So it continued for more than an hour. The sun had risen to about half the height of the trees, and Hadji Murád was already thinking of leaping on his horse and trying to make his way to the river, when the shouts were heard of many men who had just arrived. These were Hadji Aga of Mekhtulí with his followers. There were about two hundred of them. Hadji Aga had once been Hadji Murád’s kunák and had lived with him in the mountains, but he had afterwards gone over to the Russians. With him was Akhmet Khan, the son of Hadji Murád’s old enemy.
Like Kargánov, Hadji Aga began by calling to Hadji Murád to surrender, and Hadji Murád answered as before with a shot.
‘Swords out, my men!’ cried Hadji Aga, drawing his own; and a hundred voices were raised by men who rushed shrieking in among the shrubs.
The militiamen ran in among the shrubs, but from behind the entrenchment came the crack of one shot after another. Some three men fell, and the attackers stopped at the outskirts of the clump and also began firing. As they fired they gradually approached the entrenchment, running across from behind one shrub to another. Some succeeded in getting across, others fell under the bullets of Hadji Murád or of his men. Hadji Murád fired without missing; Gamzálo too rarely wasted a shot, and shrieked with joy every time he saw that his bullet had hit its aim. Khan Mahomá sat at the edge of the ditch singing ‘Il lyakha il Allakh!’ and fired leisurely, but often missed. Eldár’s whole body trembled with impatience to rush dagger in hand at the enemy, and he fired often and at random, constantly looking round at Hadji Murád and stretching out beyond the entrenchment. The shaggy Khanéfi, with his sleeves rolled up, did the duty of a servant even here. He loaded the guns which Hadji Murád and Khan Mahomá passed to him, carefully driving home with a ramrod the bullets wrapped in greasy rags, and pouring dry powder out of the powder-flask onto the pans. Bata did not remain in the ditch as the others did, but kept running to the horses, driving them away to a safer place and, shrieking incessantly, fired without using a prop for his gun. He was the first to be wounded. A bullet entered his neck and he sat down spitting blood and swearing. Then Hadji Murád was wounded, the bullet piercing his shoulder. He tore some cotton wool from the lining of his beshmét, plugged the wound with it, and went on firing.
‘Let us fly at them with our swords!’ said Eldár for the third time, and he looked out from behind the bank of earth ready to rush at the enemy; but at that instant a bullet struck him and he reeled and fell backwards onto Hadji Murád’s leg. Hadji Murád glanced at him. His eyes, beautiful like those of a ram, gazed intently and seriously at Hadji Murád. His mouth, the upper lip pouting like a child’s, twitched without opening. Hadji Murád drew his leg away from under him and continued firing.
Khanéfi bent over the dead Eldár and began taking the unused ammunition out of the cartridge-cases of his coat.
Khan Mahomá meanwhile continued to sing, loading leisurely and firing. The enemy ran from shrub to shrub, hallooing and shrieking and drawing ever nearer and nearer.
Another bullet hit Hadji Murád in the left side. He lay down in the ditch and again pulled some cotton wool out of his beshmét and plugged the wound. This wound in the side was fatal and he felt that he was dying. Memories and pictures succeeded one another with extraordinary rapidity in his imagination. Now he saw the powerful Abu Nutsal Khan, dagger in hand and holding up his severed cheek he rushed at his foe; then he saw the weak, bloodless old Vorontsóv with his cunning white face, and heard his soft voice; then he saw his son Yusúf, his wife Sofiát, and then the pale, red-bearded face of his enemy Shamil with its half-closed eyes. All these images passed through his mind without evoking any feeling within him – neither pity nor anger nor any kind of desire: everything seemed so insignificant in comparison with what was beginning, or had already begun, within him.
Yet his strong body continued the thing that he had commenced. Gathering together his last strength he rose from behind the bank, fired his pistol at a man who was just running towards him, and hit him. The man fell. Then Hadji Murád got quite out of the ditch, and limping heavily went dagger in hand straight at the foe.
Some shots cracked and he reeled and fell. Several militiamen with triumphant shrieks rushed towards the fallen body. But the body that seemed to be dead suddenly moved. First the uncovered, bleeding, shaven head rose; then the body with hands holding to the trunk of a tree. He seemed so terrible, that those who were running towards him stopped short. But suddenly a shudder passed through him, he staggered away from the tree and fell on his face, stretched out at full length like a thistle that had been mown down, and he moved no more.
He did not move, but still he felt.
When Hadji Aga, who was the first to reach him, struck him on the head with a large dagger, it seemed to Hadji Murád that someone was striking him with a hammer and he could not understand who was doing it or why. That was his last consciousness of any connexion with his body. He felt nothing more and his enemies kicked and hacked at what had no longer anything in common with him.
Hadji Aga placed his foot on the back of the corpse and with two blows cut off the head, and carefully – not to soil his shoes with blood – rolled it away with his foot. Crimson blood spurted from the arteries of the neck, and black blood flowed from the head, soaking the grass.
Kargánov and Hadji Aga and Akhmet Khan and all the militiamen gathered together – like sportsmen round a slaughtered animal – near the bodies of Hadji Murád and his men (Khanéfi, Khan Mahomá, and Gamzálo they bound), and amid the powder-smoke which hung over the bushes they triumphed in their victory.
The nightingales, that had hushed their songs while the firing lasted, now started their trills once more: first one quite close, then others in the distance.
* * *
It was of this death that I was reminded by the crushed thistle in the midst of the ploughed field.
1 About £1, for at that time the ruble was worth about three shillings.
2 ‘Well now! You’re going to tell me what it is.’
‘But, my dear.…
‘Don’t “my dear” me! It was an emissary, wasn’t it?’
‘Supposing it was, still I must not tell you.’
‘You must not? Well then, I will tell you!’
‘You?’
3 ‘It is a thing of value.’
4 ‘We must find an opportunity to make him a present.’
5 ‘This is the opportunity! Give him the watch.’
6 ‘You would do much better to remain at home … this is my business, and not yours.’
‘You cannot prevent my going to see the general’s wife!’
7 A popular expression, meaning that the sender of the message is already dead.
8 A town thirty miles south-west of Smolensk, at which, in November 1812, the rear-guard of Napoleon’s army was defeated during the retreat from Moscow. It is mentioned in War and Peace.
9 ‘Excellent, my dear!’
10 ‘Simon has had good luck.’
11 ‘How horrible!’
12 ‘War is war.’
13 ‘All this is thanks to you!’
14 ‘He has had some unpleasantness with the commandant of the place. Simon was in the wrong.’
15 Count Michael Tariélovich Lóris-Mélikov, who afterwards became Minister of the Interior and framed the Liberal ukase which was signed by Alexander II the day that he was assassinated.