Pass the church, the barricade, and you enter the most animated, the liveliest quarter of the city. On both sides of the street are shop signs, eating-house signs. Here are merchants, women with men’s hats or with handkerchiefs on their heads, officers in elegant uniforms. Everything testifies to the courage, the assurance, the safety of the inhabitants.
Enter this restaurant on the right. If you want to listen to the sailors’ and the officers’ talk, you will hear them relate the incidents of the night before, of the affair of the 24th; hear them grumble at the high price of the badly cooked cutlets, and mention the comrade recently killed.
“Devil take me! we are badly off where we are now,” says the bass voice of a pale, blond, beardless, newly appointed officer, his neck wrapped in a green knit scarf.
“Where is that?” some one asks.
“In the fourth bastion,” replies the young officer; and at this reply you attentively look at him, and feel a certain respect for him. His exaggerated carelessness, his violent gestures, his too loud laughter, which would shortly before have seemed to you impudent, become in your eyes the index of a certain kind of combative spirit common to all young people who are exposed to great danger, and you are sure he is going to explain that it is on account of the shells and the bullets that they are so badly off in the fourth bastion. Nothing of the kind! They are badly off there because the mud is deep.
“Impossible to get up to the battery,” he says, pointing to his boots, muddied even to the upper-leathers.
“My best gun captain was instantly killed to-day by a ball in his forehead,” rejoins a comrade.
“Who was it? Mituchine?”
“No, another man.—Look here! are you never going to bring me my chop, you villain?” says he, speaking to the waiter.—“It was Abrossinoff, as brave a man as lived. He took part in six sorties.”
At the other end of the table two infantry officers are eating veal cutlets with green pease washed down by sour Crimean wine, by courtesy called Bordeaux. One of them, a young man with red collar and two stars on his coat, is telling to his neighbor with a black collar and no stars the details of the fight on the Alma. The first is a little the worse for liquor. His frequently interrupted tale, his uncertain look, which reflects the lack of confidence which his story inspires in his auditor, the fine part he gives himself, the too high color of his picture, lead you to guess that he is wandering away from the absolute truth. But you haven’t anything to do with these tales, which you will hear for a long time yet in the farthest corners of Russia; you have one wish alone, that is, to go straight to the fourth bastion, which you have heard so many and so varied reports about. You will notice that whoever tells you he has been there says it with pride and satisfaction; that whoever is getting ready to go there either shows a little emotion or affects an exaggerated sangfroid. If one man is joking with another, he will invariably tell him, “Go to the fourth bastion!” If a wounded man on a stretcher is met, and he is asked where he comes from, he will answer, almost without fail, “From the fourth bastion!” Two completely different notions of this terrible earthwork have been circulated; the first by those who have never put their foot upon it, and for whom it is the inevitable tomb of its defenders, the second by those who, like the little blond officer, live there and simply speak of it, saying it is dry or muddy there, warm or cold.