Part 2

“In the fourth bastion,” replies the young officer; and at this reply you attentively look at him, and feel a certain respect for him. His exaggerated carelessness, his violent gestures, his too loud laughter, which would shortly before have seemed to you impudent, become in your eyes the index of a certain kind of combative spirit common to all young people who are exposed to great danger, and you are sure he is going to explain that it is on account of the shells and the bullets that they are so badly off in the fourth bastion. Nothing of the kind! They are badly off there because the mud is deep.

“Impossible to get up to the battery,” he says, pointing to his boots, muddied even to the upper-leathers.

“My best gun captain was instantly killed to-day by a ball in his forehead,” rejoins a comrade.

“Who was it? Mituchine?”

“No, another man.--Look here! are you never going to bring me my chop, you villain?” says he, speaking to the waiter.--“It was Abrossinoff, as brave a man as lived. He took part in six sorties.”

At the other end of the table two infantry officers are eating veal cutlets with green pease washed down by sour Crimean wine, by courtesy called Bordeaux. One of them, a young man with red collar and two stars on his coat, is telling to his neighbor with a black collar and no stars the details of the fight on the Alma. The first is a little the worse for liquor. His frequently interrupted tale, his uncertain look, which reflects the lack of confidence which his story inspires in his auditor, the fine part he gives himself, the too high color of his picture, lead you to guess that he is wandering away from the absolute truth. But you haven’t anything to do with these tales, which you will hear for a long time yet in the farthest corners of Russia; you have one wish alone, that is, to go straight to the fourth bastion, which you have heard so many and so varied reports about. You will notice that whoever tells you he has been there says it with pride and satisfaction; that whoever is getting ready to go there either shows a little emotion or affects an exaggerated _sangfroid_. If one man is joking with another, he will invariably tell him, “Go to the fourth bastion!” If a wounded man on a stretcher is met, and he is asked where he comes from, he will answer, almost without fail, “From the fourth bastion!” Two completely different notions of this terrible earthwork have been circulated; the first by those who have never put their foot upon it, and for whom it is the inevitable tomb of its defenders, the second by those who, like the little blond officer, live there and simply speak of it, saying it is dry or muddy there, warm or cold.

During the half hour you have been in the restaurant the weather has changed and the fog which spread over the sea has risen. Thick, gray, moist clouds hide the sun. The sky is gloomy, and a fine rain mixed with snow is falling, wetting the roofs, the sidewalks, and the soldiers’ overcoats. After passing one more barricade you go along up the broad street. There are no more shop-signs; the houses are uninhabitable, the doors fastened up with boards, the windows broken. On this side the corner of a wall has been carried away, on that side the roof has been broken in. The buildings look like old veterans tried by grief and misery, and stare at you with pride, one might say with disdain even. On the way you stumble over cannon-balls and into holes, filled with water, which the shells have made in the rocky ground. You pass detachments of soldiers and officers. You occasionally meet a woman or a child, but here the woman does not wear a hat. As for the sailor’s wife, she wears an old fur cloak, and has soldiers’ boots on her feet. The street now leads down a gentle declivity, but there are no more houses around you, nothing but shapeless masses of stones, of boards, of beams, and of clay. Before you, on a steep hill, stretches a black space, all muddy, and cut up with ditches. What you are looking at is the fourth bastion.

Passers become rare, no more women are met. The soldiers walk with rapid step. A few drops of blood stain the path, and you see coming towards you four soldiers bearing a stretcher, and on the stretcher a face of a sallow paleness and a bloody coat. If you ask the bearers where he is wounded, they will reply, with an irritated tone, without looking at you, that he has been hit on the arm or on the leg. If his head has been carried away, if he is dead, they will keep a morose silence.

