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Volume II, Part Two, Chapter XVI

Having passed through the corridor, the orderly led Rostov into the officers' wards, which consisted of three rooms with their doors thrown open. In these rooms there were beds; the wounded and sick officers lay or sat upon them. Some, in hospital gowns, walked about the rooms. The first person Rostov met in the officers' wards was a small, thin man without an arm, in a nightcap and hospital gown, with a little pipe clenched between his teeth, walking about the first room. Rostov, peering at him, tried to recall where he had seen him.

"So this is where God has brought us together again," said the little man. "Tushin, Tushin — remember, I gave you a lift at Schöngrabern? And they cut a little piece off me, see..." he said, smiling, pointing to the empty sleeve of his gown. "Looking for Vasili Dmitrievich Denisov? — my roommate!" he said, on learning whom Rostov needed. "Here, here" — and Tushin led him into another room, from which came the laughter of several voices.

"And how can they not only laugh, but live here?" thought Rostov, still smelling that odor of dead flesh he had taken in back in the soldiers' hospital, and still seeing around him those envious glances that had followed him from both sides, and the face of that young soldier with the rolled-back eyes.

Denisov, covered head and all with his blanket, was asleep on his bed, despite its being close to noon.

"Ah, Rostov? Hello, hello!" he cried in the very same voice he used to in the regiment; but Rostov noticed with sadness how, beneath that habitual ease and animation, some new, ugly, hidden feeling showed through in the expression of Denisov's face, in his intonations and his words.

His wound, despite its insignificance, still had not healed, though six weeks had already passed since he was wounded. His face had the same pale swelling that was on all the hospital faces. But it was not this that struck Rostov; what struck him was that Denisov seemed not glad to see him and smiled at him unnaturally. Denisov asked nothing about the regiment nor about the general course of affairs. When Rostov spoke of these things, Denisov did not listen.

Rostov even noticed that it was unpleasant for Denisov to be reminded of the regiment, and in general of that other, free life that went on outside the hospital. He seemed to be trying to forget that former life and was interested only in his affair with the commissariat officials. To Rostov's question as to how the matter stood, he at once drew out from under his pillow the paper he had received from the commission and his own draft reply to it. He grew animated as he began reading his paper, and made a particular point of having Rostov notice the barbs he had aimed at his enemies in it. Denisov's hospital companions, who had gathered round Rostov — a newly arrived face from the free world — began little by little to disperse as soon as Denisov started reading his paper. From their faces Rostov understood that all these gentlemen had heard this whole tiresome story more than once already. Only the neighbor on the next bed, a stout uhlan, sat on his cot, frowning gloomily and smoking a pipe, and little Tushin, without his arm, went on listening, shaking his head disapprovingly. In the middle of the reading the uhlan interrupted Denisov.

"For my part," he said, turning to Rostov, "one ought simply to petition the Tsar for a pardon. They say the rewards will be great now, and surely he'll forgive..."

"I, petition the Tsar!" said Denisov in a voice to which he wished to give his former energy and heat, but which rang only with futile irritability. "For what? If I were a robber, I would beg for mercy, but here I am being put on trial for bringing robbers out into the open. Let them try me — I fear no one; I served the Tsar and the fatherland honestly and did not steal! And to break me to the ranks, and... Listen, I write to them straight out, here's what I write: 'if I were an embezzler of the treasury...'"

"Cleverly written, no denying it," said Tushin. "But that's not the point, Vasili Dmitrich" — he too turned to Rostov — "one must submit, and here Vasili Dmitrich won't. After all, the auditor told you your case looks bad."

"Well, let it look bad," said Denisov.

"The auditor has drawn up a petition for you," continued Tushin, "and you must sign it and send it off with him here. He surely (he pointed to Rostov) has a connection at headquarters. You won't find a better chance."

"But I've said I won't grovel," Denisov interrupted, and went on again with the reading of his paper.

Rostov did not dare to urge Denisov, though he felt by instinct that the course proposed by Tushin and the other officers was the surest, and though he would have counted himself happy could he have rendered Denisov any help: he knew the inflexibility of Denisov's will and his truthful vehemence.

When the reading of Denisov's venomous papers, which had lasted more than an hour, was over, Rostov said nothing, and in the saddest frame of mind, in the company of Denisov's hospital companions who had again gathered round him, he spent the rest of the day telling what he knew and listening to the stories of others. Denisov kept a gloomy silence throughout the whole evening.

Late in the evening Rostov prepared to leave and asked Denisov whether he had any errands for him.

"Yes, wait," said Denisov; he glanced round at the officers and, taking his papers out from under his pillow, went to the window, where his inkwell stood, and sat down to write.

"It seems there's no breaking an axe-head with a whip," he said, coming away from the window and handing Rostov a large envelope. It was the petition addressed to the Tsar, drawn up by the auditor, in which Denisov, making no mention of the faults of the commissariat department, asked only for a pardon.

"Hand it in, it seems..." He did not finish, and smiled a sickly, false smile.