The flush of morning has but just begun to tinge the sky above Sapun
Mountain; the dark blue surface of the sea has already cast aside the
shades of night and awaits the first ray to begin a play of merry
gleams; cold and mist are wafted from the bay; there is no snow—all is
black, but the morning frost pinches the face and crackles underfoot,
and the far-off, unceasing roar of the sea, broken now and then by the
thunder of the firing in Sevastopol, alone disturbs the calm of the
morning. It is dark on board the ships; it has just struck eight bells.
Toward the north the activity of the day begins gradually to replace
the nocturnal quiet; here the relief guard has passed clanking their
arms, there the doctor is already hastening to the hospital, further on
the soldier has crept out of his earth hut and is washing his sunburnt
face in ice-encrusted water, and, turning towards the crimsoning east,
crosses himself quickly as he prays to God; here a tall and heavy
camel-wagon has dragged creaking to the cemetery, to bury the bloody
dead, with whom it is laden nearly to the top. You go to the wharf—a
peculiar odor of coal, manure, dampness, and of beef strikes you;
thousands of objects of all sorts—wood, meat, gabions, flour, iron, and
so forth—lie in heaps about the wharf; soldiers of various regiments,
with knapsacks and muskets, without knapsacks and without muskets,
throng thither, smoke, quarrel, drag weights aboard the steamer which
lies smoking beside the quay; unattached two-oared boats, filled with
all sorts of people,—soldiers, sailors, merchants, women,—land at and
leave the wharf.
“To the Grafsky, Your Excellency? be so good.” Two or three retired
sailors rise in their boats and offer you their services.
You select the one who is nearest to you, you step over the
half-decomposed carcass of a brown horse, which lies there in the mud
beside the boat, and reach the stern. You quit the shore. All about
you is the sea, already glittering in the morning sun, in front of you
is an aged sailor, in a camel's-hair coat, and a young, white-headed
boy, who work zealously and in silence at the oars. You gaze at the
motley vastness of the vessels, scattered far and near over the bay,
and at the small black dots of boats moving about on the shining
azure expanse, and at the bright and beautiful buildings of the city,
tinted with the rosy rays of the morning sun, which are visible in one
direction, and at the foaming white line of the quay, and the sunken
ships from which black tips of masts rise sadly here and there, and
at the distant fleet of the enemy faintly visible as they rock on the
crystal horizon of the sea, and at the streaks of foam on which leap
salt bubbles beaten up by the oars; you listen to the monotonous sound
of voices which fly to you over the water, and the grand sounds of
firing, which, as it seems to you, is increasing in Sevastopol.
It cannot be that, at the thought that you too are in Sevastopol, a
certain feeling of manliness, of pride, has not penetrated your soul,
and that the blood has not begun to flow more swiftly through your
veins.
“Your Excellency! you are steering straight into the Kistentin,”[A]
says your old sailor to you as he turns round to make sure of the
direction which you are imparting to the boat, with the rudder to the
right.
[A] The vessel Constantine.
“And all the cannon are still on it,” remarks the white-headed boy,
casting a glance over the ship as we pass.
“Of course; it's new. Korniloff lived on board of it,” said the old
man, also glancing at the ship.
“See where it has burst!” says the boy, after a long silence, looking
at a white cloud of spreading smoke which has suddenly appeared high
over the South Bay, accompanied by the sharp report of an exploding
bomb.
“_He_ is firing to-day with his new battery,” adds the old man, calmly
spitting on his hands. “Now, give way, Mishka! we'll overtake the
barge.” And your boat moves forward more swiftly over the broad swells
of the bay, and you actually do overtake the heavy barge, upon which
some bags are piled, and which is rowed by awkward soldiers, and it
touches the Grafsky wharf amid a multitude of boats of every sort which
are landing.
