We all stopped under the shelter of the barn.
“Well,” said the Feldsher to the soldier, “where’s your man?”
“Only a short way,” said the soldier. “Quite close.”
“Across that field?” asked the Feldsher, pointing to the moonlight.
“Yes, certainly,” said the soldier.
The Feldsher scratched his head. “We can’t go further without orders,” he said. “That’s very dangerous in front there. I’m responsible for these men. We must return and ask, your Honour,” he said, turning to me.
“We shall be nearly an hour returning,” I said. “Is your friend badly wounded?” I asked the soldier.
“Very,” said he.
“You see …” I said to the Feldsher. “We can’t possibly leave him like that. It’s only a little way.”
The Feldsher shook his head. “I can’t be responsible. I had my orders to go so far and no further. I must see that my men are safe.”
The sanitars who were sitting in a row on their haunches under the shadow of the barn all nodded their heads.
“I didn’t know Russians were cowards,” I said fiercely.
The Feldsher shook his head quite unmoved: “Your Honour must understand that I had my orders.” Then he added slowly: “but of course if your Honour wishes to go yourself … I would come with you. The others … they must do as they please. They are in their right to return. But I should advise that we return.”
“I’m going on,” I said.
I must say here that I felt no other sensation than a blind and quite obstinate selfishness. I had no thought of Nikitin or of the sanitars. I did not (and this I must emphasise) think, for a moment, of the wounded man. If the situation had been that by returning I should save many lives and by advancing should save only my own I should still have advanced. If the only hope for the wounded man was my instant speech with Nikitin I would not have gone back to speak with him. I was at this moment neither brave nor fearful. I repeat that I had no sensation except an absolutely selfish obstinate challenge that I, myself, was addressing to Something in space. I was saying: “At last, my chance has come. Now you shall see whether I fly from you or no. Now you shall do your worst and fail. I’m the hunter now, not the hunted.”
I was conscious of nothing but this quite childish preoccupation with myself. I was, nevertheless, pleased with myself. “There, you see,” someone near me seemed to say, “he’s not quite so unpractical after all. He’s full of common sense.” I looked at the row of sanitars squatting on the ground, and felt like a schoolmaster with his children.
“You’d better go home then,” I said scornfully. The Feldsher, who was a short stocky man, with a red face and melancholy eyes (something like a prizefighter turned poet), dismissed them. They went off in a line under the hedge.
The man obviously thought me a tiresome prig. He had no romantic illusions about the business; he had not been a Feldsher during twenty years for nothing and knew that a wound was a wound; when a man was dead he was dead.
However. … “Truly it’s not far?” he asked the soldier.
“Tak totchno,” the man answered, his face quite without expression.
We crossed the moonlit field and for a brief moment silence fell, as though an audience were holding its breath watching us. On the other side were cottages, the outskirts of a tiny village. Here beside these cottages we fell into a fantastic world. That small village must in other times have been a pretty place, nestling with its gardens by the river under the hill. It seemed now to rock and rattle under the noise of the cannon. All the open spaces were like white marble in the moonlight and in these open spaces there was utter silence and emptiness. The place seemed deserted—and yet, in every shadow, in long lines under the cottage wells, in little clumps and clusters round trees or ruins there were eyes staring, the gleam of muskets shone, little specks of light, dancing from wall to wall. Everywhere there were bodies, legs, boots, arms, heads, sudden caps, sudden fingers, sudden hot and streaming breaths. And over everything this infernal noise and yet no human sound. A nightmare of the true nightmare of dreams. The open silver spaces, the little gardens thick with flowers, the high moon and the starry sky, not a living soul to be seen—and nevertheless watchers everywhere. “Step forward on to that little plot of grass in front of the cottage windows and you’re a dead man”—the moonlight said. There were men in the body of the earth, not in trenches, but in holes—my foot stepped on a head of hair and some low voice cursed me. I was, I suppose, by this time, a little delirious with my adventure. I know that I could now distinguish no separate sounds—shells and bullets had vanished and in their
