The Dark Forest

a lane to the left. Sometimes there were soldiers in the hedges, sometimes they met us, slipping from shadow to shadow. Always we asked whether they knew of any wounded. We found a wounded soldier groaning under the hedge. One leg was soaked in blood and he gave little shrill desperate cries as we lifted him on to the stretcher. Another soldier, lying on the road in the moonlight, murmured incessantly: “Bojé moi! Bojé moi! Bojé moi!” But they were all ghosts. We alone, in that familiar and yet so unreal world, were alive. When a stretcher was filled, four sanitars turned back with it to the wagons, and we were soon a very small party. We arrived at a church⁠—a large fantastic white church with a green turret that I had seen from the opposite hill in the morning. Then it had seemed small and very remote. I had been told that much firing had been centring round it, and it seemed now for me very strange that we should be standing under its very shadow, its outline so quiet and grave under the moon, with its churchyard, a little orchard behind it, and a garden, scenting the night air, close at hand. Here in the graveyard there was a group of wounded soldiers, in their eyes that look of faithful expectation of certain relief. Our stretchers were soon full.

We were about to turn back when suddenly the road behind us was filled with shadows. As we came out of the churchyard an officer stepped forward to meet us. We saluted and shook hands. He seemed a boy, but stood in front of his men with an air as though he commanded the whole of this world of ghosts.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

We explained.

“Well, if you’ll excuse me, you’d better make haste. An attack very shortly⁠ ⁠… yes. I should advise you to be out of this. Petrogradsky Otriad? Yes⁠ ⁠… very glad to have the pleasure.⁠ ⁠…”

We left him, his men a grey cloud behind him, and when we had taken a few steps he seemed, with his young air of importance, his happy serious courtesy, to have been called out of the ground, then, with all his shadows behind him, to have been caught up into the air. These were not figures that had anything to do with the little curling wreaths of smoke, the bottles cracking in the sun, our furious giants of the morning.

“Ah, bojé moi, bojé moi!” sighed the wounded.⁠ ⁠… It was impossible, in such a world of dim shadow, that there should ever be any other sound again.

My excitement had never left me; I had had no doubt, during this last half-hour, that I was on the Enchanted Ground of the Enemy, so stray and figurative had been my impressions all day. Now they were all gathered into this half-hour and the whole affair received its climax. Ah, I thought to myself, if I might only stay here now I should draw closer and closer⁠—I should make my discovery, hunt him down. But just when I am on the verge I must leave it all. Ah, if I could but stay!

Nevertheless we hastened. The world, in spite of the ghosts, was real enough for us to be conscious of that attack looming behind us. We found our wagons, transferred our wounded, then hurried down the road. We found the crossroads and there, waiting for us, Semyonov and Marie Ivanovna. Standing in the moonlight, commanding, as it seemed to me, all of us, even Semyonov, she was a very different figure from the frightened girl of the early morning. Now her life was in her eyes, her body inflamed with the fire of the things that had come to her. So young in experience was she, so ignorant of all earlier adventure, that she could well be seized, utterly and completely, by her new vision⁠ ⁠… possessed by some vision she was.

And that vision was not Trenchard. Seeing her, he hurried towards her, with a glad cry:

“Ah, you are safe!”

But she did not notice him.

“Quick, this way!⁠ ⁠… Yes, the stretchers here.⁠ ⁠… No, I have everything.⁠ ⁠… At once. There is little time!”

The wounded were laid on the stretchers in the square of the crossroads. Semyonov and Marie Ivanovna bandaged them under the moonlight and with the aid of electric-torches. On every side of me there were little dialogues: “No⁠ ⁠… not there. More this way. Yes, that bandage will do. It’s fresh. Hold up his leg. No, durak, under the knee there.⁠ ⁠… Where’s the lint?⁠ ⁠… Turn him a little⁠—there⁠—like that. Horosho, golubchik. Seitchass! No, turn it back over the thigh. Now, once more⁠ ⁠… that’s it. What’s that⁠—bullet or shrapnel?⁠ ⁠… Take it back again, over the shoulder.⁠ ⁠… Yes, twice!”

Once I caught sight of Trenchard, hurrying to be useful with the little bottle of iodine, stumbling over one of the stretchers, causing the wounded man to cry out.

Then Semyonov’s voice angrily:

“Tchort! Who’s that?⁠ ⁠… Ah, Meester! of course!”

Then Marie Ivanovna’s voice: “I’ve finished this, Alexei Petrovitch.⁠ ⁠… That’s all, isn’t it?”

These voices were all whispers, floating from one side of the road to the other. The wounded men were lifted back on to the wagons. We moved off again; Semyonov, Trenchard, Marie Ivanovna and I were now sitting together.

We left the flat fields where we had been so busy. Very slowly we began to climb the hill down which I had come this afternoon. Behind me was a great fan of country, black now under a hidden moon, dead as though our retreat from it, depriving it of the last proofs of life, had flung it back into nonexistence. Before us was the black forest. Not a sound save the roll of our wheels and, sometimes, a cry from one of the wounded soldiers, not a stir of wind.⁠ ⁠…

I looked back. Without an instant’s warning that dead world, as a match is set to a waiting bonfire, broke into flame. A thousand