Throngs of gray soldiers, black sailors, and women of various colors
move noisily along the shore. The women are selling rolls, Russian
peasants with samovárs are crying _hot sbiten_;[B] and here upon the
first steps are strewn rusted cannon-balls, bombs, grape-shot, and
cast-iron cannon of various calibers; a little further on is a large
square, upon which lie huge beams, gun-carriages, sleeping soldiers;
there stand horses, wagons, green guns, ammunition-chests, and stacks
of arms; soldiers, sailors, officers, women, children, and merchants
are moving about; carts are arriving with hay, bags, and casks; here
and there Cossacks make their way through, or officers on horseback,
or a general in a drosky. To the right, the street is hemmed in by a
barricade, in whose embrasures stand some small cannon, and beside
these sits a sailor smoking his pipe. On the left a handsome house
with Roman ciphers on the pediment, beneath which stand soldiers and
blood-stained litters—everywhere you behold the unpleasant signs of
a war encampment. Your first impression is inevitably of the most
disagreeable sort. The strange mixture of camp and town life, of a
beautiful city and a dirty bivouac, is not only not beautiful, but
seems repulsive disorder; it even seems to you that every one is
thoroughly frightened, and is fussing about without knowing what he
is doing. But look more closely at the faces of these people who are
moving about you, and you will gain an entirely different idea. Look at
this little soldier from the provinces, for example, who is leading a
troïka of brown horses to water, and is purring something to himself so
composedly that he evidently will not go astray in this motley crowd,
which does not exist for him; but he is fulfilling his duty, whatever
that may be,—watering the horses or carrying arms,—with just as much
composure, self-confidence, and equanimity as though it were taking
place in Tula or Saransk. You will read the same expression on the face
of this officer who passes by in immaculate white gloves, and in the
face of the sailor who is smoking as he sits on the barricade, and in
the faces of the working soldiers, waiting with their litters on the
steps of the former club, and in the face of yonder girl, who, fearing
to wet her pink gown, skips across the street on the little stones.
[B] A drink made of water, molasses, laurel-leaves or salvia, which is
drunk like tea, especially by the lower classes.
Yes! disenchantment certainly awaits you, if you are entering
Sevastopol for the first time. In vain will you seek, on even a
single countenance, for traces of anxiety, discomposure, or even of
enthusiasm, readiness for death, decision,—there is nothing of the
sort. You will see the tradespeople quietly engaged in the duties
of their callings, so that, possibly, you may reproach yourself for
superfluous raptures, you may entertain some doubt as to the justice
of the ideas regarding the heroism of the defenders of Sevastopol
which you have formed from stories, descriptions, and the sights
and sounds on the northern side. But, before you doubt, go upon the
bastions, observe the defenders of Sevastopol on the very scene of
the defence, or, better still, go straight across into that house,
which was formerly the Sevastopol Assembly House, and upon whose roof
stand soldiers with litters,—there you will behold the defenders
of Sevastopol, there you will behold frightful and sad, great and
laughable, but wonderful sights, which elevate the soul.
You enter the great Hall of Assembly. You have but just opened the door
when the sight and smell of forty or fifty seriously wounded men and
of those who have undergone amputation—some in hammocks, the majority
upon the floor—suddenly strike you. Trust not to the feeling which
detains you upon the threshold of the hall; be not ashamed of having
come to _look at_ the sufferers, be not ashamed to approach and address
them: the unfortunates like to see a sympathizing human face, they like
to tell of their sufferings and to hear words of love and interest. You
walk along between the beds and seek a face less stern and suffering,
which you decide to approach, with the object of conversing.
“Where are you wounded?” you inquire, timidly and with indecision, of
an old, gaunt soldier, who, seated in his hammock, is watching you with
a good-natured glance, and seems to invite you to approach him. I say
“you ask timidly,” because these sufferings inspire you, over and above
the feeling of profound sympathy, with a fear of offending and with a
lofty reverence for the man who has undergone them.
“In the leg,” replies the soldier; but, at the same time, you perceive,
by the folds of the coverlet, that he has lost his leg above the knee.
“God be thanked now,” he adds,—“I shall get my discharge.”
“Were you wounded long ago?”
“It was six weeks ago, Your Excellency.”
“Does it still pain you?”
“No, there's no pain now; only there's a sort of gnawing in my calf
when the weather is bad, but that's nothing.”
“How did you come to be wounded?”
“On the fifth bastion, during the first bombardment. I had just trained
a cannon, and was on the point of going away, so, to another embrasure
when _it_ struck me in the leg, just as if I had stepped into a hole
and had no leg.”
“Was it not painful at the first moment?”
“Not at all; only as though something boiling hot had struck my leg.”
“Well, and then?”
