Towards the end of the month of August there was slowly moving along the stony Sebastopol road between Douvanka[E] and BaktchisaraÏ an officer’s carriage of peculiar form, unknown elsewhere, which held a middle place in construction between a basket-wagon, a Jewish britchka, and a Russian cart.

In this carriage a servant, dressed in linen, with a soft and shapeless officer’s cap on his head, held the reins. Seated behind him, on parcels and bags covered with a soldier’s overcoat, was an officer in a summer cloak, small in stature, as well as could be judged from the position he was in, who was less remarkable for the massive squareness of his shoulders than for the thickness of his body between his chest and his back. His neck from the nape to the shoulder was heavy and largely developed, and the muscles were firmly extended. What is commonly spoken of as a waist did not exist, nor the stomach either, although he was far from being fat; and his face, upon which was spread a layer of yellow and unhealthy sunburn, was noticeable by its thinness. It would have passed for an attractive one if it had not been for a certain bloating of the flesh and a skin furrowed by deep wrinkles, which, interweaving, distorted the features, took away all freshness, and gave a brutal expression. His small, brown, extraordinarily keen eyes had an almost impudent look. His very thick mustache, which he was in the habit of biting, did not extend much in breadth. His cheeks and his chin, which he had not shaved for two days, were covered with a black and thick beard. Wounded on the head by a piece of shell on the 10th of May, and still wearing a bandage, he felt, nevertheless, entirely cured, and left the hospital at Sympheropol to join his regiment, posted somewhere there in the direction where shots could be heard; but he had not been able to find out whether it was at Sebastopol itself or at SevernaÏa or at Inkerman. The cannonade was distinctly heard, and seemed very near when the hills did not cut off the sound which was brought by the wind. Occasionally a tremendous explosion shook the air and made you tremble in spite of yourself. Now and then less violent noises, like a drum-beat, followed each other at short intervals, intermingled with a deafening rumble; or perhaps all was confounded in a hubbub of prolonged rolls, like peals of thunder at the height of a storm when the rain begins to fall. Every one said, and indeed it could be heard, that the violence of the bombardment was terrible. The officer urged his servant to hasten. They met a line of carts driven by Russian peasants, who had carried provisions to Sebastopol, and who were on their way back, bringing sick and wounded soldiers in gray overcoats, sailors in black pilot-coats, volunteers in red fez caps, and bearded militiamen. The officer’s carriage was forced to stop, and he, grimacing and squinting his eyes in the impenetrable and motionless cloud of dust raised by the carts, which flew into the eyes and ears on all sides, examined the faces as they passed by.

“There is a sick soldier of our company,” said the servant, turning towards his master and pointing to a wounded man.

Seated sidewise on the front of his cart a Russian peasant, wearing his whole beard, a felt cap on his head, was tying a knot in an enormous whip, which he held by the handle under his elbow. He turned his back to four or five soldiers shaken and tossed about in the vehicle. One of them, his arm tied up, his overcoat thrown on over his shirt, seated erect and firm, although somewhat pale and thin, occupied the middle place. Perceiving the officer, he instinctively raised his hand to his cap, but remembering his wound, he made believe he wanted to scratch his head. Another one was lying down beside him on the bottom of the cart. All that could be seen of him was his two hands clinging to the wooden bars, and his two raised knees swinging nervelessly like two hempen dish-rags. A third, with swollen face, his head wrapped with a cloth on which was placed his soldier’s cap, seated sidewise, his legs hanging outside and grazing the wheel, was dozing, his hands resting on his knees.

“Doljikoff!” the traveller shouted at him.

“Present!” replied the latter, opening his eyes and taking off his cap. His bass voice was so full, so tremendous, that it seemed to come out of the chest of twenty soldiers together.

“When were you wounded?”

“Health to your Excellency!”[F] he cried with his strong voice, his glassy and swollen eyes growing animated at the sight of his superior officer.

“Where is the regiment?”

“At Sebastopol, your Excellency. They are thinking of going away from there Wednesday.”

“Where to?”

“They don’t know—to SevernaÏa, no doubt, your Excellency. At present,” he continued, dragging his words, “he is firing straight through everything, especially with shells, even away into the bay. He is firing in a frightful manner!—” And he added words which could not be understood; but from his face and from his position it could be guessed that, with a suffering man’s sense of injury, he was saying something of a not very consoling nature.

Sub-lieutenant Koseltzoff, who had just asked these questions, was neither an officer of ordinary stamp nor among the number of those who live and act in a certain way because others live and act thus. His nature had been richly endowed with inferior qualities. He sang and played the guitar in an agreeable manner, he conversed well, and wrote with facility, especially official correspondence, of which he had got the trick during his service as battalion aide-de-camp. His energy was remarkable, but this energy only received its impulse from self-love, and although grafted on this second-rate capacity, it formed a salient and characteristic trait of his nature. That kind of self-love which is most commonly developed among men, especially among military men, was so filtered through his existence that he did not conceive a possible choice between “first or nothing.” Self-love was then the motive force of his most intimate enthusiasms. Even alone in his own presence he was fond of considering himself superior to those with whom he compared himself.

“Come! I am not going to be the one to listen to ‘Moscow’s’[G] chatter!” murmured the sub-lieutenant, whose thoughts had been troubled somewhat by meeting the train of wounded; and the soldier’s words, the importance of which was increased and confirmed at each step by the sound of the cannonade, weighed heavily on his heart.

“They are curious fellows these ‘Moscows’—Come, NicolaÏeff, forward! you are asleep, I think,” he angrily shouted at his servant, throwing back the lappels of his coat.

NicolaÏeff shook the reins, made a little encouraging sound with his lips, and the wagon went off at a trot.

“We will stop only to feed them,” said the officer, “and then on the road—forward!”

Just as he entered the street of Douvanka, where everything was in ruins, Sub-lieutenant Koseltzoff was stopped by a wagon-train of cannon-balls and shells going towards Sebastopol, which was halted in the middle of the road.

Two infantrymen, seated in the dust on the stones of an overthrown wall, were eating bread and watermelon.

“Are you going far, fellow-countryman?” said one of them, chewing his mouthful. He was speaking to a soldier standing near them with a small knapsack on his shoulder.

“We are going to join our company; we have come from the country,” replied the soldier, turning his eyes from the watermelon and arranging his knapsack. “For three weeks we have been guarding the company’s hay, but now they have summoned everybody, and we don’t know where our regiment is to-day. They tell us that since last week our fellows have been at KorabelnaÏa. Do you know anything about it, gentlemen?”

“It is in the city, brother, in the city,” replied an old soldier of the wagon-train, busy cutting with his pocket-knife the white meat of an unripe melon. “We just came from there. What a terrible business, brother!”

“What is that, gentlemen?”

“Don’t you hear how he is firing now? No shelter anywhere! It is frightful how many of our men he has killed!” added the speaker, making a gesture, and straightening up his cap.

The soldier on his travels pensively shook his head, clacked his tongue, took his short pipe out of its box, stirred up the half-burned tobacco with his finger, lighted a bit of tinder from the pipe of a comrade who was smoking, and lifting his cap, said,

“There is no one but God, gentlemen. We say good-by to you;” and putting his knapsack in place, went his way.

“Ah! it is better worth while to wait,” said the watermelon eater, with tone of conviction.

“It is all the same,” murmured the soldier, settling the knapsack on his back, and worming his way between the wheels of the halted carts.

III.

At the station for horses Koseltzoff found a crowd of people, and the first figure he perceived was the postmaster in person, very young and very thin, quarrelling with two officers.

“You will not only wait twenty-four hours but ten times twenty-four hours. Generals wait too,” he said, with the evident wish to stir them up in a lively manner. “And I am not going to hitch myself in, you understand!”

“If this is so, if there are no horses, they can’t be given to any one. Why, then, are they given to a servant who is carrying baggage?” shouted one of the two soldiers, holding a glass of tea in his hand.

Although he carefully avoided using personal pronouns, it could easily be guessed that he would have liked to say thee and thou to his interlocutor.

“I want you to understand, Mr. Postmaster,” hesitatingly said the other officer, “that we are not travelling for our pleasure. If we have been summoned it is because we are necessary. You can be sure I will tell the general, for it really seems as if you have no respect for the rank of officer.”

“You spoil my work every time, and you are in my way,” rejoined his comrade, half vexed. “Why do you talk to him about respect? You have to speak to him in another manner. Horses!” he suddenly shouted, “horses, this instant!”

“I wouldn’t ask better than to give them to you, but where can I get them? I understand very well, my friend,” continued the postmaster, after a moment of silence, and warming up by degrees as he gesticulated, “but what do you want me to do? Let me just”—and the officers’ faces at once had a hopeful expression—“keep soul and body together to the end of the month, and then I won’t be seen any longer. I would rather go to the Malakoff than remain here, God knows! Do what you like—but I haven’t a single wagon in good condition, and for three days the horses haven’t seen a handful of hay.”

At these words he disappeared. Koseltzoff and the two officers entered the house.

“So!” said the elder to the younger with a calm tone, which strongly contrasted with his recent wrath. “We are already three months on the road. Let’s wait. It is no misfortune; there isn’t any hurry.”

Koseltzoff with difficulty found in the room of the post-house, all smoky, dirty, and filled with officers and trunks, an empty corner near the window. He sat down there, and, rolling a cigarette, began to examine faces and to listen to conversations. The chief group was placed on the right of the entrance door, around a shaky and greasy table on which two copper tea-urns, stained here and there with verdigris, were boiling; lump-sugar was strewn about in several paper wrappings. A young officer without a mustache, in a new Circassian coat, was pouring water into a teapot; four others of about his own age were scattered in different corners of the room. One of them, his head placed on a cloak which served him as a pillow, was sleeping on a divan; another, standing near a table, was cutting roast mutton into small mouthfuls for a one-armed comrade. Two officers, one in an aide-de-camp’s overcoat, the other in a fine cloth infantry overcoat, and carrying a saddle-bag, were sitting beside the stove; and it could be readily divined by the way they looked at the others, by the manner the one with the saddle-bag was smoking, that they were not officers of the line, and that they were very glad of it. Their manner did not betray scorn but a certain satisfaction with themselves, founded partly on their relations with the generals, and on a feeling of superiority developed to such a point that they tried to conceal it from others. There was also in the place a doctor with fleshy lips, and an artilleryman with a German physiognomy, seated almost on the feet of the sleeper, busily counting money. Four men-servants, some dozing, some fumbling in the trunks and the packets heaped up near the door, completed the number of those present, among whom Koseltzoff found not a face he knew. The young officers pleased him. He guessed at once from their appearance that they had just come out of school, and this called to his mind that his young brother was also coming straight therefrom to serve in one of the Sebastopol batteries. On the other hand, the officer with the saddle-bag, whom he believed he had met somewhere, altogether displeased him. He found him to have an expression of face so antipathetic and so insolent that he was going to sit down on the large base of the stove, with the intention of putting him in his proper place if he happened to say anything disagreeable. In his quality of brave and honorable officer at the front he did not like the staff-officers, and for such he took these at the first glance.

IV.

“It is bad luck,” said one of the young fellows, “to be so near the end and not be able to get there. There will perhaps be a battle to-day, even, and we will not be in it.”

The sympathetic timidity of a young man who fears to say something out of place could be guessed from the slightly sharp sound of his voice, and from the youthful rosiness which spread in patches over his fresh face.

The one-armed officer looked at him with a smile.

“You will have time enough, believe me,” he said.

The young officer respectfully turning his eyes upon the thin face of the latter suddenly lighted up by a smile, continued to pour the tea in silence. And truly the figure, the position of the wounded man, and, above all, the fluttering sleeve of his uniform, gave him that appearance of calm indifference which seemed to reply to everything said and done about him, “All this is very well, but I know it all, and I could do it if I wanted to.”

“What shall we decide to do?” asked the young officer of his comrade with the Circassian coat. “Shall we pass the night here, or shall we push on with our single horse?

“Just think of it, captain,” he continued, when his companion had declined his suggestion (he spoke to the one-armed man, picking up a knife he had dropped), “since they told us that horses could not be had at Sebastopol at any price, we bought one out of the common purse at Sympheropol.”

“Did they skin you well?”

“I don’t know anything about it, captain. We paid for the whole thing, horse and wagon, ninety rubles. Is it very dear?” he added, addressing all who looked at him, Koseltzoff included.

“It isn’t too dear if the horse is young,” said the latter.

“Isn’t it? Nevertheless, we have been assured it was dear. He limps a little, it is true, but that will go off. They told us he was very strong.”

“What institution are you from?” Koseltzoff asked him, wishing to get news of his brother.

