoccupied spaces, the feverish breathing of several hundred men, and the perspiration of the workmen with the stretchers, filled the air with a peculiar, heavy, thick, fetid mist, in which, in different parts of the hall, the candles burnt dimly. The sound of all sorts of groans, sighs, death-rattles, now and then interrupted by shrill screams, filled the whole room. Sisters, with quiet faces, expressing not an empty, feminine, painfully tearful pity, but active, practical sympathy, here and there among the bloody coats and shirts stepped across the wounded with medicines, water, bandages, and lint. The doctors, with sleeves turned up, kneeling beside the wounded⁠—near whom the assistants held the candles⁠—examined, felt, and probed their wounds, not heeding the terrible groans and the prayers of the sufferers. One doctor sat at a table near the door, and at the moment Gáltsin came in was already entering No. 532.

“Iván Bogáef, Private, Company III, S⁠⸺ Regiment, fractura femuris complicata!” shouted another doctor from the end of the room, examining a shattered leg.

“Turn him over.”

“Oh, oh, fathers! Oh, you’re our fathers!” screamed the soldier, beseeching them not to touch him.

“Perforatio capitis!”

“Simon Nefyórdof, Lieutenant-Colonel of the N⁠⸺ Infantry Regiment. Have a little patience, Colonel, or it is quite impossible; I’ll have to leave you!” said a third doctor, poking about with some kind of hook in the skull of the unfortunate Colonel.

“Oh, don’t; oh, for God’s sake be quick! be quick. Ah⁠—!”

“Perforatio pectoris.⁠ ⁠… Sebastian Séreda, Private⁠ ⁠… what regiment? But you need not write that: moritur. Carry him away,” said the doctor, leaving the soldier, whose eyes turned up while the death-rattle still sounded in his throat.

About forty soldiers, stretcher-bearers, stood at the door waiting to carry the bandaged to the wards and the dead to the chapel. They looked on in silence, broken only now and then by a heavy sigh, at the scene before them.

IX

On his way to the bastion Kaloúgin met many wounded; but knowing by experience that, in action, such sights have a bad effect on a man’s spirits, he did not stop to question them, but, on the contrary, tried not to notice them. At the foot of the hill he met an orderly-officer galloping fast from the bastion.

“Zóbkin! Zóbkin! wait a bit.”

“Yes, what?”

“Where are you from?”

“The lodgments.”

“How are things there?⁠—Hot?”

“Oh, awful!”

And the orderly galloped on.

In fact, though there was now but little small-arm firing, the cannonade had recommenced with fresh heat and persistence.

“Ah! that’s bad!” thought Kaloúgin, with an unpleasant sensation, and he, too, had a presentiment, i.e., a very usual thought⁠—the thought of death. But Kaloúgin was ambitious, and blessed with nerves of oak; in a word, he was what is called brave. He did not yield to the first feeling, but began to nerve himself. He recalled how an Adjutant, Napoleon’s he thought, having delivered an order, galloped with bleeding head full speed to Napoleon.

“Vous êtes blessé?”44 said Napoleon.

“Je vous demande pardon, sire, je suis mort,”45 and the Adjutant fell from his horse, dead.

That seemed to him very fine, and he even a bit imagined himself to be that Adjutant. Then he whipped his horse, assuming an even more dashing Cossack seat, looked back at the Cossack, who, standing up in his stirrups, was trotting behind, and rode quite gallantly up to the spot where he had to dismount. Here he found four soldiers sitting on some stones smoking their pipes.

“What are you doing there?” he shouted at them.

“Been carrying off a wounded man and sat down to rest a bit, y’r honour,” said one of them, hiding his pipe behind his back and taking off his cap.

“Resting, indeed!⁠ ⁠… to your places, march!” and he went up the hill with them, through the trench, meeting wounded men at every step.

After ascending the