Vlang was exceedingly well pleased with the duty assigned to him, and
ran hastily to make his preparations, and, when he was dressed, he went
to the assistance of Volodya, and tried to persuade the latter to take
his cot and fur coat with him, and some old “Annals of the Country,”
and a spirit-lamp coffee-pot, and other useless things. The captain
advised Volodya to read up his “Manual,”[L] first, about mortar-firing,
and immediately to copy the tables out of it.
[L] “Manual for Artillery Officers,” by Bezak.
Volodya set about this at once, and, to his amazement and delight, he
perceived that, though he was still somewhat troubled with a sensation
of fear of danger, and still more lest he should turn out a coward, yet
it was far from being to that degree to which it had affected him on
the preceding evening. The reason for this lay partly in the daylight
and in active occupation, and partly, principally, also, in the fact
that fear and all powerful emotions cannot long continue with the same
intensity. In a word, he had already succeeded in recovering from his
terror.
At seven o'clock, just as the sun had begun to hide itself behind the
Nikolaevsky barracks, the sergeant came to him, and announced that the
men were ready and waiting for him.
“I have given the list to Vlang_a_. You will please to ask him for it,
Your Honor!” said he.
Twenty artillery-men, with side-arms, but without loading-tools, were
standing at the corner of the house. Volodya and the yunker stepped up
to them.
“Shall I make them a little speech, or shall I simply say, ‘Good day,
children!’ or shall I say nothing at all?” thought he. “And why should
I not say, ‘Good day, children!’ Why, I ought to say that much!” And he
shouted boldly, in his ringing voice:—
“Good day, children!”
The soldiers responded cheerfully. The fresh, young voice sounded
pleasant in the ears of all. Volodya marched vigorously at their head,
in front of the soldiers, and, although his heart beat as if he had run
several versts at the top of his speed, his step was light and his
countenance cheerful.
On arriving at the Malakoff mound, and climbing the slope, he
perceived that Vlang, who had not lagged a single pace behind him,
and who had appeared such a valiant fellow at home in the house, kept
constantly swerving to one side, and ducking his head, as though all
the cannon-balls and bombs, which whizzed by very frequently in that
locality, were flying straight at him. Some of the soldiers did the
same, and the faces of the majority of them betrayed, if not fear, at
least anxiety. This circumstance put the finishing touch to Volodya's
composure and encouraged him finally.
“So here I am also on the Malakoff mound, which I imagined to be a
thousand times more terrible! And I can walk along without ducking my
head before the bombs, and am far less terrified than the rest! So I
am not a coward, after all?” he thought with delight, and even with a
somewhat enthusiastic self-sufficiency.
But this feeling was soon shaken by a spectacle upon which he stumbled
in the twilight, on the Kornilovsky battery, in his search for the
commander of the bastion. Four sailors standing near the breastworks
were holding the bloody body of a man, without shoes or coat, by its
arms and legs, and staggering as they tried to fling it over the
ramparts.
(On the second day of the bombardment, it had been found impossible,
in some localities, to carry off the corpses from the bastions, and so
they were flung into the trench, in order that they might not impede
action in the batteries.)
Volodya stood petrified for a moment, as he saw the corpse waver on
the summit of the breastworks, and then roll down into the ditch;
but, luckily for him, the commander of the bastion met him there,
communicated his orders, and furnished him with a guide to the battery
and to the bomb-proofs designated for his service. We will not
enumerate the remaining dangers and disenchantments which our hero
underwent that evening: how, instead of the firing, such as he had seen
on the Volkoff field, according to the rules of accuracy and precision,
which he had expected to find here, he found two cracked mortars, one
of which had been crushed by a cannon-ball in the muzzle, while the
other stood upon the splinters of a ruined platform; how he could not
obtain any workmen until the following morning in order to repair the
platform; how not a single charge was of the weight prescribed in the
“Manual;” how two soldiers of his command were wounded, and how he was
twenty times within a hair's-breadth of death.
Fortunately, there had been assigned for his assistant a gun-captain
of gigantic size, a sailor, who had served on the mortars since the
beginning of the siege, and who convinced him of the practicability of
using them, conducted him all over the bastion, with a lantern, during
the night, exactly as though it had been his own kitchen-garden, and
who promised to put everything in proper shape on the morrow.
The bomb-proof to which his guide conducted him was excavated in the
rocky soil, and consisted of a long hole, two cubic fathoms in extent,
covered with oaken planks an arshin in thickness. Here he took up his
post, with all his soldiers. Vlang was the first, when he caught sight
of the little door, twenty-eight inches high, of the bomb-proof, to
rush headlong into it, in front of them all, and, after nearly cracking
his skull on the stone floor, he huddled down in a corner, from which
he did not again emerge.
And Volodya, when all the soldiers had placed themselves along the wall
on the floor, and some had lighted their pipes, set up his bed in one
corner, lighted a candle, and lay upon his cot, smoking a cigarette.
Shots were incessantly heard, over the bomb-proof, but they were not
very loud, with the exception of those from one cannon, which stood
close by and shook the bomb-proof with its thunder. In the bomb-proof
itself all was still; the soldiers, who were a little shy, as yet, of
the new officer, only exchanged a few words, now and then, as they
requested each other to move out of the way or to furnish a light for a
pipe. A rat scratched somewhere among the stones, or Vlang, who had not
yet recovered himself, and who still gazed wildly about him, uttered a
sudden vigorous sigh.
Volodya, as he lay on his bed, in his quiet corner, surrounded by
the men, and illuminated only by a single candle, experienced that
sensation of well-being which he had known as a child, when, in the
course of a game of hide-and-seek, he used to crawl into a cupboard or
under his mother's skirts, and listen, not daring to draw his breath,
and afraid of the dark, and yet conscious of enjoying himself. He felt
a little oppressed, but cheerful.