the leg,” replies the soldier; but, at the same time, you perceive, by the folds of the coverlet, that he has lost his leg above the knee. “God be thanked now,” he adds, – “I shall get my discharge.”
“Were you wounded long ago?”
“It was six weeks ago, Your Excellency.”
“Does it still pain you?”
“No, there's no pain now; only there's a sort of gnawing in my calf when the weather is bad, but that's nothing.”
“How did you come to be wounded?”
“On the fifth bastion, during the first bombardment. I had just trained a cannon, and was on the point of going away, so, to another embrasure when it struck me in the leg, just as if I had stepped into a hole and had no leg.”
“Was it not painful at the first moment?”
“Not at all; only as though something boiling hot had struck my leg.”
“Well, and then?”
“And then – nothing; only the skin began to draw as though it had been rubbed hard. The first thing of all, Your Excellency, is not to think at all. If you don't think about a thing, it amounts to nothing. Men suffer from thinking more than from anything else.”
At that moment, a woman in a gray striped dress and a black kerchief bound about her head approaches you.
She joins in your conversation with the sailor, and begins to tell about him, about his sufferings, his desperate condition for the space of four weeks, and how, when he was wounded, he made the litter halt that he might see the volley from our battery, how the grand-duke spoke to him and gave him twenty-five rubles, and how he said to him that he wanted to go back to the bastion to direct the younger men, even if he could not work himself. As she says all this in a breath, the woman glances now at you, now at the sailor, who has turned away as though he did not hear her and plucks some lint from his pillow, and her eyes sparkle with peculiar enthusiasm.
“This is my housewife, Your Excellency!” the sailor says to you, with an expression which seems to say, “You must excuse her. Every one knows it's a woman's way – she's talking nonsense.”
You begin to understand the defenders of Sevastopol. For some reason, you feel ashamed of yourself in the presence of this man. You would like to say a very great deal to him, in order to express to him your sympathy and admiration; but you find no words, or you are dissatisfied with those which come into your head, – and you do reverence in silence before this taciturn, unconscious grandeur and firmness of soul, this modesty in the face of his own merits.
“Well, God grant you a speedy recovery,” you say to him, and you halt before another invalid, who is lying on the floor and appears to be awaiting death in intolerable agony.
He is a blond man with pale, swollen face. He is lying on his back, with his left arm thrown out, in a position which is expressive of cruel suffering. His parched, open mouth with difficulty emits his stertorous breathing; his blue, leaden eyes are rolled up, and from beneath the wadded coverlet the remains of his right arm, enveloped in bandages, protrude. The oppressive odor of a corpse strikes you forcibly, and the consuming, internal fire which has penetrated every limb of the sufferer seems to penetrate you also.
“Is he unconscious?” you inquire of the woman, who comes up to you and gazes at you tenderly as at a relative.
“No, he can still hear, but he's very bad,” she adds, in a whisper. “I gave him some tea to-day, – what if he is a stranger, one must still have pity! – and he hardly tasted it.”
“How do you feel?” you ask him.
The wounded man turns his eyeballs at the sound of your voice, but he neither sees nor understands you.
“There's a gnawing at my heart.”
A little further on, you see an old soldier changing his linen. His face and body are of a sort of cinnamon-brown color, and gaunt as a skeleton. He has no arm at all; it has been cut off at the shoulder. He is sitting with a wide-awake air, he puts himself to rights; but you see, by his dull, corpse-like gaze, his frightful gauntness, and the wrinkles on his face, that he is a being who has suffered for the best part of his life.
On the other side, you behold in a cot the pale, suffering, and delicate face of a woman, upon whose cheek plays a feverish flush.
“That's our little sailor lass who was struck in the leg by a bomb on the 5th,” your guide tells you. “She was carrying her husband's dinner to him in the bastion.”
“Has it been amputated?”
“They cut it off above the knee.”
Now, if your nerves are strong, pass through the door on the left. In yonder room they are applying bandages and performing operations. There, you will see doctors with their arms blood-stained above the elbow, and with pale, stern faces, busied about a cot, upon which, with eyes widely opened, and uttering, as in delirium, incoherent, sometimes simple and touching words, lies a wounded man under the influence of chloroform. The doctors are busy with the repulsive but beneficent work of amputation. You see the sharp, curved knife enter the healthy, white body, you see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness with a piercing cry and curses, you see the army surgeon fling the amputated arm into a corner, you see another wounded man, lying in a litter in the same apartment, shrink convulsively and groan as he gazes at the operation upon his comrade, not so much from physical pain as from the moral torture of anticipation. – You behold the frightful, soul-stirring scenes; you behold war, not from its conventional, beautiful, and brilliant side, with music and drum-beat, with fluttering flags and galloping generals, but you behold war in its real phase – in blood, in suffering, in death.
On emerging from this house of pain, you will infallibly experience a sensation of pleasure, you will inhale the fresh air more fully, you will feel satisfaction in the consciousness of your health, but, at the same time, you will draw from the sight of these sufferings a consciousness of your nothingness, and you will go calmly and without any indecision to the bastion.
“What do the death and sufferings of such an insignificant worm as I signify in comparison with so many deaths and such great sufferings?” But the sight of the clear sky, the brilliant sun, the fine city, the open church, and the soldiers moving about in various directions soon restores your mind to its normal condition of frivolity, petty cares, and absorption in the present alone.
Perhaps you meet the funeral procession of some officer coming from the church, with rose-colored coffin, and music and fluttering banners; perhaps the sounds of firing reach your ear from the bastion, but this does not lead you back to your former thoughts; the funeral seems to you a very fine military spectacle, and you do not connect with this spectacle, or with the sounds, any clear idea of suffering and death, as you did at the point where the bandaging was going on.
Passing the barricade and the church, you come to the most lively part of the city. On both sides hang the signs of shops and inns. Merchants, women in bonnets and kerchiefs, dandified officers, – everything speaks to you of the firmness of spirit, of the independence and the security of the inhabitants.
Enter the inn on the right if you wish to hear the conversations of sailors and officers; stories of the preceding night are sure to be in progress there, and of Fenka, and the affair of the 24th, and of the dearness and badness of cutlets, and of such and such a comrade who has been killed.
“Devil
