“Well, what do you think? They make soldiers of all classes there.”
“But they don’t understand our talk at all,” said the dancer with a puzzled smile. “I asked him whose subject he was, and he jabbered in his own way. A queer lot!”
“But it’s strange, friends,” continued the man who had wondered at their whiteness, “the peasants at Mozháysk were saying that when they began burying the dead—where the battle was you know—well, those dead had been lying there for nearly a month, and says the peasant, ‘they lie as white as paper, clean, and not as much smell as a puff of powder smoke.’”
“Was it from the cold?” asked someone.
“You’re a clever fellow! From the cold indeed! Why, it was hot. If it had been from the cold, ours would not have rotted either. ‘But,’ he says, ‘go up to ours and they are all rotten and maggoty. So,’ he says, ‘we tie our faces up with kerchiefs and turn our heads away as we drag them off: we can hardly do it. But theirs,’ he says, ‘are white as paper and not so much smell as a whiff of gunpowder.’”
All were silent.
“It must be from their food,” said the sergeant major. “They used to gobble the same food as the gentry.”
No one contradicted him.
“That peasant near Mozháysk where the battle was said the men were all called up from ten villages around and they carted for twenty days and still didn’t finish carting the dead away. And as for the wolves, he says...”
“That was a real battle,” said an old soldier. “It’s the only one worth remembering; but since that... it’s only been tormenting folk.”