this time the Forest has so bewitched
my senses that I'm ready to believe anything of it. There it was,
anyway, a blue lake, shifting a little under gold haze. I climbed down
the hill a yard or two and then you can believe that I jumped! My blue
lake was Austrian prisoners, nothing more nor less! Has any one quite
seen them like that before, I wonder, and isn't this Forest really the
old witch's forest, able to do what it pleases with anything? There
they were, hundreds of them, covering the whole floor of the little
valley. I walked down into the middle of them, found an officer, asked
him about wounded, and got directed some two versts in front of me.
Then I climbed up the hill back to my wagons and we started off. We
went down the hill round by the road and came to the prisoners,
crossed a stream and plunged into a shining dazzling nightmare.
_Where_ the cannon were I don't know--all a considerable distance
away, I suppose, because the only sign of shell were the little
breaking puffs of smoke in the blue sky with just a pin-flash of light
as they broke; but really amongst that welter of wooded hill the
sounds were uncanny. They'd be under one's feet, over one's head, in
one's ear, up against one's stomach, straight in the small of one's
back. Since my night with Nikitin physical fear really seems to have
left me--the whole outward paraphernalia of the war has become an
entirely commonplace thing, but it was the Forest that I felt--exactly
as though it were playing with me. Wasn't there an old mediaeval
torture when they shot arrows at their victim, always just missing
him, first on one side, then on another, until at last, tired of the
game, they fixed him through the head? Well, that's what the old beast
was trying to do to me, _anything_ to doubt what's real and what is
not, _anything_ to make me question my senses.... We tumbled quite
suddenly on to some men, a small Red Cross shelter and two or three
hundred soldiers sitting under the trees by the road resting--most of
them sleeping. The doctor in the Red Cross place--a small fussy
man--was ill-tempered and overworked. There were at least thirty dead
men lying in a row outside the shelter, and the army sanitars were
bringing in more wounded every minute. "Why weren't there more wagons?
What was the use of coming with so few? Where was the other doctor,
some one or other who ought to have relieved him?" There he was, like
a little monkey on wires, dancing up and