graf Leo Tolstoy

“ If, on the other hand, he cries, “Mortar!” you will be struck by a regular, not disagreeable hissing, which has no connection in your mind with anything terrible. It comes nearer and with greater rapidity. You see the black ball fall to the ground, and the bomb-shell burst with a metallic cracking. The pieces fly in air, whistling and screeching; stones hit each other, and mud splashes over you. You feel a strange mixture of pleasure and fright at these different sounds. At the instant the projectile reaches you, you invariably think it will kill you. ”

“ On the earth, torn up by a recent explosion, were lying, here and there, broken beams, crushed bodies of Russians and French, heavy cast-iron cannon overturned into the ditch by a terrible force, half buried in the ground and forever dumb, bomb-shells, balls, splinters of beams, ditches, bomb-proofs, and more corpses, in blue or in gray overcoats, which seemed to have been shaken by supreme convulsions, and which were lighted up now every instant by the red fire of the explosions which resounded in the air. ”

“ The commander of the bastion, in going his rounds, although he had been accustomed during eight months to courage in all its forms, could not help admiring this fine-looking boy with animated face and eyes, his unbuttoned coat exposing a red shirt, which confined a white and delicate neck, clapping his hands, and crying in a voice of command, “First! second!” and jumping gayly on the rampart to see where his shell had fallen. ”

“ Look well at this soldier of the wagon-train who is leading his bay troitka horses to drink, humming through his teeth, and you shall find that he does not go astray in this confused crowd, which in fact does not exist for him, for he is full of his own business, and will do his duty, whatever it is—will lead his horses to the watering-place or drag a cannon with as much calm and assured indifference as if he were at Toula or at Saransk. ”

“ The soldiers placed themselves on the ground along the wall. Some of them lighted their pipes, and Volodia arranged his bed in a corner, stretched himself on it, lighted a candle in his turn, and smoked a cigarette. Over their heads could be heard, deadened by the bomb-proof, the uninterrupted roar of the discharges. A single cannon close beside them shook their shelter every time it thundered. In the interior everything was quiet. The soldiers, still intimidated by the presence of the new officer, only exchanged a word with each other now and then to ask for a light or a little room. ”

“ Where, then, in my tale do we see the evil we must avoid, and the good towards which we must strive to go? Where is the traitor? Where is the hero? All are good and all are bad. It is not Kalouguine with his brilliant courage, his gentlemanly bravado, and his vanity—the chief motive power of all his actions; it{122} is not Praskoukine, an inoffensive cipher, although he fell on the battle-field for his faith, his ruler, and his country; nor timid Mikhaïloff; nor Pesth, that child with no conviction and no moral sense, who can pass for traitors or for heroes. ”

“ He was distinguished by his great size, a large mustache, and a fair state of corpulence. But there were two unpleasant things in him which met the eye at once. First, a constant perspiration on his face, joined with a puffiness which almost hid his little gray eyes and gave him the look of a leather bottle full of porter, and, second, extreme slovenliness, which reached from his thin gray hair to his great naked feet, shod in ermine-trimmed slippers.
“What a lot of money!—heavens, what a lot of money!” said Koseltzoff the first, who, on entering, cast a hungry look on the notes. ”

“ Sometimes he met soldiers and officers, and going along the left side, near the Admiralty, he noticed, by the bright light of a fire which burned behind a fence, a row of dark-leaved acacias, covered with dust, recently planted along the sidewalk and held up by green painted stakes. His steps and those of Nikolaïeff, who was loudly breathing, resounded alone in the silence. His thoughts were vague. The pretty Sister of Charity, Martzeff’s leg, with his toes moving convulsively in his stocking, the darkness, the shells, the different pictures of death, passed confusedly in his memory. ”

“ The oldest officer of the battery, a short, red-haired captain with a foretop, and with well-smoothed locks on his temples, brought up in the old traditions of artillery, amiable with ladies, and posing for a savant, asked him questions about his acquaintance with this science or that, about the new inventions, joked in an affectionate way about his youth and his handsome face, and treated him like a son, all of which charmed Volodia. ”