The near whiz of balls and shells gives you a disagreeable impression while you are climbing the hill, and suddenly you have an entirely different idea from the one you recently had of the meaning of the cannon-shots heard in the city. I do not know what placid and sweet souvenir will suddenly shine out in your memory. Your intimate _ego_ will occupy you so actively that you will no longer think of noticing your surroundings. You will permit yourself to be overcome by a painful feeling of irresolution. However, the sight of a soldier who, with extended arms, is slipping down the hill in the liquid mud, and passes near you, running and laughing, silences your small inward voice, the cowardly counsellor which arises in you in the presence of danger. You straighten up in spite of yourself, you raise your head, and you, in your turn, scale the slippery slope of the clay hill. You have scarcely gone a step before musket-balls hum in your ears, and you ask yourself if it would not be preferable to go under cover of the trench thrown up parallel with the path. But the trench is full of a yellow, fetid, liquid mud, so that you are obliged to go on in the path; all the more since it is the way everybody goes. At the end of two hundred paces you come out on a place surrounded by gabions, embankments, shelters, platforms supporting enormous cast-iron cannon, and heaps of symmetrically piled cannon-balls. These heaps of things give you the impression of a strange and aimless disorder. Here on the battery assembles a group of sailors; there in the middle of the enclosure lies a dismounted cannon, half buried in the sticky mud, through which an infantryman, musket in hand, is going to the battery, pulling out with difficulty first one foot and then the other. Everywhere in this liquid mud you see broken glass, unexploded shells, cannon-balls--every trace of camp life. You seem to hear the noise of a cannon-ball falling only two yards away, and from all sides come the sound of balls, which sometimes hum like bees, sometimes groan and split the air, which vibrates like a violin-string, the whole dominated by the sinister rumbling of cannon, which shakes you from head to foot and fills you with terror.

This is, then, the fourth bastion, this really terrible place, you say to yourself, feeling a little pride and a great deal of repressed fear. Not at all! You are the sport of an illusion. This is not yet the fourth bastion; it is the Jason redoubt, a place which, comparatively, is neither dangerous nor frightful. In order to reach the fourth bastion you enter the narrow trench which the infantryman follows, stooping over. You will perhaps see more stretchers, sailors, soldiers with spades, wires leading to the mines, earth-shelters equally muddy, into which only two men can crawl, and where the battalions of the Black Sea Sharpshooters live, eat, smoke, and put their boots on and off, in the midst of the débris of cast-iron of every form thrown here and there. You will perhaps find here four or five sailors playing cards in the shelter of the parapet, and a naval officer, who, seeing a new face come up, and a spectator at that, will be really pleased to initiate you into the details of the arrangements and give you an explanation of them. This officer, seated on a cannon, is rolling a cigarette with such coolness, passes so quietly from one embrasure to another, and talks with you with such natural calmness, that you recover your own _sangfroid_, in spite of the balls which are whistling here in greater numbers. You ask him questions, and even listen to his tales. The sailor will describe to you, if you will only ask him, the bombardment of the 5th, the state of his battery with a single serviceable cannon, his men reduced to eight, and, moreover, on the morning of the 6th, the battery fired with every gun. He will tell you also how, on the 5th, a shell penetrated a bomb-proof and struck down eleven sailors. He will show you, through the embrasure, the enemy’s trenches and batteries, which are only thirty or forty fathoms distant. I fear, however, that, leaning out of the embrasure in order to examine the enemy better, you will see nothing, or that, if you perceive something, you will be very much surprised to learn that this white and rocky rampart a few steps away, and from which are spouting little clouds of smoke, is really the enemy--“_him_,” as the soldiers and sailors say.

It is very possible that the officer, either through vanity or simply, without reflection, to amuse himself, will be willing to have them fire for you. At his order the captain of the gun and the men, fourteen sailors all told, gayly approach the cannon to load it, some chewing biscuit, others cramming their short pipes in their pockets, while their hobnailed shoes clatter on the platform. Notice the faces of these men, their bearing, their movements, and you will recognize in each of the wrinkles of their sunburned faces with high cheek-bones, in each muscle, in the breadth of the shoulders, in the thickness of the feet shod with colossal boots, in each calm and bold gesture, the principal elements that make up the strength of Russia--simplicity and obstinacy. You will also see that danger, misery, and suffering in the war will have imprinted on these faces the consciousness of their dignity, of high thoughts, of a sentiment.

