"Take some fresh air!" he said. "Go out with the stretcher for half an hour. I can manage here."
I wiped my forehead.
"Sure you can manage?" I asked.
"Quite," said Nikitin. "Here, hold his back!... No, durak, his back. Bojé moi, can't you get your arm under? There—like that. Horosho, golubchik, horosho ... only a minute! There! There!"
I washed my hands and went out. The air caressed my forehead like cold water; from the little garden at the back there came scents of flowers; the moonlight was blue on the common. Eight sanitars were waiting to start. The Feldscher in charge of them did not, I thought, seem greatly pleased when he saw me, but then I am often stupidly sensitive; no one said anything and we started. We carried two stretchers and a soldier from the trenches was with us to guide us.
I could see that the men were not happy. I heard one of them mutter to another that they should not have been sent now; that they should have waited until the attack was over ... "and the full moon.... Did any one ever see such a moon?"
We came to cross-roads and advanced very carefully.
As we crossed the road I was conscious of great excitement. The noise around us was terrific and different from any noise that I heard before. I did not think at the time, but was informed afterwards that it was because we were almost directly under a high-wooded cliff (the actual position about whose possession the battle was being fought), that the noise was so tremendous. The echo flung everything back so that each report sounded three or four times. This certainly had the strangest effect—a background as it were of rolling thunder, sometimes distant, sometimes very close and, in front of this, clapping, bellowing, stamping, and then suddenly an absolutely smashing effect as though some one cried: "Well, this will settle it!" In quieter intervals one heard the birdlike flight of bullets above one's head and the irritated bad temper of the machine-guns. At every smashing noise the sanitars, who were, I believe, schoolmasters and little clerks, and therefore of a more sensitive head than the peasant soldier, ducked their heads, and one fat red-faced man tried to lie down flat on two occasions and was cursed heartily by the Feldscher. I myself felt no fear but only a pounding exhilarating excitement, because I was at last "really in it." We found one wounded man very soon, lying under the hedge with the top of his head gone. Four sanitars (their relief showed very plainly in their faces) returned with him. We advanced again, skirting now a little orchard and keeping always in the shadow under the hedge. Our guide, the soldier, assured us that the wounded man was "very near—quite close." Then we came to a large barn on the edge of what seemed a silver lake but was in reality a long field under the full light of the moon. As we paused I saw, on the further side of the field, two shells burst, very quickly, one after the other.
We all stopped under the shelter of the barn.
"Well," said the Feldscher to the soldier, "where's your man?"