Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov

Author:Mikhail Sholokhov
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Nobel Prize for Literature, Communism, Civil War, Fiction, Revolution, War, First World War, Classics, Russia
ISBN: 9780241284407
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics
Published: 2017-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Nineteen-sixteen. October. Night. Rain and wind. The trenches in the alder-grown marshes of Polesie. Barbed-wire entanglements in front. A freezing slush in the trenches. The wet sheet-iron of an observation post gleams faintly. Lights here and there in the dugouts.

At the entrance to one of the officer’s dugouts a thick-set officer halted for a moment, his wet fingers slipping over his greatcoat fasteners. He hurriedly unfastened them, shook the water from the collar, wiped his boots on the heap of straw trampled into the mud at the entrance, and only then pushed open the door, stooped, and entered the dugout.

A yellow band of light streaming from a little paraffin lamp gleamed oilily on his face. An officer in an open jacket rose, passed his hand over his rumpled grey hair and yawned.

‘Raining?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ the visitor replied, and removing his greatcoat, hung it together with his sopping wet cap on a nail by the door. ‘You’re warm in here!’

‘We’ve had the fire alight recently. It’s bad though that the water is oozing up through the floor. The rain will outlast us. What do you think, Bunchuk?’

Rubbing his hairy hands, Bunchuk stooped and squatted down by the stove.

‘Put some planks down over the floor,’ he replied. ‘We’re fine and dry in our dugout. We could walk about with bare feet. Where’s Listnitsky?’

‘He’s asleep. He came back from a round of the guards and lay down at once.’

‘All right to wake him up?’

‘Go ahead. We’ll have a game of chess.’

Bunchuk stroked the rain from his heavy brows with his index finger, examined the finger attentively, and called quietly:

‘Eugene Nikolaivitch!’

‘Well?’ Listnitsky raised himself on his elbow.

‘Have a game of chess?’

Eugene dropped his legs from the bed, and rubbed hard with his soft white palm at his chest.

As the first game was nearing its end two officers of the fifth company, captain Kalmikov and subaltern Chubov, entered.

‘News!’ Kalmikov cried as he crossed the threshold. ‘The regiment will probably be withdrawn.’

‘Where did you hear that?’ the grey-haired officer, lieutenant Merkulov, smiled disbelievingly.

‘The commander of the battery has just informed us over the telephone. How did he know? Well, he only returned from the divisional staff yesterday.’

‘It would be great to have a bath,’ Chubov said, with a note of ecstasy in his voice.

‘You’re damp in here, gentlemen, very damp,’ Kalmikov grumbled, looking around the log-timbered walls and the squelching earthen floor.

‘We’ve got the marsh right at our side,’ Merkulov said apologetically.

‘Thank the Almighty that here in the marsh you’re as comfortable as if you were in Abraham’s bosom!’ Bunchuk intervened. ‘In other districts they’re attacking, but here we fire one round a week.’

‘Better to be attacking than rotting in this hole.’

‘They don’t keep the cossacks to get them wiped out in attacks. You ought to know better, lieutenant Merkulov,’ Bunchuk observed.

‘Then what are we kept for, in your opinion?’

‘At the right moment the government will play its old game of maintaining itself on the backs of the cossacks.’

‘Now you’re talking heresy,’ Kalmikov waved his hand.

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