The Sebastopol Sketches Read online

  Soviet critics have made much of the “satirical” elements in the second and third sketches, anxious to portray Tolstoy as an antimilitarist and a pacifist even as early as 1855. That he later became both cannot, of course, be denied; yet the criticism of the Tsarist military organization and of its pampering of human weakness is really very gentle in the Sketches. The “hero” which is “truth” is ultimately the Russian people as a whole, irrespective of social class, and transcendent in its self-assertion against the forces that threaten it both from without and from within:

  But let us quickly lower the curtain on this deeply depressing scene. Tomorrow, perhaps, even this very day, each one of these men will go proudly and cheerfully to his death, and will die with calm and fortitude; under these conditions, which appal even the most detached of sensibilities and are characterized by a total absence of the human and of any prospect of salvation, the only relief is that of oblivion, the annihilation of consciousness. Buried in each man’s soul lies the noble spark that will make a hero of him; but this spark grows weary of burning brightly all the time—when the fateful moment arrives, however, it will leap up like a flame and illuminate great deeds. (“Sebastopol in August 1855”)

  SEBASTOPOL

  IN DECEMBER

  The light of daybreak is just beginning to tint the sky above the Sapun-gora.[1] The dark surface of the sea has already thrown off night’s gloom and is waiting for the first ray of sunlight to begin, its cheerful sparkling. From the bay comes a steady drift of cold and mist. There is no snow—everything is black—but the sharp morning frost catches at your face and cracks beneath your feet, and only the incessant, far-off rumble of the sea, punctuated every now and again by the booming of the artillery in Sebastopol, breaks into the morning quiet. From nearby ships sounds the hollow chiming of eight bells.

  On the North Side,[2] daytime activity is gradually supplanting the tranquillity of night: here, with a clatter of muskets,[3] a detachment of sentries is passing by on its way to relieve the guard; here a private, having clambered from his dugout and washed his bronzed face in icy water, is turning towards the reddening east, rapidly crossing himself and saying his prayers; here a tall, heavy madzhara drawn by camels is creaking its way towards the cemetery, where the bloody corpses with which it is piled almost to the brim will be buried. As you approach the quay you are struck by the distinctive smell of coal, beef, manure and damp; thousands of oddly assorted articles—firewood, sides of meat, gabions, sacks of flour, iron bars and the like—lie piled up near the quayside; soldiers of various regiments, some with kitbags and muskets, others without, are milling around here, smoking, shouting abuse at one another or dragging heavy loads on to the ship that is lying at anchor, smoke coming from its funnel, by the landing stage; civilian skiffs, filled with a most various assortment of people—soldiers, sailors, merchants, women—are constantly mooring and casting off along the waterfront.

  “To the Grafskaya,[4] your honour? Step right this way, sir,” come the voices of two or three retired seamen who are climbing out of their skiffs to offer you their services.

  You choose the skiff nearest you, pick your way over the semi-decomposed carcass of a bay horse that is lying in the mud beside the vessel, and make your way to the tiller. Now you have cast off, and are away from the shore. Around you is the sea, sparkling now in the morning sun; in front of you an old seaman in a camelhair coat and a young, fair-haired boy are silently and assiduously working the oars together. You look at the massive striped hulls of the ships that are scattered near and far across the bay; at the ships’ boats moving like small black dots over the glittering azure water; at the beautiful, radiant structures of the town, visible on the opposite shore and tinted pink by the rays of the morning sun; at the spumy white line of the boom and the sunken ships,[5] the black-mast-tops of which jut forth from the water here and there; and at the foaming eddies, in which salt bubbles effervesce, stirred up by the oars. You listen to those oars, with their even beat, to the sounds of voices carried across the water towards you, and to the majestic resonance of the firing in Sebastopol, which, it seems to you, is growing in intensity.

  The thought that you too are in Sebastopol produces its unfailing effect of imbuing your soul with a sense of pride and courage, and of making the blood course faster in your veins . . .

