“It is strange,” he thought, seeing him rise to listen to him. “He has commanded the regiment scarcely six weeks, and power is already visible in his bearing, in his look, in his clothes. Not a long while ago this same Batretcheff amused himself in our quarters, wore for whole weeks the same dark calico shirt, and ate his hash and his sour cream without inviting any one to share it, and now an expression full of hard pride can be read in his eyes, which say to me, ‘Although I am your comrade, for I am a regimental chief of the new school, you may be sure I know perfectly well that you would give half your life to be in my place.’”
“You have been treating yourself to a rather long absence,” said the colonel, coldly, looking at him.
“I have been ill, colonel, and my wound is not yet altogether healed.”
“If that’s so, what did you come back for?” Koseltzoff’s corpulence inspired his chief with defiance. “Can you do your duty?”
“Certainly I can.”
“All right. Ensign Zaïtzeff will conduct you to the ninth company, the one you have already commanded. You will receive the order of the day. Be so good as to send me the regimental aide-de-camp as you go out,” and his chief, bowing slightly, gave him to understand by this that the interview was ended.
On his way out Koseltzoff muttered indistinct words and shrugged his shoulders several times. It might readily be believed that he felt ill at ease, or that he was irritated, not exactly against his regimental chief, but rather against himself and against all his surroundings.
XV.
Before going to find his officers he went to look up his company. The parapets built of gabions, the trenches, the cannon in front of which he passed, even the fragments and the shells themselves over which he stumbled, and which the flashes of the discharges lighted up without pause or relaxation, everything was familiar to him, and had been deeply engraven on his memory three months before, during the fortnight he had lived in the bastion. Notwithstanding the dismal side of these memories, a certain inherent charm of the past came out of them, and he recognized the places and things with an unaffected pleasure, as if the two weeks had been full of only agreeable impressions. His company was placed along the covered way which led to the sixth bastion.
Entering the shelter open on one side, he found so many soldiers there that he could scarcely find room to pass. At one end burned a wretched candle, which a reclining soldier was holding over a book that his comrade was spelling out. Around him, in the twilight of a thick and heavy atmosphere, several heads could be seen turned towards the reader, listening eagerly. Koseltzoff recognized the A B C of this sentence: “P-r-a-y-e-r a-f-t-e-r s-t-u-d-y. I give Thee thanks, my Cre-a-tor.”