Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 1

by Leo Tolstoy

  The white flags are lowered, the engines of death and suffering are sounding again, innocent blood is flowing and the air is filled with moans and curses.

  There, I have said what I wished to say this time. But I am seized by an oppressive doubt. Perhaps I ought to have left it unsaid. What I have said perhaps belongs to that class of evil truths that lie unconsciously hidden in the soul of each man and should not be uttered lest they become harmful, as the dregs in a bottle must not be disturbed for fear of spoiling the wine.…

  Where in this tale is the evil that should be avoided, and where the good that should be imitated? Who is the villain and who the hero of the story? All are good and all are bad.

  Not Kalúgin, with his brilliant courage – bravoure de gentil-homme – and the vanity that influences all his actions, not Praskúkhin, the empty harmless fellow (though he fell in battle for faith, throne, and fatherland), not Mikháylov with his shyness, nor Pesth, a child without firm principles or convictions, can be either the villain or the hero of the tale.

  The hero of my tale – whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful – is Truth.

  1 The Army and Navy Gazette.

  2 A common way in Russia of protecting a bed from the damp or cold of a wall, is to nail a rug or carpet to the wall by the side of the bed.

  3 ‘I tell you, at one time it was the only thing talked of in Petersburg.’

  4 The thick walls of Russian houses allow ample space to sit or lounge at the windows.

  5 ‘Well, gentlemen, I think there will be warm work to-night.’

  6 ‘No, tell me, will there really be anything to-night?’

  7 ‘What a charming sight, eh?’

  8 Rifles, except some clumsy stutzers, had not been introduced into the Russian army, but were used by the besiegers, who had a still greater advantage in artillery. It is characteristic of Tolstoy that, occupied with men rather than mechanics, he does not in these sketches dwell on this disparity of equipment.

  9 Our soldiers fighting the Turks have become so accustomed to this cry of the enemy that they now always say that the French also shout ‘Allah!’ L. T.

  10 ‘You are wounded?’

  11 ‘Excuse me, sire, I am dead.’

  12 The Russian icons are paintings in Byzantine style of God, the Holy Virgin, Christ, or some saint, martyr, or angel. They are usually on wood and often covered over, except the face and hands, with an embossed gilt cover.

  13 ‘Is the flag (of truce) lowered already?’

  14 ‘No, not yet.’

  15 ‘Had it remained dark for another half-hour, the ambuscades would have been recaptured.’

  16 ‘Sir, I will not say no, lest I give you the lie.’

  17 ‘What regiment do you belong to?’

  18 ‘He’s come to look at our works, the confounded —’

  19 ‘And what is this tied bird for?’

  20 ‘Because this is a cartridge pouch of a guard regiment, monsieur, and bears the Imperial eagle.’

  21 ‘And do you belong to the Guards?’

  22 ‘No, monsieur, to the 6th regiment of the line.’

  23 ‘And where did you buy this?’

  24 ‘At Balaclava, monsieur. It’s only made of palm wood.’

  25 ‘Pretty.’

  26 ‘If you will be so good as to keep it as a souvenir of this meeting you will do me a favour.’

  27 ‘Yes, good tobacco, Turkish tobacco … You others have Russian tobacco. Is it good?’

  28 ‘They are not handsome, these d— Russians.’

  29 ‘What are they laughing about?’

  30 ‘Don’t leave your ranks. To your places, damn it!’

  31 ‘Whom I knew very intimately, monsieur. He is one of those real Russian counts of whom we are so fond.’

  32 ‘I am acquainted with a Sazónov, but he is not a count, as far as I know – a small dark man, of about your age.’

  33 ‘Just so, monsieur, that is he. Oh, how I should like to meet the dear count. If you should see him, please be so kind as to give him my compliments – Captain Latour.’

  34 ‘Isn’t it terrible, this sad duty we are engaged in? It was warm work last night, wasn’t it?’

  35 ‘Ah, monsieur, it is terrible! But what fine fellows your men are, what fine fellows! It is a pleasure to fight with such fellows!’

  36 ‘It must be admitted that yours are no fools either.’ (Literally, ‘don’t wipe their noses with their feet’.)

  SEVASTOPOL IN AUGUST 1855

  I

  TOWARDS the end of August, through the hot thick dust of the rocky and hilly highway between Duvánka1 and Bakhchisaráy, an officer’s vehicle was slowly toiling towards Sevastopol (that peculiar kind of vehicle you never meet anywhere else – something between a Jewish britzka, a Russian cart, and a basket).

  In the front of the trap, pulling at the reins, squatted an orderly in a nankeen coat and wearing a cap, now quite limp, that had once belonged to an officer: behind, on bundles and bales covered with a soldier’s overcoat, sat an infantry officer in a summer cloak. The officer, as far as one could judge while he was sitting, was not tall but very broad and massive, not across the shoulders so much as from back to chest. His neck and the back of his head were much developed and very solid. He had no waist, and yet his body did not appear to be stout in that part: on the contrary he was rather lean, especially in the face, which was burnt to an unwholesome yellow. He would have been good-looking had it not been for a certain puffiness and the broad soft wrinkles, not due to age, that blurred the outlines of his features, making them seem larger and giving the face a general look of coarseness and lack of freshness. His small eyes were hazel, with a daring and even insolent expression: he had very thick but not wide moustaches the ends of which were bitten off, and his chin and especially his jaws were covered with an exceedingly strong, thick, black stubble of two days’ growth.

  This officer had been wounded in the head by a bomb splinter on 10 May2 and still wore a bandage, but having felt well again for the past week, he had left the hospital at Simferópol and was now on his way to rejoin his regiment stationed somewhere in the direction of the firing – but whether in Sevastopol itself, on the North Side, or at Inkerman, no one had yet been able to tell him for certain. The sound of frequent firing, especially at times when no hills intercepted it and the wind carried it this way, was already very distinct and seemed quite near. Now an explosion shook the air and made one start involuntarily, now less violent sounds followed one another in quick succession like the roll of drums, broken now and then by a startling boom, and now again all these sounds mingled into a kind of rolling crash, like peals of thunder when a storm is raging in all its fury and rain has just begun to fall in torrents. Everyone was remarking (and one could moreover hear for oneself) that a terrific bombardment was going on. The officer kept telling his orderly to drive faster; he seemed in a hurry to get to his destination. They met a train of Russian peasant-carts that had taken provisions to Sevastopol and were now returning laden with sick and wounded soldiers in grey uniforms, sailors in black cloaks, volunteers with red fezes on their heads, and bearded militiamen. The officer’s trap had to stand still in the thick motionless cloud of dust raised by this train of carts and, frowning and blinking at the dust that filled his eyes, he sat looking at the faces of the sick and wounded as they drove past.

  ‘There’s a soldier of our company – that one who is so weak!’ said the orderly, turning to his master and pointing to a cart laden with wounded men which had just come up to them.

  A bearded Russian in a felt hat sat sideways in the front of the cart plaiting the lash of a whip, the handle of which he held to his side with his elbow. Behind him in the cart five or six soldiers were being jolted along, some lying and some sitting in different positions. One with a bandaged arm and his cloak thrown loosely over his very dirty shirt, though he looked pale and thin, sat upright
in the middle of the cart and raised his hand as if to salute the officer, but probably remembering that he was wounded, pretended that he only meant to scratch his head. Beside him on the bottom of the cart lay a man of whom all that was visible was his two hands holding on to the sides of the cart and his lifted knees swaying to and fro like rags. A third, whose face was swollen and who had a soldier’s cap stuck on the top of his bandaged head, sat on the side of the cart with his legs hanging down over the wheel, and, resting his elbows on his knees, seemed to be dozing. The officer addressed him: ‘Dolzhnikóv!’ he cried.

  ‘Here!’ answered the soldier, opening his eyes and taking off his cap and speaking in such a deep and abrupt bass that it sounded as if twenty soldiers had shouted all together.

  ‘When were you wounded, lad?’

  The soldier’s leaden eyes with their swollen lids brightened. He had evidently recognized his officer.

  ‘Good-day, your Honour!’ said he in the same abrupt bass.

  ‘Where is your regiment stationed now?’

  ‘In Sevastopol. We were going to move on Wednesday, your Honour!’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Don’t know, your Honour – to the North Side, maybe.… Now they’re firing right across, your Honour!’ he added in a long-drawn tone, replacing his cap. ‘Mostly bombs – they reach us right across the bay. He’s giving it us awful hot now …’

  What the soldier said further could not be heard, but the expression of his face and his pose showed that his words, spoken with the bitterness of one suffering, were not reassuring.

  The officer in the trap, Lieutenant Kozeltsóv, was not an ordinary type of man. He was not one of those who live and act this way or that because others live and act so: he did what he chose, and others followed his example and felt sure it was right. He was by nature endowed with many minor gifts: he sang well, played the guitar, talked to the point, and wrote very easily (especially official papers – a knack for writing which he had acquired when he was adjutant of his battalion), but his most remarkable characteristic was his ambitious energy, which though chiefly founded on those same minor talents was in itself a marked and striking feature. He had ambition of a kind most frequently found among men and especially in military circles, and this had become so much a part of his life that he could imagine no other course than to lead or to perish. Ambition was at the root of his innermost impulses and even in his private thoughts he liked to put himself first when he compared himself with others.

  ‘It’s likely I should pay attention to the chatter of a private!’ he muttered, with a feeling of heaviness and apathy at heart and a certain dimness of thought left by the sight of the convoy of wounded men and the words of the soldier, enforced as they were by the sounds of the cannonade.

  ‘Funny fellow, that soldier! Now then, Nikoláev, get on!… Are you asleep?’ he added rather fretfully as he arranged the skirt of his cloak.

  Nikoláev jerked the reins, clicked his tongue, and the trap rolled on at a trot.

  ‘We’ll only stop just to feed the horse, and then go on at once, to-night,’ said the officer.

  II

  WHEN he was entering what was left of a street of ruined stone Tartar houses in Duvánka, Lieutenant Kozeltsóv was stopped by a convoy of bombs and cannon-balls on its way to Sevastopol, that blocked the road.

  Two infantrymen sat on the stones of a ruined wall amid a cloud of dust, eating a water-melon and some bread.

  ‘Going far, comrade?’ asked one of them, with his mouth full of bread, as another soldier with a little bag on his back stopped beside them.

  ‘Going to join our regiment,’ answered the soldier, looking past the water-melon and readjusting his bag. ‘We’ve been nearly three weeks in the province looking for hay for our company, and now we’ve all been recalled, but we don’t know where the regiment is. Some say it crossed to the Korábelnaya last week. Perhaps you have heard, friends?’

  ‘In the town, mate. It’s quartered in the town,’ muttered the other, an old convoy soldier who was digging a clasp-knife into an unripe, whitish water-melon. ‘We only left there this afternoon. [It’s so awful there, mate, you’d better not go, but fall down here somewhere among the hay and lie there for a day or two!]’

  ‘What do you mean, friend?’

  ‘Why, can’t you hear? They’re firing from all sides today, there’s not a place left whole. As for the likes of us as has been killed – there’s no counting ’em!’ And making an expressive gesture with his hand, the speaker set his cap straight.

  The soldier who had stopped shook his head thoughtfully and clicked his tongue, then he took a pipe out of the leg of his boot, and not filling it but merely loosening the scorched tobacco in it, he lit a bit of tinder at the pipe of one of the others. Then he raised his cap and said:

  ‘One can’t get away from God, friends! Good-bye.’ And straightening his bag with a jerk he went his way.

  ‘It would be far better to wait!’ the man who was digging into the water-melon said with conviction.

  ‘It can’t be helped!’ muttered the newcomer, as he squeezed between the wheels of the crowded carts. [‘It seems I too must buy a water-melon for my supper. Just think what people are saying!’]

