ith surprising quickness that
was spontaneous too; all the emotions in our Otriad were spontaneous
to the very extreme of spontaneity. But we were not real students of
one another; we were content to call things by their names, to call
silence silence, obstinacy obstinacy, good temper good temper, and
leave it at that.

No one, I think, really considered Nikitin at all deeply. They admired
him for his "quiet" but would have liked him better had he shared some
of their frankness--and that was all.

It happened that for several days I worked in the bandaging room
directly under Nikitin. The work had a peculiar and really
unanalysable fascination for me. It was perhaps the directness of
contact that pleased me. I suppose one felt that here at any rate one
was doing immediate practical good, relieving distress and agony that
must, by some one, be immediately relieved; and, at any rate, in the
first days at M---- when the press of wounded was terrific (we
treated, in one day and night, nine hundred wounded soldiers) there
could be no doubt of the real demand for incessant tireless work. But
there was in my pleasure more than this. It was as though, through the
bodies of the wounded soldiers, I was helping to drive home the attack
upon our enemy. By our enemy I do not mean anything as concretely
commonplace as the German nation. One scarcely considered Germany as a
definite personality. One was resolved to cripple its power because
one believed that power to be a menace to the helpless, the innocent,
the lovers of truth and beauty; but that resolve, although it never
altered, seemed (the nearer one approached the citadel) in some way to
be farther and farther removed from the real question. Germany was of
no importance, and the ruin that Germany was wreaking was of no
importance compared with the histories of the individual souls that
were now in the making. Here were we: Nikitin, Trenchard, Sister
K----, Molozov, myself and the others--engaged upon our great
adventure. Across the surface of the world, at this same instant, out
upon the same hunt, seeking the same answer to their mystery, were
millions of our fellows. Somewhere in the heart of the deep forest the
enemy was hiding. We would defeat him? He would catch us unawares? He
had some plot, some hidden surprise? What should we find when we met
him?... We hated Germany, God knows, with a quiet, unresting,
interminable hatred, but it was not Germany that we were fightin