She always utters it in a hoarse voice, and very excitedly and clumsily I tell her all I know. After breakfast I walk about outside the window looking at the old factory and awaiting the postman's arrival.
Thus I pass my days one by one, watching for the post, for the newspapers, enduring the mother's grief--and my own. And whenever I wait for the letters, I recall a little episode of the War told me by a wounded subaltern at an evacuated point. He had sustained a slight head wound, and I am certain he was not normal, but was suffering from shell-shock. Dark-eyed, swarthy, he was lying on a stretcher and wearing a white bandage. I offered him tea, but he would not take it; pushing aside the mug and gripping my hand he said:
"Do you know what war is? Don't laugh! bayonets ... do you understand?"--his voice rose in a shriek--"... into bayonets ... that is, to cut, to kill, to slaughter one another--men! They turned the machine-guns on us, and this is what happened: the private Kuzmin and I were together, when suddenly two bullets struck him. He fell, and, losing all sense of distinction, forgetting that I was his officer, he stretched out his arms towards me in a sort of half-conscious way, and cried: 'Towny, bayonet me!' You understand? 'Towny, bayonet me!' But you cannot understand.... Do not laugh!"
He told me this, now whispering, now shrieking. He told me that I could not understand; but I can . . . "Towny, bayonet me!" Those words express all the terror of war for me--Georgie's death, Alexander's wound, the mother's grief; all, all that the War has brought: they express it with such force that my temples ache with an almost physical sense of anguish,
"Towny, bayonet me!" How simple, how superhuman!
I remember those words every day, especially when in the hall waiting for the post. Alexander writes seldom and his letters are very dry, merely telling me that he is well, that either there are no dangers or that they have passed; he writes to us all at the same time, to mother, to Asya, and to me.
It was like that to-day. I was waiting for the postman. He came and brought several letters, one of them from Alexander. I did not open it at once, but waited for Mother.
Yesterday and to-day (a Censor's erasure) I feel depressed and think of you, only of you. When things are quiet and there is little doing many a fine thing passes unobserved; I allude to the flowers, of which I am sending you specimens. They grow quite close to the trench, but it is difficult and dangerous to get them, as one may easily be killed. I have seen such flowers before, but am ignorant of their name."