“Can you manage to go? Stop--I’ll tell off some one to go with you,” said Danchich, making what seemed to me an unnecessary fuss. I was annoyed, and angrily said: “Who wants to be accompanied?” and bravely started to go down the ladder, not realising what had happened. When a small splinter had wounded me in the waist at the beginning of the fight, it had hurt me; but this time I felt nothing. Later, in the hospital, when carried there on a stretcher, I understood why it is that during a fight one hears neither groans nor shouts. All that comes afterwards. Apparently our feelings have strict limits for receiving external impressions, being even deeply impressed by an absurd sentence. A thing can be so painful that you feel nothing, so terrible that you fear nothing. Having passed through the upper and lower batteries, I descended to the mess deck (under the armoured one), to the hospital, but I involuntarily went back to the ladder. The mess deck was full of wounded.[23] They were standing, sitting, lying--some on mattresses put ready beforehand--some on hastily spread tarpaulins--some on stretchers--some just anyhow. Here it was that they first began to feel. The dreadful noise of deep sighs and half-stifled groans was audible in the close, damp air, which smelt of something sour and disgustingly sickly. The electric light seemed scarcely able to penetrate this stench. Ahead somewhere, in white coats stained with red splotches, busy figures were moving about, and towards them all these piles of flesh, clothes, and bones turned, and in their agony dragged themselves, expecting something from them. It seemed as if a cry, motionless, voiceless, but intelligible, a cry which reached to one’s very soul, a request for help, for a miracle, for relief from suffering--though at the price of a speedy death--rose up on all sides. I did not stop to wait my turn, and, not wishing to put myself before others, quickly went up the ladder to the lower battery, where I met the Flag Captain, who had his head bandaged. (He had been wounded in the back of the neck by three splinters.) On enquiry I learned that at the same time as the steering gear had been injured and the flag-ship had left her place, the Admiral and Vladimirsky were wounded in the head in the conning tower. The latter had gone below to get his wounds dressed, and had been succeeded in command by Bogdanoff, the third lieutenant. The Admiral’s orders were to steer after the fleet.