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By Root 4032 0

the smoke, deafened by the ceaseless firing, which made him jump each time, Tushin, without relinquishing his nose-warmer, ran from one gun to the other, now taking aim, now counting the charges, now ordering the dead and wounded horses to be changed and reharnessed, and shouting all the while in his weak, high, irresolute voice. His face was growing more and more animated. Only when people were killed or wounded, he winced and, turning away from the dead man, shouted angrily at his crew, who, as always, were slow to pick up a wounded man or a body. His soldiers, for the most part fine, handsome fellows (two heads taller and twice as broad as their officer, as always in a battery company), all looked to their commander, like children in a difficult situation, and the expression on his face was inevitably mirrored on theirs.

As a result of the dreadful rumbling, the noise, the necessity for attention and activity, Tushin did not experience the slightest unpleasant feeling of fear, and the thought that he could be killed or painfully wounded did not occur to him. On the contrary, he felt ever merrier and merrier. It seemed to him that the moment when he saw the enemy and fired the first shot was already very long ago, maybe even yesterday, and that the spot on the field where he stood was a long-familiar and dear place to him. Though he remembered everything, considered everything, did everything the best officer could do in his position, he was in a state similar to feverish delirium or to that of a drunken man.

From the deafening noise of his guns on all sides, from the whistling and thud of the enemy’s shells, from the sight of the sweaty, flushed crews hustling about the guns, from the sight of the blood of men and horses, from the sight of the little puffs of smoke on the enemy’s side (after each of which a cannonball came flying and hit the ground, a man, a cannon, or a horse)—owing to the sight of all these things, there was established in his head a fantastic world of his own, which made up his pleasure at that moment. In his imagination, the enemy’s cannon were not cannon but pipes, from which an invisible smoker released an occasional puff of smoke.

“Look, he’s puffing away again,” Tushin said to himself in a whisper, as a puff of smoke leaped from the hillside and was borne leftwards in a strip by the wind, “now wait for the ball—and send it back.”

“What orders, Your Honor?” asked the fireworker, who was standing close to him and heard him mutter something.

“Nothing…a shell…” he replied.

“Now for our Matvevna,” he said to himself. In his imagination, Matvevna was the big cannon at the end, of ancient casting. The French looked like ants around their guns. A handsome man and a drunkard, the number one at the second gun was known in his world as uncle; Tushin looked at him more often than at the others and rejoiced at his every movement. The sound of musket fire at the foot of the hill, now dying down, now intensifying again, seemed to him like someone’s breathing. He listened to the fading and flaring up of these sounds.

“Hah, breathing again, breathing,” he said to himself.

He pictured himself as of enormous size, a mighty man, flinging cannonballs at the French with both hands.

“Well, Matvevna, old girl, don’t let us down!” he said, moving away from the gun, when a strange, unfamiliar voice rang out over his head.

“Captain Tushin! Captain!”

Tushin turned around, frightened. It was the same staff officer who had driven him out of Grunt. He was shouting at him in a breathless voice:

“What, have you lost your mind? You’ve been ordered twice to retreat, but you…”

“Well, what are they getting at me for?…” Tushin thought to himself, looking fearfully at his superior.

“I…nothing…” he said, putting two fingers to his visor. “I…”

But the colonel did not finish everything he wanted to say. A cannonball flew close to him and made him duck and crouch down on his horse. He fell silent and was about to say something more when another cannonball stopped him. He turned his horse and galloped away.

“Retreat! Everybody