Anna Karenina

At the Tsaritsyn station⁴ the train was met by a harmonious choir of young people singing ‘Glory Be’. Again the volunteers bowed and stuck their heads out the windows, but Sergei Ivanovich paid no attention to them; he had dealt with the volunteers so much that he knew their general type and it did not interest him. But Katavasov, busy with his learned occupations, had had no chance to observe the volunteers, was very interested in them and questioned Sergei Ivanovich about them.

Sergei Ivanovich advised him to go to second class and talk with them himself. At the next station Katavasov followed that advice.

At the first stop he went to second class and made the acquaintance of the volunteers. They were sitting apart in a corner of the carriage, talking loudly, obviously aware that the attention of the passengers and of the entering Katavasov was turned on them. The loudest talker of all was the young man with the sunken chest. He was obviously drunk and was recounting some episode that had happened at his school. Opposite him sat an officer, no longer young, wearing an Austrian military jacket from the uniform of the guards. He listened, smiling, to the narrator and kept interrupting him. The third, in an artillery uniform, sat on a suitcase next to them. The fourth was asleep.

Getting into conversation with the young man, Katavasov learned that he was a wealthy Moscow merchant who had squandered a large fortune before he was twenty-two. Katavasov disliked him for being pampered, spoiled, and of weak health; he was obviously convinced, especially now, after drinking, that he was performing a heroic deed, and he boasted in a most disagreeable manner.

The second, the retired officer, also made an unpleasant impression on Katavasov. One could see that this was a man who had tried everything. He had worked for the railway, and as a steward, and had started his own factory, and talked about it all using learned words needlessly and inappropriately.

The third, the artilleryman, on the contrary, Katavasov liked very much. He was a modest, quiet man, who obviously admired the knowledge of the retired guardsman and the heroic self-sacrifice of the merchant and did not say anything about himself. When Katavasov asked him what had moved him to go to Serbia, he replied modestly:

‘Why, everybody’s going. We must help the Serbs. It’s a pity.’

‘Yes, they’re especially short of you artillerymen,’ said Katavasov.

‘I didn’t serve long in the artillery. Maybe they’ll send me to the infantry or the cavalry.’

‘Why the infantry when artillerymen are needed most of all?’ said Katavasov, calculating from the artilleryman’s age that he must be of significant rank.

‘I didn’t serve long in the artillery, I retired as a cadet,’ he said, and began to explain why he had not passed the examination.

All this together made an unpleasant impression on Katavasov, and when the volunteers got out at the station to have a drink, he wanted to talk with someone and share his unfavourable impression. One passenger, a little old man in a military overcoat, had been listening all the while to his conversation with the volunteers. Left alone with him, Katavasov addressed him.

‘What a variety of situations among all the men going there,’ Katavasov said vaguely, wishing to voice his opinion and at the same time to find out what the old man’s opinion was.

The old man was a soldier who had done two campaigns. He knew what it was to be a soldier, and from the look and talk of these gentlemen, from the dashing way they applied themselves to the flask as they went, he considered them poor soldiers. Besides, he lived in a provincial town and wanted to tell how a discharged soldier in his town had volunteered, a drunkard and a thief whom no one would even hire as a worker. But knowing from experience that, in the present mood of society, it was dangerous to express an opinion contrary to the general one, and particularly to denounce the volunteers, he also searched out Katavasov.

‘Well, they need people there. I’ve heard the Serbian officers aren’t any good.’

‘Oh, yes, and these will make fine soldiers,’ Katavasov said, laughing with his eyes. And they began to talk about the latest war news, each concealing from the other his perplexity as to whom the next day’s battle was to be fought with, if, according to the latest news, the Turks had been beaten at all points. And so they parted, neither of them having voiced his opinion.

Katavasov went to his carriage and, involuntarily dissembling, told Sergei Ivanovich his observations on the volunteers, from which it turned out that they were excellent fellows.

At a large town station the volunteers were again met with singing and shouting, again men and women appeared with collection cups, and the provincial ladies offered bouquets to the volunteers and followed them to the buffet; but all this was considerably weaker and smaller than in Moscow.

IV