rowding, a tall well-fed man lay on his back with his head thrown back.
His curly hair, its color, and the shape of his head seemed strangely
familiar to Prince Andrew. Several dressers were pressing on his chest
to hold him down. One large, white, plump leg twitched rapidly all
the time with a feverish tremor. The man was sobbing and choking
convulsively. Two doctors--one of whom was pale and trembling--were
silently doing something to this man's other, gory leg. When he had
finished with the Tartar, whom they covered with an overcoat, the
spectacled doctor came up to Prince Andrew, wiping his hands.

He glanced at Prince Andrew's face and quickly turned away.

"Undress him! What are you waiting for?" he cried angrily to the
dressers.

His very first, remotest recollections of childhood came back to Prince
Andrew's mind when the dresser with sleeves rolled up began hastily to
undo the buttons of his clothes and undressed him. The doctor bent
down over the wound, felt it, and sighed deeply. Then he made a sign to
someone, and the torturing pain in his abdomen caused Prince Andrew to
lose consciousness. When he came to himself the splintered portions of
his thighbone had been extracted, the torn flesh cut away, and the
wound bandaged. Water was being sprinkled on his face. As soon as Prince
Andrew opened his eyes, the doctor bent over, kissed him silently on the
lips, and hurried away.

After the sufferings he had been enduring, Prince Andrew enjoyed a
blissful feeling such as he had not experienced for a long time. All
the best and happiest moments of his life--especially his earliest
childhood, when he used to be undressed and put to bed, and when leaning
over him his nurse sang him to sleep and he, burying his head in the
pillow, felt happy in the mere consciousness of life--returned to his
memory, not merely as something past but as something present.

The doctors were busily engaged with the wounded man the shape of whose
head seemed familiar to Prince Andrew: they were lifting him up and
trying to quiet him.

"Show it to me.... Oh, ooh... Oh! Oh, ooh!" his frightened moans could
be heard, subdued by suffering and broken by sobs.

Hearing those moans Prince Andrew wanted to weep. Whether because he
was dying without glory, or because he was sorry to part with life,
or because of those memories of a childhood that could not return, or
because he was suffering and others were suffering and that man near him
wa