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Then there was the congregation in three groups. The second group the singing sanitars, some ten of them, stout and healthy, singing as Russians do with complete self-forgetfulness and a rapturous happiness in front of them, a funny little man with spectacles and a sharp-pointed beard, once a schoolmaster, now a sanitar, conducting their music with a long bony finger all of them chanting the responses with perfect precision and harmony.
I seemed to begin to be a new man out of England. The journey delighted me.... I was in Moscow before I knew. I was there three months trying to learn Russian. Then I came to Petrograd and through the English Embassy found a place in one of the hospitals, where I worked as a sanitar for three months. I did not leave England until November, so that I have been in Russia now just six months.
It seemed absurd enough there in the uncertain candlelight with the wounded groaning and crying in front of it. There was already in the air that familiar smell of blood and iodine, the familiar cries of: "Oh, Sestritza Oh, Sestritza!" the familiar patient faces of the soldiers, sitting up, waiting for their turn, the familiar sharp voice of the sanitar: "What Division?
One sanitar, asleep, had leaned, still standing, over a chair, and his shadow with his heavy hanging head high above the candle against the wall. Nikitin, seeming gigantic in the failing candlelight, stood back against the window. He did not keep, as did Semyonov, perfect neatness.
He looked about him but could see nothing clearly, as though he were still sleeping. Then he was aware of a sanitar standing below the cart, looking up at him with great agitation and saying again and again: "Borjé moi! Borjé moi! Borjé moi!" "What is it?" he asked, rubbing his eyes. The sanitar then seemed to slip away leaving him alone with a vague sense of disaster.
During the second one, when the man's arm tumbled off into the basin and lay there amongst the filthy rags with the dirty white fingers curved, their nails dead and grey, I suddenly felt violently sick. A sanitar took my place and I went out into the cool of the forest, where a silver pattern of stars swung now above the branches and a full moon, red and cold, was rising beyond the hill.
I had only that one glimpse of her face on my entry, because, at the shake of the doctor's head, a sanitar stepped forward and covered her with a cloth. But I shall see her face as it was until I die. Her eyes were closed, she seemed very peaceful.... But I cannot write of it, even now.... My business here is simply with facts, and I must be forgiven if now I am brief in my account.
They searched the wood until late in the afternoon, trampling through the wet, peering through thickets, listening for one another's voices, finding sometimes a trophy in the shape of an empty shrapnel case, an Austrian cap or dagger. Then, quite suddenly, a sanitar noticed that the bursting of the shrapnel was much closer than it had been during the early afternoon.
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