“Ought I not to go and take part in this sortie?” said Prince Galtzine, after a pause. “My dear fellow, what an idea! Don’t think of it. I won’t let you go; you will have time enough.” “Seriously--do you think I ought not to?” At this moment, right in the direction these gentlemen were looking, could be heard above the roar of artillery the rattle of a terrible fusillade; a thousand little flames spurted and sparkled along the whole line. “Look, it is in full swing,” said Kalouguine. “I can’t calmly listen to this fusillade; it stirs my soul! They are shouting ‘Hurrah!’” he added, stretching his ear towards the bastion, from which arose the distant and prolonged clamor of thousands of voices. “Who is shouting ‘Hurrah’--_he_ or we?” “I don’t know; but they are surely fighting at the sword’s point, for the fusillade has stopped.” An officer on horseback, followed by a Cossack, galloped up under their window, stopped, and dismounted. “Where do you come from?” “From the bastion, to see the general.” “Come, what is the matter? Speak!” “They have attacked--have taken the quarters. The French have pushed forward their reserves--ours have been attacked--and there were only two battalions of them,” said the officer, out of breath. It was the same one who had come in the evening, but this time he went towards the door with confidence. “Then we retreated?” asked Galtzine. “No,” replied the officer, in a surly tone, “a battalion arrived in time. We repulsed them, but the chief of the regiment is killed, and many officers besides. They want reinforcements.” So saying, he went with Kalouguine into the general’s room, whither we will not follow them. Five minutes later Kalouguine set out for the bastion on a horse, which he rode in the Cossack fashion, a kind of riding which seems to give a particular pleasure to the aides-de-camp. He was the bearer of certain orders, and had to await the definite result of the affair. As to Prince Galtzine, he, agitated by the painful emotions which the signs of a battle in progress usually excite in the idle spectator, hastily went out into the street to wander aimlessly to and fro. V. Soldiers carried the wounded on stretchers, and supported others under the arms. It was very dark in the streets; here and there shone the lights in the hospital windows or in the quarters of a wakeful officer. The uninterrupted sound of the cannonade and the fusillade came from the bastions, and the same fires still lighted up the black sky. From time to time could be recognized the gallop of a staff-officer, the groan of a wounded man, the steps and the voices of the stretcher-bearers, the exclamations of doting women who stood on the thresholds of their houses and watched in the direction of the firing. Among these last we find our acquaintance Nikita, the old sailor’s widow with whom he had made up, and the little daughter of the latter, a child of ten years.