The front was receding toward the west. The morning was unbelievably still. In the frozen, sunlit air their voices rang out clear and remote. "We must finish before it thaws out, otherwise we'll be up to our knees!" All four of them were dropping with weariness. Their eyes, red from sleepless nights, blinked in the low sun. But they worked effectively and as a team. They treated the wounded, loaded them onto stretchers, and slowly made their way to the van, crunching the lacework of ice, turning over the dead and stumbling in the ruts. The third year of the war was slipping by. And this springtime meadow covered in frozen greatcoats lay somewhere in the torn heart of Russia.

Passing close by the soldier, the young orderly hardly paused. She glanced at the puddle of frozen blood, the glassy eyes and the eyelids distended by an explosion and muddied with earth. Dead. With a wound like that no one could survive. She continued on her way, then went back. Averting her gaze from those horrible bulging eyes, she took out his service record.

"Hey, Manya," she called out to her comrade, who was tending a wounded man ten paces away from her, "he's a Hero of the Soviet Union!"

"Wounded?" asked the other one.

"Afraid not… dead."

She bent over him and began breaking the ice around his hair so as to lift up his head.

"Well, then! Come on, Tatyana. Let's carry mine."

And Manya was already slipping her hands under the armpits of her wounded man, whose head was white with bandages.

But Tatyana, her hands moist and numb, hastily sought out a little fragment of mirror in her pocket, wiped it with a scrap of bandage and held it to the soldier's lips.

In this fragment the blue of the sky appeared. A bush miraculously intact and covered in crystals. A sparkling spring morning. The glittering quartz of the hoarfrost, the brittle ice, the resonant, sunlit void of the air.