  “You’re heading straight for the Constantine, your honour,” the old seaman tells you, turning round to check the direction you are steering in. “Move the tiller a bit to starboard, sir.”

  “Well, she still has all her guns,”[6] the fair-haired lad observes, examining the ship as the skiff moves past.

  “Of course she has; she’s new, Kornilov[7] had his quarters on her,” says the old man, also giving the ship an appraising look.

  “Cor, look where that one’s gone off!” says the boy, after a long silence, looking up at a small, dispersing cloud of white smoke which has suddenly appeared high above the South Bay, accompanied by the sharp report of an exploding shell.

  “That’s him, he’s firing from a new battery today,” says the old man, spitting on his hand indifferently. “All right, come on, Mishka, let’s get ahead of this longboat.” At this, your skiff begins to advance more rapidly over the broad swell of the bay; it really does overtake the heavy longboat, which is loaded with sacks and is being unevenly rowed by some inexperienced soldiers, and finally draws in alongside the Grafskaya landing amid the multitude of assorted vessels that are moored there.

  The quayside contains a noisy jostle of soldiers in grey, sailors in black, and women in all sorts of colours. Peasant women are selling rolls, Russian muzhiks with samovars are shouting “Hot sbitén!”[8] and right here, lying about on the very first steps of the landing, are rusty cannonballs, shells, grapeshot and cast-iron cannon of various calibres. A little further off there is a large, open area strewn with enormous squared beams, gun carriages and the forms of sleeping soldiers; there are horses, waggons, green field guns and ammunition boxes, infantry muskets stacked in criss-cross piles; a constant movement persists of soldiers, sailors, officers, merchants, women and children; carts laden with hay, sacks or barrels come and go; and here and there a Cossack or an officer is passing by on horseback, or a general in his droshky. To the right the street is blocked by a barricade, the embrasures of which are mounted with small cannon; beside them sits a sailor, puffing at his pipe. To the left is a handsome building with Roman numerals carved on its pediment,[9] beneath which soldiers are standing with bloodstained stretchers—everywhere you perceive the unpleasant signs of a military encampment . . .

  Your first impression is bound to be a most disagreeable one: the strange intermingling of camp and town life, of handsome town and dirty bivouac is not merely unsightly but gives the sense of an abominable state of chaos; it may even appear to you that everyone is afraid, that all these people are scurrying about with no idea of what to do. But take a closer look at the faces of those who are moving around you, and you will realize that the truth is altogether different. Look, for example, at this convoy soldier on his way to water those three bay horses: so calmly is he humming to himself that it is plain he is not going to be put off his stride by this oddly assorted crowd, which does not even exist as far as he is concerned, but is going to carry out his appointed task, whatever it may be—from watering horses to manhandling a field gun—every bit as calmly, confidently and dispassionately as if this were all taking place somewhere in Tula or Saransk. You will see the same expression written on the face of this immaculately white-gloved officer who is strolling by; of that sailor smoking his pipe on the barricade; of each of those men from the work party who are waiting with a stretcher on the steps of what used to be the Assembly Hall; and of that young unmarried girl who, afraid of muddying her pink dress, is hopping from one stone to another as she crosses the street.

  Yes, you are certainly in for a disappointment if this is the first time you have entered Sebastopol. Not on a single face will you read the signs of flurry or dismay, nor even those of enthusiasm, readiness to die, resolve—of that there is none: you will see ordinary, everyday people, going about their ordinary, everyday business, and it is possible that you may end up reproaching yourself for your own excessive zeal, and begin to entertain slight doubts as to the validity of the current notions concerning the defenders of Sebastopol—notions you have gleaned from tales and descriptions of the sights to be seen and the sounds to be heard from the North Side. Before you let such doubts overwhelm you, however, go and observe the defenders of Sebastopol on the defences themselves or, better still, walk straight across to the other side of the street and enter that building which was once Sebastopol’s Assembly Hall, but on whose steps soldiers bearing stretchers now stand—there you will see the defenders of Sebastopol and witness spectacles both sad and terrible, noble and comical, but which will astonish and exalt your soul.

