War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [530]
“Get down!” cried the voice of the adjutant, throwing himself to the ground. Prince Andrei stood undecided. The shell was smoking, spinning like a top between him and the prone adjutant, on the border between the field and the meadow, near a bush of wormwood.
“Can this be death?” thought Prince Andrei, gazing with completely new, envious eyes at the grass, at the wormwood, and at the little stream of smoke curling up from the spinning black ball. “I can’t, I don’t want to die, I love life, I love this grass, the earth, the air…” He was thinking all that and at the same time remembered that he was being looked at.
“Shame on you, officer!” he said to the adjutant. “What an…” He did not finish. At one and the same time there was the sound of an explosion, a whistling of splinters as if from a shattered window, a choking smell of powder—and Prince Andrei hurtled sideways and, raising his arm, fell on his chest.
Several officers ran to him. From the right side of his stomach a large stain of blood was spreading onto the grass.
The summoned militiamen stopped behind the officers. Prince Andrei lay on his chest, his face lowered to the grass, and was breathing in heavy gasps.
“Well, what are you standing there for, come here!”
The muzhiks went over and took hold of him by the shoulders and legs, but he moaned pitifully, and the muzhiks, exchanging glances, let go of him again.
“Pick him up, lay him out, it’s all the same!” cried someone’s voice. They took hold of him again by the shoulders and laid him on a stretcher.
“Ah, my God! My God! What is it?…The stomach! That’s the end! Ah, my God!” voices were heard among the officers. “It whizzed just a hair away from my ear,” said the adjutant. The muzhiks, hoisting the stretcher on their shoulders, started down the path they had trodden to the dressing station.
“Keep in step…Eh!…You clodhoppers!” cried an officer, stopping the muzhiks by the shoulders as they walked off unevenly, jolting the stretcher.
“Come on, fall in, Fyodor, fall in,” said the muzhik in front.
“There we go, that’s grand,” the one behind said joyfully, falling into step.
“Your Excellency? Eh? Prince?” Timokhin said in a trembling voice, running up and looking into the stretcher.
Prince Andrei opened his eyes, looked out from the stretcher, into which his head had sunk deeply, at the one who was speaking, and lowered his eyelids again.
The militiamen brought Prince Andrei to the woods where the carts stood and where the dressing station was. The dressing station consisted of three tents with turned-back flaps pitched at the edge of a birch grove. In the birch grove stood carts and horses. The horses were eating oats from their nosebags, and sparrows flew down to them, pecking up the spilled grain. Crows, scenting blood, crowing impatiently, flew about in the birches. Around the tents, over more than five acres, bloodied men lay, sat, or stood in various clothes. Around the wounded, with dejected, attentive faces, stood crowds of stretcher bearers, whom the officers in charge of keeping order tried in vain to drive away from the place. Not heeding the officers, the bearers stood leaning on the stretchers and, as if trying to comprehend the difficult meaning of the spectacle, looked intently at what was going on before them. From the tents came now loud, angry screams, now a pitiful wailing. Occasionally surgeons’ assistants ran out to fetch water and pointed to those who were to be carried in. The wounded, waiting their turn by the tents, wheezed, moaned, wept, shouted, cursed, begged for vodka. Some were delirious. As Prince Andrei was a regimental commander, the bearers, stepping among the not-yet-treated