The red laugh: fragments of a discovered manuscriptAndreyev, Leonid
History
The red laugh: fragments of a discovered manuscript
Andreyev, Leonid
Russian fiction -- Translations into English
These were the first that we found, and they horrified us. But later
on we came upon them oftener and oftener along the rails or near
them, and the whole field, lit up by the motionless red flare of the
conflagrations, began stirring as if it were alive, breaking out into
loud cries, wails, curses and groans. All those dark mounds stirred
and crawled about like half-dead lobsters let out of a basket, with
outspread legs, scarcely resembling men in their broken, unconscious
movements and ponderous immobility. Some were mute and obedient, others
groaned, wailed, swore and showed such a passionate hate towards us
that were saving them, as if _we_ had brought about that bloodly,
indifferent night, and been the cause of all those terrible wounds and
their loneliness amidst the night and dead bodies.
The train was full, and our clothes were saturated with blood, as if
we had stood for a long time under a rain of blood, while the wounded
were still being brought in, and the field, come to life, was stirring
wildly as before.
Some of the wounded crawled up themselves, some walked up tottering and
falling. One soldier almost ran up to us. His face was smashed, and
only one eye remained, burning wildly and terribly, and he was almost
naked, as if he had come from the bath-room. Pushing me aside, he
caught sight of the doctor, and rapidly seized him by the chest with
his left hand.
"I'll smash your snout!" he cried, shaking the doctor, and added slowly
and mordantly a coarse oath. "I'll smash your snouts! you rabble!"
The doctor broke away from the soldier, and advancing towards him,
cried chokingly,--
"I will have you court-martialled, you scoundrel! To prison with you!
You're hindering my work! Scoundrel! Brute!"
We pulled them apart, but the soldier kept on crying out for a long
time: "Rabble! I'll smash your snout!"
I was beginning to get exhausted, and went a little way off to have
a smoke and rest a bit. The blood, dried to my hands, covered them
like a pair of black gloves, making it difficult for me to bend my
fingers, so that I kept dropping my cigarettes and matches. And when
I succeeded in lighting my cigarette, the tobacco smoke struck me as
novel and strange, with quite a peculiar taste, the like of which I
never experienced before or after. Just then the ambulance student with
whom I had travelled came up to me, and it seemed to me as if I had
met with him several years back, but where I could not remember. His
tread was firm as if he were marching, and he was staring through me at
something farther on and higher up.
"And they are sleeping," said he, as it seemed, quite calmly.
I flew into a rage, as if the reproach was addressed to me.
"You forget, that they fought like lions for ten days."
"And they are sleeping," he repeated, looking through me and higher up.
Then he stooped down to me and shaking his finger, continued in the
same dry and calm way: "I will tell you--I will tell you...."
"What?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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