“And then—nothing; only the skin began to draw as though it had been
rubbed hard. The first thing of all, Your Excellency, _is not to think
at all_. If you don't think about a thing, it amounts to nothing. Men
suffer from thinking more than from anything else.”
At that moment, a woman in a gray striped dress and a black kerchief
bound about her head approaches you.
She joins in your conversation with the sailor, and begins to tell
about him, about his sufferings, his desperate condition for the space
of four weeks, and how, when he was wounded, he made the litter halt
that he might see the volley from our battery, how the grand-duke spoke
to him and gave him twenty-five rubles, and how he said to him that he
wanted to go back to the bastion to direct the younger men, even if he
could not work himself. As she says all this in a breath, the woman
glances now at you, now at the sailor, who has turned away as though
he did not hear her and plucks some lint from his pillow, and her eyes
sparkle with peculiar enthusiasm.
“This is my housewife, Your Excellency!” the sailor says to you, with
an expression which seems to say, “You must excuse her. Every one knows
it's a woman's way—she's talking nonsense.”
You begin to understand the defenders of Sevastopol. For some reason,
you feel ashamed of yourself in the presence of this man. You would
like to say a very great deal to him, in order to express to him your
sympathy and admiration; but you find no words, or you are dissatisfied
with those which come into your head,—and you do reverence in silence
before this taciturn, unconscious grandeur and firmness of soul, this
modesty in the face of his own merits.
“Well, God grant you a speedy recovery,” you say to him, and you halt
before another invalid, who is lying on the floor and appears to be
awaiting death in intolerable agony.
He is a blond man with pale, swollen face. He is lying on his back,
with his left arm thrown out, in a position which is expressive of
cruel suffering. His parched, open mouth with difficulty emits his
stertorous breathing; his blue, leaden eyes are rolled up, and from
beneath the wadded coverlet the remains of his right arm, enveloped
in bandages, protrude. The oppressive odor of a corpse strikes you
forcibly, and the consuming, internal fire which has penetrated every
limb of the sufferer seems to penetrate you also.
“Is he unconscious?” you inquire of the woman, who comes up to you and
gazes at you tenderly as at a relative.
“No, he can still hear, but he's very bad,” she adds, in a whisper. “I
gave him some tea to-day,—what if he is a stranger, one must still have
pity!—and he hardly tasted it.”
“How do you feel?” you ask him.
The wounded man turns his eyeballs at the sound of your voice, but he
neither sees nor understands you.
“There's a gnawing at my heart.”
A little further on, you see an old soldier changing his linen. His
face and body are of a sort of cinnamon-brown color, and gaunt as a
skeleton. He has no arm at all; it has been cut off at the shoulder. He
is sitting with a wide-awake air, he puts himself to rights; but you
see, by his dull, corpse-like gaze, his frightful gauntness, and the
wrinkles on his face, that he is a being who has suffered for the best
part of his life.
On the other side, you behold in a cot the pale, suffering, and
delicate face of a woman, upon whose cheek plays a feverish flush.
“That's our little sailor lass who was struck in the leg by a bomb on
the 5th,” your guide tells you. “She was carrying her husband's dinner
to him in the bastion.”
“Has it been amputated?”
“They cut it off above the knee.”
Now, if your nerves are strong, pass through the door on the left.
In yonder room they are applying bandages and performing operations.
There, you will see doctors with their arms blood-stained above the
elbow, and with pale, stern faces, busied about a cot, upon which, with
eyes widely opened, and uttering, as in delirium, incoherent, sometimes
simple and touching words, lies a wounded man under the influence of
chloroform. The doctors are busy with the repulsive but beneficent
work of amputation. You see the sharp, curved knife enter the healthy,
white body, you see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness with
a piercing cry and curses, you see the army surgeon fling the amputated
arm into a corner, you see another wounded man, lying in a litter in
the same apartment, shrink convulsively and groan as he gazes at the
operation upon his comrade, not so much from physical pain as from the
moral torture of anticipation.—You behold the frightful, soul-stirring
scenes; you behold war, not from its conventional, beautiful, and
brilliant side, with music and drum-beat, with fluttering flags and
galloping generals, but you behold war in its real phase—in blood, in
suffering, in death.