  As you step inside, you enter the large chamber of the Assembly Hall. No sooner have you opened the door than you are assailed without warning by the sight and smell of about forty or fifty amputees and critically wounded, some of them on camp beds, but most of them lying on the floor. Ignore the sensation that makes you hesitate at the threshold of the chamber—it is not a pleasant sensation—make your way forward and do not be ashamed to have come, as it were, to observe the sufferers, do not be embarrassed to go up to them and talk to them: people in distress are glad to see a friendly human face, they are glad to talk about their sufferings and receive a few words of sympathy and affection. Walk down the aisle between the beds and look for someone whose face seems less grim and tortured than the rest, someone you can make up your mind to approach and engage in conversation.

  “Where are you wounded?” you ask an old, emaciated soldier, timidly and uncertainly. As he sits on his camp bed he is watching you with a good-natured expression, apparently inviting you to go up and talk to him. I say “timidly,” because it appears that, in addition to a feeling of deep compassion, suffering for some reason inspires a fear of offending those who are enduring it, and also a profound respect for them.

  “In the leg,” replies the old man; as he speaks, however, you observe by the folds of his blanket that one of his legs stops short above the knee. “But I’m off the danger list now, thank God,” he adds.

  “When did it happen?”

  “Oh, about six weeks ago, your honour.”

  “Really? And are you still in pain?”

  “No, sir, it doesn’t hurt now; only when the weather’s bad it feels as though my calf were a bit sore, but otherwise I don’t feel a thing.”

  “And how did it happen?”

  “It was in the 5th bastion,[10] your honour, during the first bombardment:[11] I’d aimed the cannon and started to make for the next embrasure—like this, see—when he got me in the leg. It was like falling into a hole in the ground. I looked down, and my leg was gone.”

  “You must have been in awful pain when it happened, surely?”

  “No, sir, I wasn’t, not at all; it just felt as though somebody had shoved something hot into my leg.”

  “But later on?”

  “I didn’t feel anything later on, either; it was only when they started drawing the skin together that I got this kind of burning sensation. The main thing, your honour, is not to spend too much time thinking about it; if you don’t think about it, it doesn’t seem much. Most of a man’s troubles come from thinking too much.”

  Just then you are approached by a woman in a grey striped dress and a black headscarf; she interrupts your conversation with this man, who turns out to be a sailor,[12] not a soldier, and starts to tell you about him, his sufferings, the desperate plight he was in for four weeks. She tells you how, after he had been wounded, he told the men who were carrying him on a stretcher to stop for a while so he could watch a salvo from one of our batteries, how the Grand Dukes[13] had spoken to him and given him a reward of twenty-five roubles, and how he had told them of his desire to return to the bastion in order to instruct the young men, even though he himself was no good for active service any more. Telling you all this in one breath, the woman looks now at you and now at the sailor who, seemingly oblivious to her words, his face averted, is plucking at a tuft of lint on his pillow; his eyes are gleaming with a peculiar delight.

  This is my wife, your honour!” he remarks, with a look as if to say: “You’ll have to make allowances for her. You know how it is with women—they’re always saying stupid things.”

  Now you are beginning to see what the defenders of Sebastopol are really like; and for some reason in this man’s presence you start to feel ashamed of yourself. There are so many things you would like to say to him in order to express your sympathy and admiration; but you are unable to find any words, or are dissatisfied with the words that do suggest themselves to you—and silently you defer to this man’s taciturn and unselfconscious nobility and steadfastness of spirit, his diffidence in the face of his own personal merit.

  “Well, may God grant you a speedy recovery,” you say to him as you move on and come to a halt in front of another patient who is lying on the floor in what looks like intolerable agony, apparently waiting for death.