“We belonged to the regiment of the nobility. There are six of us who are going of our own accord to Sebastopol,” replied the loquacious little officer, “but we don’t exactly know where our battery is. Some say at Sebastopol, but this gentleman says it is at Odessa.”

“Wouldn’t you have been able to find out at Sympheropol?” asked Koseltzoff.

“They didn’t know anything there. Imagine it. They insulted one of our comrades who went to the government office for information! It was very disagreeable. Wouldn’t you like to have this cigarette, already rolled?” he continued, offering it to the one-armed officer, who was looking for his cigar-case.

The young man’s enthusiasm even entered into the little attentions he showered on him.

“You have also just come from Sebastopol?” he rejoined. “Heavens, how astonishing! At Petersburg we did nothing but think of you all, you heroes!” he added, turning to Koseltzoff with good-fellowship and respect.

“What if you are obliged to go back there?” asked the latter.

“That’s just what we are afraid of; for after having bought the horse and what we had to get—this coffee-pot, for example, and a few other trifles—we are left without a penny,” he said, in a lower tone, casting a look at his companion on the sly, “so that we don’t know how we are going to get out of it.”

“You haven’t received money on the road, then?” Koseltzoff asked him.

“No,” murmured the young man, “but they promised to give it to us here.”

“Have you the certificate?”

“I know the certificate is the chief thing. One of my uncles, a Senator at Moscow, could have given it to me, but I was assured I should receive it here without fail.”

“Doubtless.”

“I believe it also,” replied the young officer, in a tone which proved that after having repeated the same question in thirty different places, and having received different replies everywhere, he no longer believed any one.

V.

“Who ordered beet soup?” shouted the house-keeper at this moment, a stout, slovenly dressed wench, about forty years old, who was bringing in a great earthen dish.

There was a general silence, and every eye was turned towards the woman. One of the officers even winked, exchanging with his comrade a look which plainly referred to the matron.

“But it was Koseltzoff who ordered it,” rejoined the young officer; “we must wake him up. Halloo! come and eat,” he added, approaching the sleeper and shaking him by the shoulder.

A youth of seventeen years, with black, lively, sparkling eyes and red cheeks, rose with a bound, and having involuntarily pushed against the doctor, said, “A thousand pardons!” rubbing his eyes and standing in the middle of the room.

Sub-lieutenant Koseltzoff immediately recognized his younger brother and went up to him.

“Do you know me?” he asked.

“Oh, oh, what an astonishing thing!” cried the younger, embracing him.

Two kisses were heard, but just as they were about to give each other a third, as the custom is, they hesitated a moment. It might have been said that each asked himself why he must kiss three times.

“How glad I am to see you!” said the elder, leading his brother outside. “Let’s chat a bit.”

“Come, come! I don’t want any soup now. Eat it up, FÉderson,” said the youth to his comrade.

“But you were hungry—”

“No, I don’t want it now.”

Once outside on the piazza, after the first joyous outbursts of the youth, who went on to ask his brother questions without speaking to him of that which concerned himself, the latter, profiting by a moment of silence, asked him why he had not gone into the guard, as they had expected him to do.

“Because I wanted to go to Sebastopol. If everything comes out all right, I shall gain more than if I had remained in the guard. In that branch of the service you have to count ten years to the rank of colonel, while here Todtleben has gone from lieutenant-colonel to general in two years. And if I am killed, well, then, what’s to be done?”

“How you do argue,” said the elder brother, with a smile.

“And then, that I have just told you is of no importance. The chief reason”—and he stopped, hesitating, smiling in his turn, and blushing as if he were going to say something very shameful—“the chief reason is that my conscience bothered me. I felt scruples at living in Petersburg while men are dying here for their country. I counted also on being with you,” he added, still more bashfully.

“You are a curious fellow,” said the brother, without looking at him, hunting for his cigar-case. “I am sorry we can’t stay together.”

“Come, pray tell me the truth about the bastions. Are they horribly frightful?”

“Yes, at first; then one gets used to it. You will see.”

“Tell me also, please, do you think Sebastopol will be taken? It seems to me that such a thing cannot happen.”

“God only knows!”

“Oh, if you only knew how annoyed I am! Imagine my misfortune. On the road I have been robbed of different things, among others my helmet, and I am in a fearful position. What will I do when I am presented to my chief?”

Vladimir Koseltzoff, the younger, looked very much like his brother Michael, at least as much as a half-open columbine can resemble one which has lost its flower. He had similar blond hair, but thicker, and curled around the temples; while one long lock strayed down the white and delicate back of his neck; a sign of happiness, as the old women say. Rich young blood suddenly tinged his habitually dull complexion at each impression of his soul; a veil of moisture often swept over his eyes, which were like his brother’s, but more open and more limpid; a fine blond down began to show on his cheeks and on his upper lip, which, purplish red in color, often extended in a timid smile, exposing teeth of dazzling whiteness. As he stood there in his unbuttoned coat, under which could be seen a red shirt with Russian collar; slender, broad-shouldered, a cigarette between his fingers, leaning against the balustrade of the piazza, his face lighted up by unaffected joy, his eyes fixed on his brother, he was really the most charming and most sympathetic youth possible to see, and one looked away from him reluctantly. Frankly happy to find his brother, whom he considered with pride and respect as a hero, he was, nevertheless, a little ashamed of him on account of his own more cultivated education, of his acquaintance with French, of his association with people in high places, and finding himself superior to him, he hoped to succeed in civilizing him. His impressions, his judgments, were formed at Petersburg under the influence of a woman who, having a weakness for pretty faces, made him pass his holidays in her house. Moscow had also contributed its part, for he had danced there at a great ball at the house of his uncle the Senator.

VI.

After having chatted so long as to prove, what often happens, that, while loving each other very much, they had few common interests, the brothers were silent for a moment or two.

“Come, get your traps and we’ll go,” said the elder.

The younger blushed and was confused.

“Straight away to Sebastopol?” he asked, at length.

“Of course. I don’t believe you have many things with you; we will find a place for them.”

“All right, we’ll go,” replied the younger, as he went into the house sighing.

Just as he was opening the door of the hall he stopped and held down his head.

“Go straight to Sebastopol,” he said to himself, “be exposed to shells—it is terrible! However, isn’t it all the same whether it is to-day or later? At least with my brother—”

To tell the truth, at the thought that the carriage would carry him as far as Sebastopol in a single trip, that no new incident would delay him longer on the road, he began to appreciate the danger he had come to meet, and the proximity of it profoundly moved him. Having succeeded in calming himself at last, he rejoined his comrades, and remained such a long time with them that his brother, out of patience, opened the door to call him, and saw him standing before the officer, who was scolding him like a school-boy. At the sight of his brother his countenance fell.

“I’ll come at once,” he shouted, making a gesture with his hand; “wait for me, I’m coming!”

A moment later he went to find him.

“Just think,” he said, with a deep sigh, “I can’t go off with you.”

“Stuff and nonsense! Why not?”

“I am going to tell you the truth, Micha. We haven’t a penny; on the other hand, we owe money to that captain. It is horribly shameful!”

The elder brother scowled and kept silent.

“Do you owe much?” he asked at last, without looking at him.

“No, not much; but it worries me awfully. He paid three posts for me. I used his sugar, and then we played the game of preference, and I owe him a trifle on that.”

“That’s bad, Volodia! What would you have done if you hadn’t met me?” said the elder, in a stern tone, never looking at him.

“But you know I count on receiving my travelling expenses at Sebastopol, and then I shall pay him. That can still be done; and so I had rather go there with him to-morrow.”

At this moment the elder brother took a purse out of his pocket, from which his trembling fingers drew two notes of ten rubles each and one of three.

“Here’s all I have,” said he. “How much do you want?” He exaggerated a little in saying that it was all his fortune, for he still had four gold-pieces sewn in the seams of his uniform, but he had promised himself not to touch them.

It was found, on adding up, that Koseltzoff owed only eight rubles—the loss on the game and the sugar together. The elder brother gave them to him, making the remark that one never ought to play when he had not the wherewithal to pay. The younger said nothing; for his brother’s remark seemed to throw a doubt on his honesty. Irritated, ashamed of having done something which could lead to suspicions or reflections on his character on the part of his brother, of whom he was fond, his sensitive nature was so violently agitated by it that, feeling it impossible to stifle the sobs which choked him, he took the note without a word and carried it to his comrade.

VII.

NikolaÏeff, after refreshing himself at Douvanka with two glasses of brandy which he bought from a soldier who was selling it on the bridge, shook the reins, and the carriage jolted over the stony road which, with spots of shadow at rare intervals, led along Belbek to Sebastopol; while the brothers, seated side by side, their legs knocking together, kept an obstinate silence, each thinking about the other.

“Why did he offend me?” thought the younger. “Does he really take me for a thief? He seems to be still angry. Here we have quarrelled for good, and yet we two, how happy we could have been at Sebastopol! Two brothers, intimate friends, and both fighting the enemy—the elder lacking cultivation a little, but a brave soldier, and the younger as brave as he, for at the end of a week I shall have proved to all that I am no longer so young. I sha’n’t blush any more; my face will be manly and my mustache will have time to grow so far,” he thought, pinching the down which was visible at the corners of his mouth. “Perhaps we will get there to-day, even, and will take part in a battle. My brother must be very headstrong and very brave; he is one of those who talk little and do better than others. Is he continually pushing me on purpose towards the side of the carriage? He must see that it annoys me, and he makes believe he does not notice it. We will surely get there to-day,” he continued to himself, keeping close to the side of the carriage, fearing if he stirred that he would show his brother he was not well seated. “We go straight to the bastion—I with the artillery, my brother with his company. Suddenly the French throw themselves upon us. I fire on the spot, I kill a crowd of them, but they run just the same straight upon me. Impossible to fire—I am lost! but my brother dashes forward, sword in hand. I seize my musket and we run together; the soldiers follow us. The French throw themselves on my brother. I run up; I kill first one, then another, and I save Micha. I am wounded in the arm; I take my musket in the other hand and run on. My brother is killed at my side by a bullet; I stop a moment, I look at him sadly, I rise and cry, ‘Forward with me! let us avenge him!’ I add, ‘I loved my brother above everything; I have lost him. Let us avenge ourselves, kill our enemies, or all die together!’ All follow me, shouting. But there is the whole French army, PÉlissier at their head. We kill all of them, but I am wounded once, twice, and the third time mortally. They gather around me. Gortschakoff comes and asks what I wish for. I reply that I wish for nothing—I wish for only one thing, to be placed beside my brother and to die with him. They carry me and lay me down beside his bloody corpse. I raise myself up and say, ‘Yes, you could not appreciate two men who sincerely loved their country. They are killed—may God pardon you!’ and thereupon I die.”

Who could tell to what point these dreams were destined to be realized?

“Have you ever been in a hand-to-hand fight?” he suddenly asked his brother, entirely forgetting that he did not want to speak to him again.

“No, never. We have lost two thousand men in our regiment, but always in the works. I also was wounded there. War is not carried on as you imagine, Volodia.”

This familiar name softened the younger. He wished to explain himself to his brother, who did not imagine he had offended him.

“Are you angry with me, Micha?” he asked, after a few moments.

“Why?”

“Because—nothing. I thought there had been between us—”

“Not at all,” rejoined the elder, turning towards him and giving him a friendly tap on the knee.

“I ask pardon, Micha, if I have offended you,” said the younger, turning aside to hide the tears which filled his eyes.

VIII.

“Is this really Sebastopol?” asked Volodia, when they had reached the top of the hill.

Before them appeared the bay with its forest of masts, the sea, with the hostile fleet in the distance, the white shore batteries, the barracks, the aqueducts, the docks, the buildings of the city. Clouds of white and pale lilac-colored smoke continually rose over the yellow hills that surrounded the city, and came out sharp against the clear blue sky, lighted by the rosy rays, brilliantly reflected by the waves; while at the horizon the sun was setting into the sombre sea.

It was without the least thrill of horror that Volodia looked upon this terrible place he had thought so much about. He experienced, on the contrary, an Æsthetic joy, a feeling of heroic satisfaction at thinking that in half an hour he would be there himself, and it was with profound attention that he looked uninterruptedly, up to the very moment they arrived at SevernaÏa, at this picture of such original charm. There was the baggage of his brother’s regiment, and there also he had to find out where his own regiment and his battery was.