“ What you are looking at is the fourth bastion.
Passers become rare, no more women are met. The soldiers walk with rapid step. A few drops of blood stain the path, and you see coming towards you four soldiers bearing a stretcher, and on the stretcher a face of a sallow paleness and a bloody coat. If you ask the bearers where he is wounded, they will reply, with an irritated tone, without looking at you, that he has been hit on the arm or on the leg. If his head has been carried away, if he is dead, they will keep a morose silence. ”

“ Everywhere in this liquid mud you see broken glass, unexploded shells, cannon-balls—every trace of camp life. You seem to hear the noise of a cannon-ball falling only two yards away, and from all sides come the sound of balls, which sometimes hum like bees, sometimes groan and split the air, which vibrates like a violin-string, the whole dominated by the sinister rumbling of cannon, which shakes you from head to foot and fills you with terror. ”

“ From time to time could be recognized the gallop of a staff-officer, the groan of a wounded man, the steps and the voices of the stretcher-bearers, the exclamations of doting women who stood on the thresholds of their houses and watched in the direction of the firing. ”

“ Volodia and Vlang, who did not leave his heels, went out together and ran to the battery. On one side as well as on the other the artillery had ceased firing. The despicable and cynical cowardice of the yunker still more than the coolness of the soldiers had the effect of restoring his courage.
“Am I like him?” he thought, rushing quickly towards the parapet, near which the mortars were placed. From there he distinctly saw the French dash across the space, free from every obstacle, and run straight towards him. Their bayonets, sparkling in the sun, were moving in the nearest trenches. ”

“ You will perhaps find here four or five sailors playing cards in the shelter of the parapet, and a naval officer, who, seeing a new face come up, and a spectator at that, will be really pleased to initiate you into the details of the arrangements and give you an explanation of them. This officer, seated on a cannon, is rolling a cigarette with such coolness, passes so quietly from one embrasure to another, and talks with you with such natural calmness, that you recover your own sangfroid, in spite of the balls which are whistling here in greater numbers. ”

“ So{40} when it has passed without grazing you, you live again; for an instant a feeling of indescribable sweetness possesses you to such a degree that you find a special charm in danger, in the game of life and death. You would like to have a ball or a shell fall nearer, very near you. But the sentinel announces with his strong, full voice, “Mortar!” The hissing, the blow, the explosion are repeated, but accompanied this time by a human groan. You go up to the wounded man at the same time with the stretcher-bearers. He has a strange look, lying in the mud mingled with his blood. ”

“ Before doubting, however, go up to a bastion, see the defenders of Sebastopol on the very place of the defence, or rather enter straight into this house at whose door stand the stretcher-bearers. You will see there the heroes of the army, you will see there horrible and heart-rending sights, both sublime and comic, but wonderful and of a soul-elevating nature. Enter this great hall, which before the war was the hall of the Assembly. Scarcely have you opened the door before the odor exhaled from forty or fifty amputations and severe wounds turns you sick. ”

“ White flags are flying on our fortifications and in the French intrenchments. In the blossom-covered valley mutilated bodies, clothed in blue or in gray, with bare feet, lie in heaps, and the men are carrying them off to place them in carts. The air is poisoned by the odor of the corpses. Crowds of people pour out of Sebastopol and out of the French camp to witness this spectacle. ”

“ SEBASTOPOL. SEBASTOPOL IN DECEMBER, 1854.
Dawn tinges the horizon above Mount Sapouné; the shadows of the night have left the surface of the sea, which, now dark blue in color, only awaits the first ray of sunshine to sparkle merrily; a cold wind blows from the fog-enveloped bay; there is no snow on the ground, the earth is black, but frost stings the face and cracks underfoot. The quiet of the morning is disturbed only by the incessant murmuring of the waves, and is broken at long intervals by the dull roar of cannon. All is silent on the men-of-war ”

“ The parapets built of gabions, the trenches, the cannon in front of which he passed, even the fragments and the shells themselves over which he stumbled, and which the flashes of the discharges lighted up without pause or relaxation, everything was familiar to him, and had been deeply engraven on his memory three months before, during the fortnight he had lived in the bastion. ”

