There's nothing at all to be made of it....
I may say at once that there was no atom of drama in it.

At one moment I was standing with Marie Ivanovna under the sunrise, at another I was standing behind a trench in the heart of the forest with a battery to my left and a battery to my right, a cuckoo somewhere not very far away, and a dead man with his feet sticking out from under the cloth that covered him peacefully beneath a tree at my side.

There had, of course, been that drive in the wagons, bumping over the uneven road whilst the sun rose gallantly in the heavens and the clanging of the iron door grew, with every roll of our wheels, louder and louder.

But it was rather as though I had been lifted in a sheet from one life--a life of speculation, of viewing war from a superior and safe distance, of viewing indeed all catastrophe and reality from that same distance--into the other.

I had been caught up, had hung for a moment in midair, had been "planted" in this new experience.