Suddenly a deafening noise makes you quake from head to foot. You hear at the same instant the shot whistling away, while a thick powder-smoke envelops the platform and the black figures of sailors moving about. Listen to their conversation, notice their animation, and you will discover among them a feeling which you would not expect to meet--that of hatred of the enemy, of vengeance. “It fell straight into the embrasure; two killed. Look! they are carrying them away,” and they shout for joy. “But he is getting angry now, he is going to hit back,” says a voice, and in truth you see at the same instant a flash and spurting smoke, and the sentinel on the parapet calls, “Cannon!” A ball whizzes in your ears and buries itself in the ground, digging it up and casting around a shower of earth and stones. The commander of the battery gets angry, renews the order to load a second, a third gun. The enemy replies, and you experience interesting sensations. The sentinel again calls, “Cannon!” and the same sound, the same blow, and the same throwing up of earth are repeated. If, on the other hand, he cries, “Mortar!” you will be struck by a regular, not disagreeable hissing, which has no connection in your mind with anything terrible. It comes nearer and with greater rapidity. You see the black ball fall to the ground, and the bomb-shell burst with a metallic cracking. The pieces fly in air, whistling and screeching; stones hit each other, and mud splashes over you. You feel a strange mixture of pleasure and fright at these different sounds. At the instant the projectile reaches you, you invariably think it will kill you. But pride keeps you up, and no one notices the dagger that is digging into your heart. So when it has passed without grazing you, you live again; for an instant a feeling of indescribable sweetness possesses you to such a degree that you find a special charm in danger, in the game of life and death. You would like to have a ball or a shell fall nearer, very near you. But the sentinel announces with his strong, full voice, “Mortar!” The hissing, the blow, the explosion are repeated, but accompanied this time by a human groan. You go up to the wounded man at the same time with the stretcher-bearers. He has a strange look, lying in the mud mingled with his blood. Part of his chest has been carried away. In the first moment his mud-splashed face expresses only fright and the premature sensation of pain, a feeling familiar to man in this situation. But when they bring the stretcher to him, and he unassisted lies down on it on his uninjured side, an exalted expression, elevated but restrained thoughts, enliven his features. With brilliant eyes and shut teeth he raises his head with an effort, and at the moment the stretcher-bearers move he stops them, and addressing his comrades with trembling voice, says, “Good-by, brothers!” He would like to say something more, he seems to be trying to find something touching to say, but he limits himself to repeating, “Good-by, brothers!” A comrade approaches the wounded man, puts his cap on his head for him, and turns back to his cannon with a gesture of perfect indifference. At the sight of your terrified expression of face the officer, yawning, and rolling between his fingers a cigarette in yellow paper, says, “So it is every day, up to seven or eight men.”

You have just seen the defenders of Sebastopol on the very place of the defence, and, strange to say, you will retrace your steps without paying the least attention to the bullets and balls which continue to whistle the whole length of the road as far as the ruins of the theatre. You walk with calmness, your soul elevated and strengthened, for you bring away the consoling conviction that never, and in no place, can the strength of the Russian people be broken; and you have gained this conviction not from the solidity of the parapets, from the ingeniously combined intrenchments, from the number of mines, from the cannon heaped one on the other, and all of which you have not in the least understood, but from the eyes, the words, the bearing, from what may be called the spirit of the defenders of Sebastopol.

