Chapter X

Entering the first room, filled with beds on which the wounded were lying, they were struck by the heavy and nauseating odor which is peculiar to hospitals. Two Sisters of Charity came to meet them. One of them, about fifty years old, had a stern face; she held in her hands a bundle of bandages and lint, and was giving orders to a very young assistant-surgeon who was following her. The other, a pretty girl of twenty, had a blond, pale, and delicate face. She appeared particularly gentle and timid under her little white cap; she followed her companion with her hands in her apron-pockets, and it could be seen that she was afraid of stopping behind. Koseltzoff asked them to show him Martzeff, who had lost a leg the day before.

“Of the P---- regiment?” asked the elder of the two sisters. “Are you a relative?”

“No, a comrade.”

“Show them the way,” she said in French to the younger sister, and left them, accompanied by the assistant-surgeon, to go to a wounded man.

“Come, come, what are you looking like that for?” said Koseltzoff to Volodia, who had stopped with raised eyebrows, and whose eyes, full of painful sympathy, could not leave the wounded, whom he watched without ceasing, at the same time following his brother, and repeating, in spite of himself, “Oh, my God! my God!”

“He has just come in, has he not?” the young sister asked Koseltzoff, pointing to Volodia.

“Yes, he has just come.”

She looked at him again and burst into tears, despairingly repeating, “My God! my God! when will it end?”

They entered the officers’ room. Martzeff was there, lying on his back, his muscular arms bare to the elbow and held under his head. The expression on his yellow visage was that of a man who shuts his teeth tightly so as not to cry out with pain. His well leg, with a stocking on, stuck out from under the coverlid, and the toes worked convulsively.

“Well, how do you feel?” asked the young sister, raising the wounded man’s hot head and arranging his pillow with her thin fingers, on one of which Volodia espied a gold ring. “Here are your comrades come to see you.”

“I am suffering, you know,” he replied, with an irritated air. “Don’t touch me; it is well as it is,” and the toes in the stocking moved with a nervous action. “How do you do? What’s your name? Ah, pardon!” when Koseltzoff had told his name. “Here everything is forgotten. Nevertheless we lived together,” he added, without expressing the least joy, and looking at Volodia with a questioning air.

“It is my brother; he has just come from Petersburg.”

“Ah! and I have done with it, I believe. Heavens, how I am suffering! If that would only stop quicker!”

He pulled his leg in with a convulsive movement. His toes worked with double restlessness. He covered his face with both hands.

“He must be left in quiet; he is very ill,” the sister whispered to them. Her eyes were full of tears.

The brothers, who had decided to go to the fifth bastion, changed their minds on coming out of the hospital, and concluded, without telling each other the true reason, to separate, in order to not expose themselves to useless danger.

“Will you find your way, Volodia?” asked the elder. “However, Nikolaïeff will lead you to Korabelnaïa. Now I am going alone, and to-morrow I will be with you.”

That was all they said in this last interview.