I walked down into the middle of them, found an officer, asked him about wounded, and got directed some two versts in front of me.
Then I climbed up the hill back to my wagons and we started off.

We went down the hill round by the road and came to the prisoners, crossed a stream and plunged into a shining dazzling nightmare.
_Where_ the cannon were I don't know--all a considerable distance away, I suppose, because the only sign of shell were the little breaking puffs of smoke in the blue sky with just a pin-flash of light as they broke; but really amongst that welter of wooded hill the sounds were uncanny.

They'd be under one's feet, over one's head, in one's ear, up against one's stomach, straight in the small of one's back.

Since my night with Nikitin physical fear really seems to have left me--the whole outward paraphernalia of the war has become an entirely commonplace thing, but it was the Forest that I felt--exactly as though it were playing with me.

Wasn't there an old mediaeval torture when they shot arrows at their victim, always just missing him, first on one side, then on another, until at last, tired of the game, they fixed him through the head?
Well, that's what the old beast was trying to do to me, _anything_ to doubt what's real and what is not, _anything_ to make me question my senses....