The officer of the wagon-train lived near to what they called the new little town, composed of board shanties built by sailors’ families. In a tent adjoining a shed of considerable size, made of leafy oak branches which had not yet time to wither, the brothers found the officer sitting down in a shirt of dirty yellow color before a rather slovenly table, on which a cup of tea was cooling beside a plate and a decanter of brandy. A few crumbs of bread and of caviare had fallen here and there. He was carefully counting a package of notes. But before bringing him on the stage, we must necessarily examine closer the interior of his camp, his duties, and his mode of life. The new hut was large, solid, and conveniently built, provided with turf tables and seats, the same as they build for the generals; and in order to keep the leaves from falling, three rugs, in bad taste, although new, but probably very dear, were stretched on the walls and the ceiling of the building. On the iron bed placed under the principal rug, which represented the everlasting amazon, could be seen a red coverlid of shaggy stuff, a soiled torn pillow, and a cloak of cat-skin. On a table were, helter-skelter, a mirror in a silver frame, a brush of the same metal in a frightfully dirty state, a candlestick, a broken horn comb full of greasy hair, a bottle of liquor ornamented by an enormous red and gold label, a gold watch with the portrait of Peter the Great, gilt pen-holders, boxes holding percussion-caps, a crust of bread, old cards thrown about in disorder, and finally, under the bed, bottles, some empty, others full. It was the duty of this officer to look out for the wagon-train and the forage for the horses. One of his friends, occupied with financial work, shared his dwelling, and was asleep in the tent at this moment, while he was making out the monthly accounts with Government money. He had an agreeable and martial appearance. He was distinguished by his great size, a large mustache, and a fair state of corpulence. But there were two unpleasant things in him which met the eye at once. First, a constant perspiration on his face, joined with a puffiness which almost hid his little gray eyes and gave him the look of a leather bottle full of porter, and, second, extreme slovenliness, which reached from his thin gray hair to his great naked feet, shod in ermine-trimmed slippers.

“What a lot of money!—heavens, what a lot of money!” said Koseltzoff the first, who, on entering, cast a hungry look on the notes. “If you would lend me half, Vassili MikhaÏlovitch!”

The officer of the wagon-train looked sour at the sight of the visitors, and gathering up the money, saluted them without rising.

“Oh, if it were mine, but it is money belonging to the Crown, brother! But whom have you there?”

He looked at Volodia while he piled up the papers and put them in an open chest beside him.

“It is my brother just out of school. We come to ask where the regiment is.”

“Sit down, gentlemen,” he said, rising to go into the tent. “Can I offer you a little porter?”

“I agree to porter, Vassili MikhaÏlovitch.”

Volodia, on whom a profound impression was produced by the grand airs of the officer, as well as by his carelessness and by the respect his brother showed him, said to himself timidly, sitting on the edge of the lounge, “This officer, whom everybody respects, is doubtless a good fellow, hospitable, and probably very brave.”

“Where is our regiment, then?” asked the elder brother from the officer, who had disappeared in the tent.

“What do you say?” shouted the latter.

The other repeated his question.

“I saw Seifer to-day,” he replied; “he told me it was in the fifth bastion.”

“Is it, sure?”

“If I say so it is sure. However, devil take him! he lies cheaply enough! Say,” he added, “will you have some porter?”

“I would gladly take a drink,” replied Koseltzoff.

“And you, Ossip Ignatievitch,” continued the same voice in the tent, addressing the sleeping commissary, “will you have a drink? You have slept enough; it is almost five o’clock.”

“Enough of that old joke. You see well enough that I am not asleep,” replied a shrill and lazy voice.

“Get up, then, for I am tired of it,” and the officer rejoined his guests. “Give us some Sympheropol porter!” he shouted to his servant.

The latter, pushing against Volodia proudly, as it appeared to the young man, pulled out from under the bench a bottle of the porter called for.

The bottle had been empty some time, but the conversation was still going on, when the flap of the tent was put aside to let pass a small man in a blue dressing-gown with cord and tassel, and a cap trimmed with red braid and ornamented with a cockade.

With lowered eyes, and twisting his black mustache, he only replied to the officer’s salute by an imperceptible movement of the shoulders.

“Give me a glass,” he said, sitting down near the table. “Surely you have just come from Petersburg, young man?” he said, addressing Volodia with an amiable air.

“Yes, and I am going to Sebastopol.”

“Of your own accord?”

“Yes.”

“Why in the devil are you going, then? Gentlemen, really I don’t understand that,” continued the commissary. “It seems to me, if I could, I would go back to Petersburg on foot. I have had my bellyful of this cursed existence.”

“But what are you grumbling at?” asked the elder Koseltzoff. “You are leading a very enviable life here.”

The commissary, surprised, cast a look at him, turned around, and addressing Volodia, said, “This constant danger, these privations, for it is impossible to get anything—all that is terrible. I really cannot understand you, gentlemen. If you only got some advantage out of it! But is it agreeable, I ask you, to become at your age good-for-nothing for the rest of your days?”

“Some try to make money, some serve for honor,” replied Koseltzoff the elder, vexed.

“What is honor when there is nothing to eat?” rejoined the commissary, with a disdainful smile, turning towards the officer of the wagon-train, who followed his example. “Wind up the music-box,” he said, pointing to a box. “We’ll hear ‘Lucia;’ I like that.”

“Is this Vassili MikhaÏlovitch a brave man,” Volodia asked his brother, when, twilight having fallen, they rolled again along the Sebastopol road.

“Neither good nor bad, but a terribly miserly fellow. As to the commissary, I can’t bear to see even his picture. I shall knock him down some day.”

IX.

When they arrived, at nightfall, at the great bridge over the bay, Volodia was not exactly in bad humor, but a terrible weight lay on his heart. Everything he saw, everything he heard, harmonized so little with the last impressions that had been left in his mind by the great, light examination-hall with polished floor, the voices of his comrades and the gayety of their sympathetic bursts of laughter, his new uniform, the well-beloved Czar, whom he was accustomed to see during seven years, and who, taking leave of them with tears in his eyes, had called them “his children”—yes, everything he saw little harmonized with his rich dreams sparkling from a thousand facets.

“Here we are!” said his brother, getting out of the carriage in front of the M—— battery. “If they let us cross the bridge we will go straight to the Nicholas barracks. You will stop there until to-morrow morning. As for me, I shall go back to my regiment to find out where the battery is, and to-morrow I will go and hunt you up.”

“Why do that? rather let’s go together,” said Volodia. “I will go to the bastion with you; won’t that be the same thing? One must get accustomed to it. If you go there, why can’t I go?”

“You would do better not to go.”

“Let me go—please do. At least I will see what it is—”

“I advise you not to go there; but, nevertheless—”

The cloudless sky was sombre, the stars, and the flashes of the cannon, and the bombs flying in space, shone in the darkness. The tÊte du pont and the great white pile of the battery came out sharply in the dark night. Every instant reports, explosions, shook the air, together or separately, ever louder, ever more distinct. The mournful murmur of the waves played an accompaniment to this incessant roll. A fresh breeze filled with moisture blew from the sea. The brothers approached the bridge. A soldier awkwardly shouldered arms and shouted,

“Who comes there?”

“A soldier.”

“You can’t pass.”

“Impossible—we must pass!”

“Ask the officer.”

The officer was taking a nap, seated on an anchor. He arose and gave the order to let them pass.

“You can go in, but you can’t come out. Attention! Where are you getting to all together?” he shouted to the wagons piled up with gabions, which were stopping at the entrance to the bridge.

On the first pontoon they met some soldiers talking in a loud voice.

“He has received his outfit; he has received it all.”

“Ah! friends,” said another voice, “when a fellow gets to SevernaÏa he begins to revive. There is quite another air here, by heavens!”

“What nonsense are you talking there?” said the first. “The other day a cursed bomb-shell carried away the legs of two sailors. Oh! oh!”

The water in several places was dashing into the second pontoon, where the two brothers stopped to await their carriage. The wind, which had appeared light on land, blew here with violence and in gusts. The bridge swayed, and the waves, madly dashing against the beams, broke upon the anchors and the ropes and flooded the flooring. The sea roared with a hollow sound, forming a black, uniform, endless line, which separated it from the starry horizon, now lighted by a silvery glow. In the distance twinkled the lights of the hostile fleet. On the left rose the dark mass of a sailing ship, against the sides of which the water dashed violently; on the right, a steamer coming from SevernaÏa, noisily and swiftly advanced. A bomb-shell burst, and lighted up for a second the heaps of gabions, revealing two men standing on the deck of the ship, a third in shirt-sleeves, sitting with swinging legs, busy repairing the deck, and showing the white foam and the dashing waves with green reflections made by the steamer in motion.

The same lights continued to furrow the sky over Sebastopol, and the fear-inspiring sounds came nearer. A wave driven from the sea broke into foam on the right side of the bridge and wet Volodia’s feet. Two soldiers, noisily dragging their legs through the water, passed by. Suddenly something burst with a crash and lighted up before them the part of the bridge along which was passing a carriage, followed by a soldier on horseback. The pieces fell whistling into the water, which spouted up in jets.

“Ah, MikhaÏl Semenovitch!” said the horseman, drawing up before Koseltzoff the elder, “here you are—well again?”

“Yes, as you see. Where in God’s name are you going?”

“To SevernaÏa for cartridges. They send me in place of the aide-de-camp of the regiment. They are expecting an assault every moment.”

“And Martzeff, where’s he?”

“He lost a leg yesterday in the city; in his room. He was asleep. You know him, perhaps.”

“The regiment is in the fifth, isn’t it?”

“Yes; it relieved the M——. Stop at the field-hospital, you will find our fellows there; they will show you the way.”

“Have my quarters in the MorskaÏa been kept?”

“Ah, brother, the shells destroyed them long since! You wouldn’t recognize Sebastopol any longer. There isn’t a soul there; neither women, nor band, nor eating-house. The last cafÉ closed yesterday. It is now so dismal! Good-by!” and the officer went away on the trot.

A terrible fear suddenly seized Volodia. It seemed to him that a shell was going to fall on him, and that a piece would surely strike him on the head. The moist darkness, the sinister sounds, the constant noise of the wrathful waves, all seemed to urge him to take not another step, and to tell him that no good awaited him there; that his foot would never touch the solid earth on the other side of the bay; that he would do well to turn back, to flee as quickly as possible this terrible place where death reigns. “Who knows? Perhaps it is too late. My lot is fixed.” He said this to himself, trembling at the thought, and also on account of the water which was running into his boots. He sighed deeply, and kept away from his brother a little.

“My God! shall I really be killed—I? Oh, my God, have mercy on me!” he murmured, making the sign of the cross.

“Now we will push on, Volodia,” said his companion, when their carriage had rejoined them. “Did you see the shell?”

Farther on they met more wagons carrying wounded men and gabions. One of them, filled with furniture, was driven by a woman. On the other side no one stopped their passage.

Instinctively hugging the wall of the Nicholas battery the two brothers silently went along it, with ears attentive to the noise of the shells which exploded over their heads and to the roar of the pieces thrown down from above; and at last they reached the part of the battery where the holy image was placed. There they learned that the Fifth Light Artillery Regiment, which Volodia was to join, was at KorabelnaÏa. They consequently made up their minds in spite of the danger to go and sleep in the fifth bastion, and to go from there to their battery on the next day. Passing through the narrow passage, stepping over the soldiers who were sleeping along the wall, they at last reached the hospital.

X.

Entering the first room, filled with beds on which the wounded were lying, they were struck by the heavy and nauseating odor which is peculiar to hospitals. Two Sisters of Charity came to meet them. One of them, about fifty years old, had a stern face; she held in her hands a bundle of bandages and lint, and was giving orders to a very young assistant-surgeon who was following her. The other, a pretty girl of twenty, had a blond, pale, and delicate face. She appeared particularly gentle and timid under her little white cap; she followed her companion with her hands in her apron-pockets, and it could be seen that she was afraid of stopping behind. Koseltzoff asked them to show him Martzeff, who had lost a leg the day before.

“Of the P—— regiment?” asked the elder of the two sisters. “Are you a relative?”

“No, a comrade.”

“Show them the way,” she said in French to the younger sister, and left them, accompanied by the assistant-surgeon, to go to a wounded man.

“Come, come, what are you looking like that for?” said Koseltzoff to Volodia, who had stopped with raised eyebrows, and whose eyes, full of painful sympathy, could not leave the wounded, whom he watched without ceasing, at the same time following his brother, and repeating, in spite of himself, “Oh, my God! my God!”

“He has just come in, has he not?” the young sister asked Koseltzoff, pointing to Volodia.

“Yes, he has just come.”

She looked at him again and burst into tears, despairingly repeating, “My God! my God! when will it end?”

They entered the officers’ room. Martzeff was there, lying on his back, his muscular arms bare to the elbow and held under his head. The expression on his yellow visage was that of a man who shuts his teeth tightly so as not to cry out with pain. His well leg, with a stocking on, stuck out from under the coverlid, and the toes worked convulsively.

