“But perhaps I shall only be wounded,” reasoned the Lieutenant-Captain with himself, arriving at the bastion with his company in the twilight. “But where? and how?⁠—here or here?” he said to himself, mentally pointing to his chest and his stomach. “Supposing it were here” (he thought of his thighs) “and went right round?⁠ ⁠… But suppose it’s here, and with a piece of a bomb, then it’s all up.”

The Lieutenant-Captain, passing along the trenches, safely reached the lodgments. It was in perfect darkness that he and a sapper-officer set the men to their work, after which he sat down in a hole under the breastwork. There was little firing; only now and again on our side or his there was a lightning flash, and the brilliant fuse of a bomb formed a fiery arc on the dark, star-speckled sky. But all the bombs fell far beyond or far to the right of the lodgment where the Lieutenant-Captain sat in his hole. He drank some vodka, ate some cheese, smoked a cigarette, prayed, and felt inclined for sleep.