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Volume II, Part Two, Chapter XV

In June the Battle of Friedland took place, in which the Pavlogradians did not take part, and on its heels an armistice was declared. Rostov, keenly feeling the absence of his friend, having received no news of him since his departure and being anxious about the progress of his case and his wound, took advantage of the armistice and obtained permission to go to the hospital to visit Denisov.

The hospital was situated in a small Prussian town that had been ransacked twice — by the Russian and then by the French forces. It was precisely because it was summer, when the countryside was so fine, that this little town with its broken roofs and fences, its filth-strewn streets, its ragged inhabitants and the sick and drunken soldiers wandering through it, presented a peculiarly bleak spectacle.

In a stone house, in a courtyard with the remains of a pulled-down fence and window frames partly broken out and stripped of their glass, the hospital had been set up. Several bandaged, pale, and swollen soldiers were walking about or sitting in the courtyard in the sun.

The moment Rostov stepped through the doorway of the house, the smell of rotting flesh and sickness wrapped around him. On the staircase he met a Russian military doctor with a cigar in his mouth, and a Russian medical orderly following behind the doctor.

"I can't be in three places at once," the doctor was saying; "come round this evening to Makar Alexeich — I'll be there." The orderly asked him something.

"Ah! Do as you know best! Is it not all one?" The doctor caught sight of Rostov coming up the staircase.

"What brings you here, Your Honour?" the doctor said. "What brings you here? A bullet hasn't got you yet, so now you want to catch typhus? This place, my friend, is a house of lepers."

"How so?" asked Rostov.

"Typhus, my friend. Anyone who comes in — death. Only the two of us, Makeyev and I" — he indicated the orderly — "are keeping on here. Five of our doctors have died already. Whenever a new one arrives — in a week he's done," the doctor said with evident satisfaction. "We sent for Prussian doctors, but our allies don't much care for that."

Rostov explained to him that he wished to see a hussar major named Denisov who was lying here.

"I don't know, I've no idea, my friend. Think of it — I alone have three hospitals to run, over four hundred patients! It's a good thing the Prussian ladies of charity send us coffee and lint, two pounds a month — otherwise we'd have perished." He laughed. "Four hundred, my friend; and they keep sending me new ones. Four hundred there are, isn't that so?" he turned to the orderly.

The orderly looked worn out. He was evidently waiting with impatience for the garrulous doctor to finish and go.

"Major Denisov," Rostov repeated; "he was wounded at Moliteno."

"Died, I think. Eh, Makeyev?" the doctor said, without interest, turning to the orderly.

The orderly, however, did not confirm the doctor's words.

"What was he like — tall, reddish-haired?" asked the doctor.

Rostov described Denisov's appearance.

"There was one like that, yes there was," the doctor said, as if glad of something. "That one has most likely died — but I'll check; I had lists somewhere. Do you have them, Makeyev?"

"The lists are with Makar Alexeich," the orderly said. "But you can go through to the officers' wards yourself and see," he added, addressing Rostov.

"Ah, better not go, my friend," said the doctor; "otherwise you might stay here yourself." But Rostov bowed to the doctor and asked the orderly to take him through.

"Don't come blaming me afterwards!" the doctor called out from below the staircase.

Rostov and the orderly entered the corridor. The hospital smell was so strong in this dark corridor that Rostov seized his nose and had to stop to gather himself before going further. A door to the right opened, and from it emerged a thin, yellow man on crutches, barefoot, in his underclothes alone. He leaned against the doorframe and looked at those passing with bright, envious eyes. Glancing in through the door, Rostov saw that the sick and wounded lay there on the floor, on straw and greatcoats.

"May one go in to look?" asked Rostov.

"What is there to look at?" said the orderly. But precisely because the orderly obviously did not wish to let him in, Rostov walked into the soldiers' ward. The smell, to which he had already begun to accustom himself in the corridor, was even stronger here; it had altered somewhat in character — sharper — and one sensed that this was where it had its source.

In a long room brightly lit through large windows, the sick and wounded lay in two rows, heads to the walls and a passage left down the middle. Most of them were insensible and took no notice of the newcomers. Those who had their wits raised themselves or lifted their thin, yellow faces, and all with one identical look — of hope for help, of reproach, and of envy toward another's health — fixed their eyes on Rostov and did not look away. Rostov walked to the middle of the room, looked into adjoining rooms through their open doors, and on both sides saw the same thing. He stopped, silently looking about him. He had in no way expected to see this. Right before him, lying almost crosswise in the central passage, on the bare floor, was a sick man — a Cossack, to judge by his hair cropped in the peasant fashion. The Cossack lay on his back with enormous arms and legs flung wide. His face was a deep crimson, his eyes rolled entirely back so that only the whites showed, and the veins on his bare reddened feet and hands stood out taut as ropes. He struck the back of his head against the floor, hoarsely uttered a word and began to repeat it. Rostov listened and made out the repeated word. The word was: drink — water — drink! Rostov looked around for someone who could settle this sick man in his proper place and give him water.

"Who looks after the patients here?" he asked the orderly. At that moment a supply-train soldier, a hospital attendant, came out of the next room and snapped to attention before Rostov.

"Good day to Your High Honour!" this soldier cried, rolling his eyes at Rostov and evidently taking him for the hospital's commanding officer.

"See to this man — give him water," said Rostov, pointing to the Cossack.

"Very good, Your High Honour," the soldier said with readiness, rolling his eyes more industriously still and drawing himself up yet straighter — but without moving from the spot.

"Nothing can be done here," Rostov thought, lowering his eyes, and was already turning to leave — but he felt a significant gaze fixed on him from the right and turned toward it. Close in the corner, sitting on a greatcoat, was an old soldier with a face as yellow and gaunt as a skeleton, stern, unshaven, with grey bristle, staring hard at Rostov. On one side, the old soldier's neighbour was whispering something to him, pointing at Rostov. Rostov understood that the old man meant to ask him something. He went nearer and saw that the old man had only one leg bent under him — the other was gone above the knee. The old man's other neighbour, lying motionless with his head thrown back some distance away, was a young soldier with the waxen pallor of death on his snub-nosed face, still covered in freckles, his eyes rolled back under their lids.

"But this one, he seems..." Rostov said, turning to the orderly.

"We begged them, Your Honour," said the old soldier, his lower jaw trembling. "He was gone by this very morning. We are human beings too, after all — not dogs..."

"I'll send someone at once — they'll come for him, they'll come," the orderly said quickly. "If you'll come this way, Your Honour."

"Let us go, let us go," said Rostov quickly, and lowering his eyes, making himself small, trying to pass unnoticed through the gauntlet of those reproachful and envious eyes fixed upon him, he walked out of the room.