A whiz and a thud！ Five paces from him the dry soil was thrown up, as a cannon ball sank into the earth. A chill ran down his back. He looked at the ranks. Probably a number had been struck： the men had gathered in a crowd in the second battalion.
“M. l’aide-de-camp,” he shouted, “tell the men not to crowd together.”
The adjutant, having obeyed this instruction, was approaching Prince Andrey. From the other side the major in command of the battalion came riding up.
“Look out！” rang out a frightened cry from a soldier, and like a bird, with swift, whirring wings alighting on the earth, a grenade dropped with a dull thud a couple of paces from Prince Andrey, near the major’s horse. The horse, with no question of whether it were right or wrong to show fear, snorted, reared, almost throwing the major, and galloped away. The horse’s terror infected the men.
“Lie down！” shouted the adjutant, throwing himself on the ground. Prince Andrey stood in uncertainty. The shell was smoking and rotating like a top between him and the recumbent adjutant, near a bush of wormwood in the rut between the meadow and the field.
“Can this be death？” Prince Andrey wondered, with an utterly new, wistful feeling, looking at the grass, at the wormwood and at the thread of smoke coiling from the rotating top. “I can’t die, I don’t want to die, I love life, I love this grass and earth and air …”
He thought this, and yet at the same time he did not forget that people were looking at him.
“For shame, M. l’aide-de-camp！” he said to the adjutant; “what sort of …” He did not finish. Simultaneously there was a tearing, crashing sound, like the smash of broken crockery, a puff of stifling fumes, and Prince Andrey was sent spinning over, and flinging up one arm, fell on his face.
Several officers ran up to him. A great stain of blood was spreading over the grass from the right side of his stomach.
The militiamen stood with the stretchers behind the officers. Prince Andrey lay on his chest, with his face sunk in the grass; he was still breathing in hard, hoarse gasps.
“Well, why are you waiting, come along！”
The peasants went up and took him by the shoulders and legs, but he moaned piteously, and they looked at one another, and laid him down again.
“Pick him up, lay him on, it’s all the same！” shouted some one. They lifted him by the shoulders again and laid him on the stretcher.
“Ah, my God！ my God！ what is it？…The stomach！ It’s all over then！ Ah, my God！” could be heard among the officers. “It almost grazed my ear,” the adjutant was saying. The peasants, with the stretcher across their shoulders, hurried along the path they had trodden to the ambulance station.
“Keep step！…Aie！…these peasants！” cried an officer, seizing them by the shoulders, as they jogged along, jolting the stretcher.
“Drop into it, Fyodor, eh？” said the foremost peasant.
“That’s it, first-rate,” said the hindmost, falling into step.
“Your excellency？ Eh, prince？” said the trembling voice of Timohin, as he ran up and peeped over the stretcher.
Prince Andrey opened his eyes, and looked at the speaker from the stretcher, through which his head had dropped, and closed his eyelids again.
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 problem 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.”
