Chapter 36 Chapter Thirty-Six

Prince Andrew's regiment remained in the reserve until one o'clock in the afternoon, which remained behind the village of Semyonovskoe under heavy artillery fire and did not move.After one o'clock, with the loss of more than two hundred people, the regiment moved forward to a flattened oat field between the village of Semyonovskoye and the mound battery. Thousands of people were killed or injured in the fortress. At one o'clock in the afternoon, the enemy's hundreds of cannons concentrated their fire on it. The regiment did not move here, did not fire a single shot, and lost another third of its men.From the front, and especially from the right, in the stagnant smoke, the cannons boomed, and the whole ground of the mysterious district ahead was filled with smoke, from which flew continuously the swift, hissing guns. Cannonballs and slow whizzing grenades.Sometimes, as if to give the people a break, shells and grenades flew overhead for a quarter of an hour, but sometimes several men were lost in the regiment in a minute.The dead were dragged away, and the wounded were carried away.

With each new attack, the chances of survival for those who hadn't been killed dwindled.The regiment formed a column battalion at a distance of three hundred paces. Even so, the whole regiment was still shrouded in the same mood.The whole group was silent and looked gloomy.There was very little conversation in the ranks, and even if there was talk, it stopped when they heard the sound of being shot and shouting "stretcher!"Most of the time, the whole regiment sat on the ground following the orders of the commander.Some took off their hats, straightened the folds attentively, and then folded them again; some grabbed a handful of dry soil, crushed it in the palm of their hand, and used it to wipe the bayonet; some rubbed the belt and tightened the buckle Some of them stretched out the foot wraps carefully, then rewrapped their feet and put on their boots.Some build huts out of clods from plowed fields, or weave things out of straw.Everyone seemed engrossed in these matters.When men were wounded or killed, when lines of stretchers passed by, when our ranks were retreating, when masses of the enemy appeared in the smoke, no one paid any attention to these situations.But when our artillery and cavalry walked forward, when our infantry moved forward, voices of approval sounded from all directions.But the ones that get the most attention are the ones that have absolutely nothing to do with combat, nothing to do with it.As if these mentally tormented people could rest by focusing on these mundane, everyday things.An artillery battery passed in front of the regiment, and a horse drawn by an artillery ammunition cart stepped out of the noose. "Hey, look at that horse with the harness! . . . Put your legs in! He's going to fall... Oh, they didn't see it! . . . " the whole regiment yelled.Another time, everyone noticed a brown puppy that appeared out of nowhere. It raised its tail high and walked thoughtfully in small steps. A cannonball, he screamed, tucked his tail, and jumped aside.The whole regiment roared with laughter and screams.But this happy event only lasted for a few minutes. People stood for more than eight hours without eating or drinking in the constant terror of death, and their pale and melancholy faces became more and more pale and melancholy.

Prince Andrei, like the rest of the regiment, was pale and gloomy, and walked up and down the meadow by the oat-field, from row to row, with his hands behind his back and his head bowed.He had nothing to do with the founder of existentialism.Husserl's student.He worked successively at the University of Marburg and at Frey, and there was no order to issue.Everything is left to itself.The dead were dragged outside the lines, the wounded were carried away, and the ranks closed.If soldiers ran away, they rushed back at once. At first, Prince Andrei thought it was his duty to encourage morale and set an example for the soldiers, so he walked up and down the ranks; Teach them, and there is nothing to teach them.He, like every soldier, tried with all his energy to avoid the danger of imagining their situation.He walked up and down the grass, shuffling his feet slowly, making the grass rustle, his eyes fixed on the dust on his boots; Footprints, sometimes counting your own steps, calculating the distance between two field ridges to walk a verst; sometimes picking a few wormwood flowers growing on the field ridges, crushing them on the palm of your hand, and smelling the strong smell Sweet and bitter aroma.None of the things I thought about yesterday were gone.He doesn't want anything.He listened with weary ears to the always the same voice, distinguishing the screech of bullets from the boom of shells, watching the tired faces of the men of the 1st Battalion, and he waited. "Here it comes... This one is coming for us again!" he thought, listening to the approaching whistling sound from the smoky field. "One, two! Another one! Hit..." He stopped and looked at the team.

"No, it flew over. But this one hit." He began to walk up and down again, taking strides as hard as he could, trying to reach another ridge in sixteen steps. Whoosh and bang!Five paces away from him, a shell blasted the dry earth and disappeared.He couldn't help feeling a chill run down his spine.He looked at the team again.There were probably many more casualties: a large crowd was gathered in the 2nd Battalion. "Monsieur Adjutant," he called, "order them not to gather together." The adjutant carried out the order, and went up to Prince Andrew.A battalion commander came galloping from the other direction.