On emerging from this house of pain, you will infallibly experience
a sensation of pleasure, you will inhale the fresh air more fully,
you will feel satisfaction in the consciousness of your health, but,
at the same time, you will draw from the sight of these sufferings a
consciousness of your nothingness, and you will go calmly and without
any indecision to the bastion.
“What do the death and sufferings of such an insignificant worm as I
signify in comparison with so many deaths and such great sufferings?”
But the sight of the clear sky, the brilliant sun, the fine city, the
open church, and the soldiers moving about in various directions soon
restores your mind to its normal condition of frivolity, petty cares,
and absorption in the present alone.
Perhaps you meet the funeral procession of some officer coming from the
church, with rose-colored coffin, and music and fluttering banners;
perhaps the sounds of firing reach your ear from the bastion, but this
does not lead you back to your former thoughts; the funeral seems to
you a very fine military spectacle, and you do not connect with this
spectacle, or with the sounds, any clear idea of suffering and death,
as you did at the point where the bandaging was going on.
Passing the barricade and the church, you come to the most lively part
of the city. On both sides hang the signs of shops and inns. Merchants,
women in bonnets and kerchiefs, dandified officers,—everything speaks
to you of the firmness of spirit, of the independence and the security
of the inhabitants.
Enter the inn on the right if you wish to hear the conversations of
sailors and officers; stories of the preceding night are sure to be in
progress there, and of Fenka, and the affair of the 24th, and of the
dearness and badness of cutlets, and of such and such a comrade who has
been killed.
“Devil take it, how bad things are with us to-day!” ejaculates the bass
voice of a beardless naval officer, with white brows and lashes, in a
green knitted sash.
“Where?” asks another.
“In the fourth bastion,” replies the young officer, and you are
certain to look at the white-lashed officer with great attention, and
even with some respect, at the words, “in the fourth bastion.” His
excessive ease of manner, the way he flourishes his hands, his loud
laugh, and his voice, which seems to you insolent, reveal to you that
peculiar boastful frame of mind which some very young men acquire
after danger; nevertheless, you think he is about to tell you how bad
the condition of things on the fourth bastion is because of the bombs
and balls. Nothing of the sort! things are bad because it is muddy.
“It's impossible to pass through the battery,” says he, pointing at
his boots, which are covered with mud above the calf. “And my best
gun-captain was killed to-day; he was struck plump in the forehead,”
says another. “Who's that? Mitiukhin?” “No!... What now, are they going
to give me any veal? the villains!” he adds to the servant of the inn.
“Not Mitiukhin, but Abrosimoff. Such a fine young fellow!—he was in the
sixth sally.”
At another corner of the table, over a dish of cutlets with peas, and
a bottle of sour Crimean wine called “Bordeaux,” sit two infantry
officers; one with a red collar, who is young and has two stars on his
coat, is telling the other, with a black collar and no stars, about the
affair at Alma. The former has already drunk a good deal, and it is
evident, from the breaks in his narrative, from his undecided glance
expressive of doubt as to whether he is believed, and chiefly from
the altogether too prominent part which he has played in it all, and
from the excessive horror of it all, that he is strongly disinclined
to bear strict witness to the truth. But these tales, which you will
hear for a long time to come in every corner of Russia, are nothing
to you; you prefer to go to the bastions, especially to the fourth,
of which you have heard so many and such diverse things. When any one
says that he has been in the fourth bastion, he says it with a peculiar
air of pride and satisfaction; when any one says, “I am going to the
fourth bastion,” either a little agitation or a very great indifference
is infallibly perceptible in him; when any one wants to jest about
another, he says, “You must be stationed in the fourth bastion;” when
you meet litters and inquire whence they come, the answer is generally,
“From the fourth bastion.” On the whole, two totally different opinions
exist with regard to this terrible bastion; one is held by those who
have never been in it, and who are convinced that the fourth bastion is
a regular grave for every one who enters it, and the other by those
who live in it, like the white-lashed midshipman, and who, when they
mention the fourth bastion, will tell you whether it is dry or muddy
there, whether it is warm or cold in the mud hut, and so forth.
During the half-hour which you have passed in the inn, the weather has
changed; a fog which before spread over the sea has collected into
damp, heavy, gray clouds, and has veiled the sun; a kind of melancholy,
frozen mist sprinkles from above, and wets the roofs, the sidewalks,
and the soldiers' overcoats.
