‘What is it, Apollón Sergéich?’ asked the senior officer.
‘They order an officer and men to some mortar-battery or other.… As it is I have only four officers, and not enough men for the gun detachments,’ grumbled the commander of the battery, ‘and here they are taking more away.… However, gentlemen, someone will have to go,’ he said after a short silence, ‘the order is, to be at the outposts at seven. Send the sergeant-major to me. Well, who will go? Decide, gentlemen.’
‘There’s your man – he’s not been anywhere yet,’ said Tchernovítski, pointing to Volódya.
The commander of the battery did not answer.
‘Yes, I should like to go,’ said Volódya, feeling a cold sweat break out on his back and neck.
‘No, why should he?’ interrupted the captain. ‘Of course no one would refuse, but one need not offer oneself either: if Apollón Sergéich leaves it to us, let us cast lots as we did last time.’
All agreed. Kraut cut up some paper, rolled up the pieces, and threw them into a cap. The captain joked and on this occasion even ventured to ask the colonel for some wine – to keep up their courage, as he said. Dyádenko sat looking grim, something made Volódya smile. Tchernovítski declared he was sure to draw it. Kraut was perfectly calm. Volódya was allowed to draw first. He took a roll of paper a bit longer than the others but then decided to change it, and taking a thinner and shorter one unrolled it and read, ‘Go.’
‘It’s I,’ he said with a sigh.
‘Well, God be with you! You’ll get your baptism of fire at once,’ said the commander, looking at the ensign’s perturbed face with a kindly smile. ‘But make haste and get ready, and to make it more cheerful for you, Vlang shall go with you as gun-sergeant.’
XXI
VLANG was extremely pleased with his appointment, ran off quickly to get ready, and when dressed came to help Volódya, trying to persuade him to take with him a bed, a fur coat, some back numbers of Fatherland Records, the coffee-pot with the spirit-lamp, and other unnecessary things. The captain advised Volódya to read up in the Handbook (Bezák’s Artillery Officer’s Handbook) about firing mortars, and especially to copy out the tables in it. Volódya set to work at once and noticed to his surprise and joy that his fear of the danger and even greater fear that he was a coward, though it still troubled him a little, was far from what it had been the night before. This was partly the effect of daylight and activity, but was chiefly due to the fact that fear, like every strong feeling, cannot long continue with the same intensity. In short he had already had time to live through the worst of it. At about seven o’clock, just as the sun began to disappear behind the Nicholas Barracks, the sergeant-major came and announced that the men were ready and waiting.
‘I have given Vlánga the list, your Honour will please receive it from him,’ said he.
About twenty artillerymen, with side-arms only, stood behind the corner of the house. Volódya and the cadet walked up to them. ‘Shall I make them a little speech or simply say “Good-day lads,” or say nothing at all?’ he thought. ‘But why not say “Good-day lads”, it is even right that I should,’ and he cried boldly with his ringing voice, ‘Good-day lads!’ The soldiers answered gaily. The fresh young voice sounded pleasantly in the ears of each. Volódya went briskly in front of the soldiers, and though his heart beat as fast as if he had run full-speed for miles his step was light and his face cheerful. As they approached the Malákhov Redoubt and mounted the hill he noticed that Vlang, who kept close to him all the time and had seemed so brave before leaving the house, was continually dodging and stooping, as if all the bombs and cannon-balls, which whistled past very frequently here, were flying straight at him. Some of the soldiers did the same, and in general most of the faces expressed uneasiness if not exactly alarm. These circumstances emboldened Volódya and completely comforted him.
‘So here am I too on the Malákhov mound, which I fancied a thousand times more terrible. And I get along without bowing to the balls, and am even much less frightened than the others. So I am no coward,’ he thought with pleasure, and even with a certain self-complacent rapture.
This feeling however was quickly shaken by a sight he came upon in the twilight at the Kornílov Battery while looking for the commander of the bastion. Four sailors stood by the breastwork holding by its arms and legs the blood-stained corpse of a man without boots or coat and swinging it before heaving it over. (On the second day of this bombardment it was found impossible in some parts to clear away the corpses from the bastions, and they were therefore thrown out into the ditch so as not to be in the way at the batteries.) Volódya felt stunned for a moment when he saw the body bump on the top of the breastwork and then roll down into the ditch, but luckily for him the commander of the bastion met him just then and gave him his orders and a guide to show him the way to the battery and to the bomb-proof assigned to his men. We will not speak of all the dangers and disenchantments our hero lived through that evening: how – instead of the firing he was used to on the Vólkov field amid conditions of perfect exactitude and order which he had expected to meet with here also – he found two damaged mortars, one with its muzzle battered in by a ball, the other standing on the splinters of its shattered platform; how he could not get workmen before the morning to mend the platform; how not a single charge was of the weight specified in the Handbook; how two of the men under him were wounded, and how he was twenty times within a hair’s-breadth of death. Fortunately a gigantic gunner, a seaman who had served with the mortars since the commencement of the siege, had been appointed to assist Volódya, and convinced him of the possibility of using the mortars. By the light of a lantern this gunner showed him all over the battery as he might have shown him over his own kitchen-garden, and undertook to have everything right by the morning. The bomb-proof to which his guide led him was an oblong hole dug in the rocky ground, twenty-five cubic yards in size and covered with oak beams two and a half feet thick. He and all his soldiers installed themselves in it.
As soon as he discovered the little door, not three feet high, Vlang rushed in headlong before anyone else, and at the risk of breaking his limbs against the stone bottom squeezed into the farthest corner and remained there. Volódya, when all the soldiers had settled on the ground along the walls and some had lit their pipes, made up his own bed in a corner, lit a candle, and after lighting a cigarette, lay down.
The reports of continuous firing could be heard overhead but not very distinctly, except from one cannon which stood quite close and shook the bomb-proof with its thunder. In the bomb-proof all was quiet, except when one or other of the soldiers, still rather shy in the presence of the new officer, spoke, asking a neighbour to move a little or to give him a light for his pipe, when a rat scratched somewhere among the stones, or when Vlang, who had not yet recovered and was still looking wildly around him, heaved a deep sigh.
Volódya, on his bed in this quiet corner crammed with people and lighted by a solitary candle, experienced a sensation of cosiness such as he had felt as a child when, playing hide-and-seek, he used to creep into a cupboard or under his mother’s skirt and sit listening in breathless silence, afraid of the dark yet conscious of enjoyment. It felt rather uncanny, yet his spirits were high.
XXII
AFTER ten minutes or so the soldiers grew bolder and began to talk. The more important ones – two non-commissioned officers: an old grey-haired one with every possible medal and cross except the St George, and a young one, a Cantonist,11 who was smoking cigarettes he had rolled himself – settled nearest to the light and to the officer’s bed. The drummer had as usual assumed the duty of waiting upon the officer. The bombardiers and those who had medals came next, and farther off, in the shadow nearer the entrance, sat the humbler folk. It was these last who started a conversation, caused by the noise a man made who came tumbling hurriedly into the bomb-proof.