“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.”