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By Root 4005 0

crumbling some dry clay between his palms, polished his bayonet; a third worked the leather and readjusted the buckle of his bandolier; yet another carefully spread out his footcloth, wound it up again, and put his boot back on. Some built little houses from the clods of the field or plaited little baskets out of straw. They all seemed fully immersed in these occupations. When men were wounded or killed, when stretchers were carried past, when our troops retreated, when large masses of the enemy were seen through the smoke, no one paid any attention to these circumstances. But when the artillery or cavalry advanced, or movements of our infantry could be seen, approving remarks could be heard on all sides. But the greatest attention was accorded to totally extraneous events, which had no relation to the battle. It was as if the attention of these morally exhausted men found rest in these ordinary everyday events. An artillery battery was passing by in front of the regiment. The outrunner of one of the artillery caissons stepped over a trace. “Hey, that outrunner!…Put it right! It’ll fall…Eh, they don’t see it!…” men shouted from the ranks all through the regiment. Another time, general attention was drawn to a little brown dog with a stiffly raised tail, who, coming from God knows where, trotted out in front of the ranks with a preoccupied air and, when a cannonball suddenly hit close by, squealed and dashed off, its tail between its legs. Guffaws and squeals came from all over the regiment. But distractions of this sort last only a few minutes, while the men had been standing for more than eight hours with no food and with nothing to do, under the relentless terror of death, and their pale and frowning faces grew more pale and frowning.

Prince Andrei, frowning and pale, like all the men of the regiment, paced up and down the meadow next to the oat field from one edge to the other, his hands behind his back, his head bowed. There was nothing for him to do or to order. Everything was being done by itself. The dead were dragged back behind the front line, the wounded were carried away, the ranks closed up. If soldiers ran off, they came hurrying back at once. At first Prince Andrei walked up and down the ranks, considering it his duty to rouse the courage of the solders and set them an example; but then he realized that he had nothing to teach them. All the forces of his soul, as of every soldier, were unconsciously bent solely on keeping himself from contemplating the horror of the situation they were in. He paced over the meadow, dragging his feet, scuffing up the grass, and observing the dust that covered his boots. Now he took big steps, trying to get into the footprints left on the meadow by the mowers; then he counted his steps, trying to reckon up how many times he had to go from edge to edge to make a mile; then he pulled off the flowers of the wormwood that grew along the edge, and rubbed those flowers between his palms, sniffing the fragrantly bitter, strong smell. Of all his mental work the day before, nothing remained. He was not thinking about anything. He listened with a weary ear to the same sounds, distinguishing the whistle of projectiles from the roar of cannon fire, looked at the familiar faces of the first battalion, and waited. “Here it comes…This one’s for us again!” he thought, listening to the approaching whistle of something from the hidden zone of smoke. “One, another! More! A hit…” He stopped and looked at the ranks. “No, an overshot. But that one’s a hit.” And he began pacing again, trying to take big strides so as to reach the edge in sixteen steps.

A whistle and a thud! Five paces from him a cannonball dug up the dry earth and disappeared. An involuntary chill ran down his spine. He glanced at the ranks again. Many had probably been taken out; a large crowd gathered by the second battalion.

“Mr. Adjutant!” he shouted, “order them not to crowd around.” The adjutant, having carried out the order, was coming towards Prince Andrei. From the other side the battalion commander rode up.

“Look out!