War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [531]
“We just pounded him out of there, he dropped everything, we caught the king himself!” the soldier shouted, looking around him, his black, inflamed eyes glittering. “If only the reservers had come just then, brothers, he wouldn’t even have left his name behind, it’s the truth I’m telling you…”
Prince Andrei, like everyone else around the narrator, looked at him with shining eyes and experienced a comforting feeling. “But does it make any difference now?” he thought. “And what will be there, and what has there been here? Why was I so sorry to part with life? There was something in this life that I didn’t and still don’t understand…”
XXXVII
One of the doctors came out of the tent in a bloody apron and with small, bloody hands, in one of which, between the thumb and the little finger (so as not to stain it), he was holding a cigar. This doctor raised his head and began looking from side to side, but over the heads of the wounded. He obviously wanted to rest a little. Turning his head to right and left for some time, he sighed and lowered his eyes.
“Right now,” he said to the words of the assistant, who was pointing to Prince Andrei, and ordered him brought into the tent.
A murmur arose in the crowd of waiting wounded.
“Looks like in the next world, too, only the masters’ll have it good,” one said.
Prince Andrei was brought in and laid on a just-vacated table, from which an assistant was rinsing something. Prince Andrei could not sort out separately what was in the tent. The pitiful moans on all sides, the tormenting pain in his hip, stomach, and back distracted him. Everything he saw around him merged for him into a general impression of bared, bloody human flesh, which seemed to fill this low tent, as several weeks ago, on that hot August day, that same flesh had filled the dirty pool on the Smolensk road. Yes, it was the same flesh, the same chair à canon, the sight of which already then, as if foretelling the present, had filled him with horror.
There were three tables in the tent. Two were occupied, Prince Andrei was laid on the third. He was left alone for a time, and he involuntarily saw what was taking place on the other two tables. On the near table sat a Tartar, probably a Cossack, judging by the uniform thrown down next to him. Four soldiers were holding him. A doctor in spectacles was cutting at something in his brown, muscular back.
“Unh, unh, unh!…” the Tartar was as if grunting, and suddenly, lifting up his high-cheeked, dark, snub-nosed face, and baring his white teeth, he began to strain, pull, and shriek in a piercingly ringing, drawn-out shriek. On the other table, around which many people crowded, a big, sturdy man lay on his back with his head thrown back (his curly hair, its color, and the shape of his head seemed strangely familiar to Prince Andrei). Several assistants leaned their weight on the man’s chest and held him down. One big, sturdy white leg kept jerking quickly and rhythmically with a feverish quivering. The man sobbed and spluttered convulsively. Two doctors—one was pale and trembling—were silently doing something to the man’s other leg, which was red. Having finished with the Tartar, over whom an overcoat was thrown, the doctor in spectacles, wiping his hands, came up to Prince Andrei.
He looked at Prince Andrei’s face and quickly turned away.
“Undress him! What are you standing there for?” he cried angrily to the assistants.
His very first, distant childhood came to Prince Andrei’s