the many
backgrounds that were, during the next months, to follow in procession
behind me, there only remain to me with enduring vitality: this
school-house at O----, the banks of the River Nestor which I had
indeed good reason to remember, and finally the forest of S----. How
strange a contrast, that school-house with its little garden and white
cobbles and that forest which will, to the end of my life, ever haunt
my dreams.

And yet, by its very contrast, how fitting a background to our
Prologue this school-house made! I wonder whether Nikitin sees it
still in his visions? Trenchard and Semyonov ... does it mean anything
to them, where they now are? First of them all, Marie Ivanovna.... I
see her still, bending over the well looking down, then suddenly
flinging her head back, laughing as we stood behind her, the sunlight
through the apple-trees flashing in her eyes.... That fortnight must
be to many of us of how ironic, of how tragic a tranquillity!

So we settled down and did our best to become happily accustomed to
one another. Our own immediate company numbered twenty or so--Molozov,
two doctors, myself, Trenchard and Andrey Vassilievitch, the two new
Sisters and the three former ones, five or six young Russians,
gentlemen of ease and leisure who had had some "bandaging" practice at
the Petrograd hospitals, and three very young medical students,
directly attached to our two doctors. In addition to these there were
the doctors, Sisters and students belonging to the army itself--the
Sixty-Fifth Division of the Ninth Army. These sometimes lived with us
and sometimes by themselves; they had at their head Colonel Oblonsky,
a military doctor of much experience and wide knowledge. There were
also the regular sanitars, some thirty or forty, men who were often by
profession schoolmasters or small merchants, of a better class for the
most part than the ordinary soldier.

It is not, of course, my intention to describe with any detail the
individuals of this company. I have chosen already those of us who are
especially concerned with my present history, but these others made a
continually fluctuating and variable background, at first confusing
and, to a stranger, almost terrifying. When the army doctors and
Sisters dined with us we numbered from thirty to forty persons:
sometimes also the officers of the Staff of the Sixty-Fifth came to
our table. There were other occasions when every one was engaged on
one business or an