“Well, how do you feel?” asked the young sister, raising the wounded man’s hot head and arranging his pillow with her thin fingers, on one of which Volodia espied a gold ring. “Here are your comrades come to see you.”

“I am suffering, you know,” he replied, with an irritated air. “Don’t touch me; it is well as it is,” and the toes in the stocking moved with a nervous action. “How do you do? What’s your name? Ah, pardon!” when Koseltzoff had told his name. “Here everything is forgotten. Nevertheless we lived together,” he added, without expressing the least joy, and looking at Volodia with a questioning air.

“It is my brother; he has just come from Petersburg.”

“Ah! and I have done with it, I believe. Heavens, how I am suffering! If that would only stop quicker!”

He pulled his leg in with a convulsive movement. His toes worked with double restlessness. He covered his face with both hands.

“He must be left in quiet; he is very ill,” the sister whispered to them. Her eyes were full of tears.

The brothers, who had decided to go to the fifth bastion, changed their minds on coming out of the hospital, and concluded, without telling each other the true reason, to separate, in order to not expose themselves to useless danger.

“Will you find your way, Volodia?” asked the elder. “However, NikolaÏeff will lead you to KorabelnaÏa. Now I am going alone, and to-morrow I will be with you.”

That was all they said in this last interview.

XI.

The cannon roared with the same violence, but EkatherinenskaÏa Street, through which Volodia went, accompanied by NikolaÏeff, was empty and quiet. He could see in the darkness only the white walls standing in the midst of the great overthrown houses, and the stones of the sidewalk he was on. Sometimes he met soldiers and officers, and going along the left side, near the Admiralty, he noticed, by the bright light of a fire which burned behind a fence, a row of dark-leaved acacias, covered with dust, recently planted along the sidewalk and held up by green painted stakes. His steps and those of NikolaÏeff, who was loudly breathing, resounded alone in the silence. His thoughts were vague. The pretty Sister of Charity, Martzeff’s leg, with his toes moving convulsively in his stocking, the darkness, the shells, the different pictures of death, passed confusedly in his memory. His young and impressionable soul was irritated and wounded by his isolation, by the complete indifference of every one to his lot, although he was exposed to danger. “I shall suffer, I shall be killed, and no one will mourn me,” he said to himself. Where, then, was the life of the hero full of the energetic ardor and of the sympathies he had so often dreamed of? The shells shrieked and burst nearer and nearer, and NikolaÏeff sighed oftener without speaking. In crossing the bridge which led to KorabelnaÏa he saw something two steps off plunge whistling into the gulf, illuminating for a second with a purple light the violet-tinted waves, and then bound off, throwing a shower of water into the air.

“Curse it! the villain is still alive,” murmured NikolaÏeff.

“Yes,” answered Volodia, in spite of himself, and surprised at the sound of his own voice, so shrill and harsh.

They now met wounded men carried on stretchers, carts filled with gabions, a regiment, men on horseback. One of the latter, an officer followed by a Cossack, stopped at the sight of Volodia, examined his face, then, turning away, hit his horse with his whip and continued on his way. “Alone, alone! whether I am alive or not, it is the same to all!” said the youth to himself, ready to burst into tears. Having passed a great white wall, he entered a street bordered with little, quite ruined houses, continually lighted up by the flash of the shells. A drunken woman in rags, followed by a sailor, came out of a small door and stumbled against him. “I beg pardon, your Excellency,” she murmured. The poor boy’s heart was more and more oppressed, while the flashes continually lit up the black horizon and the shells whistled and burst about him. Suddenly NikolaÏeff sighed, and spoke with a voice which seemed to Volodia to express a restrained terror.

“It was well worth while to hurry from home to come here! We went on and went on, and what was the use of hurrying?”

“But, thank the Lord! my brother is cured,” said Volodia, in order by talking to drive away the horrible feeling which had got possession of him.

“Finely cured, when he is in a bad way altogether! The well ones would find themselves much better off in the hospital in times like these. Do we, perchance, take any pleasure in being here? Now an arm is lost, now a leg, and then—And yet it is better here in the city than in the bastion, Lord God! On the way a man has to say all his prayers. Ah, scoundrel! it just hummed in my ears,” he added, listening to the sound of a piece of shell which had passed close to him. “Now,” continued NikolaÏeff, “I was told to lead your Excellency, and I know I must do what I am ordered to, but our carriage is in the care of a comrade, and the bundles are undone. I was told to come, and I have come. But if any one of the things we have brought is lost, it is I, NikolaÏeff, who answers for it.”

A few steps farther on they came out on an open space.

“Here is your artillery, your Excellency,” he suddenly said. “Ask the sentinel, he will show you.”

Volodia went forward alone. No longer hearing behind him NikolaÏeff’s sighs, he felt himself abandoned for good and all. The feeling of this desertion in the presence of danger, of death, as he believed, oppressed his heart with the glacial weight of a stone. Halting in the middle of the place, he looked all about him to see if he was observed, and taking his head in both hands, he murmured, with a voice broken by terror, “My God! am I really a despicable poltroon, a coward? I who have lately dreamed of dying for my country, for my Czar, and that with joy! Yes, I am an unfortunate and despicable being!” he cried, in profound despair, and quite undeceived about himself. Having finally overcome his emotion, he asked the sentinel to show him the house of the commander of the battery.

XII.

The commander of the battery lived in a little two-story house. It was entered through a court-yard. In one of the windows, in which a pane was missing and was replaced by a sheet of paper, shone the feeble light of a candle. The servant, seated in the door-way, was smoking his pipe. Having announced Volodia to his master, he showed him into his room. There, between two windows, beside a broken mirror, was seen a table loaded with official papers, several chairs, an iron bed with clean linen and a rug before it. Near the door stood the sergeant-major, a fine man, with a splendid pair of mustaches, his sword in its belt. On his coat sparkled a cross and the medal of the Hungary campaign. The staff-officer, small in stature, with a swollen and bandaged cheek, walked up and down, dressed in a frock-coat of fine cloth which bore marks of long wear. He was decidedly corpulent, and appeared about forty years old. A bald spot was clearly marked on the top of his head; his thick mustache, hanging straight down, hid his mouth; his brown eyes had an agreeable expression; his hands were fine, white, a little fat; his feet, very much turned out, were put down with a certain assurance and a certain affectation which proved that bashfulness was not the weak side of the commander.

“I have the honor to present myself. I am attached to the Fifth Light Battery—Koseltzoff, the second-ensign,” said Volodia, who, entering the room, recited in one breath this lesson learned by heart.

The commander of the battery replied by a somewhat dry salute, and without offering him his hand begged him to be seated. Volodia then sat down timidly near the writing-table, and in his distraction getting hold of a pair of scissors, began to play with them mechanically. With hands behind his back and with bowed head, the commander of the battery continued his promenade in silence, casting his eyes from time to time on the fingers which continued to juggle with the scissors.

“Yes,” he said, stopping at last in front of the sergeant-major, “from to-morrow on we must give another measure of oats to the caisson horses; they are thin. What do you think of it?”

“Why not? It can be done, your High Excellency; oats are now cheaper,” replied the sergeant-major, his arms stuck to the side of his body and his fingers stirring—an habitual movement with which he usually accompanied his conversation.

“Then there is the forage-master, Frantzone, who wrote me a line yesterday, your High Excellency. He said we must buy axle-trees without fail; they are cheap. What are your orders?”

“Well, they must be bought; there is money,” answered the commander, continuing to walk. “Where are your traps?” he suddenly said, pausing before Volodia.

Poor Volodia, pursued by the thought that he was a coward, saw in each look, in each word, the scorn he must inspire; and it seemed to him that his chief had already discovered his sad secret, and that he was jeering at him. Then he replied in confusion that his things were at Grafskaia, and that his brother would send them to him the following day.

“Where shall we put up the ensign?” the lieutenant-colonel asked the sergeant-major, without listening to the young man’s answer.

“The ensign?” repeated the sergeant-major. A rapid glance thrown on Volodia, and which seemed to say, “What sort of an ensign is that?” finished the disconcerting of the latter. “Down there, your Excellency, with the second-captain. Since the captain is in the bastion his bed is empty!”

“Will that do for you while you are waiting?” asked the commander of the battery. “You must be tired, I think. To-morrow it can be more conveniently arranged for you.”

Volodia arose and saluted.

“Will you have some tea?” added his superior officer. “The samovar can be heated.”

Volodia, who had already reached the door, turned around, saluted again, and went out.

The lieutenant-colonel’s servant conducted him down-stairs, and showed him into a bare and dirty room where different broken things were thrown aside as rubbish, and in which, in a corner, a man in a red shirt, whom Volodia took for a soldier, was sleeping on an iron bed without sheets or coverlid, wrapped in his overcoat.

“Peter NikolaÏevitch”—and the servant touched the sleeper’s shoulder—“get up; the ensign is going to sleep here. It’s Vlang, our yunker,” he added, turning to Volodia.

“Oh, don’t disturb yourself, I beg,” cried the latter, seeing the yunker, a tall and robust young man, with a fine face, but one entirely devoid of intelligence, rise, throw his overcoat over his shoulders, and drowsily go away, murmuring, “That’s nothing; I will go and sleep in the yard.”

XIII.

Left alone with his thoughts, Volodia at first felt a return of the terror caused by the trouble which agitated his soul. Counting upon sleep to be able to cease thinking of his surroundings and to forget himself, he blew out his candle and lay down, covering himself all up with his overcoat, even his head, for he had kept his fear of darkness since his childhood. But suddenly the idea came to him that a shell might fall through the roof and kill him. He listened. The commander of the battery was walking up and down over his head.

“It will begin by killing him first,” he said to himself, “then me. I shall not die alone!” This reflection calmed him, and he was going to sleep when this time the thought that Sebastopol might be taken that very night, that the French might burst in his door, and that he had no weapon to defend himself, completely waked him up again. He rose and walked the room. The fear of the real danger had stifled the mysterious terror of darkness. He hunted and found to hand only a saddle and a samovar. “I am a coward, a poltroon, a wretch,” he thought again, filled with disgust and scorn of himself. He lay down and tried to stop thinking; but then the impressions of the day passed again through his mind, and the continual sounds which shook the panes of his single window recalled to him the danger he was in. Visions followed. Now he saw the wounded covered with blood; now bursting shells, pieces of which flew into his room; now the pretty Sister of Charity who dressed his wounds weeping over his agony, or his mother, who, carrying him back to the provincial town, praying to God for him before a miraculous image, shed hot tears. Sleep eluded him; but suddenly the thought of an all-powerful Deity who sees everything and who hears every prayer flashed upon him distinct and clear in the midst of his reveries. He fell upon his knees, making the sign of the cross, and clasping his hands as he had been taught in his childhood. This simple gesture aroused in him a feeling of infinite, long-forgotten calm.

“If I am to die, it is because I am useless! Then, may Thy will be done, O Lord! and may it be done quickly. But if the courage and firmness which I lack are necessary to me, spare me the shame and the dishonor, which I cannot endure, and teach me what I must do to accomplish Thy will.”

His weak, childish, and terrified soul was fortified, was calmed at once, and entered new, broad, and luminous regions. He thought of a thousand things; he experienced a thousand sensations in the short duration of this feeling; then he quietly went to sleep, heedless of the dull roar of the bombardment and of the shaking windows.

Lord, Thou alone hast heard, Thou alone knowest the simple but ardent and despairing prayers of ignorance, the confused repentance asking for the cure of the body and the purification of the soul—the prayers which rise to Thee from these places where death resides; beginning with the general, who with terror feels a presentiment of approaching death, and a second after thinks only of wearing a cross of Saint George on his neck, and ending with the simple soldier prostrate on the bare earth of the Nicholas battery, supplicating Thee to grant him for his sufferings the recompense he unconsciously has a glimpse of.

XIV.

The elder Koseltzoff, having met a soldier of his regiment in the street, was accompanied by him to the fifth bastion.

“Keep close to the wall, Excellency,” the soldier said.

“What for?”

“It is dangerous, Excellency. He is already passing over us,” replied the soldier, listening to the whistling of the ball, which struck with a dry sound the other side of the hard road. But Koseltzoff continued on in the middle of the road without heeding this advice. There were the same streets, the same but more frequent flashes, the same sounds and the same groans, the same meeting of wounded men, the same batteries, parapet, and trenches, just as he had seen them in the spring. But now their aspect was more dismal, more sombre and more martial, so to speak. A greater number of houses was riddled, and there were no more lights in the windows—the hospital was the only exception—no more women in the street; and the character of the accustomed, careless life formerly imprinted on everything was effaced, and was replaced by the element of anxious, weary expectation, and of redoubled and incessant effort.

