“Are those ours?”—listening to a battery across the fields.
“Ours, your Honour.”
“Well, we’ll go on and see.”
I had listened to this conversation with the sensation of a man who has stopped himself on the very edge of a precipice. I thought in those few moments with a marvellous and penetrating clarity. I had, after all, been always until now at the battle of S⸺, or when I had gone with the wagons to Nijnieff, on the outskirts of the thing. I knew that tonight, in another ten minutes, I would be in the middle—the “very middle.” As I waited there I recalled the pages of the diary of some officer, a diary that had been shown me quite casually by its owner. It had been a miracle of laconic brevity: “6:30 a.m., down to the battery. All quiet. 8:00, three of their shells. One of ours killed, two wounded. Five yards’ distance. 8:30, breakfasted; K. arrived from the ‘Doll’s House’—all quiet there,” and so on. This, I knew, was the proper way to look at the affair: “6:00 a.m., down to the battery. 7:00 a.m., breakfasted. 8:00 a.m., dead. …” For the life of me now I could not look at it like that. I saw a thousand things that were, perhaps, not really there, but were there at any rate for me. If I was beaten tonight I was beaten once and for all. … I saw the shining road under the starlight and shadows of wounded men, groaning and stumbling, whispering their way along.
“Let’s go,” said Nikitin.
I drew a breath and stepped out into the moonlight. A shell burst with a delicate splash of fire amongst the stars. The road looked very long and very, very lonely.
However, soon I found myself walking along it quite casually and talking about unimportant peaceful things. Come,
I thought to myself. This really isn’t so bad.
“It’s a great pity,” Nikitin said, “that I can’t read English. Have to take your novelists as they choose to give them us. Who is there now in England?”
“Well,” said I as one talks in a dream, “there’s Hardy, and Henry James, and Conrad. I’ve seen translations of Conrad in Petrograd. And then there’s Wells—”
“Yes, Wells I know. But he writes stories for boys. … There’s Jack London, but his are American. I like to read an English novel sometimes. Your English life is so cosy. You have tea before the fire and everything is comfortable. We don’t know what comfort is in Russia.”
A machine gun rat-tat-tat-tated close to us, and three rockets, like a flight of startled birds, rose suddenly together on the far horizon.
“No, we have no comfort in Russia,” repeated Nikitin. “Now I fancy that an English country-house. …”
We had reached the further wood; the moonlight fell away from us and the shadows shifted and trembled under the reflection of rockets and a projector that swung lazily and unsteadily, like something nodding in its sleep.
On the left of the road there was a house standing back in its own garden. I could see dimly that this was a row of country villas.
“Stand by this gate five minutes,” Nikitin whispered to me. “I must find the Colonel. The sanitars will come and fetch you when I’ve settled the spot for our bandaging.”
Nikitin disappeared and I was quite alone. I felt terribly desolate. I stood back against the gate of the villa watching soldiers hurry by, seeing high mysterious hedges, the roofs of houses, a line of lighted sky, the tops of trees, all these things rising and falling as the glare in the heavens rose and fell. There was sometimes a terrible noise and sometimes an equally terrible stillness. Somewhere in the darkness a man was groaning, “Oh! ah!—Oh! ah!” without cessation. Somewhere the gate of one of the villas swung to and fro, creaking. Sometimes soldiers would stare at my motionless figure and then pass on. All this time, as in one’s dreams sometimes one holds off a nightmare, I was keeping my fear at bay. I had now exactly the sensation that I had known so often in my dream, that I was standing somewhere in the dark, that the Enemy was watching me and waiting to spring. But tonight I was only nearly afraid. One step on my part, one extra noise, one more flare of light, and I would abandon myself to panic, but, although the perspiration was wet on my forehead, my heart thumping, and my hands dry and hot, I was not yet quite afraid.
I had a strange sensation of suffocation, as though I were at the bottom of a well, a well black and damp, with the stars of the sky miles away. There came to me, with a kind of ironic sentimentality, the picture of the drawing-room at home in Polchester, the corner where the piano stood with a palm in an ugly brass pot just behind it, the table near the door with a brass Indian tray and a fat photograph-book with, gilt clasps, the picture of “Christ being Scourged” above the fireplace, and the green silk screen that stood under the picture in the summer.
A soldier stopped and spoke to me: “Your Honour, it’s on the right—the next gate.” I followed him without attention, having no doubt but that this was one of our own sanitars, and accompanied a group of soldiers that surrounded a bobbing kitchen on wheels. I was puzzled by the kitchen because I knew that one had not been brought by our Otriad, but I thought that the doctors of the Division had perhaps begged our men to aid the army sanitars.
We hurried through a gate to the right, where in what appeared to be a yard of some kind, the kitchen was established and then, from out of the very earth as it seemed, soldiers appeared, clustering around it with their tin cans. The soldier who was in charge of the party said to me in a confidential whisper: “There’s plenty of
