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By Root 3491 0

“‘Well, where’s your superior here?’ They point. ‘Kindly wait.’ ‘I have duties, I’ve ridden twenty miles, I have no time to wait, announce me.’ Very good, this super-thief comes out and starts teaching me. ‘This is robbery!’ ‘Robbery,’ I say, ‘is not when somebody takes pgrrovisions to feed his soldiers, but when he takes them so as to line his pockets!’ Very good. ‘Give your signature to the commissioner,’ he says, ‘and your case will be passed on through the chain of command.’ I go to the commissioner. I enter—at the table sits…who do you think?! No, just think!…Who is it that’s starving us?” Denisov shouted, pounding the table with the fist of his just-bled arm so hard that the table almost fell and the glasses on it jumped. “Telyanin!! ‘So it’s you who are starving us to death?!’ One-two in the mug, they landed nicely…‘Ah!…you this, this, this, and that…’ and I started pummeling him! Anyhow it was good fun, I can tell you,” Denisov cried, baring his white teeth gleefully and spitefully under his black mustache. “I’d have killed him if they hadn’t pulled us apart.”

“But what are you shouting for? Calm down,” said Rostov. “Here you’re bleeding again. Wait, your bandage should be changed.”

Denisov’s bandage was changed, and he was put to bed. The next day he woke up cheerful and calm.

But at noon the regimental adjutant came with a grave and mournful face to Denisov and Rostov’s dugout and regretfully showed them an official paper to Major Denisov from the regimental commander, in which questions were raised about yesterday’s occurrence. The adjutant informed them that the affair was bound to take a rather bad turn, that a court-martial had been appointed, and that, considering the present strictness about marauding and insubordination among the troops, in the best case the affair might end in demotion.

The affair was presented by the offended side in such guise that, after seizing the transport, Major Denisov, uninvited, in a drunken state, appeared at the quartermaster general’s, called him a thief, threatened him with a beating, and, when removed, rushed into the office, attacked two clerks, and dislocated the arm of one.

To Rostov’s renewed questions, Denisov, laughing, said that it seemed somebody else had turned up there, but it was all nonsense, trifles, that he did not even dream of being afraid of any courts, and that if those scoundrels dared to provoke him, he would give them an answer they would remember.

Denisov spoke disdainfully of the whole affair; but Rostov knew him too well not to notice that, in his soul (concealing it from others), he was afraid of the trial and suffered over the affair, which was obviously going to have bad consequences. Every day papers of inquiry came, summonses from the court, and on the first of May, Denisov was ordered to turn over command of the squadron to the next in seniority and report to the division staff for explanations of the case of violence in the provisions commission. On the eve of that day, Platov made a reconnaissance of the enemy with two Cossack regiments and two hussar squadrons. Denisov, as always, rode out in front of the line, showing off his courage. A bullet fired by a French rifleman hit him in the fleshy upper part of the leg. Perhaps at another time Denisov would not have left the regiment with such a slight wound, but now he took advantage of this chance, excused himself from appearing at the division, and went to the hospital.

XVII

In the month of June, the battle of Friedland took place,23 in which the Pavlogradsky regiment did not participate, and after it a truce was declared. Rostov, who painfully felt his friend’s absence, having no news of him since the time of his departure and worried about the course of his case and his wound, took advantage of the truce and obtained permission to visit Denisov in the hospital.

The hospital was in a little Prussian village twice ravaged by Russian and French troops. Precisely because it was summer, when it was so pleasant in the fields, this little village, with its broken roofs and fences and its