Everything showed that the artillerymen liked the bullets as little as the infantry had liked the cannonballs. Antonov frowned, Chikin imitated the bullets and joked about them, but it was easy to see he did not like them. “It’s in a mighty hurry,” he said of one of them; another he called “little bee”; a third, which seemed to fly slowly past overhead with a kind of piteous wail, he called an “orphan,” which caused general laughter.

The recruit, who, unaccustomed to such scenes, bent his head to one side and stretched his neck every time a bullet passed, also made the soldiers laugh. “What, is that a friend of yours you’re bowing to?” they said to him. Velenchuk also, usually quite indifferent to danger, was now excited: he was evidently vexed that we did not fire case-shot in the direction whence the bullets came. He repeated several times in a discontented tone, “Why is he allowed to go for us and gets nothing in return? If we turned a gun that way and gave them a taste of case-shot they’d hold their noise, no fear!”