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Show 194 THE DARK FOREST ONE NIGHT worked until the sweat ran down our backs and arms in streams. It dripped from my nose, into my mouth, into my eyes. The wounds were horrible. No man seemed to come into the room with an unmane‘lcd body. The smell rose higher and higher, the bloody 1 'aus lay about the kitchen \ floor, torn arms. smashed legs. heads with gapingr wounds, the pitiful cryiin:r and praying. the shrill Voices of the delirious. Nikitin, his arms steeped in blood to the elbows, probing, cutting. digging. I myself bandae'ing until I did not know what my hands were doing. . . . Then suddenly the battle coming right back to us again, oyerhead now as it seemed; the cannon shaking three silly staring china dogs on the kitchen dresser, the rifle tire cluttering like tumbling crockery about the walls of the cottage-and through it all the white youth, crouched like a ghost on the stove, watching without pause. "Ah, no, your Honour . . . Ah, no! . . . I can't! can't! I Oh, oh, oh, oh!" and then sobs, the man breaking down like a child, hiding his face in his arms, his wounded leg twitching convulsively. I paused, wiped the sweat from my eyes, stood up. Nikitin looked at me. "Take some fresh air!" he said. "Go out with the stretcher for half an hour. I can manage here." I wiped my forehead. "Sure you can manage?" I asked. "Quite," said Nikitin. "Here, hold his back! . . . N0, 11‘1"(1'73) his back. Bojé moi, can't you get your arm under? There-like that. Horosho, golubchik, horosho . . . only a minute! There! There!" I washed my hands and went out. The air caressed my forehead like cold water; from the little garden at the back there came scents of flowers; the moonlight was blue on the common. Eight sanitars were waiting to start. The Feld- 195 scher in charge of them did not, I thought, seem greatly pleased when he saw me, but then I am often stupidly sensitive; no one said anything and we started. W'e carried two stretchers and a soldier from the trenches was with us to guide us. I could see that the men were not happy. I heard one of them mutter to another that. they should not have been sent now; that they should have waited until the attack was over . . . "and the full moon. . . . Did any one ever see such a moon ?" We came to cross-roads and advanced very carefully. As we crossed the road I was conscious of great excitement. The noise around us was tcrriti . and (litlicrent from any noise that I heard before. I did not think at the time, but was informed afterwards that it was because we were almost directly under a high-woodml clitl (the actual posi' tion about whose possession the battle was being; fought), that the noise was so trcmendous. The echo flung every thingr back so that each rcport sounded three or four times. This certainly had the strangest otl'cctwa background as it were of rollingr thunder. sometimcs distant, sometimes very close and. in front of this, clapping, bellowing, stamping, and then suddenly an absolutely NIIHIN/I iii/1 ctl'cct as though some one cried: "Well, this will settle it!" ln quieter in. tcrvals one heard the liirdlike tlight of bullets above onc's head and thc irritated bad tciupcr of the Iuachiuog‘uim. At every snuzx/zim/ noiw the sanitars, who were, I bclicvc, schoolmastcrs and little clerks, and therefore of a more sensitive hcad than the peasant soldier. duckcd their hcads, and one tat i'I-d taccd man tricd to lie down tlat on two oc~ casions and was t'lll‘>(‘tl heartily by tho heldschi-r. I myself felt no fear but only a poiiiuliii;_r exhilarating excitement, because I was at last "really in it." We, found one wounded |