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Ragged and lean and bearded, with the soil of the Crimea still upon them, the men of Alma and Inkerman, of Balaclava and Sevastopol, marched through the roaring citizen crowd and formed up in the Park.
On 23rd August, the battleship Sevastopol which, it will be remembered, was one of the ships which contrived to make good her escape from the Japanese fleet after the battle of the Yellow Sea having been patched-up, as far as the resources of Port Arthur dockyard would allow, got under way and, steaming round to Takhe Bay, proceeded to shell the Japanese lines in the neighbourhood of Ta-ku-Shan and the Panlung redoubts.
He progressed, but did not change; and he progressed along the path already clearly marked in his first books. The author of "Sevastopol" and "The Cossacks" was the same man mentally and spiritually who wrote "Anna Karenina," "Ivan Ilyich," "The Kreuzer Sonata," and "Resurrection." Indeed, few great authors have steered so straight a course as he.
Le comme il faut tout pur, but rather in a different style." He soon learned from her that her name was Sofya Matveyevna Ulitin and she lived at K , that she had a sister there, a widow; that she was a widow too, and that her husband, who was a sub-lieutenant risen from the ranks, had been killed at Sevastopol. "But you are still so young, vous n'avez pas trente ans."
"I pity myself above all men that I did not lose my arm at Sevastopol, not having been there at all, but served all the campaign delivering paltry provisions, which I look on as a degradation. You are a goddess of antiquity, and I am nothing, but have had a glimpse of infinity.
Do you know what I did in the Crimea how gallantly I behaved at the storming of Sevastopol? how I held the rifle-pits against a host of the enemy? how at the Alma I climbed up the heights, shouting `Death or victory! when my men were driven back by the showers of bullets hissing past us and might have fled? Why, sir, if any officer deserved the Victoria Cross, I did!"
In this same year he wrote the book which was the first absolute proof of his genius, and with the publication of which his reputation began "Sevastopol in December." This was printed in the same review that had accepted his first work, was greeted with enthusiasm by Turgenev and the literary circles at Petersburg, was read by the Tsar, and translated into French at the imperial command.
At the moment when the confusion created by the erratic movements of the Tsarevich was at its height, the Peresviet displayed a signal from her bridge and, sheering out of the melee, headed away back in the direction of Port Arthur, followed by the Sevastopol and Poltava, while the Askold, Admiral Reitsenstein's flagship, followed by the cruisers Diana, Pallada, and Novik, broke away from the rest of the fleet and, under every ounce of steam that they could raise, headed away in a south-easterly direction, followed by the Asama and six other cruisers.
"Let my funeral," said he, "be conducted with the least possible expense or display, as all the resources of the empire are now needed for the prosecution of the war." While conversing, news came that dispatches had arrived from Sevastopol. The emperor deeming that he had already abdicated, declined perusing them, saying, "I have nothing more to do with earth."
If I am unlucky I may, in addition, be sent to war, where I shall be forced to kill men of foreign nations who have done me no harm, where I may be maimed or killed, or sent to certain destruction as in the case of the garrison of Sevastopol, and other cases in every war, or what would be most terrible of all, I may be sent against my own compatriots and have to kill my own brothers for some dynastic or other state interests which have absolutely nothing to do with me.
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