I had to go on alone and reconnoitre. I was right out in the open then and more alone than one could believe. Cannon were blazing away and one battery seemed just behind me--and yet I couldn't see it. I could see nothing--only great ridges of hills with the Forest like gigantic torrents of green water under the mist, and just at my feet cornfields _thick_ with cornflowers. Then I saw rather a wonderful thing. I came to the edge of my hill and looked down into a cup of a valley, quite a little valley with the green waves towering on every side of it. Through the mist there shimmered below me a blue lake. I was puzzled--there was no water here that I knew, but by this time the Forest has so bewitched my senses that I'm ready to believe anything of it. There it was, anyway, a blue lake, shifting a little under gold haze. I climbed down the hill a yard or two and then you can believe that I jumped! My blue lake was Austrian prisoners, nothing more nor less! Has any one quite seen them like that before, I wonder, and isn't this Forest really the old witch's forest, able to do what it pleases with anything? There they were, hundreds of them, covering the whole floor of the little valley. I walked down into the middle of them, found an officer, asked him about wounded, and got directed some two versts in front of me. Then I climbed up the hill back to my wagons and we started off. We went down the hill round by the road and came to the prisoners, crossed a stream and plunged into a shining dazzling nightmare. _Where_ the cannon were I don't know--all a considerable distance away, I suppose, because the only sign of shell were the little breaking puffs of smoke in the blue sky with just a pin-flash of light as they broke; but really amongst that welter of wooded hill the sounds were uncanny. They'd be under one's feet, over one's head, in one's ear, up against one's stomach, straight in the small of one's back. Since my night with Nikitin physical fear really seems to have left me--the whole outward paraphernalia of the war has become an entirely commonplace thing, but it was the Forest that I felt--exactly as though it were playing with me. Wasn't there an old mediaeval torture when they shot arrows at their victim, always just missing him, first on one side, then on another, until at last, tired of the game, they fixed him through the head? Well, that's what the old beast was trying to do to me, _anything_ to doubt what's real and what is not, _anything_ to make me question my senses.... We tumbled quite suddenly on to some men, a small Red Cross shelter and two or three hundred soldiers sitting under the trees by the road resting--most of them sleeping. The doctor in the Red Cross place--a small fussy man--was ill-tempered and overworked. There were at least thirty dead men lying in a row outside the shelter, and the army sanitars were bringing in more wounded every minute. "Why weren't there more wagons?