He came at last to the farthermost intrenchment, and a soldier of the P—— regiment recognized his former company chief. There was the third battalion, as could be guessed in the darkness by the constrained murmur of voices and the clicks of the muskets placed against the wall, which the flash of the discharges lit up at frequent intervals.

“Where is the commander of the regiment?” asked Koseltzoff.

“In the bomb-proof with the marines, your Excellency,” replied the obliging soldier. “If you would like to go I will show you the way.”

Passing from one trench to another, he led Koseltzoff to the ditch, where a sailor was smoking his pipe. Behind him was a door, through the cracks of which shone a light.

“Can we go in?”

“I will announce you;” and the sailor entered the bomb-proof, where two voices could be heard.

“If Prussia continues to keep neutral, then Austria—” said one of them.

“What is Austria good for when the slavs—” said the other.—“Ah yes! ask him to come in,” added this same voice.

Koseltzoff, who had never before put his foot in these bomb-proof quarters, was struck by their elegance. A polished floor took the place of boards, a screen hid the entrance door. In a corner was a great icon representing the holy Virgin, with its gilt frame lighted by a small pink glass lamp. Two beds were placed along the wall, on one of which a naval officer was sleeping in his clothes, on the other, near a table on which two open bottles of wine were standing, sat the new regimental chief and an aide-de-camp. Koseltzoff, who was not bashful, and who felt himself in nowise guilty, either towards the State or towards the chief of the regiment, felt, nevertheless, at the sight of the latter—his comrade until very recently—a certain apprehension.

“It is strange,” he thought, seeing him rise to listen to him. “He has commanded the regiment scarcely six weeks, and power is already visible in his bearing, in his look, in his clothes. Not a long while ago this same Batretcheff amused himself in our quarters, wore for whole weeks the same dark calico shirt, and ate his hash and his sour cream without inviting any one to share it, and now an expression full of hard pride can be read in his eyes, which say to me, ‘Although I am your comrade, for I am a regimental chief of the new school, you may be sure I know perfectly well that you would give half your life to be in my place.’”

“You have been treating yourself to a rather long absence,” said the colonel, coldly, looking at him.

“I have been ill, colonel, and my wound is not yet altogether healed.”

“If that’s so, what did you come back for?” Koseltzoff’s corpulence inspired his chief with defiance. “Can you do your duty?”

“Certainly I can.”

“All right. Ensign ZaÏtzeff will conduct you to the ninth company, the one you have already commanded. You will receive the order of the day. Be so good as to send me the regimental aide-de-camp as you go out,” and his chief, bowing slightly, gave him to understand by this that the interview was ended.

On his way out Koseltzoff muttered indistinct words and shrugged his shoulders several times. It might readily be believed that he felt ill at ease, or that he was irritated, not exactly against his regimental chief, but rather against himself and against all his surroundings.

XV.

Before going to find his officers he went to look up his company. The parapets built of gabions, the trenches, the cannon in front of which he passed, even the fragments and the shells themselves over which he stumbled, and which the flashes of the discharges lighted up without pause or relaxation, everything was familiar to him, and had been deeply engraven on his memory three months before, during the fortnight he had lived in the bastion. Notwithstanding the dismal side of these memories, a certain inherent charm of the past came out of them, and he recognized the places and things with an unaffected pleasure, as if the two weeks had been full of only agreeable impressions. His company was placed along the covered way which led to the sixth bastion.

Entering the shelter open on one side, he found so many soldiers there that he could scarcely find room to pass. At one end burned a wretched candle, which a reclining soldier was holding over a book that his comrade was spelling out. Around him, in the twilight of a thick and heavy atmosphere, several heads could be seen turned towards the reader, listening eagerly. Koseltzoff recognized the A B C of this sentence: “P-r-a-y-e-r a-f-t-e-r s-t-u-d-y. I give Thee thanks, my Cre-a-tor.”

“Snuff the candle!” some one shouted. “What a good book!” said the reader, preparing to go on. But at the sound of Koseltzoff’s voice calling the sergeant-major it was silent. The soldiers moved, coughed, and blew their noses, as always happens after an enforced silence. The sergeant-major arose from the middle of the group, buttoning his uniform, stepping over his comrades, and trampling on their feet, which for lack of room they did not know where to stow, approached the officer.

“How do you do, my boy? Is this our company?”

“Health to your Excellency! We congratulate you on your return,” replied the sergeant-major, gayly and good-naturedly. “You are cured, Excellency? God be praised for that! for we missed you a good deal.”

Koseltzoff, it was evident, was beloved by his company. Voices could immediately be heard spreading the news that the old company chief had come back, he who had been wounded—MikhaÏl Semenovitch Koseltzoff. Several soldiers, the drummer among others, came to greet him.

“How do you do, Obanetchouk?” said Koseltzoff. “Are you safe and sound? How do you do, children?” he then added, raising his voice.

The soldiers replied in chorus,

“Health to your Excellency!”

“How goes it, children?”

“Badly, your Excellency. The French have the upper hands. He fires from behind the intrenchments, but he doesn’t show himself outside.”

“Now, then, who knows? perhaps I shall have the chance of seeing him come out of the intrenchments, children. It won’t be the first time we have fought him together.”

“We are ready to do our best, your Excellency,” said several voices at the same time.

“He is very bold, then?”

“Terribly bold,” replied the drummer in a low tone, but so as to be heard, and speaking to another soldier, as if to justify his chief for having made use of the expression, and to persuade his comrade that there was nothing exaggerated nor untrue in it.

Koseltzoff left the soldiers in order to join the officers in the barracks.

The great room of the barracks was filled with people—a crowd of naval, artillery, and infantry officers. Some were sleeping, others were talking, seated on a caisson or on the carriage of a siege-gun. The largest group of the three, seated on their cloaks spread on the ground, were drinking porter and playing cards.

“Ah! Koseltzoff’s come back! Bravo! And your wound?” said divers voices from different sides.

Here also he was liked, and they were rejoiced at his return.

After having shaken hands with his acquaintances, Koseltzoff joined the gay group of card-players. One of them, thin, with a long nose, and a large mustache which encroached on his cheeks, cut the cards with his white, slender fingers on one of which was a great seal ring. He seemed disturbed, and dealt with an affected carelessness. On his right, lying half raised on his elbow, a gray-haired major staked and paid a half-ruble every time with exaggerated calmness. On his left, crouching on his heels, an officer with a red and shining face joked and smiled with an effort, and when his card was laid down, one of his hands moved in the empty pocket of his trousers. He played a heavy game, but without any money—a fact which visibly irritated the dark officer with the handsome face. Another officer, pale, thin, and bald, with an enormous nose and a large mouth, walking about the room with a bundle of bank-notes in his hand, counted down the money on the bank and won every time.

Koseltzoff drank a small glass of brandy and sat down beside the players.

“Come, MikhaÏl Semenovitch, come; put up your stake!” said the officer who was cutting the cards; “I’ll bet you have brought back a lot of money.”

“Where could I have got it? On the contrary, I spent my last penny in town!”

“Really! You must have fleeced some one at Sympheropol, I’m sure!”

“What an idea!” replied Koseltzoff, not wanting his words to be believed, and unbuttoning his uniform, to be more comfortable, he took a few old cards.

“I have nothing to risk, but, devil take me! who can foresee luck? A gnat can sometimes accomplish wonders! Let’s go on drinking to keep our courage up.”

Shortly after he swallowed a second small glass of brandy, a little porter into the bargain, and lost his last three rubles, while a hundred and fifty were charged to the account of the little officer with the sweat-moistened face.

“Have the kindness to send me the money,” said the banker, interrupting the deal to look at him.

“Allow me to put off sending it until to-morrow,” replied the one addressed, rising. His hand was nervously moving in his empty pocket.

“Hum!” said the banker, spitefully throwing the last cards of the pack right and left. “We can’t play in this way,” he rejoined; “I will stop the game. It can’t be done, Zakhar Ivanovitch. We are playing cash down, and not for credit.”

“Do you distrust me? That would be strange indeed!”

“From whom have I to get eight rubles?” the major who had just won asked at this moment. “I have paid out more than twenty, and when I win I get nothing.”

“How do you think I can pay you when there is no money on the table?”

“That’s nothing to me!” cried the major, rising. “I am playing with you, and not with this gentleman!”

“As long as I tell you,” said the perspiring officer—“as long as I tell you I will pay you to-morrow, how do you dare insult me?”

“I’ll say what I like. This is no way of doing!” cried the major, excited.

“Come, be quiet, FÉdor FÉdorovitch!” shouted several players at once, turning around.

Let us drop the curtain on this scene. To-morrow, perhaps to-day, each of these men will go to meet death gayly, proudly, and will die calmly and firmly. The only consolation of a life the conditions of which freeze with horror the coldest imagination, of a life which has nothing human in it, to which all hope is interdicted, is forgetfulness, annihilation of the consciousness of the reality. In the soul of every man lies dormant the noble spark which at the proper time will make a hero of him; but this spark grows tired of shining always. Nevertheless, when the fatal moment comes, it will burst into a flame which will illumine grand deeds.

XVII.

The next day the bombardment continued with the same violence. About eleven o’clock in the forenoon Volodia Koseltzoff joined the officers of his battery. He became accustomed to these new faces, asked them questions, and, in his turn, shared his impressions with them. The modest but slightly pedantic conversation of the artillery-men pleased him and inspired his respect. On the other hand, his own sympathetic appearance, his timid manner, and his simplicity predisposed these gentlemen in his favor. The oldest officer of the battery, a short, red-haired captain with a foretop, and with well-smoothed locks on his temples, brought up in the old traditions of artillery, amiable with ladies, and posing for a savant, asked him questions about his acquaintance with this science or that, about the new inventions, joked in an affectionate way about his youth and his handsome face, and treated him like a son, all of which charmed Volodia. Sub-lieutenant Dedenko, a young officer with an accent of Little Russia, with shaggy hair and a torn overcoat, pleased him also, in spite of his loud voice, his frequent quarrels, and his brusque movements, for under this rude exterior Volodia saw a brave and worthy man. Dedenko eagerly offered his services to Volodia, and tried to prove to him that the cannon at Sebastopol had not been placed according to rule. On the other hand, Lieutenant Tchernovitzky, with high-arched eyebrows, who wore a well-cared-for but worn and mended overcoat, and a gold chain on a satin waistcoat, did not inspire him with any sympathy, although superior to the others in politeness. He continually asked Volodia details about the emperor, the minister of war, related with factitious enthusiasm the heroic exploits accomplished at Sebastopol, expressed his regrets at the small number of true patriots, made a show of a great deal of knowledge, of wit, of exceedingly noble sentiments, but in spite of all that, and without being able to tell why, all these discourses sounded false in his ears, and he even noticed that the officers in general avoided speaking to Tchernovitzky. The yunker, Vlang, whom he had waked up the evening before, sat modestly in a corner, kept silent, laughed sometimes at a joke, always ready to recall what had been forgotten, presented to the officers in turn the small glass of brandy, and rolled cigarettes for all. Charmed by the simple and polite manners of Volodia, who did not treat him like a boy, and by his agreeable appearance, his great, fine eyes never left the face of the new-comer. Urged by a feeling of great admiration, he divined and forestalled all his wishes, a fact which the officers immediately noticed, and which furnished the subject of unsparing jokes.

A little before dinner second-captain Kraut, relieved from duty on the bastion, joined the little company. A blond, fine-looking fellow, of a lively turn of mind, proud possessor of a pair of red mustaches, and side-whiskers of the same color, he spoke the language to perfection, but too correctly and too elegantly for a pure-blooded Russian. Quite as irreproachable in duty as in his private life, perfection was his failing. A perfect comrade, to be counted on beyond proof in all affairs of interest, he lacked something as a man, just because everything in him was an accomplishment. In striking contrast with the ideal Germans of Germany, he was, after the example of the Russian Germans, in the highest degree practical.

“Here he is! here’s our hero!” shouted the captain at the moment Kraut came in, gesticulating and clanking his spurs. “What’ll you have, Frederic Christianovitch—tea or brandy?”

“I am having some tea made, but I won’t refuse brandy while I am waiting, for my soul’s consolation! Happy to make your acquaintance! Please get fond of us, and be well-disposed towards us,” he said to Volodia, who had arisen to salute him. “Second-captain Kraut! The artificer told me you came last evening.”

“Allow me to thank you for your bed, which I profited by last night.”

“Did you at least sleep comfortably there? Because one of the legs is gone, and no one can repair it during the siege. You have to keep wedging it up.”