Passing by yet another barricade, you emerge from the door at the right
and ascend the principal street. Behind this barricade, the houses are
unoccupied on both sides of the street, there are no signs, the doors
are covered with boards, the windows are broken in; here the corners
are broken away, there the roofs are pierced. The buildings seem to
be old, to have undergone every sort of vicissitude and deprivation
characteristic of veterans, and appear to gaze proudly and somewhat
scornfully upon you. You stumble over the cannon-balls which strew
the way, and into holes filled with water, which have been excavated
in the stony ground by the bombs. In the street you meet and overtake
bodies of soldiers, sharpshooters, officers; now and then you encounter
a woman or a child, but it is no longer a woman in a bonnet, but a
sailor's daughter in an old fur cloak and soldier's boots. As you
proceed along the street, and descend a small declivity, you observe
that there are no longer any houses about you, but only some strange
heaps of ruined stones, boards, clay, and beams; ahead of you, upon a
steep hill, you perceive a black, muddy expanse, intersected by canals,
and this that is in front is the fourth bastion. Here you meet still
fewer people, no women are visible, the soldiers walk briskly, you come
across drops of blood on the road, and you will certainly encounter
there four soldiers with a stretcher and upon the stretcher a pale
yellowish face and a blood-stained overcoat. If you inquire, “Where
is he wounded?” the bearers will say angrily, without turning towards
you, “In the leg or the arm,” if he is slightly wounded, or they will
preserve a gloomy silence if no head is visible on the stretcher and he
is already dead or badly hurt.
The shriek of a cannon-ball or a bomb close by surprises you
unpleasantly, as you ascend the hill. You understand all at once,
and quite differently from what you have before, the significance of
those sounds of shots which you heard in the city. A quietly cheerful
memory flashes suddenly before your fancy; your own personality begins
to occupy you more than your observations; your attention to all
that surrounds you diminishes, and a certain disagreeable feeling of
uncertainty suddenly overmasters you. In spite of this decidedly base
voice, which suddenly speaks within you, at the sight of danger, you
force it to be silent, especially when you glance at a soldier who
runs laughing past you at a trot, waving his hands, and slipping down
the hill in the mud, and you involuntarily expand your chest, throw up
your head a little higher, and climb the slippery, clayey hill. As soon
as you have reached the top, rifle-balls begin to whiz to the right
and left of you, and, possibly, you begin to reflect whether you will
not go into the trench which runs parallel with the road; but this
trench is full of such yellow, liquid, foul-smelling mud, more than
knee-deep, that you will infallibly choose the path on the hill, the
more so as you see that _every one uses the path_. After traversing a
couple of hundred paces, you emerge upon a muddy expanse, all ploughed
up, and surrounded on all sides by gabions, earthworks, platforms,
earth huts, upon which great cast-iron guns stand, and cannon-balls
lie in symmetrical heaps. All these seem to be heaped up without any
aim, connection, or order. Here in the battery sit a knot of sailors;
there in the middle of the square, half buried in mud, lies a broken
cannon; further on, a foot-soldier, with his gun, is marching through
the battery, and dragging his feet with difficulty through the sticky
soil. But everywhere, on all sides, in every spot, you see broken
dishes, unexploded bombs, cannon-balls, signs of encampment, all sunk
in the liquid, viscous mud. You seem to hear not far from you the thud
of a cannon-ball; on all sides, you seem to hear the varied sounds
of balls,—humming like bees, whistling sharply, or in a whine like a
cord—you hear the frightful roar of the fusillade, which seems to shake
you all through with some horrible fright.
“So this is it, the fourth bastion, this is it—that terrible, really
frightful place!” you think to yourself, and you experience a little
sensation of pride, and a very large sensation of suppressed terror.
But you are mistaken, this is not the fourth bastion. It is the
Yazonovsky redoubt—a place which is comparatively safe; and not at all
dreadful.
