“What would we do without you, Vorobeyev?” asked Captain Kuriczamatin, and he was not joking. Lieutenant Vorobeyev could not shoot or read a map or remember the signal codes; he spoke to his superiors just as he spoke to the men and neither really understood him; he was active and excitable like a man with a fever. The war had lifted him from a coffee house in St Petersburg, dropped him into the Second Army and made him a lieutenant because he was an educated man, but it had not made him a soldier. Nevertheless: he was brave, and even in our current fatal position his cheerfulness never faded.
