On the following evening the band of the regiment of chasseurs again
played on the boulevard. Around the pavilion officers, yunkers,
soldiers, and young women promenaded with a festal air in the paths of
white flowering acacias.
Kalouguine, Prince Galtzine, and another colonel marched arm-in-arm
along the street, talking of the affair of the day before. The chief
subject of this conversation was, as it always is, not of the affair
itself, but of the part the talkers had taken in it. The expression of
their faces, the sound of their voices, had something serious in it, and
it might have been supposed that the losses profoundly affected them.
But, to tell the truth, since no one among them had lost any one dear to
him, they put on this officially mournful expression for propriety’s
sake. Kalouguine and the colonel, although they were very good fellows,
would have asked nothing better than to be present at a similar
engagement every day, in order to receive each time a sword of honor or
the rank of major-general. When I hear a conqueror who sends to their
destruction millions of men in order to satisfy his personal ambition
called a monster, I always want to laugh. Ask sub-lieutenants Petrouchef
Antonoff, and others, and you will see that each is a little Napoleon, a
monster ready to engage in battle, to kill a hundred men, in order to
obtain one more little star or an increase of pay.
“I ask pardon,” said the colonel, “the affair began on the left flank.
_I was there._”
“Perhaps so,” replied Kalouguine, “for I was almost all the time on the
right flank. I went there twice, first to seek the general, then simply
of my own accord to look on. It was there it was hot!”
“If Kalouguine says so it is a fact,” continued the colonel, turning
towards Galtzine. “Do you know that only to-day V---- told me you were a
brave man? Our losses are truly frightful. In my own regiment four
hundred men disabled! I don’t understand how I came out alive.”
At the other end of the boulevard they saw Mikhaïloff’s bandaged head
arise. He was coming to meet them.
“Are you wounded, captain?” asked Kalouguine.
“Slightly--by a stone,” said Mikhaïloff.
“_Le pavillon est il déjà amené?_” said Prince Galtzine, looking over
the head of the captain, and addressing himself to no one in
particular.
“_Non pas encore_,” said Mikhaïloff, very anxious to show that he knew
French.
“Does the armistice still go on?” asked Galtzine, addressing him
politely in Russian, as if to say to the captain, “I know you speak
French with difficulty, why not simply speak Russian?” Upon this the
aides-de-camp went away from Mikhaïloff, who felt, as on the evening
before, very lonesome. Not wishing to come in contact with some of them,
and not making up his mind to approach others, he limited himself to
saluting certain officers, and sat down near the Kazarsky monument to
smoke a cigarette.
Baron Pesth also made his appearance on the boulevard. He related that
he had taken part in the negotiations of the armistice, that he had
chatted with the French officers, and that one of them had said to him,
“If daylight had come an hour later the ambuscades would have been
retaken.”
To which he had replied,
“Sir, I don’t say they would not have been, so that I shall not
contradict you,” and his answer had filled him with pride.
In reality, although he had been present at the conclusion of the
armistice, and had been very desirous of talking with the French, he
had said nothing remarkable. The yunker simply promenaded for a long
time in front of the lines, asking the nearest Frenchmen,
“What regiment do you belong to?”
They answered him, and that was all. As he advanced a little beyond the
neutral zone, a French sentinel, who did not imagine that the Russian
understood his language, flung a formidable curse at him.
“He is coming to examine our works, this damned--”
Indeed, after that the yunker returned home, composing along the road
the French phrases he had just retailed to his acquaintances.
Captain Zobkine was also seen on the promenade, shouting with a loud
voice; Captain Objogoff, with his torn uniform; the captain of
artillery, who asked no favors of any one; the yunker, in love--in a
word, all the personages of the day before, swayed by the same eternal
moving forces. Praskoukine, Neferdoff, and several others were alone
absent. Nobody thought of them. Nevertheless, their bodies were neither
washed, nor dressed, nor buried in the earth.