Third group, the other sanitars, the strangest collection of faces, wild, savage and eastern: Tartars, Lithuanians, Mongolian, mild and northern, cold and western, merry and human from Little Russia, gigantic and fierce from the Caucasus, small and frozen from Archangel, one or two civilised and superior _and_ uninteresting from Petrograd and Moscow.
Over the wall a long row of interested Galician peasants and soldiers passing in carts or on horseback.

Seeing the ikon, the priest, the blowing candles, hearing the singing they would take off their hats, cross themselves, for a moment their eyes would go dreamy, mild, forgetful, then on their hats would go again, back they would turn their horses, cursing them up the hill, chaffing the Galician women, down deep in the everyday life again.
The service ended.

The priest turns to us, the gold Cross is raised, we advance one by one: the generals, the colonels, the lieutenants, the Sisters, Semyonov, Nikitin, Goga, then the choir, then the sanitars, even to hunch-backed Alesha, who is always given the dirtiest work to do and is only half a human being; one by one we kiss the Cross, the candles are blown out, the ikon folded up and put away in a cardboard box, we are introduced to the generals, there is general conversation, and the stars and the moon come out "blown straight up, it seems, out of the bosom of the Nestor...." It was a very happy and innocent evening.

For extracting the utmost happiness possible out of the simplest materials the Russians have surely no rivals.

How our generals and our colonels enjoyed that evening! A wonderful dinner was cooked between two stones in the garden--little pig, young chickens, _borshtsh_, that most luxurious of soups, and ices--yes, and ices.