In order to reach the fourth bastion, you turn to the right, through
this narrow trench, through which the foot-soldier has gone. In this
trench you will perhaps meet stretchers again, sailors and soldiers
with shovels; you will see the superintendent of the mines, mud huts,
into which only two men can crawl by bending down, and there you will
see sharpshooters of the Black Sea battalions, who are changing their
shoes, eating, smoking their pipes, and living; and you will still see
everywhere that same stinking mud, traces of a camp, and cast-off iron
débris in every possible form. Proceeding yet three hundred paces,
you will emerge again upon a battery,—on an open space, all cut up
into holes and surrounded by gabions, covered with earth, cannon, and
earthworks. Here you will perhaps see five sailors playing cards under
the shelter of the breastworks, and a naval officer who, perceiving
that you are a new-comer, and curious, will with pleasure show his
household arrangements, and everything which may be of interest to you.
This officer rolls himself a cigarette of yellow paper, with so much
composure as he sits on a gun, walks so calmly from one embrasure
to another, converses with you so quietly, without the slightest
affectation, that, in spite of the bullets which hum above you
even more thickly than before, you become cool yourself, question
attentively, and listen to the officer's replies.
This officer will tell you, but only if you ask him, about the
bombardment on the 5th, he will tell you how only one gun in his
battery could be used, and out of all the gunners who served it only
eight remained, and how, nevertheless, on the next morning, the 6th, he
fired all the guns; he will tell you how a bomb fell upon a sailor's
earth hut on the 5th, and laid low eleven men; he will point out to
you, from the embrasures, the enemy's batteries and entrenchments,
which are not more than thirty or forty fathoms distant from this
point. I fear, however, that, under the influence of the whizzing
bullets, you may thrust yourself out of the embrasure in order to view
the enemy; you will see nothing, and, if you do see anything, you will
be very much surprised that that white stone wall, which is so near you
and from which white smoke rises in puffs,—that that white wall is the
enemy—_he_, as the soldiers and sailors say.
It is even quite possible that the naval officer will want to discharge
a shot or two in your presence, out of vanity or simply for his own
pleasure. “Send the captain and his crew to the cannon;” and fourteen
sailors step up briskly and merrily to the gun and load it—one
thrusting his pipe into his pocket, another one chewing a biscuit,
still another clattering his heels on the platform.
Observe the faces, the bearing, the movements of these men. In every
wrinkle of that sunburned face, with its high cheek-bones, in every
muscle, in the breadth of those shoulders, in the stoutness of those
legs shod in huge boots, in every calm, firm, deliberate gesture,
these chief traits which constitute the power of Russia—simplicity
and straightforwardness—are visible; but here, on every face, it
seems to you that the danger, misery, and the sufferings of war
have, in addition to these principal characteristics, left traces of
consciousness of personal worth, emotion, and exalted thought.
All at once a frightful roar, which shakes not your organs of hearing
alone but your whole being, startles you so that you tremble all over.
Then you hear the distant shriek of the shot as it pursues its course,
and the dense smoke of the powder conceals from you the platform and
the black figures of the sailors who are moving about upon it. You
hear various remarks of the sailors in reference to this shot, and you
see their animation, and an exhibition of a feeling which you had not
expected to behold perhaps—a feeling of malice, of revenge against
the enemy, which lies hidden in the soul of each man. “It struck the
embrasure itself; it seems to have killed two men—see, they've carried
them off!” you hear in joyful exclamation. “And now they are angry;
they'll fire at us directly,” says some one; and, in fact, shortly
after you see a flash in front and smoke; the sentry, who is standing
on the breastwork, shouts “Can-non!” And then the ball shrieks past
you, strikes the earth, and scatters a shower of dirt and stones about
it.
This ball enrages the commander of the battery; he orders a second and
a third gun to be loaded, the enemy also begins to reply to us, and
you experience a sensation of interest, you hear and see interesting
things. Again the sentry shouts, “Can-non!” and you hear the same
report and blow, the same shower, or he shouts “Mortar!” and you hear
the monotonous, even rather pleasant whistle of the bomb, with which it
is difficult to connect the thought of horror; you hear this whistle
approaching you, and increasing in swiftness, then you see the black
sphere, the impact on the ground, the resounding explosion of the bomb
which can be felt. With the whistle and shriek, splinters fly again,
stones whiz through the air, and mud showers over you. At these sounds
you experience a strange feeling of enjoyment, and, at the same time,
of terror. At the moment when you know that the projectile is flying
towards you, it will infallibly occur to you that this shot will kill
you; but the feeling of self-love upholds you, and no one perceives
the knife which is cutting your heart. But when the shot has flown
past without touching you, you grow animated, and a certain cheerful,
inexpressibly pleasant feeling overpowers you, but only for a moment,
so that you discover a peculiar sort of charm in danger, in this game
of life and death, you want cannon-balls or bombs to strike nearer to
you.
