o has had experience of war will admit the
truth of this. I had myself already known something of the kind and
had wondered at the fashion in which the crossing of a mere verst or
two can bring the old life about one. I had known it during the battle
of S----, in the days that followed the battle, in moments of the
Retreat, when for half an hour we would suddenly be laughing and
careless as though we were in Petrograd.

And so when I look back to the weeks of whose history I wish now to
give a truthful account, I am afraid of myself. I wish to give nothing
more than the facts, and yet that something that is _more_ than the
facts is of the first, and indeed the only, importance. Moreover the
last impression that I wish to convey is that war is a _hysterical_
business. I believe that that succession of days in the forest of
S----, the experience of Nikitin, Semyonov, Andrey Vassilievitch,
Trenchard and myself--might have occurred to any one, must have
occurred to many other persons, but from the cool safe foundation on
which now I stand it cannot but seem exceptional, even exaggerated.
Exaggerated, in very truth, I know that it is not. And yet this
life--so ordered, so disciplined, so rational, and THAT life--where do
they join?... I penetrated but a little way; my friends penetrated
into the very heart ... and, because I was left outside, I remain the
only possible recorder: but a recorder who can offer only signs,
moments, glimpses through a closing door....

I am waiting now for the return of my opportunity.

On the night of the death of Marie Ivanovna I slept a heavy, dreamless
sleep. I was wakened between six and seven the next morning by
Nikitin, who told me that he, Trenchard, Andrey Vassilievitch and I
were to return at once to the forest. I realised at once that
indescribable quiver in the air of momentous events. The house was
quite still, the summer morning very fresh and clear, but the air was
weighted with some crisis. It was not only the death of Marie Ivanovna
that was present with us, it was rather something that told us that
now no individual life or death counted ... individualities,
personalities, were swallowed up in the sweeping urgency of a great
climax. Nikitin simply told me that a furious battle was raging some
ten versts on the other side of the river, that we were to go at once
to form a temporary hospital behind the lines in the Forest; that the
nurses and the rest of the Otriad would remain