a to the cholera village that is on the outskirts of the
forest, and I recollect that we hastened back because that evening we
were to celebrate the conclusion of the first six months' work of our
Otriad. Of my entrance into the forest I remember absolutely nothing;
it seemed, I suppose, an ordinary enough forest to me. Of the
festivities in the evening I have a very clear recollection. I
remember that it was the loveliest summer weather, not too hot, with a
little breeze coming up from the river, and the green glittering on
every side of us with the quiver of flashing water. In the little
garden outside our house a table had been improvised and on this were
a large gilt ikon, a vase of flowers in a hideous purple jar, and two
tall candles whose flames looked unreal and thin in the sunlight.
There was the priest, a fine stout man with a long black beard and
hair falling below his shoulders, clothed in silk of gold and purple,
waving a censer, monotoning the prayers in a high Russian tenor, with
one eye on the choir of sanitars, one eye on the candles blown by the
wind, the breeze meanwhile playing irreverent jests on his splendid
skirts of gold. Then there was the congregation in three groups. The
first group--two generals, two colonels, four or five other officers,
the Sisters (Sister K---- bowing and crossing herself incessantly,
Anna Petrovna with her attention obviously on the dinner cooking
behind a tree in the garden, Marie Ivanovna looking lovely and happy
and good), ourselves--Molozov official, Semyonov sarcastic, Nikitin in
a dream, Andrey Vassilievitch busy with his smart uniform, Trenchard
(forgotten his sword, his blue handkerchief protruding from his
pocket) absorbed by the ceremony, myself thinking of Trenchard,
Goga--and the rest. The second group--the singing sanitars, some ten
of them, stout and healthy, singing as Russians do with complete
self-forgetfulness and a rapturous happiness in front of them, a funny
little man with spectacles and a sharp-pointed beard, once a
schoolmaster, now a sanitar, conducting their music with a long bony
finger--all of them chanting the responses with perfect precision and
harmony. Third group, the other sanitars, the strangest collection of
faces, wild, savage and eastern: Tartars, Lithuanians, Mongolian, mild
and northern, cold and western, merry and human from Little Russia,
gigantic and fierce from the Caucasus, small and frozen from
Archangel, one or two civilised a