“So then you got out of it safely?” Dedenko asked him.

“Yes, thank God! but Skvortzoff was hit. We had to repair one of the carriages; the side of it was smashed to pieces.”

He suddenly arose and walked up and down. It could be seen that he felt the agreeable sensation of a man who has just come safe and sound out of great danger.

“Now, Dmitri Gavrilovitch,” he said, tapping the captain’s knee in a friendly manner, “how are you, brother? What has become of your presentation for advancement? Has it finally been settled?”

“No; nothing has come of it.”

“And nothing will come of it,” said Dedenko; “I’ve proved it to you already.”

“Why will nothing come of it?”

“Because your statement is badly made.”

“Ah, what a violent wrangler!” said Kraut, gayly. “A truly obstinate Little Russian. All right; you will see that they will make you lieutenant to pay for your mortification.”

“No, they won’t do anything.”

“Vlang,” added Kraut, speaking to the yunker, “fill my pipe and bring it to me, please.”

Kraut’s presence had waked them all up. Chatting with each one, he gave the details of the bombardment, and asked questions about what had taken place during his absence.

XVIII.

“Now, then, are you settled?” Kraut asked of Volodia. “But, pardon me, what is your name—both your names? It’s our custom in the artillery. Have you a saddle-horse?”

“No,” answered Volodia, “and I am much troubled about it. I have spoken to the captain. I shall have neither horse nor money until I get my forage-money and my travelling expenses. I would like to ask the commander of the battery to lend me his horse, but I am afraid he will refuse.”

“You would like to ask this of Apollo SerguÉÏtch?” said Kraut, looking at the captain, while he made a sound with his lips which expressed doubt.

“Well,” said the latter, “if he refuses, there is no great harm done. To tell the truth, there is seldom need of a horse here. I will undertake to ask him to-day even.”

“You don’t know him,” said Dedenko. “He would refuse anything else, but he wouldn’t refuse his horse to this gentleman. Would you like to bet on it?”

“Oh, I know you are ripe for contradiction, you—”

“I contradict when I know a thing! He isn’t generous usually, but he will lend his horse, because he has no interest in refusing it.”

“How no interest? When oats cost eight rubles here it is evidently in his interest. He will have one horse the less to keep.”

“Vladimir Semenovitch!” cried Vlang, coming back with Kraut’s pipe. “Ask for the spotted one; it is a charming horse.”

“That’s the one you fell into the ditch with, eh, Vlang?” observed the second-captain.

“But you are mistaken in saying that oats are eight rubles,” maintained Dedenko, in the mean time, continuing the discussion. “According to the latest news they are ten-fifty. It is evident that there is no profit in—”

“You would like to leave him nothing, then? If you were in his place you would not lend your horse to go into town either. When I am commander of the battery my horses, brother, will have four full measures to eat every day! I sha’n’t think of making an income, rest assured!”

“He who lives will see,” replied the second-captain. “You will do the same when you have a battery, and he also,” pointing to Volodia.

“Why do you suppose, Frederic Christianovitch, that this gentleman would also like to reserve for himself some small profit? If he has a certain amount of money, what will he do it for?” Tchernovitzky asked in his turn.

“No—I—excuse me, captain,” said Volodia, blushing up to his ears. “That would be dishonest in my eyes.”

“Oh! oh! what milk porridge!” Kraut said to him.

“This is another question, captain, but it seems to me that I couldn’t take money for myself which doesn’t belong to me.”

“And I will tell you something else,” said the second-captain, in a more serious tone. “You must learn that, being battery commander, there is every advantage in managing affairs well. You must know that the soldier’s food doesn’t concern him. It has always been that way with us in the artillery. If you don’t succeed in making both ends meet, you will have nothing left. Let us count up your expenses. You have first the forage”—and the captain bent one finger; “next the medicine”—he bent a second one; “then the administration—that makes three; then the draft-horses, which certainly cost five hundred rubles—that makes four; then the refitting of the soldiers’ collars; then the charcoal, which is used in great quantities, and at last the table of your officers; lastly, as chief of the battery you must live comfortably, and you need a carriage, a cloak, etc.”

“And the principal thing is this, Vladimir Semenovitch,” said the captain, who had been silent up to this moment. “Look at a man like me, for example, who has served twenty years, receiving at first two, then three hundred rubles pay. Well, then, why shouldn’t the Government reward him for his years of service by giving him a morsel of bread for his old days.”

“It can’t be discussed,” rejoined the second-captain; “so don’t be in a hurry to judge. Serve a little while and you will see.”

Volodia, quite ashamed of the remark which he had thrown out without stopping to reflect, murmured a few words, and listened in silence how Dedenko set about defending the opposite thesis. The discussion was interrupted by the entrance of the colonel’s orderly announcing that dinner was ready.

“You ought to tell Apollo SerguÉÏtch to give us wine to-day,” said Captain Tchernovitzky, buttoning his coat. “Devil take his avarice! He will be shot, and no one will get any.”

“Tell him yourself.”

“Oh no, you are my elder; the hierarchy before everything!”

XIX.

A table, covered with a stained tablecloth, was placed in the middle of the room in which Volodia had been received by the colonel the evening before. The latter gave him his hand, and asked him questions about Petersburg and about his journey.

“Now, gentlemen, please come up to the brandy. The ensigns don’t drink,” he added, with a smile.

The commander of the battery did not seem as stern to-day as the day before; he had rather the air of a kind and hospitable host than that of a comrade among his officers. In spite of that, all, from the old captain to Ensign Dedenko, evinced respect for him which betrayed itself in the timid politeness with which they spoke to him and came up in line to drink their little glass of brandy.

The dinner consisted of cabbage-soup, served in a great tureen in which swam lumps of meat with fat attached, laurel leaves, and a good deal of pepper, Polish zrasi with mustard, koldouni with slightly rancid butter; no napkins; the spoons were of pewter and of wood, the glasses were two in number. On the table was a single water decanter with broken neck. The conversation did not flag. They first spoke of the battle of Inkerman, in which the battery took a part. Each related his impressions, his opinions on the causes of the failure, keeping silent as soon as the battery commander spoke. Then they complained of the lack of cannon of a certain calibre; they talked of certain other improvements, which gave Volodia an opportunity of showing his knowledge. The curious part was that the talk did not even touch upon the frightful situation of Sebastopol, which seemed to mean that each one, on his part, thought too much about it to speak of it.

Volodia, very much astonished, and even vexed, that there was no question of the duties of his service, said to himself that he seemed to have come to Sebastopol only in order to give the details about the new cannon and to dine with the battery commander.

During the repast a shell burst very near the house. The floor and the wall were shaken by it as by an earthquake, and powder-smoke spread over the window outside.

“You certainly didn’t see that at Petersburg, but here we often have these surprises. Go, Vlang,” added the commander, “and see where the shell burst.”

Vlang went to look, and announced that it had burst in the yard. After that they did not speak of it again.

A little before the end of the dinner one of the military clerks came in to give to his chief three sealed envelopes. “This one is very urgent. A Cossack has just brought it from the commander of the artillery,” he said. The officers watched the practised fingers of their superior with anxious impatience while he broke the seal of the envelope, which bore the words “in haste,” and drew a paper from it.

“What can that be?” each one thought. “Can it be the order to leave Sebastopol for a rest, or the order to bring out the whole battery upon the bastion?”

“Once more!” cried the commander, angrily, throwing the sheet of paper on the table.

“What is it, Apollo SerguÉÏtch?” asked the oldest of the officers.

“They want an officer and men for a mortar battery. I have only four officers, and my men are not up to the full number,” he growled, “and now they ask for some of them. However, some one must go, gentlemen,” he continued, after a moment; “they must be there at seven o’clock. Send me the sergeant-major. Now, gentlemen, who will go? Decide it among yourselves.”

“But here is this gentleman who hasn’t yet served,” said Tchernovitzky, pointing to Volodia.

“Yes; I wouldn’t ask for anything better,” said Volodia, feeling a cold sweat moisten his neck and his backbone.

“No—why not?” interrupted the captain. “No one ought to refuse; but it is useless to ask him to go; and since Apollo SerguÉÏtch leaves us free, we will draw lots, as we did the other time.”

All consented to this. Kraut carefully cut several little paper squares, rolled them up, and threw them into a cap. The captain cracked a few jokes and profited by this occasion to ask the colonel for wine, “to give us courage,” he added. Dedenko had a depressed air, Volodia smiled, Tchernovitzky declared that he would be chosen by the lot. As to Kraut, he was perfectly calm.

They offered Volodia the first chance. He took one of the papers, the longest, but immediately changed it for another, shorter and smaller, and unrolling it, read the word “Go.”

“It is I,” he said, with a sigh.

“All right. May God protect you! It will be your baptism of fire,” said the commander, looking with a pleasant smile at the disturbed face of the ensign. “But get ready quickly, and in order that it may be pleasanter, Vlang will go with you in the place of the artificer.

XX.

Vlang, delighted with his mission, ran away to dress, and came back at once to assist Volodia to make up his bundles, advising him to take his bed, his fur cloak, an old number of the “Annals of the Country,” a coffee-pot with an alcohol lamp, and other useless articles. The captain, in his turn, advised Volodia to read in the “Manual for the use of Artillery Officers” the passage relating to firing mortars, and to copy it at once! Volodia set himself to work at it immediately, happy and surprised to feel that the dread of danger, especially the fear of passing for a coward, was less strong than on the evening before. His impressions of the day and his occupation had partly contributed to diminish the violence of this; and then it is well known that an acute sensation cannot last long without weakening. In a word, his fear was being cured. At seven in the evening, at the moment the sun was setting behind the Nicholas barracks, the sergeant-major came to tell him that the men were ready, and were waiting for him.

“I have given the list to Vlang, your Excellency; you can ask him for it,” he said.

“Must I make a little speech to them?” thought Volodia, on his way, accompanied by the yunker, to join the twenty artillery-men who, swords by their sides, were waiting for him outside—“or must I simply say to them, ‘How do you do, children?’ or, indeed, say nothing at all? Why not say ‘How do you do, children?’ I think I ought to;” and with his full and sonorous voice he cried boldly, “How do you do, children?” The soldiers replied cheerfully to his salutation; his young and fresh voice sounded agreeably in their ears. He put himself at their head, and although his heart was beating as if he had just run several furlongs, his walk was light and his face was smiling. When they got near the Malakoff mamelon, he noticed, while climbing up it, that Vlang, who did not leave his heels, and who had seemed so courageous down below in their quarters, stooped and ducked his head as if the bullets and shells which were whistling without cessation were coming straight towards him. Several soldiers did the same, and the majority of the faces expressed, if not fear, at least disquiet. This circumstance reassured him and revived his courage.

“Here I am, then, I also, on the Malakoff mamelon. I imagined it a thousand times more terrible, and I am walking, I am advancing, without saluting the bullets! I am less afraid than the others, and I am not a coward, then,” he said to himself joyfully, with the enthusiasm of satisfied self-love.

This feeling was, however, shaken by the spectacle that presented itself to his eyes. When he reached in the twilight the Korniloff battery, four sailors, some holding by the legs, others by the arms, the bloody corpse of a man with bare feet and no coat, were in the act of throwing him over the parapet. (The second day of the bombardment they threw the dead into the ditch, because they had no time to carry them off.) Volodia, stupefied, saw the corpse strike the upper part of the rampart, and slide from there into the ditch. Fortunately for him, he met at this very moment the commander of the bastion, who gave him a guide to lead him to the battery and into the bomb-proof quarters of the men. We will not relate how often our hero was exposed to danger during that night. We will say nothing of how he was undeceived when he noticed that instead of finding them firing here according to the precise rules such as they practise at Petersburg on the plain of Volkovo, he saw himself in front of two broken mortars, one with its muzzle bruised by a shell, the other still upright on the pieces of a destroyed platform. We will not tell how it was impossible for him to get the soldiers in order to repair it before daylight, how he found no charge of the calibre indicated in the “Manual,” nor describe his feelings at seeing two of his soldiers fall, hit before his eyes, nor how he himself, even, escaped death twenty times by a hair’s-breadth. Happily for him, the captain of the mortar, who had been given him for an assistant, a tall sailor attached to these mortars since the beginning of the siege, assured him that they could make use of them still, and promised him while he was walking on the bastion, lantern in hand, as calmly as if he were in his kitchen-garden, to put them in good condition before morning.

The bomb-proof reduct into which his guide conducted him was only a great, long cavern dug in the rocky earth, two fathoms deep, protected by oaken timbers eighteen inches thick. There he established himself with his soldiers.

