Chapter XXIV

Koseltzoff the elder, who had had the time during the night to win and lose again all his winnings, including even the gold-pieces sewn in the seams of his uniform, was sleeping, towards morning, in the barracks of the fifth bastion, a heavy but deep sleep, when the sinister cry rang out, repeated by different voices, “The alarm!”

“Wake up, Mikhaïl Semenovitch! It is an assault!” a voice cried in his ear.

“A school-boy trick,” he replied, opening his eyes without believing the news; but when he perceived an officer, pale, agitated, running wildly from one corner to another, he understood all, and the thought that he might perhaps be taken for a coward refusing to join his company in a critical moment, gave him such a violent start that he rushed out and ran straight to find his soldiers. The cannon were dumb, but the musket-firing was at its height, and the bullets were whistling, not singly but in swarms, just as the flights of little birds pass over our heads in autumn. The whole of the place occupied by the battalion the evening before was filled with smoke, with cries, and with curses. On his way he met a crowd of soldiers and wounded, and thirty paces farther on he saw his company brought to a stand against a wall.

“The Swartz redoubt is occupied,” said a young officer. “All is lost!”

“What stuff and nonsense!” he angrily replied, and drawing his small rusty sword from its scabbard, shouted, “Forward, children! Hurrah!”

His strong and resounding voice stimulated his own courage, and he ran forward along the traverse. Fifty soldiers dashed after him with a shout. They came out on an open place, and a hail of bullets met them. Two struck him simultaneously, but he did not have time to understand where they had hit him, or whether they had bruised or had wounded him, for in the smoke before him blue uniforms and red trousers started up, and cries were heard which were not Russian. A Frenchman sitting on the rampart was waving his hat and shouting. The conviction that he would be killed whetted Koseltzoff’s courage. He continued to run forward; some soldiers passed him, others appeared suddenly from another side and began to run with him. The distance between them and the blue uniforms, who regained their intrenchments by running, remained the same, but his feet stumbled over the dead and the wounded. Arrived at the outer ditch, everything became confused before his eyes, and he felt a violent pain in his chest. A half hour later he was lying on a stretcher near the Nicholas barrack. He knew he was wounded, but he felt no pain. He would have liked, nevertheless, to drink something cold, and to feel himself lying more comfortably.

A stout little doctor with black whiskers came up to him and unbuttoned his overcoat. Koseltzoff looked over his chin at the face of the doctor, who was examining his wound without causing him the least pain. He, having covered the wounded man again with his shirt, wiped his fingers on the lapels of his coat, and turning aside his head, passed to another in silence. Koseltzoff mechanically followed with his eyes all that was going on about him, and remembering the fifth bastion, congratulated himself with great satisfaction. He had valiantly done his duty. It was the first time since he was in the service that he had performed it in a way that he had nothing to reproach himself for. The surgeon, who had just dressed another officer’s wound, pointed him out to a priest, who had a fine large red beard, and who stood there with a cross.

“Am I going to die?” Koseltzoff asked him, seeing him come near.

The priest made no reply, but recited a prayer and held the cross down to him. Death had no terror for Koseltzoff. Carrying the cross to his lips with weakening hands, he wept.

“Are the French driven back?” he asked the priest in a firm voice.

“Victory is ours along the whole line,” answered the latter, hiding the truth to spare the feelings of the dying man, for the French flag was already flying on the Malakoff mamelon.

“Thank God!” murmured the wounded man, whose tears ran down his cheeks unnoticed. The memory of his brother passed through his mind for a second. “God grant him the same happiness!” he said.