The Feldscher, who was a short stocky man, with a red face and melancholy eyes (something like a prize-fighter turned poet), dismissed them.

They went off in a line under the hedge.
The man obviously thought me a tiresome prig.

He had no romantic illusions about the business; he had not been a Feldscher during twenty years for nothing and knew that a wound was a wound; when a man was dead he was _dead_.
However....

"Truly it's not far ?" he asked the soldier.
"_Tak totchno_," the man answered, his face quite without expression.
We crossed the moonlit field and for a brief moment silence fell, as though an audience were holding its breath watching us.

On the other side were cottages, the outskirts of a tiny village.