I often visit our hospital. It is now being supported by the town, and occupies two stories in our building. I suffer needless torments by the sight of the wounded—men who have lost an arm or a leg, or their sight. The effect produced after a couple of hours in their presence is indescribable. You feel perfectly unstrung, particularly after the arrival of a batch of “fresh ones,” as the nurses call them. I can’t help going, or people would think me a brute, so I suffer and conform to public opinion.
A certain reservist, no longer a young man, made a great impression on me. He told me that when he first went out to the front, he resolved not to take life, and to be on the safe side, in a bayonet attack on a German trench he threw away his rifle as they charged forward—a most excellent thing to do it seemed—but when, together with his fellows, he stepped over the fatal barrier, such a feeling of fury came over him, that he dug his teeth into some German’s throat. Now he rages at night, and digs his teeth into his pillow as if it were a German’s throat, and there he lies tearing and screaming.
Great God, supposing such a thing were to have happened to me! I was nearly brought to the condition of digging my teeth into someone the other night, when I lay awake thinking of the war and the Germans who had started it; I grew so terrified at the possibilities in me, at Sashenka’s empty bed (Sashenka is on night duty at the hospital), at mother’s ghostly face, at the futile destruction, that I dressed hastily and went in to Sashenka. (The hospital being in our own building made it an easy thing to do.) Sashenka was not surprised at this nocturnal visit; she just asked me to be quiet, and brought me a cup of tea from somewhere, and smiled. There was a gentle moaning; the lamps were low, and feeble voices called “Nurse! Nurse!” Sashenka led me over to the man who bites and tears an imaginary German. The poor man, his head completely bandaged, was squeezing his blanket with both hands, “Strangling someone,” Sashenka said. She gave him a drink of water, and he seemed to grow quiet after that, and lay with his hands folded as innocently as a child.
I remained in the hospital until daybreak, but I could not go to sleep for a long time when I got home. I wept aloud from sheer pity. The thought of the man’s bandaged head and pale hands depressed me deeply.
I wonder if Sashenka was right, after all? Was it meanness that made me regret the cigarettes? My God! I could have gone down on my knees before that wounded man, and for the pleasure of having him ask me for a cigarette, I could have torn out my own heart! How short a man’s memory is!