At ten o'clock in the evening the troops were ordered to march. At
half-past nine I mounted my horse, and started off to find the general;
but on reflecting that he and his adjutant must be busy, I remained in
the street, and, tying my horse to a fence, sat down on the terrace to
wait until the general should come.
The heat and glare of the day had already vanished in the fresh night
air; and the obscure light of the young moon, which, infolding around
itself a pale gleaming halo against the dark blue of the starry sky,
was beginning to decline. Lights shone in the windows of the houses and
in the chinks of the earth huts. The gracefully proportioned poplars
in the gardens, standing out against the horizon from behind the earth
huts, whose reed-thatched roofs gleamed pale in the moonlight, seemed
still taller and blacker.
The long shadows of the houses, of the trees, of the fences, lay
beautifully across the white dusty road. In the river rang incessantly
the voice of the frogs;[17] in the streets were heard hurrying steps,
and sounds of voices, and the galloping of horses. From the suburb came
floating, now and again, the strains of the hand-organ; now the popular
Russian air, "The winds are blowing," now one of the Aurora waltzes.
I will not tell what my thoughts were: in the first place, because
I should be ashamed to confess to the melancholy ideas which without
cessation arose in my mind, while all around me I perceived only gayety
and mirth; and, in the second place, because they have nothing to do
with my story.
I was so deeply engrossed in thought, that I did not notice that the
bell was ringing for eleven o'clock, and the general was riding past me
with his suite.
The rearguard was just at the fortress gate. I galloped at full speed
across the bridge, amid a crush of cannon, caissons, military wagons,
and commanding officers shouting at the top of their voices. After
reaching the gate, I rode at a brisk trot for almost a verst, past
the army stretched out and silently moving through the darkness, and
overtook the general. As I made my way past the mounted artillery
dragging their ordnance, amid the cannon and officers, a German voice,
like a disagreeable dissonance interrupting soft and majestic harmony,
struck my ear. It screamed, "Agkhtingkhist,[18] bring a linstock."
And a soldier's voice replied, quick as a flash, "Chevchenko! the
lieutenant asks for a light!"
The greater part of the sky had become enveloped in long steel-gray
clouds: here and there gleamed from between them the lustreless stars.
The moon was now sinking behind the near horizon of dark mountains
which were on the right; and it shed on their summits a feeble, waning,
half light, which contrasted sharply with the impenetrable darkness
that marked their bases.
The air was mild, and so still, that not a single grass-blade, not a
single mist-wreath, moved. It became so dark, that it was impossible
to distinguish objects, even though very near at hand. On the side of
the road, there seemed to me sometimes to be rocks, sometimes animals,
sometimes strange men; and I knew that they were bushes only when I
heard them rustle, and felt the coolness of the dew with which they
were covered. In front of me I saw a dense, waving black shadow, behind
which followed a few moving spots; this was the van-guard of cavalry,
and the general with his suite. Between us moved another similar black
mass, but this was not as high as the first; this was the infantry.
Such silence reigned in the whole detachment, that there could be
plainly distinguished all the harmonious voices of the night, full of
mysterious charm. The distant melancholy howls of jackals, sometimes
like the wails of despair, sometimes like laughter; the monotonous
ringing song of the cricket, the frog, the quail; a gradually
approaching murmur, the cause of which I could not make clear to my own
mind; and all those nocturnal, almost audible motions of nature, which
it is so impossible either to comprehend or define,--unite into one
complete, beautiful harmony which we call silent night.
This silence was broken, or rather was unified, by the dull thud of the
hoofs, and the rustling of the tall grass through which the division
was slowly moving.
Occasionally, however, was heard in the ranks the ring of a heavy
cannon, the sound of clashing bayonets, stifled conversation, and the
snorting of a horse.
Nature breathed peacefully in beauty and power.
Is it possible that people find no room to live together in this
beautiful world, under this boundless starry heaven? Is it possible
that amid this bewitching nature, the soul of man can harbor the
sentiments of hatred and revenge, or the passion for inflicting
destruction upon his kind? All ugly feelings in the heart of man ought,
it would seem, to vanish away in this intercourse with nature,--with
this immediate expression of beauty and goodness!
[Footnote 17: The frogs in the Caucasus make a sound entirely different
from the _Kvakan'yé_ of the Russian frogs.]
[Footnote 18: German mispronunciation for _Antichrist,_ the accent of
which in Russian falls on the penult.]