As soon as Vlang noticed the little low door which led into it, he threw himself in the first with such haste that he nearly fell on the stone-paved floor, cowered down in a corner, and did not care to come out of it. The soldiers placed themselves on the ground along the wall. Some of them lighted their pipes, and Volodia arranged his bed in a corner, stretched himself on it, lighted a candle in his turn, and smoked a cigarette. Over their heads could be heard, deadened by the bomb-proof, the uninterrupted roar of the discharges. A single cannon close beside them shook their shelter every time it thundered. In the interior everything was quiet. The soldiers, still intimidated by the presence of the new officer, only exchanged a word with each other now and then to ask for a light or a little room. A rat was scratching somewhere among the stones, and Vlang, who had not yet recovered from his emotion, occasionally sighed deeply as he looked about him. Volodia, on his bed in this peaceful corner crammed with people, lighted by a single candle, gave himself up to the feeling of comfort which he had often had as a child when, playing hide-and-seek, he slipped into a wardrobe or under his mother’s skirt, holding his breath, stretching his ears, being very much afraid of the dark, and feeling at the same time an unconscious impression of well-being.

In the same way here, without being altogether at his ease, he felt rather disposed to be cheerful.

XXI.

At the end of ten minutes the soldiers got bold and began to talk. Near the officer’s bed, in the circle of light, were placed the highest in rank—the two artificers, one an old gray-haired man, his breast adorned with a mass of medals and crosses, among which the cross of Saint George was wanting, however, the other a young man, smoking cigarettes which he was rolling, and the drummer, who placed himself, as is the custom, at the orders of the officer, in the background. In the shadow of the entrance, behind the bombardier and the medalled soldiers seated in front, the “humbles” kept themselves. They were the first to break silence. One of them, running in frightened from outside, served as a theme for their conversation.

“Eh! say there, you didn’t stay long in the street. Young girls are not playing there, hey?” said a voice.

“On the contrary, they are singing wonderful songs. You don’t hear such ones in the village,” replied the new-comer, with a laugh, and all out of breath.

“Vassina doesn’t like the shells; no, he doesn’t like them!” some one cried from the aristocratic side.

“When it is necessary it is another story,” slowly replied Vassina, whom everybody listened to when he spoke. “The twenty-fourth, for example, they fired so that it was a blessing, and there is no harm in that. Why let us be killed for nothing? Do the chiefs thank us for that?”

These words provoked a general laugh.

“Nevertheless, there is Melnikoff, who is outside all the time,” said some one.

“It is true. Make him come in,” added the old artificer, “otherwise he will get killed for nothing.”

“Who is this Melnikoff?” asked Volodia.

“He is, your Excellency, an animal who is afraid of nothing. He is walking about outside. Please examine him; he looks like a bear.”

“He practises witchcraft,” added Vassina, in his calm voice.

Melnikoff, a very corpulent soldier (a rare thing), with red hair, a tremendously bulging forehead, and light blue projecting eyes, came in just at this moment.

“Are you afraid of bomb-shells?” Volodia asked him.

“Why should I be afraid of them?” repeated Melnikoff, scratching his neck. “No bomb-shell will kill me, I know.”

“Do you like to live here?”

“To be sure I do; it is very entertaining,” and he burst out laughing.

“Then you must be sent out in a sortie. Would you like to? I will speak to the general,” said Volodia, although he knew no general.

“Why not like to? I should like to very much!” and Melnikoff disappeared behind his comrades.

“Come, children, let’s play ‘beggar my neighbor!’ Who has cards?” asked an impatient voice, and the game immediately began in the farthest corner. The calling of the tricks could be heard, the sound of taps on the nose and the bursts of laughter. Volodia in the mean time drank tea prepared by the drummer, offering some to the artificers, joking and chatting with them, desirous of making himself popular, and very well satisfied with the respect they showed him. The soldiers having noticed that the “barine” was a good fellow, became animated, and one of them announced that the siege was soon going to come to an end, for a sailor had told him for a certainty that Constantine, the Czar’s brother, was coming to deliver them with the ‘merican’[H] fleet; that there would soon be an armistice of two weeks to rest, and that seventy-five kopeks would have to be paid for every shot that was fired during the truce.

Vassina, whom Volodia had already noticed—the short soldier with fine great eyes and side-whiskers—related in his turn, in the midst of a general silence, which was next broken by bursts of laughter, the joy that had been felt at first on seeing him come back to his village on his furlough, and how his father had then sent him to work in the fields every day, while the lieutenant-forester sent to fetch his wife in a carriage. Volodia was amused by all these tales. He had no longer the least fear, and the strong odors which filled their reduct did not cause him any disgust. He felt, on the contrary, very gay, and in a very agreeable mood.

Several soldiers were snoring already. Vlang was also lying on the ground, and the old artificer, having spread his overcoat on the earth, crossed himself with devotion and mumbled the evening prayer, when Volodia took a fancy to go and see what was going on out of doors.

“Pull in your legs!” the soldiers immediately said to one another as they saw him get up, and each one drew his legs back to let him pass.

Vlang, who was supposed to be asleep, got up and seized Volodia by the lapel of his coat. “Come, don’t go! what is the use?” he said, in a tearful and persuasive voice. “You don’t know what it is. Bullets are raining out there. We are better off here.”

But Volodia went out without heeding him, and sat down on the very threshold of their quarters by the side of Melnikoff.

The air was fresh and pure, especially after that he had just been breathing, and the night was clear and calm. Through the roar of the cannonade could be heard the creak of the wheels of the carts bringing gabions, and the voices of those working in the magazine. Over their heads sparkled the starry sky, striped by the luminous furrows of the projectiles. On the left was a small opening, two feet and a half high, leading to a bomb-proof shelter, where could be perceived the feet and the backs of the sailors who lived there, and who were plainly heard talking. Opposite rose the mound which covered the magazine, in front of which figures, bent double, passed and repassed. On the very top of the eminence, exposed to bullets and shells which did not stop whistling at that spot, was a tall black figure, with his hands in his pockets, trampling on the fresh earth which was brought in bags. From time to time a shell fell and burst two paces from him. The soldiers who were carrying sacks bent down and separated, while the black silhouette continued quietly to level the earth with his feet without changing his position.

“Who is it?” Volodia asked Melnikoff.

“I don’t know; I am going to see.”

“Don’t go; it is no use.”

But Melnikoff rose without listening to him, went up to the black man, and remained immovable a long time beside him with the same indifference to danger.

“It is the guardian of the magazine, your Excellency,” he said, on his return. “A shell made a hole in it, and they are covering it up with earth.”

When the shells seemed to fly straight upon the bomb-proof quarters Volodia squeezed himself into the corner, and then came out raising his eyes to the sky to see if others were coming. Although Vlang, still lying down, had more than once begged him to come in, Volodia passed three hours seated on the threshold, finding a certain pleasure in thus exposing himself, as well as in watching the flight of the projectiles. Towards the end of the evening he knew perfectly well the number of the cannon and the direction they fired, and where their shots struck.

XXII.

The next day—the 27th of August—after ten hours of sleep, Volodia came out of the bomb-proof fresh and well. Vlang followed him, but at the first hissing of a cannon-ball he bounded back and threw himself through the narrow opening, knocking his head as he went, to the general laugh of the soldiers, all of whom, with the exception of Vlang, of the old artificer, and two or three others who rarely showed themselves in the trenches, had slipped outside to breathe the fresh morning air. In spite of the violence of the bombardment, they could not be prevented from remaining there, some near the entrance, others sheltered by the parapet. As to Melnikoff, he had been going and coming between the batteries since daybreak, looking in the air with indifference.

On the very threshold of the quarters were seated three soldiers, two old and one young one. The latter, a curly-headed Jewish infantryman attached to the battery, picked up a bullet which rolled at his feet, and flattening it against a stone with a piece of a shell, he cut out of it a cross on the model of that of Saint George, while the others chatted, watching his work with interest, for he succeeded well with it.

“I say that if we stay here some time yet, when peace comes we shall be retired.”

“Sure enough. I have only four years more to serve, and I have been here six months!”

“That doesn’t count for retirement,” said another, at the moment when a cannon-ball whizzing over the group struck the earth a yard away from Melnikoff, who was coming towards them in the trench.

“It almost killed Melnikoff!” cried a soldier.

“It won’t kill me,” replied the former.

“Here, take this cross for your bravery,” said the young Jewish soldier, finishing the cross and giving it to him.

“No, brother, here the months count for years without exception. There was an order about it,” continued the talker.

“Whatever happens, there will surely be, on the conclusion of peace, a review by the Emperor at Warsaw, and if we are not retired we shall have an unlimited furlough.”

Just at this instant a small cannon-ball passing over their heads with a ricochet, seemed to moan and whistle together and fell on a stone.

“Attention!” said one of the soldiers. “Perhaps between now and night you will get your definite furlough!”

Everybody began to laugh. Two hours had not passed, evening had not yet come, before two of them had, in effect, received their “definite furlough,” and five had been wounded, but the rest continued to joke as before.

In the morning the two mortars had been put in order, and Volodia received at ten o’clock the order from the commander of the bastion to assemble his men and go with them upon the battery. Once at work, there remained no trace of that terror which the evening before showed itself so plainly. Vlang alone did not succeed in overcoming it; he hid himself, and bent down every instant. Vassina had also lost his coolness, he was excited and saluted. As to Volodia, stirred by an enthusiastic satisfaction, he thought no more of the danger. The joy he felt at doing his duty well, at being no longer a coward, at feeling himself, on the contrary, full of courage, the feeling of commanding and the presence of twenty men, who he knew were watching him with curiosity, had made a real hero of him. Being even a little vain of his bravery, he got up on the banquette, unbuttoning his coat so as to be well observed. The commander of the bastion, in going his rounds, although he had been accustomed during eight months to courage in all its forms, could not help admiring this fine-looking boy with animated face and eyes, his unbuttoned coat exposing a red shirt, which confined a white and delicate neck, clapping his hands, and crying in a voice of command, “First! second!” and jumping gayly on the rampart to see where his shell had fallen. At half-past eleven the firing stopped on both sides, and at noon precisely began the assault on the Malakoff mamelon, as well as upon the second, third, and fifth bastions.

XXIII.

On this side of the bay, between Inkerman and the fortifications of the north, two sailors were standing, in the middle of the day, on Telegraph Height. Near them an officer was looking at Sebastopol through a field-glass, and another on horseback, accompanied by a Cossack, had just rejoined him near the great signal-pole.

The sun soared over the gulf, where the water, covered with ships at anchor, and with sail and row boats in motion, played merrily in its warm and luminous rays. A light breeze, which scarcely shook the leaves of the stunted oak bushes that grew beside the signal-station, filled the sails of the boats, and made the waves ripple softly. On the other side of the gulf Sebastopol was visible, unchanged, with its unfinished church, its column, its quay, the boulevard which cut the hill with a green band, the elegant library building, its little lakes of azure blue, with their forests of masts, its picturesque aqueducts, and, above all that, clouds of a bluish tint, formed by powder-smoke, lighted up from time to time by the red flame of the firing. It was the same proud and beautiful Sebastopol, with its festal air, surrounded on one side by the yellow smoke-crowned hills, on the other by the sea, deep blue in color, and sparkling brilliantly in the sun. At the horizon, where the smoke of a steamer traced a black line, white, narrow clouds were rising, precursors of a wind. Along the whole line of the fortifications, along the heights, especially on the left side, spurted out suddenly, torn by a visible flash, although it was broad daylight, plumes of thick white smoke, which, assuming various forms, extended, rose, and colored the sky with sombre tints. These jets of smoke came out on all sides—from the hills, from the hostile batteries, from the city—and flew towards the sky. The noise of the explosions shook the air with a continuous roar. Towards noon these smoke-puffs became rarer and rarer, and the vibrations of the air strata became less frequent.

“Do you know that the second bastion is no longer replying?” said the hussar officer on horseback; “it is entirely demolished. It is terrible!”

“Yes, and the Malakoff replies twice out of three times,” answered the one who was looking through the field-glass. “This silence is driving me mad! They are firing straight on the Korniloff battery, and that is not replying.”

“You’ll see it will be as I said; towards noon they will cease firing. It is always that way. Come and take breakfast, they are waiting for us. There is nothing more to see here.”

“Wait, don’t bother me,” replied, with marked agitation, the one looking through the field-glass.

“What is it?—what’s the matter?”

“There is a movement in the trenches; they are marching in close columns.”

“Yes, I see it well,” said one of the sailors; “they are advancing by columns. We must set the signal.”

“But see, there—see! They are coming out of the trenches!”