  III

  THE post-station was full of people when Kozeltsóv drove up. The first one he met in the porch was a very thin young man, the superintendent, bickering with two officers who were following him.

  ‘It’s not only three days you’ll have to wait but maybe ten.… Even generals have to wait, my good sir!’ said the superintendent, evidently wishing to hurt the travellers’ feelings. ‘I can’t hitch myself to a cart for you, can I?’

  ‘Then don’t give horses to anyone, if you have none! Why did you give them to that lackey with the baggage?’ shouted the elder of the officers, who had a tumbler of tea in his hand.

  ‘Just consider a moment, Mr Superintendent,’ said the other, a very young officer, hesitatingly. ‘We are not going for our own pleasure. You see, we are evidently wanted there, since we have been summoned. I shall really have to report it to the general. It will never do, you know.… It seems you don’t respect an officer’s position.’

  But the elder man interrupted him crossly. ‘You always spoil everything! You only hinder me … a man has to know how to speak to these people. There you see, he has lost all respect.… Horses, I say, this very minute!’

  ‘Willingly, my dear sir, but where am I to get them from?’

  The superintendent was silent for a few minutes. Then he suddenly flared up and waving his arms began:

  ‘I know it all very well, my dear sir, and fully understand it, but what am I to do? You give me but’ (a ray of hope showed itself on the faces of the officers) … ‘let me but hold out to the end of the month, and I’ll stay here no longer. I’d rather go to the Malákhov Hill than remain here, I swear I would! Let them do what they please. There’s not a single sound vehicle left in the whole place, and it’s the third day the horses haven’t had a wisp of hay.’ And the superintendent disappeared through the gate.

  Kozeltsóv entered the room together with the officers.

  ‘Well,’ said the elder calmly to the younger, though the moment before he had seemed quite beside himself, ‘we’ve been three months on the road already and can wait a bit longer. No matter, we’ll get there soon enough!’

  The dirty, smoky room was so full of officers and trunks that Kozeltsóv had some difficulty in finding a seat on the window-sill. While observing the faces and listening to the conversation of the others he began rolling himself a cigarette. To the right of the door sat the principal group round a crooked, greasy table on which stood two samovars with verdigris showing on them here and there, and with sugar spread on various bits of paper. A young officer who had not yet grown a moustache, in a new, quilted Caucasian coat which had certainly been made out of a woman’s dressing-gown, was filling a teapot, and there were four other equally young officers in different parts of
the room. One of them lay asleep on the sofa with a fur coat of some kind rolled up under his head; another was standing at the table cutting up some roast mutton for a one-armed officer who sat there. Two officers, one in an adjutant’s cloak, the other in infantry uniform made of fine cloth and with a satchel across his shoulders, were sitting by the stove, and from the way they looked at the others and the manner in which the one with the satchel smoked his cigar, it was plain that they were not officers of the line and were glad they were not. Their manner did not show contempt so much as a certain calm self-satisfaction founded partly on money and partly on intimacy with generals – a consciousness of superiority extending even to a desire to conceal it. Then there was a thick-lipped young doctor and an artillery officer who looked like a German – these were sitting on the sofa almost on the feet of the sleeping officer, counting money. There were also several orderlies, some dozing, others near the door busy with bundles and portmanteaux. Among all these people Kozeltsóv did not recognize a single acquaintance, but he listened with interest to their conversation. He liked the young officers who, as he at once concluded from their appearance, had come straight from the Cadet College; they reminded him of the fact that his brother, who was coming straight from the College too, ought to reach one of the batteries in Sevastopol in a few days’ time. But he did not like the officer with the satchel, whose face he had seen somewhere before – everything about him seemed insolent and repellent. ‘We’ll put him down if he ventures to say anything!’ he thought, and he even moved from the window to the stove and sat down there. Belonging to a line regiment and being a good officer, he had a general dislike for those ‘on the Staff’, and such he at once recognized these officers to be.