“On the fifth bastion, your excellency, in the first bombardment. I had just sighted the cannon, and was going quietly to the other embrasure, when suddenly something struck my foot. I thought I had fallen into a hole. I looked--my leg was gone!” “You didn’t have any pain at first, then?” “None at all, only just as if I had scalded my leg; that’s all.” “And afterwards?” “None afterwards, only when they stretched the skin; that was a little rough. First of all things, your excellency, we mustn’t think. When we don’t think we don’t feel. When a man thinks, it is the worse for him.” Meanwhile, a woman dressed in gray, with a black kerchief tied around her head, approaches, joins in the conversation, and begins to give a detailed account of the sailor: how he has suffered, how his life was despaired of for four weeks, how, when wounded, he made them stop the stretcher on which he was being carried to the rear in order to watch the discharge of our battery, and how the grand-dukes had spoken with him, had given him twenty-five rubles, and how he had replied that, not being able to serve any more himself, he would like to come back to the bastion to train the conscripts. The good woman, her eyes sparkling with enthusiasm, relates this in one breath, looking at you and then at the sailor, who turns away and pretends not to hear, busy with picking lint from his pillow. “It is my wife, your excellency,” says the sailor at last, with an intonation of voice which seems to say, “You must excuse her; all that is woman’s foolish prattle, you know.” You then begin to understand what the defenders of Sebastopol are, and you are ashamed of yourself in the presence of this man. You would have liked to express all your admiration for him, all your sympathy, but the words will not come, or those which do come are worthless, and you can only bow in silence before this unconscious grandeur, before this firmness of soul and this exquisite shame of his own merit. “Ah, well, may God speedily cure you!” you say, and you stop before another wounded man lying on the floor, who, suffering horrible pain, seems to be awaiting his death. He is blond, and his pale face is much swollen. Stretched on his back, his left hand thrown up, his position indicates acute suffering. His hissing breath escapes with difficulty from his dry, half-open mouth. The glassy blue pupils of his eyes are rolled up under the eyelids, and a mutilated arm, wrapped in bandages, sticks out from under the tumbled blanket. A nauseating, corpse-like odor rises to your nostrils, and the fever which burns the sufferer’s limbs seems to penetrate your own body. “Is he unconscious?” you ask of the woman who kindly accompanies you, and to whom you are no longer a stranger. “No; he can still hear, but he is very bad;” and she adds, under her breath, “I have just made him drink a little tea. He is nothing to me, only I have pity on him; indeed, he has only been able to swallow a few mouthfuls.”