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 bloodstained 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
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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 frivolit)^, petty cares, and absorption in the present alone.
Perhaps you meet the funeral procession of some officer coming from the church, with rosecolored 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 take it, how bad things are with us today!" ejaculates the bass voice of a beardless naval officer, with white brows and lashes, in a green knitted sash.
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
" In the fourth bastion," replies the young officer, and you are certain to look at the white-lashed officer with great attention, and even with some respect, at the words, "in the fourth bastion." His excessive ease of manner, the way he flourishes his hands, his loud laugh, and his voice, which seems to you insolent, reveal to you that peculiar boastful frame of mind which some very young men acquire after danger; nevertheless, you think he is about to tell you how bad the condition of things on the fourth bastion is because of the bombs and balls. Nothing of the sort! things are bad because it is muddy. " It's impossible to pass through the battery," says he, pointing at his boots, which are covered with mud above the calf. "And my best gun-captain was killed to-day; he was struck plump in the forehead," says another. " Who's that } Mitiukhin } " "No!... What now, are they going to give me any veal? the villains! " he adds to the servant of the inn. " Not Mitiukhin, but Abrosimoff. Such a fine young fellow! — he was in the sixth sally."
At another corner of the table, over a dish of cutlets with peas, and a bottle of sour Crimean wine called " Bordeaux," sit two infantry officers; one with a red collar, who is young and has two stars on his coat, is telling the other, with a black collar and no stars, about the affair at Alma. The
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