Hundreds of mutilated, freshly bleeding bodies, which two hours before were full of hopes and of different desires, sublime or humble, lay with stiffened limbs in the flowery and dew-bathed valley which separated the bastion from the intrenchment, or on the smooth floor of the little mortuary chapel of Sebastopol. The dry lips of all of these men murmured prayers, curses, or groans. They crawled, they turned on their sides, some were abandoned among the corpses of the blossom-strewn valley, others lay on stretchers, on cots, and on the damp floor of the field-hospital. Notwithstanding all this, the heavens shed their morning light over Mount Saponné as on the preceding days, the sparkling stars grew pale, a white mist rose from the sombre and plaintively swelling sea, the east grew purple with the dawn, and long, flame-colored clouds stretched along the blue horizon. As on the days before, the grand torch mounted slowly, powerful and proud, promising joy, love, and happiness to the awakened world. XIV. On the following evening the band of the regiment of chasseurs again played on the boulevard. Around the pavilion officers, yunkers, soldiers, and young women promenaded with a festal air in the paths of white flowering acacias. Kalouguine, Prince Galtzine, and another colonel marched arm-in-arm along the street, talking of the affair of the day before. The chief subject of this conversation was, as it always is, not of the affair itself, but of the part the talkers had taken in it. The expression of their faces, the sound of their voices, had something serious in it, and it might have been supposed that the losses profoundly affected them. But, to tell the truth, since no one among them had lost any one dear to him, they put on this officially mournful expression for propriety’s sake. Kalouguine and the colonel, although they were very good fellows, would have asked nothing better than to be present at a similar engagement every day, in order to receive each time a sword of honor or the rank of major-general. When I hear a conqueror who sends to their destruction millions of men in order to satisfy his personal ambition called a monster, I always want to laugh. Ask sub-lieutenants Petrouchef Antonoff, and others, and you will see that each is a little Napoleon, a monster ready to engage in battle, to kill a hundred men, in order to obtain one more little star or an increase of pay. “I ask pardon,” said the colonel, “the affair began on the left flank. _I was there._” “Perhaps so,” replied Kalouguine, “for I was almost all the time on the right flank. I went there twice, first to seek the general, then simply of my own accord to look on. It was there it was hot!” “If Kalouguine says so it is a fact,” continued the colonel, turning towards Galtzine. “Do you know that only to-day V---- told me you were a brave man? Our losses are truly frightful. In my own regiment four hundred men disabled! I don’t understand how I came out alive.”