A whistling sound followed by a thud! Five paces away a cannonball smacked into the dry soil and buried itself. A chill ran down his back. Again he glanced down the ranks. That one could have got quite a few of them; there was a bunch of men along by the second battalion.
‘Mr Adjutant!’ he shouted. ‘Tell them not to stand too close together!’
The adjutant did as instructed and started to walk over towards Prince Andrey. From the other side a battalion commander came riding up.
‘Look out!’ yelled a terrified soldier as a grenade came over like a little bird zooming down with whirring wings on the look-out for a landing place, and plopped down with a dull thud next to the major’s horse a couple of paces away from Prince Andrey. The horse was the first to move. Unconcerned about the rights and wrongs of showing fear, it gave a snort, reared up, almost throwing the major and galloped away. The men latched on to the horse’s terror.
‘Get down!’ yelled the adjutant, flinging himself to the ground. Prince Andrey hesitated. The smoking shell was spinning like a top between him and the prostrate adjutant, near a clump of wormwood growing in the ditch between meadow and field.
‘Is this death then?’ Prince Andrey wondered, and he was swept by a new sense of longing as he gazed down at the grass, the wormwood and the spiral of smoke swirling up from the spinning ball. ‘I can’t die. I don’t want to die. I love life. I love this grass, the earth, the air . . .’
These thoughts flashed through his mind, though he was still aware that eyes were on him.
‘Shame on you, Mr Adjutant!’ he called to the officer. ‘What kind of . . .’ But he didn’t finish. In one terrific bang shrapnel flew like matchwood with an overwhelming smell of gunpowder and Prince Andrey was sent flying to one side with one arm in the air, and he fell to the ground face-down.
Several officers ran up. He was bleeding from the stomach on the right-hand side, and a great stain was oozing out all over the grass.
The militiamen were called over and they stood there behind the officers holding a stretcher. Prince Andrey lay on his chest with his face buried in the grass, gasping as he struggled for air.
‘Don’t just stand there! Come on!’
The peasants came up and got hold of him by the shoulders and feet, but he gave such a terrible cry they looked at each other and put him down again.
‘Pick him up! Get him on the stretcher. You can’t do any harm!’ yelled a voice. They lifted him by the shoulders again and put him on the stretcher.
‘Oh, my God! My God! What’s happened to him? . . . Stomach! . . . He’s had it! Oh, my God!’ came the officers’ voices.
‘Went right past my ear,’ the adjutant was saying.
The peasants settled the stretcher across their shoulders and hurried off to the dressing station down the path that they had trampled flat.
‘Get in step! . . . Blast these peasants!’ cried an officer, grabbing them by the shoulders as they bumbled along, jolting the stretcher.
‘Get it right, Fyodor. ’Ow be ’e?’ said the leading peasant.
‘Got ’e now!’ said the one at the back, delighted with himself as he fell into step.
‘Your Excellency! Prince! Are you all right, sir?’ came the trembling voice of Timokhin as he ran up and peeped over the stretcher.
Prince Andrey opened his eyes and looked up at the speaker from deep in the stretcher where his head had sunk down, but his eyelids soon closed again.
