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Nikitin simply told me that a furious battle was raging some ten versts on the other side of the river, that we were to go at once to form a temporary hospital behind the lines in the Forest; that the nurses and the rest of the Otriad would remain in Mittövo to wait for the main tide of the wounded, but that we were to go forward to help the army doctors. He spoke very quietly.
Som was a tall black dog with long legs and a tail as hard as a stick. At dinner and tea he usually moved about under the table, and thumped on people's boots and on the legs of the table with his tail. He was a good-natured, stupid dog, but Nikitin could not endure him because he had the habit of putting his head on people's knees at dinner and messing their trousers with saliva.
"Well, Mr.," he said in the ironical voice he always uses to me. "Krylov has been again," I said. "He told Nikitin that we ought to go to-night. Nikitin asked him whether the Division had plenty of wagons and Krylov admitted that there weren't nearly enough.
Nikitin lived nearly half a mile from the Shelestoys' in a flat of eight rooms at the rent of three hundred roubles a year, which he shared with his colleague Ippolit Ippolititch, a teacher of geography and history.
They felt behind his silence a personality that might indeed be equal to Semyonov's own. By little Andrey Vassilievitch they were always being assured: "Nikitin! A most remarkable man! You may believe me. I have known him for many years. A great friend of my poor wife's and mine...." They did not appear to be great friends. Nikitin quite obviously avoided the little man whenever it was possible.
But twice now I had been properly beaten, and why, after all, should I imagine that I would be able to put up a fight I who had never in all my life fought anything successfully? I lay on my back, looked at the sky. I sat up, looked at the country, I set my teeth, looked at Nikitin. Nikitin grunted. "I've had a good nap," he said. "You should have had one.
Conti, who was in India about a century earlier than the war in question, told Bracciolini that the Vijayanagar army consisted of "a million of men and upwards." Twenty years later Nikitin states that the Kulbarga forces marching to attack the Hindus amounted to 900,000 foot, 190,000 horse, and 575 elephants.
I believe that that succession of days in the forest of S , the experience of Nikitin, Semyonov, Andrey Vassilievitch, Trenchard and myself might have occurred to any one, must have occurred to many other persons, but from the cool safe foundation on which now I stand it cannot but seem exceptional, even exaggerated. Exaggerated, in very truth, I know that it is not.
There was something so strange in its mixture of irony, bitterness and kindness just that rather contemptible, patronising kindness that is so especially his. "We had no time to wait after that. We got the wagons out by a miracle without losing a man. Semyonov was marvellous in his self-control and coolness...." We were both silent for a long time. Nikitin only once again.
There arose then in these days of the wounded at M a strange relationship between myself and Nikitin. Friendship, I have said, I may not call it. Nikitin afterwards told me it was my interest in the study of human character that led to his frankness as though he had said, "Here is a man who likes to play a certain game. I also enjoy it.
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