There is so much simplicity and so little effort in what they do that you are persuaded that they could, if it were necessary, do a hundred times more, that they could do everything. You judge that the sentiment that impels them is not the one you have experienced, mean and vain, but another and more powerful one, which has made men of them, living tranquilly in the mud, working and watching among the bullets, with a hundred chances to one of being killed, contrary to the common lot of their kind. It is not for a cross, for rank; it is not that they are threatened into submitting to such terrible conditions of existence. There must be another, a higher motive power. This motive power is found in a sentiment which rarely shows itself, which is concealed with modesty, but which is deeply rooted in every Russian heart--patriotism. It is now only that the tales that circulated during the first period of the siege of Sebastopol, when there were neither fortifications, nor troops, nor material possibility of holding out there, and when, moreover, no one admitted the thought of surrender--it is now only that the anecdote of Korniloff, that hero worthy of antique Greece, who said to his troops, “Children, we will die, but we will not surrender Sebastopol,” and the reply of our brave soldiers, incapable of using set speeches, “We will die, hurrah!”--it is now only that these stories have ceased to be to you beautiful historical legends, since they have become truth, facts. You will easily picture to yourself, in the place of those you have just seen, the heroes of this period of trial, who never lost courage, and who joyfully prepared to die, not for the defence of the city, but for the defence of the country. Russia will long preserve the sublime traces of the epoch of Sebastopol, of which the Russian people were the heroes!

Day closes; the sun, disappearing at the horizon, shines through the gray clouds which surround it, and lights up with purple rays the rippling sea with its green reflections, covered with ships and boats, the white houses of the city, and the population stirring there. On the boulevard a regimental band is playing an old waltz, which sounds far over the water, and to which the cannonade of the bastions forms a strange and striking accompaniment.

_SEBASTOPOL IN MAY, 1855._

Six months had rolled by since the first bomb-shell thrown from the bastions of Sebastopol ploughed up the soil and cast it upon the enemy’s works. Since that time millions of bombs, bullets, and balls had never ceased flying from bastions to trenches, from trenches to bastions, and the angel of death had constantly hovered over them.

The self-love of thousands of human beings had been sometimes wounded, sometimes satisfied, sometimes soothed in the embrace of death! What numbers of red coffins with coarse palls!--and the bastions still continued to roar. The French in their camp, moved by an involuntary feeling of anxiety and terror, examined in the soft evening light the yellow and burrowed earth of the bastions of Sebastopol, where the black silhouettes of our sailors came and went; they counted the embrasures bristling with fierce-looking cannon. On the telegraph tower an under-officer was watching through his field-glass the enemy’s soldiers, their batteries, their tents, the movements of their troops on the Mamelon-Vert, and the smoke ascending from the trenches. A crowd composed of heterogeneous races, moved by quite different desires, converged from all parts of the world towards this fatal spot. Powder and blood had not succeeded in solving the question which diplomats could not settle.

I.

A regimental band was playing in the besieged city of Sebastopol; a crowd of soldiers and women in Sunday best was promenading in the avenues. The clear sun of spring had risen upon the English works, had passed over the fortifications, over the city, and over the Nicholas barracks, shedding everywhere its just and joyous light; now it was setting into the blue distance of the sea, which gently rippled, sparkling with silvery reflections.

An infantry officer of tall stature and with a slight stoop, busy putting on gloves of doubtful whiteness, though still presentable, came out of one of the small sailor-houses built on the left side of Marine Street. He directed his steps towards the boulevard, fixing his eyes in a distracted manner on the toe of his boots. The expression of his ill-favored face did not denote a high intellectual capacity, but traits of good-fellowship, good sense, honesty, and love of order were to be plainly recognized there. He was not well-built, and seemed to feel some confusion at the awkwardness of his own motions. He had a well-worn cap on his head, and on his shoulders a light cloak of a curious purplish color, under which could be seen his watch-chain, his trousers with straps, and his clean and well-polished boots. If his features had not clearly indicated his pure Russian origin he would have been taken for a German, for an aide-de-camp, or for a regimental baggage-master--he wore no spurs, to be sure--or for one of those cavalry officers who have been exchanged in order to take active service. In fact, he was one of the latter, and while going up to the boulevard he was thinking of a letter he had just received from an ex-comrade, now a landholder in the Government of F----; he was thinking of his comrade’s wife, pale, blue-eyed Natacha, his best friend; he was especially recalling the following passage:

