" 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 bombardmerrt. 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 t "
" 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 tJiink 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.
1
" 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 wideawake 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."