Budslav station; the roof is demolished by aeroplane bombs. Soldiers sleep side by side in a little garden on asphalt steps beneath crocuses. A drowsy Jew opens his bookstall on the arrival of the train: he sells books by Chirikov, Von Vizin, and Verbitskaya. And from the distance, with strange distinctness, comes a sound like muffled clapping. "What is that?" "Must be the heavy artillery." "Where is the Commandant?" "The Commandant is asleep!..." A week has passed by in the trenches, and another week has commenced. The bustle of the first few days is over; now all is in order. In a corner of a meadow, a little way from the front, hangs a man's body; the head by degrees has become severed from the trunk. But I do not see very much. We sleep in the day. It is June, and there is scarcely any night. I know when it is evening by the sound of the firing; it begins from beyond the marshes at seven o'clock. Moment after moment a bullet comes--zip--into my dug-out: scarcely a second passes before there is another zip. The sound of the shot itself is lost amid the general crashing of guns; there is only the zip of the bullet as it strikes the earth or is embedded in the beams overhead. And so on all through the night, moment after moment, until seven in the morning. There are three of us in the dug-out; two are playing chess, but I am reading--the same thing over and over again, for I am tired to death of lying idle, of sleeping and walking. Poor indeed are men's resources, for in three days we had exhausted all we had to say. Yesterday a soldier who had lost his hand when scouting, came running in to us crying wildly: "Bayonet me, Towny, Bayonet me!" Sometimes we come out at night to enjoy the fireworks. They fire on us hoping to unnerve us, and their bullets strike--zip-zip-zip--into our earthworks. We stand and look on as though spell-bound. Guns belch out in the distance, a green light begins to quiver over the whole horizon. Rockets incessantly tear their way, screaming, through the air, amongst them some similar to those we ourselves used to send up over the river Oka. Balls of fire burst in twain, and huge discs emitting a hundred different deadly lights flare above us. Soon the rockets disappear, and from behind the frost creep three gigantic luminous figures; at first they stretch up into the sky, then, quivering convulsively, they fall down upon us, upon the trenches upon our right and left. In their lurid light our uniforms show white. Over the graves in the Lithuanian forests stand enormous crosses--as enormous as those in Gogol's "_Dreadful Vengance_" and now, on the hill behind us, we discern two of them, one partly shattered and overhanging the other--a bodeful grim reminder! Always soldiers, soldiers, soldiers. Not a single old man, not a single woman, not a single child. For three weeks now I have not seen a glimpse of a woman. That is what I want to speak of--the meaning of woman.