Short Fiction by Leonid Andreyev (fastest ebook reader TXT) 📕

an attack, when somebody clearly discerned our uniforms, and ten minutes later our guess had become a calm and happy certainty: they were our own men. They apparently had recognised us too: they advanced quite calmly, and that calm motion seemed to express the same happy smile of an unexpected meeting.

And when they began firing, we did not understand for some time what it meant, and still continued smiling⁠—under a hail of shrapnel and bullets, that poured down upon us, snatching away at one stroke hundreds of men. Somebody cried out by mistake and⁠—I clearly remember⁠—we all saw that it was the enemy, that it was his uniform and not ours, and instantly answered the fire. About fifteen minutes after the beginning of that strange engagement both my legs were torn off, and I recovered consciousness in the hospital after the amputation.

I asked how the battle had ended, and received an evasive, reassuring answer, by which I could understand that we had been beaten; and afterwards, legless as I was, I was overcome by joy at the thought that now I would be sent home, that I was alive⁠—alive for a long time to come, alive forever. And only a week later I learnt some particulars, that once more filled me with doubts and a new, unexperienced feeling of terror. Yes, I believe they were our own men after all⁠—and it was with one of our shells, fired out of one of our guns by one of our men, that my legs had been torn off. And nobody could explain how it had happened. Something occurred, something darkened our vision, and two regiments, belonging to the same army, facing each other at a distance of one verst, had been destroying each other for a whole hour in the full conviction that it was the enemy they had before them. Later on the incident was remembered and spoken of reluctantly in halfwords and⁠—what is most surprising of all⁠—one could feel that many of the speakers did not admit the mistake even then. That is to say, they admitted it, but thought that it had occurred later on, that in the beginning they really had the enemy before them, but that he disappeared somewhere during the general fray, leaving us in the range of our own shells. Some spoke of it openly, giving precise explanations, which seemed to them plausible and clear. Up to this very minute I cannot say for certain how the strange blunder began, as I saw with equal clearness first our red uniforms and then their orange-coloured ones. And somehow very soon everybody forgot about the incident, forgot about it to such an extent that it was spoken of as a real battle, and in that sense many accounts were written and sent to the papers in all good faith; I read them when I was back home. At first the public’s attitude towards us, the wounded in that engagement, was rather strange⁠—we seemed to be less pitied than those wounded in other battles, but soon even that disappeared too. And only new facts, similar to the one just described, and a case in the enemy’s army, when two detachments actually destroyed each other almost entirely, having come to a hand-to-hand fight during the night⁠—gives me the right to think that a mistake did occur.

Our doctor, the one that did the amputation, a lean, bony old man, tainted with tobacco smoke and carbolic acid, everlastingly smiling at something through his yellowish-grey thin moustache, said to me, winking his eye⁠—

“You’re in luck to be going home. There’s something wrong here.”

“What is it?”

“Something’s going wrong. In our time it was simpler.”

He had taken part in the last European war almost a quarter of a century back and often referred to it with pleasure. But this war he did not understand, and, as I noticed, feared it.

“Yes, there’s something wrong,” sighed he, and frowned, disappearing in a cloud of tobacco smoke. “I would leave too, if I could.”

And bending over me he whispered through his yellow smoked moustache⁠—

“A time will come when nobody will be able to go away from here. Yes, neither I nor anybody,” and in his old eyes, so close to me, I saw the same fixed, dull, stricken expression. And something terrible, unbearable, resembling the fall of thousands of buildings, darted through my head, and growing cold from terror, I whispered⁠—

“The red laugh.”

And he was the first to understand me. He hastily nodded his head and repeated⁠—

“Yes. The red laugh.”

He sat down quite close to me and looking round began whispering rapidly, in a senile way, wagging his sharp, grey little beard.

“You are leaving soon, and I will tell you. Did you ever see a fight in an asylum? No? Well, I saw one. And they fought like sane people. You understand⁠—like sane people.” He significantly repeated the last phrase several times.

“Well, and what of that?” asked I, also in a whisper, full of terror.

“Nothing. Like sane people.”

“The red laugh,” said I.

“They were separated by water being poured over them.”

I remembered the rain that had frightened us so, and got angry.

“You are mad, doctor!”

“Not more than you. Not more than you in any case.”

He hugged his sharp old knees and chuckled; and, looking at me over his shoulder and still with the echo of that unexpected painful laugh on his parched lips, he winked at me slyly several times, as if we two knew something very funny, that nobody else knew. Then with the solemnity of a professor of black magic, giving a conjuring performance, he lifted his arm and, lowering it slowly, carefully touched with two fingers that part of the blanket, under which my legs would have been, if they had not been cut off.

“And do you understand this?” he asked mysteriously.

Then, in the same solemn and significant manner, he waved his hand towards the row of beds on which the wounded were lying, and repeated⁠—

“And can you explain this?”

“The wounded?” said I. “The wounded?”

“The