They could see, in fact, with the naked eye black spots going down from the hill into the ravine, and proceeding from the French batteries towards our bastions. In the foreground, in front of the former, black spots could be seen very near our lines. Suddenly, from different points of the bastion at the same time, spurted out the white plumes of the discharges, and, thanks to the wind, the noise of a lively fusillade could be heard, like the patter of a heavy rain against the windows. The black lines advanced, wrapped in a curtain of smoke, and came nearer. The fusillade increased in violence. The smoke burst out at shorter and shorter intervals, extended rapidly along the line in a single light, lilac-colored cloud, unrolling and enlarging itself by turns, furrowed here and there by flashes or rent by black points. All the noises mingled together in the tumult of one continued roar.

“It is an assault,” said the officer, pale with emotion, handing his glass to the sailor.

Cossacks and officers on horseback went along the road, preceding the commander-in-chief in his carriage, accompanied by his suite. Their faces expressed the painful emotion of expectation.

“It is impossible that it is taken!” said the officer on horseback.

“God in heaven!—the flag! Look now!” cried the other, choked by emotion, turning away from the glass. “The French flag is in the Malakoff mamelon!”

“Impossible!”

XXIV.

Koseltzoff the elder, who had had the time during the night to win and lose again all his winnings, including even the gold-pieces sewn in the seams of his uniform, was sleeping, towards morning, in the barracks of the fifth bastion, a heavy but deep sleep, when the sinister cry rang out, repeated by different voices, “The alarm!”

“Wake up, MikhaÏl Semenovitch! It is an assault!” a voice cried in his ear.

“A school-boy trick,” he replied, opening his eyes without believing the news; but when he perceived an officer, pale, agitated, running wildly from one corner to another, he understood all, and the thought that he might perhaps be taken for a coward refusing to join his company in a critical moment, gave him such a violent start that he rushed out and ran straight to find his soldiers. The cannon were dumb, but the musket-firing was at its height, and the bullets were whistling, not singly but in swarms, just as the flights of little birds pass over our heads in autumn. The whole of the place occupied by the battalion the evening before was filled with smoke, with cries, and with curses. On his way he met a crowd of soldiers and wounded, and thirty paces farther on he saw his company brought to a stand against a wall.

“The Swartz redoubt is occupied,” said a young officer. “All is lost!”

“What stuff and nonsense!” he angrily replied, and drawing his small rusty sword from its scabbard, shouted, “Forward, children! Hurrah!”

His strong and resounding voice stimulated his own courage, and he ran forward along the traverse. Fifty soldiers dashed after him with a shout. They came out on an open place, and a hail of bullets met them. Two struck him simultaneously, but he did not have time to understand where they had hit him, or whether they had bruised or had wounded him, for in the smoke before him blue uniforms and red trousers started up, and cries were heard which were not Russian. A Frenchman sitting on the rampart was waving his hat and shouting. The conviction that he would be killed whetted Koseltzoff’s courage. He continued to run forward; some soldiers passed him, others appeared suddenly from another side and began to run with him. The distance between them and the blue uniforms, who regained their intrenchments by running, remained the same, but his feet stumbled over the dead and the wounded. Arrived at the outer ditch, everything became confused before his eyes, and he felt a violent pain in his chest. A half hour later he was lying on a stretcher near the Nicholas barrack. He knew he was wounded, but he felt no pain. He would have liked, nevertheless, to drink something cold, and to feel himself lying more comfortably.

A stout little doctor with black whiskers came up to him and unbuttoned his overcoat. Koseltzoff looked over his chin at the face of the doctor, who was examining his wound without causing him the least pain. He, having covered the wounded man again with his shirt, wiped his fingers on the lapels of his coat, and turning aside his head, passed to another in silence. Koseltzoff mechanically followed with his eyes all that was going on about him, and remembering the fifth bastion, congratulated himself with great satisfaction. He had valiantly done his duty. It was the first time since he was in the service that he had performed it in a way that he had nothing to reproach himself for. The surgeon, who had just dressed another officer’s wound, pointed him out to a priest, who had a fine large red beard, and who stood there with a cross.

“Am I going to die?” Koseltzoff asked him, seeing him come near.

The priest made no reply, but recited a prayer and held the cross down to him. Death had no terror for Koseltzoff. Carrying the cross to his lips with weakening hands, he wept.

“Are the French driven back?” he asked the priest in a firm voice.

“Victory is ours along the whole line,” answered the latter, hiding the truth to spare the feelings of the dying man, for the French flag was already flying on the Malakoff mamelon.

“Thank God!” murmured the wounded man, whose tears ran down his cheeks unnoticed. The memory of his brother passed through his mind for a second. “God grant him the same happiness!” he said.

XXV.

But such was not Volodia’s lot. While he was listening to a tale that Vassina was relating, the alarm cry, “The French are coming!” made his blood rush immediately back to his heart; he felt his cheeks pale and turn cold, and he remained a second stupefied. Then looking around, he saw the soldiers button their coats and glide out one after the other, and he heard one of them, Melnikoff, probably, say, in a joking way, “Come, children, let’s offer him bread and salt.”

Volodia and Vlang, who did not leave his heels, went out together and ran to the battery. On one side as well as on the other the artillery had ceased firing. The despicable and cynical cowardice of the yunker still more than the coolness of the soldiers had the effect of restoring his courage.

“Am I like him?” he thought, rushing quickly towards the parapet, near which the mortars were placed. From there he distinctly saw the French dash across the space, free from every obstacle, and run straight towards him. Their bayonets, sparkling in the sun, were moving in the nearest trenches. A small, square-shouldered Zouave ran ahead of the others, sabre in hand, leaping over the ditches. “Grape!” shouted Volodia, throwing himself down from the parapet. But the soldiers had already thought of it, and the metallic noise of the grape, thrown first by one mortar and then by the other, thundered over his head. “First! second!” he ordered, running across between the two mortars, completely forgetting the danger. Shouts and the musket reports of the battalion charged with the defence of the battery were heard on one side, and suddenly on the left arose a desperate clamor, repeated by many voices: “They are coming in our rear!” and Volodia, turning around, saw a score of Frenchmen. One of them, a fine man with a black beard, ran towards him, and halting ten paces from the battery, fired at him point-blank and went on. Volodia, petrified, could not believe his eyes. In front of him, on the rampart, were blue uniforms, and two Frenchmen who were spiking a cannon. With the exception of Melnikoff, killed by a bullet at his side, and Vlang, who with downcast eyes, and face inflamed by fury, was brandishing a hand-spike, no one was left.

“Follow me, Vladimir Semenovitch! follow me!” shouted Vlang, in a despairing tone, defending himself with the lever from the French who came behind him. The yunker’s menacing look, and the blow which he struck two of them, made them halt.

“Follow me, Vladimir Semenovitch!—What are you waiting for? Fly!” and he threw himself into the trench, from which our infantry were firing on the enemy. He immediately came out of it, however, to see what had become of his beloved lieutenant. A shapeless thing, clothed in a gray overcoat, lay, face to earth, on the spot where Volodia stood, and the whole place was filled by the French, who were firing at our men.

XXVI.

Vlang found his battery again in the second line of defence, and of the twenty soldiers who recently composed it, only eight were alive.

Towards nine o’clock in the evening Vlang and his men were crossing the bay in a steamboat in the direction of SevernaÏa. The boat was laden with wounded, with cannon, and with horses. The firing had stopped everywhere. The stars sparkled in the sky as on the night before, but a strong wind was blowing and the sea was rough. On the first and second bastions flames flashed up close to the ground, preceding explosions which shook the atmosphere and showed stones and black objects of strange form thrown into the air. Something near the docks was on fire, and a red flame was reflected in the water. The bridge, covered with people, was lighted up by fires from the Nicholas battery. A great sheaf of flames seemed to rise over the water on the distant point of the Alexander battery, and lighted up the under side of a cloud of smoke which hovered over it. As on the preceding evening, the lights of the hostile fleet sparkled afar on the sea, calm and insolent. The masts of our scuttled vessels, slowly settling into the depths of the water, contrasted sharply against the red glow of the fires. On the deck of the steamboat no one spoke. Now and then, in the midst of the regular chopping of the waves struck by the wheels, and the hissing of escaping steam, could be heard the snorting of horses, the striking of their iron-shod hoofs on the planks, the captain speaking a few words of command, and also the dolorous groaning of the wounded. Vlang, who had not eaten since the day before, drew a crust of bread from his pocket and gnawed it, but at the thought of Volodia he broke out sobbing so violently that the soldiers were surprised at it.

“Look! our Vlang is eating bread and weeping,” said Vassina.

“Strange!” added one of them.

“See! they have burned our barracks!” he continued, sighing. “How many of our fellows are dead, and dead to no purpose, for the French have got possession!”

“We have scarcely come out alive. We must thank God for it,” said Vassina.

“It’s all the same. It is maddening!”

“Why? Do you think they will lead a happy life there? Wait a bit; we will take them back. We will still lose some of our men, possibly, but as true as God is holy, if the emperor orders it we will take them back! Do you think they have been left as they were? Come, come; these were only naked walls. The intrenchments were blown up. He has planted his flag on the mamelon, it is true, but he won’t risk himself in the town. Wait a bit; we won’t be behindhand with you! Only give us time,” he said, looking in the direction of the French.

“It will be so, that’s sure,” said another, with conviction.

On the whole line of the bastions of Sebastopol, where during whole months an ardent and energetic life was stirring, where during months death alone relieved the agony of the heroes, one after the other, who inspired the enemy’s terror, hatred, and finally admiration—on these bastions, I say, there was not a single soul, everything there was dead, fierce, frightful, but not silent, for everything all around was falling in with a din. On the earth, torn up by a recent explosion, were lying, here and there, broken beams, crushed bodies of Russians and French, heavy cast-iron cannon overturned into the ditch by a terrible force, half buried in the ground and forever dumb, bomb-shells, balls, splinters of beams, ditches, bomb-proofs, and more corpses, in blue or in gray overcoats, which seemed to have been shaken by supreme convulsions, and which were lighted up now every instant by the red fire of the explosions which resounded in the air.

The enemy well saw that something unusual was going on in formidable Sebastopol, and the explosions, the silence of death on the bastions, made them tremble. Under the impression of the calm and firm resistance of the last day they did not yet dare believe in the disappearance of their invincible adversary, and they awaited, silent and motionless, the end of the dismal night.

The army of Sebastopol, like a sea whose liquid mass, agitated and uneasy, spreads and overflows, moved slowly forward in the dark night, undulating into the impenetrable gloom, over the bridge on the bay, proceeding towards SevernaÏa, leaving behind them those spots where so many heroes had fallen, sprinkling them with their blood, those places defended during eleven months against an enemy twice as strong as itself, and which it had received the order this very day to abandon without a fight.

The first impression caused by this order of the day weighed heavily on the heart of every Russian; next the fear of pursuit was the dominant feeling with all. The soldiers, accustomed to fight in the places they were abandoning, felt themselves without defence the moment they left those behind. Uneasy, they crowded together in masses at the entrance of the bridge, which was lifted by violent wind gusts. Through the obstruction of regiments, of militiamen, of wagons, some crowding the others, the infantry, whose muskets clashed together, and the officers carrying orders, made a passage for themselves with difficulty. The inhabitants and the military servants accompanying the baggage begged and wept to be permitted to cross, while the artillery, in a hurry to go away, rolled along noisily, coming down towards the bay. Although the attention was distracted by a thousand details, the feeling of self-preservation, and the desire to fly as soon as possible from that fatal spot, filled each one’s soul. It was thus with the mortally wounded soldier lying among five hundred other unfortunates on the flag-stones of the Paul quay, begging God for death; with the exhausted militiaman, who by a last effort forces his way into the compact crowd to leave a free passage for a superior officer; with the general who is commanding the passage with a firm voice, and restraining the impatient soldiers; with the straggling sailor or the battalion on the march, almost stifled by the moving crowd; with the wounded officer borne by four soldiers, who, stopped by the crowd, lay down the stretcher near the Nicholas barracks; with the old artilleryman, who, during sixteen years, has not left the cannon which, with the assistance of his comrades and at the command of his chief, incomprehensible for him, he is about to tumble over into the bay; and, at length, with the sailors who have just scuttled their ships, and are vigorously rowing away in their boats.

Arrived at the end of the bridge, each soldier, with very few exceptions, takes off his cap and crosses himself. But besides this feeling he has another, more poignant, deeper—a feeling akin to repentance, to shame, to hatred; for it is with an inexpressible bitterness of heart that each of them sighs, utters threats against the enemy, and, as he reaches the north side, throws a last look upon abandoned Sebastopol.

FINIS.

FOOTNOTES: