I fancy
that he felt that he would venture anything to escape our adjacency to
the battery.
So they departed, leaving us more forlorn than before We sat down on
the stretchers: Anna Petrovna, fat, heavy, phlegmatic, silent; Marie
Ivanovna silent too but with a look now of expectation in her eyes as
though she knew that something was coming for her very shortly;
Trenchard near her, trying to be cheerful, but conscious of the dead
soldier under the tree from whom he seemed unable to remove his eyes.
There was, in the open space near us, a _kipiatilnik_, that is, a
large boiler on wheels in which tea is made. To this the soldiers were
crowding with their tin cans; the cuckoo, far away now, continued his
cry....
At long intervals, out of the forest, a wounded soldier would appear.
He seemed to be always the same figure, sometimes wounded in the head,
sometimes in the leg, sometimes in the stomach, sometimes in the
hand--but always the same, with a look in his eyes of mild protest
because this had happened to him, also a look of dumb confidence that
some one somewhere would make things right for him.
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