The militiamen carried Prince Andrey to the dressing station at the edge of a wood, where there were wagons waiting. The station – three tents with their flaps turned back – stood under a few birch-trees. Just inside the wood were the wagons and horses. The horses were munching oats in their nose-bags and sparrows kept swooping down to pick up any dropped grains. One or two crows, scenting blood, cawed impatiently as they flitted about among the birch-trees. Tents were spread out over four or five acres, with bloodstained men outside them, lying on the grass, standing up or sitting around, dressed in all kinds of clothing. They were surrounded by hordes of long-faced stretcher-bearers who were watching carefully. In the interests of good order the officers kept shooing them away, but it was no good. The soldiers ignored them and stood there leaning on their stretchers with a close eye on what was happening under their noses, as if it might help them fathom the difficult meaning of this spectacle. From inside the tents came a variety of sounds, from wild and angry screaming to heart-rending moans and groans. Now and then dressers would come rushing out to get water and say who was next. The wounded men stood in line by the tent, gasping for breath, moaning, weeping, yelling and cursing, or asking for vodka. Some were delirious. Prince Andrey, a colonel no less, was whisked through the crowd waiting for treatment and taken straight to one of the tents, where his bearers stopped, awaiting instructions. Prince Andrey opened his eyes and for some time could not make out what was happening around him. The meadow, the wormwood, the whirling black ball, and that deep surge of love for life all flashed again through his mind. A couple of paces away stood a tall, handsome, dark-haired sergeant with a bandage round his head, leaning against a branch. He had bullet-wounds to the head and leg, and his loud voice made him the centre of attention. Quite a crowd of wounded men and stretcher-bearers had gathered round him, hanging on his words.
‘Give ’im a right thumpin’, we did. ’E soon packed it in. Got the king ’imself, we did,’ the soldier was shouting, glaring round with a feverish glint in his black eyes. ‘If only them preserves had got there in time, old boy, there wouldn’t have been nothin’ left of ’im. God’s truth, I’m telling you . . .’
Prince Andrey was no different from all the other bystanders; he gazed across at him with shining eyes, and felt some relief. ‘But it doesn’t make any difference now, does it?’ he thought. ‘What will it be like over there – and what’s it been like down here? Why did I feel so sorry to let go of life? There’s been something in this life I never understood, and still don’t.’
CHAPTER 37
A doctor in a bloodstained apron came out of the tent, holding a cigar between the thumb and little finger of one of his bloodstained hands to keep the blood off it. He threw his head back and had a good look round over the heads of the wounded men. He obviously wanted a short break. He spent a few minutes turning his head right and left, after which he gave a sigh and looked down again.
‘Come on, then,’ he said to a dresser who was pointing to Prince Andrey, and told the bearers to bring him into the tent.
A murmur ran through the waiting wounded.
‘Oh yes, posh people first. Just the same up in heaven,’ said one.
Prince Andrey was carried in and laid on a recently vacated table that had just been washed down by an assistant. He could not see anything very clearly inside the tent, distracted as he was by pathetic groans coming from every side and the excruciating pain in his thigh, his stomach, and his back. Everything he saw blended into a single overall impression of naked, bloodstained human flesh, which seemed to fill the low tent in the way that naked human flesh had filled that dirty pond on the Smolensk road a few weeks before on a hot day in August. Yes, it was the same flesh, the same cannon-fodder, the sight of which had horrified him then, perhaps as a portent of things to come.
There were three tables in the tent. Two were occupied; Prince Andrey was laid on the third. For some time he was left alone with no choice but to watch what was happening on the other two tables. On the nearest one sat a Tatar, most likely a Cossack, going by the uniform thrown down at his side. Four soldiers were holding him down while a doctor in spectacles cut into his muscular brown back.