"Beware!" a soldier shouted in panic, and a grenade flew with a whistling sound, like a bird swooping down on the ground, and landed on the side of the battalion commander's horse, two steps away from Prince Andrew. , with a bang.Whether or not the horse showed terror, it snorted first, put up its front hooves, almost threw the major off, and then ran away.The fear of horses infected people. "Lie down!" shouted the lieutenant, who had fallen to the ground.Prince Andrew stood hesitating.A grenade was between him and the adjutant, on the edge of the plow and meadow, beside a clump of wormwood, whirling like a top, smoking.

"Is this death?" thought Prince Andrew, looking at the grass, the wormwood, and the wisp of smoke rising from the spinning black ball with completely new and envious eyes. "I can't die, I don't want to die, I love life, I love this grass, I love the earth, I love the sky..." He thought like this, and at the same time he thought that people were looking at him. "Shame, Monsieur Adjutant!" he said to the adjutant. "How..." He couldn't finish the sentence.At that moment there was an explosion, fragments flew in all directions like a broken glass window, and the smell of gunpowder was suffocating, and Prince Andrei rushed aside, raised his hand, and fell on his chest. fall down.

Several officers ran towards him.Blood was coming from the right side of the abdomen, and there was a big pool of blood on the grass. Reservists called to carry stretchers stood behind the officers.Prince Andrey was lying on his stomach, his face buried in the grass, and he was breathing heavily. "What are you standing there for, come here!" The farmers came up and grabbed him by the shoulders and legs, but he groaned miserably, and the farmers looked at each other and put him down again. "Lift it up, put it down, it's always the same!" someone yelled.They lifted him again by the shoulders and put him on the stretcher.

"Oh, my God! My God! What's the matter? . . . Belly! It's over! Oh, my God!" sighed from among the officers. "The shells are flying past my ears," said the adjutant. Several farmers put the stretcher on their shoulders and hurried down the path they had trod to the ambulance station. "Let's keep pace... Hey! . . . folks!" shouted an officer, grabbing the shoulders of the wobbling peasants, jolting their stretchers, and telling them to stop. "Come on, what's the matter with you, Hévédor, I say, Hévédor," said the farmer in front.

"That's right, all right." The farmer at the back who had adjusted his pace said happily. "My lord? Ah? It's the Duke?" Timothy ran over, looked at the stretcher, and said in a trembling voice.Prince Andrew opened his eyes, looked at the speaker from the stretcher (in which his head was sunk), and lowered his eyelids again. The reservists carried Prince Andrew to the edge of the wood, where the wagons were parked and the ambulance station was there.The ambulance station has three tents with rolled sides erected beside the small birch forest.In the woods were parked carts and horses.The horse was eating the oats in the feed bag, and the sparrow flew to the horse and pecked at the scattered grains.The crow smelled the blood, screamed impatiently, and flew back and forth on the birch tree.In the two dessiacres around the tent, blood-stained people in various costumes were lying, sitting or standing.Around the wounded stood many dejected and concerned stretcher soldiers, and the officers maintaining order could not drive them away.The soldiers didn't listen to the officers, but still stood there leaning on the stretchers, as if they wanted to understand the profound meaning of this scene, and they watched what happened before them intently.From the tent there were loud, fierce wailings, miserable groans, and sometimes a medical assistant ran out to fetch water and designate the person who should be carried in.The hoarse voices of the wounded waited outside the tents, moaning, weeping, shouting, cursing, asking for vodka.Some people are unconscious and talking nonsense.Stretchers stepped over the undressed wounded and carried the regimental commander, Prince Andrew, to a nearby tent, where they stopped to wait for instructions.Prince Andrew opened his eyes and for a long time could not make out what was going on around him.He remembered the meadows, the wormwood, the tilled fields, the spinning black balls, and his passion for life.Two steps away from him stood a tall, handsome black-haired sergeant with a bandage on his head, leaning on a branch and talking loudly, hoping to attract everyone's attention.He was wounded by bullets to the head and legs.Around him was a crowd of wounded and stretcher bearers.Listening eagerly to his speech.

"We beat him so badly that he'd lose all his armor and shit, and get the king!" cried the sergeant, looking around with his fiery black eyes gleaming. "If the reserve army arrives in time, brothers, he will be fully reimbursed. I dare to assure you..." Prince Andrew, like those around the speaker, looked at him with shining eyes and was relieved. "But doesn't everything matter now?" he thought. "What will the next life be like? What has this world been like? Why did I miss life so much in the past? There is something in this life that I didn't and still don't understand."