“ A barricade looms up in the street to the right, and in its embrasures are small cannon, beside which a sailor is sitting quietly smoking his pipe. On the left stands a pretty house, on the pediment of which are scrawled numerals, and above can be seen soldiers and blood-stained stretchers. The dismal traces of a camp in war-time meet the eye everywhere. Your first impression is, doubtless, a disagreeable one; the strange amal{20}gamation of town life with camp life, of an elegant city and a dirty bivouac, strikes you like a hideous incongruity. ”

“ The joy he felt at doing his duty well, at being no longer a coward, at feeling himself, on the contrary, full of courage, the feeling of commanding and the presence of twenty men, who he knew were watching him with curiosity, had made a real hero of him. ”

“ You turn your eyes upon the gigantic ships with scratched hulls scattered over the harbor, upon the shallops,—black dots on the sparkling azure of the water—upon the pretty houses of the town, to whose light-colored tones the rising sun gives a rosy tinge, upon the hostile fleet standing like light-houses in the crystalline distance of the sea, and, at last, upon the foaming waves, where play the salt drops which the oars dash into the air. ”

“ The self-love of thousands of human beings had been sometimes wounded, sometimes satisfied, sometimes soothed in the embrace of death! What numbers of red coffins with coarse palls!—and the bastions still continued to roar. The French in their camp, moved by an involuntary feeling of anxiety and terror, examined in the soft evening light the yellow and burrowed earth of the bastions of Sebastopol, where the black silhouettes of our sailors came and went; they counted the embrasures bristling with fierce-looking cannon. ”

“ During these three hours Mikhaïloff, who, not without reason, was thinking of death as an inevitable thing, had the time to get accustomed to the notion that he would surely be killed, and that he no longer belonged to the living world. In spite of that, it was by a violent effort that he kept from running when he came out of the quarters at the head of his company, side by side with Praskoukine.
“Au revoir! bon voyage!” shouted the major who commanded the battalion left in the quarters. Mikhaïloff had shared his cheese with him, both of them seated in a pit in shelter of the parapet. ”

“ The army of Sebastopol, like a sea whose liquid mass, agitated and uneasy, spreads and overflows, moved slowly forward in the dark night, undulating into the impenetrable gloom, over the bridge on the bay, proceeding towards Severnaïa, leaving behind them those spots where so many heroes had fallen, sprinkling them with their blood, those places defended during eleven months against an enemy twice as strong as itself, and which it had received the order this very day to abandon without a fight. ”

“ He will tell you also how, on the 5th, a shell penetrated a bomb-proof and struck down eleven sailors. He will show you, through the embrasure, the enemy’s trenches and batteries, which are only thirty or forty fathoms distant. I fear, however, that, leaning out of the embrasure in order to examine the enemy better, you will see nothing, or that, if you perceive something, you will be very much surprised to learn that this white and rocky rampart a few steps away, and from which are spouting little clouds of smoke, is really the enemy—“him,” as the soldiers and sailors say. ”

“ The Frenchman throws away his cigarette, blows in the mouth-piece, and politely presents it to the officer with a salute. The latter gives him his in exchange. All the French and Russian by-standers smile and seem delighted.
Here comes a shrewd-looking infantryman in a red shirt, his overcoat thrown over his shoulders. His face is full of good spirits and curiosity. Accompanied by two comrades, their hands behind their backs, he approaches and asks a Frenchman for a light. The latter blows into his pipe, shakes it, and offers a light to the Russian. ”

“ You walk with calmness, your soul elevated and strengthened, for you bring away the consoling conviction that never, and in no place, can the strength of the Russian people be broken; and you have gained this conviction not from the solidity of the parapets, from the ingeniously combined intrenchments, from the number of mines, from the cannon heaped{42} one on the other, and all of which you have not in the least understood, but from the eyes, the words, the bearing, from what may be called the spirit of the defenders of Sebastopol. ”

“ Your intimate ego will occupy you so actively that you will no longer think of noticing your surroundings. You will permit yourself to be overcome by a painful feeling of irresolution. However, the sight of a soldier who, with extended arms, is slipping down the hill in the liquid mud, and passes near you, running and laughing, silences your small inward voice, the cowardly counsellor which arises in you in the presence of danger. You straighten up in spite of yourself, you raise your head, and you, in your turn, scale the slippery slope of the clay hill. ”