By the same post we received four letters from Pavel. He is alive and well, and in Prussia once more. Needless to say, both mother and Sashenka and I were beside ourselves with joy. How absurd it seems! Pavel might have been killed a hundred times since his last letter, and yet there we were rejoicing over a piece of crumpled paper and a few faint pencil strokes as though Pavel himself stood before us. Among other things, this is what he writes, “What else can I tell you, my dear Sashenka? Everything here is so interesting. You look at the moving mass of men in the snow and twilight, and think. … Snow … fields … Germany … great events … a great war … and this is the war, and I am part of it. An officer comes back from the firing lines, soaking wet, his coat and hood covered with snow. He takes off his coat and tries to warm himself with a cup of tea, and you think again, ‘This then is the great war, and this is the great Russian army!’ In the most trifling little act you see something of the passing greatness. The military operations on our front have been slow. The cold and the snow seems to have made everything heavy to move, especially the men. There is not much life in us, wrapped up as we are, and the hardest time is yet to come! I am having tea in the officers’ mess just now, in a real glass with a stand. I am writing this letter, but the telephone may ring at any moment, and everything will change as in a dream. Our battery may have to be moved half a mile to right or left or forward, and then will come digging in the hard, cold soil to have a dugout ready by nightfall (it is horribly cold in the trenches now), in which we will he down to sleep, damp and hungry. This is not fiction, but naked fact. Do you know what blood on snow looks like, Sashenka? Like a red watermelon. Isn’t it funny?”
In another letter he tells how the men covered themselves with wet straw one night in a thaw, and had to force their way out of it, so hard had it frozen by morning. Poor Pavel! and we rejoiced over his letter!