But again the sentry has shouted in his loud, thick voice, “Mortar!”
again there is a shriek, and a bomb bursts, but with this noise comes
the groan of a man. You approach the wounded man, at the same moment
with the bearers; he has a strange, inhuman aspect, covered as he is
with blood and mud. A part of the sailor's breast has been torn away.
During the first moments, there is visible on his mud-stained face
only fear and a certain simulated, premature expression of suffering,
peculiar to men in that condition; but, at the same time, as the
stretcher is brought to him and he is laid upon it on his sound side,
you observe that this expression is replaced by an expression of a
sort of exaltation and lofty, inexpressible thought. His eyes shine
more brilliantly, his teeth are clenched, his head is held higher with
difficulty, and, as they lift him up, he stops the bearers and says
to his comrades, with difficulty and in a trembling voice: “Farewell,
brothers!” He tries to say something more, and it is plain that he
wants to say something touching, but he repeats once more: “Farewell,
brothers!”
At that moment, one of his fellow-sailors steps up to him, puts the cap
on the head which the wounded man holds towards him, and, waving his
hand indifferently, returns calmly to his gun. “That's the way with
seven or eight men every day,” says the naval officer to you, in reply
to the expression of horror which has appeared upon your countenance,
as he yawns and rolls a cigarette of yellow paper.
* * * * *
Thus you have seen the defenders of Sevastopol, on the very scene of
the defence, and you go back paying no attention, for some reason
or other, to the cannon-balls and bullets, which continue to shriek
the whole way until you reach the ruined theatre,—you proceed with
composure, and with your soul in a state of exaltation.
The principal and cheering conviction which you have brought away is
the conviction of the impossibility of the Russian people wavering
anywhere whatever—and this impossibility you have discerned not in the
multitude of traverses, breastworks, artfully interlaced trenches,
mines, and ordnance, piled one upon the other, of which you have
comprehended nothing; but you have discerned it in the eyes, the
speech, the manners, in what is called the spirit of the defenders
of Sevastopol. What they are doing they do so simply, with so little
effort and exertion, that you are convinced that they can do a hundred
times more—that they can do anything. You understand that the feeling
which makes them work is not a feeling of pettiness, ambition,
forgetfulness, which you have yourself experienced, but a different
sentiment, one more powerful, and one which has made of them men who
live with their ordinary composure under the fire of cannon, amid
hundreds of chances of death, instead of the one to which all men are
subject who live under these conditions amid incessant labor, poverty,
and dirt. Men will not accept these frightful conditions for the sake
of a cross or a title, nor because of threats; there must be another
lofty incentive as a cause, and this cause is the feeling which rarely
appears, of which a Russian is ashamed, that which lies at the bottom
of each man's soul—love for his country.
Only now have the tales of the early days of the siege of Sevastopol,
when there were no fortifications there, no army, no physical
possibility of holding it, and when at the same time there was not
the slightest doubt that it would not surrender to the enemy,—of the
days when that hero worthy of ancient Greece, Korniloff, said, as he
reviewed the army: “We will die, children, but we will not surrender
Sevastopol;” and our Russians, who are not fitted to be phrase-makers,
replied: “We will die! hurrah!”—only now have tales of that time ceased
to be for you the most beautiful historical legends, and have become
real facts and worthy of belief. You comprehend clearly, you figure
to yourself, those men whom you have just seen, as the very heroes of
those grievous times, who have not fallen, but have been raised by the
spirit, and have joyfully prepared for death, not for the sake of the
city, but of the country. This epos of Sevastopol, whose hero was the
Russian people, will leave mighty traces in Russia for a long time to
come.
Night is already falling. The sun has emerged from the gray clouds,
which cover the sky just before its setting, and has suddenly
illuminated with a crimson glow the purple vapors, the greenish sea
covered with ships and boats rocking on the regular swell, and the
white buildings of the city, and the people who are moving through its
streets. Sounds of some old waltz played by the regimental band on the
boulevard, and the sounds of firing from the bastions, which echo them
strangely, are borne across the water.