To my intense surprise Andrey Vassilievitch asked whether he might accompany him.

I fancy that he felt that he would venture anything to escape our adjacency to the battery.
So they departed, leaving us more forlorn than before We sat down on the stretchers: Anna Petrovna, fat, heavy, phlegmatic, silent; Marie Ivanovna silent too but with a look now of expectation in her eyes as though she knew that something was coming for her very shortly; Trenchard near her, trying to be cheerful, but conscious of the dead soldier under the tree from whom he seemed unable to remove his eyes.
There was, in the open space near us, a _kipiatilnik_, that is, a large boiler on wheels in which tea is made.

To this the soldiers were crowding with their tin cans; the cuckoo, far away now, continued his cry....
At long intervals, out of the forest, a wounded soldier would appear.
He seemed to be always the same figure, sometimes wounded in the head, sometimes in the leg, sometimes in the stomach, sometimes in the hand--but always the same, with a look in his eyes of mild protest because this had happened to him, also a look of dumb confidence that some one somewhere would make things right for him.

He came either to us or to the Red Cross building across the road, according to his company.

One soldier with a torn thumb cried bitterly, looking at his thumb and shaking his head at it, but he alone showed any emotion.