“When they bring us the _Invalide_,[A] Poupka (that was the name the retired uhlan gave his wife) rushes into the antechamber, seizes the paper, and throws herself upon the sofa in the arbor[B] in the parlor, where we have passed so many pleasant winter evenings in your company while your regiment was in garrison in our city. You can’t imagine the enthusiasm with which she reads the story of your heroic exploits! ‘Mikhailoff,’ she often says in speaking of you, ‘is a pearl of a man, and I shall throw myself on his neck when I see him again! _He is fighting in the bastions, he is!_ He will get the cross of St. George, and the newspapers will be full of him.’ Indeed, I am beginning to be jealous of you. It takes the papers a very long time to get to us, and although a thousand bits of news fly from mouth to mouth, we can’t believe all of them. For example: your good friends the _musical girls_ related yesterday how Napoleon, taken prisoner by our cossacks, had been brought to Petersburg--you understand that I couldn’t believe that! Then one of the officials of the war office, a fine fellow, and a great addition to society now our little town is deserted, assured us that our troops had occupied Eupatoria, _thus preventing the French from communicating with Balaklava_; that we lost two hundred men in this business, and they about fifteen thousand. My wife was so much delighted at this that she celebrated it all night long, and she has a feeling that you took part in the action and distinguished yourself.”

In spite of these words, in spite of the expressions which I have put in italics and the general tone of the letter, Captain Mikhaïloff took a sweet and sad satisfaction in imagining himself with his pale, provincial lady friend. He recalled their evening conversations on _sentiment_ in the parlor arbor, and how his brave comrade, the ex-uhlan, became vexed and disputed over games of cards with kopek stakes when they succeeded in starting a game in his study, and how his wife joked him about it. He recalled the friendship these good people had shown for him; and perhaps there was something more than friendship on the side of the pale friend! All these pictures in their familiar frames arose in his imagination with marvellous softness. He saw them in a rosy atmosphere, and, smiling at them, he handled affectionately the letter in the bottom of his pocket.

These memories brought the captain involuntarily back to his hopes, to his dreams. “Imagine,” he thought, as he went along the narrow alley, “Natacha’s joy and astonishment when she reads in the _Invalide_ that I have been the first to get possession of a cannon, and have received the Saint George! I shall be promoted to be captain-major: I was proposed for it a long time ago. It will then be very easy for me to get to be chief of an army battalion in the course of a year, for many among us have been killed, and many others will be during this campaign. Then, in the next battle, when I have made myself well known, they will intrust a regiment to me, and I shall become lieutenant-colonel, commander of the Order of Saint Anne--then colonel--” He was already imagining himself general, honoring with his presence Natacha, his comrade’s widow--for his friend would, according to the dream, have to die about this time--when the sound of the band came distinctly to his ears. A crowd of promenaders attracted his gaze, and he came to himself on the boulevard as before, second-captain of infantry.

II.

He first approached the pavilion, by the side of which several musicians were playing. Other soldiers of the same regiment served as music-stands by holding before them the open music-books, and a small circle surrounded them, quartermasters, under-officers, nurses, and children, engaged in watching rather than in listening. Around the pavilion marines, aides-de-camp, officers in white gloves were standing, were sitting, or promenading. Farther off in the broad avenue could be seen a confused crowd of officers of every branch of the service, women of every class, some with bonnets on, the majority with kerchiefs on their heads; others wore neither bonnets nor kerchiefs, but, astonishing to relate, there were no old women, all were young. Below in fragrant paths shaded by white acacias were seen isolated groups, seated and walking.