The militiamen carried Prince Andrey to the copse, where there were vans and an ambulance station. The ambulance station consisted of three tents, pitched at the edge of a birch copse. In the wood stood the ambulance waggons and horses. The horses in nose-bags were munching oats, and the sparrows flew up to them and picked up the grains they dropped. Some crows, scenting blood, flitted to and fro among the birches, cawing impatiently. For more than five acres round the tents there were sitting or lying men stained with blood, and variously attired. They were surrounded by crowds of dejected-looking and intently observant soldiers, who had come with stretchers. Officers, trying to keep order, kept driving them away from the place; but it was of no use. The soldiers, heedless of the officers, stood leaning against the stretchers, gazing intently at what was passing before their eyes, as though trying to solve some difficult orobletn in this spectacle. From the tents came the sound of loud, angry
wailing, and piteous moans. At intervals a doctor’s assistant ran out for water, or to point out those who were to be taken in next. The wounded, awaiting their turn at the tent, uttered hoarse groans and moans, wept, shouted, swore, or begged for vodka. Several were raving in delirium. Prince Andrey, as a colonel, was carried through the crowd of wounded not yet treated, and brought close up to one of the tents, where his bearers halted awaiting instructions. Prince Andrey opened his eyes, and for a long while could not understand what was passing around him. The meadow, the wormwood, the black, whirling ball, and his passionate rush of love for life came back to his mind. A couple of paces from him stood a tall, handsome, dark-haired sergeant, with a bandaged head, leaning against a branch. He had been wounded in the head and in the leg, and was talking loudly, attracting general attention. A crowd of wounded men and stretcher-bearers had gathered round him, greedily listening to his words.
‘We regularly hammered him out, so he threw up everything; we took the king himself,’ the soldier was shouting, looking about him with feverishly glittering black eyes. ‘If only the reserves had come up in the nick of time, my dear fellow, there wouldn’t have been a sign of him left, for I can tell you . . .’
Prince Andrey, like all the men standing round the speaker, gazed at him with bright eyes, and felt a sense of comfort. ‘But isn’t it all the same now?’ he thought, ‘What will be there, and what has been here? Why was I so sorry to part with life? There was something in this life that I didn’t understand, and don’t understand.’
XXXVII
One of the doctors came out of the tent with a blood-stained apron, and small, blood-stained hands, in one of which he had a cigar, carefully held between his thumb and little finger, that it might not be stained too. This doctor threw his head up, and looked about him, but over the level of the wounded crowd. He was evidently longing for a short respite. After turning his head from right to left for a few minutes, he sighed and dropped his eyes again.
‘All right, immediately,’ he said in reply to an assistant, who pointed him out Prince Andrey, and he bade the bearers carry him into the tent.
A murmur rose in the crowd of wounded men waiting.
‘Even in the next world it’s only the gentry who will have a good time,’ said one.
Prince Andrey was carried in, and laid on a table that had just been cleared, and was being rinsed over by an assistant. He could not make i out distinctly what was in the tent. The pitiful groans on all sides, and the excruciating pain in his thigh, his stomach, and his back distracted his attention. Everything he saw around melted for him into a single general impression of naked, blood-stained, human flesh, which seemed
to fill up the whole low-pitched tent, as, a few weeks before, on that hot August day, the bare human flesh had filled up the dirty pond along the Smolensk road. Yes, it was the same flesh, the same chair a canon, the sight of which had aroused in him then a horror, that seemed prophetic of what he felt now.
There were three tables in the tent. Two were occupied, on the third they laid Prince Andrey. For some time he was left alone, an involuntary witness of what was being done at the other tables. On the table nearest sat a Tatar, probably of a Cossack regiment, judging from the uniform that had been thrown down close by. Four soldiers were holding him. A doctor in spectacles was cutting something in his brown, muscular back.
