Page:Stories from Garshin.djvu/136

FROM MEMOIRS OF PRIVATE IVANOV. 133 'If you'd seen, Ivan Platonych, what your warm-hearted man did the other day.'. ..

I told him how Wentzel had beaten the soldier who had smoked.

'There! There you are; it's always like that' Ivan Platonych reddened, puffed, broke off and began again. 'But all the same he's not a brute. Whose men are best fed of the whole lot? Wentzel's. Whose men are best trained? Wentzel's. Who hardly ever puts a man under punishment? Who never sends anyone up for trial—unless a man does some regularly scoundrelly thing? Always Wentzel. Really, if it weren't for this miserable weakness, the soldiers would just worship him.'

'Have you talked to him about it, Ivan Platonych?

'Talked to him and quarrelled with him a dozen times over. What can you do with a man like that? "Either an army," he says "or a militia." He just invents a lot of stupid phrases. "War is such a cruel thing altogether," he says, "that, if I'm cruel with the soldiers, that is only a drop in the sea." . . . "They're at such a low level of development," . . . . and so on. . . . In fact, such a deuced lot of rubbish! . . . And yet, for all that, he's a capital fellow. He never drinks, never plays cards, does his work conscientiously, helps his sister and his old mother; and he's