  He is a fair-haired man with a bloodless, puffy face. He is lying on his back with his left arm thrown behind him in a position expressive of intense suffering. His parched, open mouth lets out his wheezing breath with difficulty; his blue, pewter-coloured eyes have rolled upwards, and from beneath the blanket, which has become displaced, protrudes what remains of his right arm, swathed in bandages. The cloying smell of dead flesh seems suddenly stronger, and the voracious inner fever that penetrates all the sufferer’s limbs seems to penetrate you also.

  “What sort of state is he in, is he unconscious?” you ask the woman who is following you and surveying you affectionately, as if you were one of her own.

  “No, he still has all his wits about him, but he’s in a very poor way now,” she adds in a whisper. “I tried to get him to drink some tea I made for him today—even though he isn’t one of us, you can’t but feel sorry for him—but he hardly touched it.”

  “How do you feel?” you ask the wounded man.

  His pupils stir at the sound of your voice, but he neither sees you nor takes in what you say.

  “My h-heart’s on fire,” he gasps.

  A little further on you come across an old soldier who is changing his underwear. His face and body are a sort of brownish colour, and he is extremely thin, like a skeleton. One of his arms is missing: it has been amputated at the shoulder. He is sitting up cheerfully, he has recovered from the operation; but from his dead, lustreless gaze, his terrible emaciation and the wrinkles on his face you can see that this is a man who has already lived out the best part of his life.

  On a bed on the other side of the chamber you will see the pale, tortured, delicate face of a woman, both her cheeks alight with the red glow of fever.

  “This is the wife of one of our sailors, sir; she was hit in the leg when a shell landed near her on the fifth,”[14] your guide informs you. “On her way to the bastion with her husband’s dinner, she was, when it happened.”

  “So what did they do, amputate?”

  “Yes, sir, they sawed off her leg above the knee.”

  Now, if you have strong nerves, go through the doorway on the left: that is the room in which wounds are bandaged and operations performed. There you will see surgeons with pale, gloomy physiognomies, their arms soaked in blood up to the elbows, deep in concentration over a bed on which a wounded man is lying under the influence of chloroform, open-eyed as in a delirium, and uttering meaningless words which are occasionally simple and affecting. The surgeons are going about the repugnant but beneficial task of amputation. You will see the sharp, curved knife enter the white, healthy body; you will see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness with a terrible, harrowing shrieked cursing; you will see the apothecary assistant fling the severed arm into a corner; you will see another wounded man who is lying on a stretcher in the same room and watching the operation on his companion, writhing and groaning less with physical pain than with the psychological agony of apprehension; you will witness fearsome sights that will shake you to the roots of your being; you will see war not as a beautiful, orderly, and gleaming formation, with music and beaten drums, streaming banners and generals on prancing horses, but war in its authentic expression—as blood, suffering and death.

  As you emerge from this house of suffering you will not fail to experience a sense of relief; you will breathe the fresh air more deeply and take pleasure in the consciousness of your own health. From the observation of these sufferings you will at the same time, however, derive a sense of your own insignificance, and calmly and without a trace of indecision you will make your way to the bastions . . .

  “What do the death and suffering of an insignificant worm such as myself signify, when placed alongside so many deaths and so many sufferings?” you will ask yourself. But the sight of the cloudless sky, the brilliant sun, the beautiful town, the open church and the military personnel moving in all directions will soon restore your mind to its normal condition of frivolity, petty concern and exclusive preoccupation with the present.

  Perhaps you will encounter the cortège of some officer’s funeral returning from the church with pink coffin, band music and flying gonfalons; perhaps you will hear the sounds of the firing from the bastions, but this will not bring on a recurrence of your previous thoughts; the funeral cortège will seem to you a thoroughly appealing martial spectacle, the sounds of the gunfire thoroughly appealing martial sounds, and with neither will you associate that clear and personally experienced awareness of suffering and death which you had at the dressing station.