I remember then that he poured the water into the blue tin basin for me and then, taking the tin mug himself, poured it in cupfuls over my hands and arms. I afterwards did the same for him. At that moment I very nearly spoke to him of Marie. I wished desperately to try; but I looked at his face, and his eyes, laughing at me as they always did, stopped me.
When I had finished he thanked me, wiped his hands, then turning round at the door he said: “Why don’t you go back to Mittövo, Mr. ⸻. You’re tired out.”
“You know why,” I answered, without looking at him He seemed then as though he would speak, but he stopped himself and went away. I lay down again and tried to sleep, but when I closed my eyes the green beyond the window burnt through my eyelids—and then the fly (I am sure it was the same fly) returned. …
Monday, August 16. … Lord! but I am tired of this endless bandaging, cleaning of filthy wounds, paring away of ragged ends of flesh, smelling, breathing, drinking blood and dust and dirt. The poor fellows! Their bravery is beyond any word of mine. They have come these last few days with their eyes dazed and their ears deafened. Indeed the roaring of the cannon has been since yesterday afternoon incessant. They say that the Austrians are straining every nerve to break through to the river and cross. We are doing what we can to prevent them, but what can we do? There simply is not ammunition! The officers here are almost crying with despair, and the men know it and go on, with their cheerfulness, their obedience, their mild kindliness—go into that green hell to be butchered, and come out of it again, if they are lucky, with their bodies mangled and twisted, and horror in their eyes. It’s nobody’s fault, I suppose, this business. How easy to write in the daily papers that the Germans prepared for war and that we did not, and that after a month or two all will be well. … After a month or two! tell that to us here stuck in this Forest and hear us how we laugh! …
Meanwhile, for the good of my health, I’m figuring very clearly to myself all the physical features of this place. It’s a long white house, two-storied. The front door has broken glass over it and there’s a litter of tumbled bricks on the top step. After you’ve gone through the front door you come into the hall where the wounded are as thick as flies. You go through the hall and turn to the left. There’s a pantry place on your right all full of flies and when you open the door they unsettle with a great buzz and shift into all sorts of shapes and patterns. Next to them is our sitting-room, the horrid place always dirty and stifling. Then there’s the operating-room, then another room for beds, then the kitchen. Outside to the right there’s the garden, dry now with the heat, and the orchard smells of the men they’ve buried in it. To the left, after a little clearing, there’s the forest always green and glittering. The men are in the trenches now, the new ones that were made last week, so I suppose that we shall be in the thick of it very shortly. That battery at the edge of the hill has been banging away all the morning. What else is there? There’s an old pump just outside the sitting-room window. There’s a litter of dirty paper and refuse there, too, that the flies gather round. There’s an old barn away to the right where some horses are and two cows. I have to keep my mind on these things because I know they’re real. You can touch them with your hands and they’ll still be there even if you go away—they won’t walk with you as you move. So I must fasten on to these things about which there can’t be any doubt. In the same way I like to remember that book in the sitting-room—Mr. Glass who lectured on “Fools,” the Ruysdael, and the Normal Pupils who acted Othello. They’re real enough and are probably somewhere now quietly studying, or teaching, or sleeping—I envy them. …
A thing that happened this morning disturbed us all. Four soldiers came out of the Forest quite mad. They seemed rational enough at first and said that they’d been sent out of the first line trenches with contusion—one of them had a bleeding finger, but the others were untouched. Then one of them, a middle-aged man with a black beard, began quite gravely to tell us that the Forest was moving. They had seen it with their own eyes. They had watched all the trees march slowly forward like columns of soldiers and soon the whole Forest would move and would crush everyone in it. It was all very well fighting Austrians, but whole forests was more than anyone could expect of them. Then suddenly one of them cried out, pointing with his finger: “See, Your Honour—there it comes! … Ah! let us run! let us run!” One of them began to cry. It was very disagreeable. I saw Andrey Vassilievitch who was present glance anxiously through the window at the Forest and then gravely check himself and look at me nervously to see whether I had noticed. The men afterwards fell into a strange kind of apathy. We sent them off to Mittövo in the afternoon.
I want now to remember as exactly as possible a strange conversation I had this evening with Semyonov. I came up when it was getting dusk to the bedroom. One of the Austrian batteries was spitting away over the hill but
