‘Who looks after the patients in here?’ he asked the assistant. At that moment a commissariat soldier working in the hospital as an orderly came in from the adjoining room, marched up, stamped and came to attention.
‘Good day to you, sah!’ bawled this soldier, goggling at Rostov and obviously mistaking him for some medical authority.
‘Move that man. Give him some water,’ said Rostov, pointing to the Cossack.
‘Sah!’ the soldier replied most obligingly, goggling harder than ever, still standing rigidly at attention and not offering to move away.
‘No, nothing can be done here,’ thought Rostov, looking down, and he was just about to walk away when he became aware of someone to his right giving him a special kind of look and he turned to see who it was. An old veteran sat there on a greatcoat, almost hidden in the corner, his harsh face all yellow, emaciated and cadaverous, his grey beard unshaven. He was staring closely at Rostov. The man next to him was whispering something and pointing to Rostov. Rostov could see that the old man wanted to ask him something. He went up closer and saw that the old veteran had only one leg bent under him, the other having been cut off above the knee. On the other side of the old man, a short distance away, lay a young private with his head thrown back, a waxen pallor on his snub-nosed, freckled face and his eyes rolled up under their lids. Rostov looked at this snub-nosed soldier and a chill ran down his spine.
‘Hey, that one seems to be . . .’ he said to the assistant.
‘We’ve begged and begged, your Honour,’ said the old soldier with a trembling jaw. ‘He died early this morning. We’re men, too, we’re not dogs . . .’
‘I’ll see to it immediately. He’ll be taken away, yes, er, taken away,’ said the assistant hurriedly. ‘This way, sir.’
‘Come on, let’s go,’ said Rostov hastily, looking down, shrinking into himself and trying to pass unnoticed down the lines of those resentful and envious eyes which remained glued on him as he walked out of the room.
CHAPTER 18
The assistant walked down the corridor and led Rostov to the officers’ wards, three rooms with doors opening between them. These rooms contained beds, and the sick or wounded officers were sitting or lying on them. Some were walking from one room to another in hospital dressing-gowns. The first person to meet Rostov in the officers’ ward was a thin little man who had lost an arm. He was sucking on a stumpy pipe as he walked about the first room wearing a hospital dressing-gown and a night-cap. Rostov looked at him closely, trying to remember where he had seen him before.
‘We meet again – by God’s will – and what a place!’ said the little man. ‘Tushin, Tushin. You remember. I gave you a lift after Schöngrabern? Look, I’ve had a bit chopped off . . .’ he said with a broad grin, showing the empty sleeve of his dressing-gown. ‘Oh, you’re looking for Vasily Denisov, are you? He’s one of our room-mates,’ he said, when he heard who Rostov wanted. ‘Come through here,’ and he led him into the next room, from which he could hear the sound of voices and several men laughing.
‘How can they even live in this place, never mind laugh?’ thought Rostov, with that stench of dead flesh from the privates’ ward still in his nose. He had not yet escaped from those envious eyes following him on both sides, and the face of that young soldier with the eyes rolled upwards.
Denisov was asleep on his bed, with a quilt pulled up over his head, even though it was nearly midday.
‘Hello, Wostov! How are you, how are you?’ called the old familiar voice. But Rostov noticed with great sadness that behind this habitual show of breeziness lurked a new, secret and sinister feeling, just discernible in what Denisov said, the way he said it and the look on his face.
His wound was nothing much, but six weeks after the incident it still hadn’t healed. His face was puffy and pallid like all the other hospital faces. But Rostov was struck by something else – Denisov didn’t seem pleased to see him, and his smile was forced. He asked not a single question about the regiment or how the war was going, and when Rostov talked about these things Denisov wasn’t listening.
