The Hospital Visit — War and Peace

In June the battle of Friedland is fought without the Pávlograds, and an armistice is proclaimed. Rostóv, who has had no news of Denísov since he left, is anxious about the wound and the court-martial, and takes leave to visit him in hospital. The hospital sits in a small Prussian town twice devastated by Russian and French troops. In summer the fields are beautiful, which makes the place more dismal: broken roofs and fences, foul streets, tattered inhabitants, sick and drunken soldiers wandering about. The brick building has broken window frames; the wooden courtyard fence has been pulled to pieces. Bandaged men with pale swollen faces sit or walk in the sunshine. Inside, putrefaction and hospital air envelop Rostóv on the stairs.

He meets a Russian army doctor smoking a cigar, followed by an assistant. The doctor cannot tear himself to pieces, tells the assistant to do the best he can, then asks Rostóv what he wants: the bullets having spared him, does he want to try typhus? This is a pesthouse. Five doctors have died here; a new one is done for in a week, he says with evident satisfaction. Prussian doctors were invited, but the allies do not like it. He is alone in charge of three hospitals with more than four hundred patients; charitable Prussian ladies send two pounds of coffee and some lint a month or they would be lost. He laughs. Asked for Major Denísov of the hussars, wounded at Molliten, he fancies the man is dead, then asks if he was tall with reddish hair, then says there was one like that, that one is dead he fancies, they had a list. The fagged assistant says Makár Alexéevich has the list, but if Rostóv will step into the officers' wards he will see for himself. The doctor warns him he may have to stay. Rostóv bows away. Only don't blame me, the doctor shouts after him.

The dark corridor smell is so strong Rostóv holds his nose and must collect his strength. An emaciated man on crutches, barefoot in underclothing, looks out with glittering envious eyes; inside, sick and wounded lie on straw and overcoats. Because the assistant does not want him to enter, Rostóv goes into the soldiers' ward. Sun through large windows lights two rows of heads to the walls. Most are unconscious. The conscious lift thin yellow faces with the same look of hope, relief, reproach, and envy of another's health. A Cossack, to judge by his hair, lies across the passage, huge arms and legs outstretched, face purple, eyes rolled back, veins like cords, knocking his head on the floor, hoarsely repeating drink. A hospital orderly marches in, salutes, rolls his eyes, mistakes Rostóv for an authority, promises water, and does not move. Rostóv thinks nothing can be done here, then feels an intense look from the right: an old unshaven gray-bearded soldier, thin as a skeleton, one leg amputated above the knee, jaw quivering. His neighbour on the other side, a young snub-nosed soldier with a waxen freckled face, has been dead since morning. After all we are men, not dogs. The assistant hurries that the body shall be taken away at once. Rostóv, lowering his eyes, tries to pass unnoticed between rows of reproachful envious eyes, and goes out still without Denísov.