: A seriously injured boy helps nature survive in the form of a blue dragonfly flying over a stream.
During the First World War of 1914, the narrator, dressed as an orderly, went as a war correspondent to the front and got into a big battle in the west. Once the storyteller walked, not paying attention to bullets and shells, and watched a flock of partridges. Suddenly, as if from under the ground, a stern voice came, shouted at the narrator, and ordered them to do business, not writer's nonsense. It was captain Maxim Maksimych.
By order of the captain, the narrator raised people, dragged benches, laid the wounded, forgetting about himself as a writer. Once a seriously wounded man asked the narrator for water. Bringing him to drink from a nearby stream, the narrator noticed that the wounded was very young, almost a boy. He didn’t drink, he only repeated in delirium: “I wish there were water ... A stream”. The narrator and the orderly took the boy to a stream.
In the oblique rays of the evening sun with a special green light, as if emanating from inside the plants, horsetail minarets, teloresis leaves, water lilies shone, a blue dragonfly circled over the creek.
The boy thanked the narrator, looked at the beautiful dragonfly and closed his eyes. From time to time, struggling with death, the wounded man came to his senses and asked if the blue dragonfly was still flying, and the narrator replied: “Flies,‹ ... ›and how!”.When it began to get dark, the boy again asked about the dragonfly. The narrator, deep in thought, replied that she was flying without looking, is it really so. Opening his eyes, the boy did not see the dragonfly, and the narrator was afraid that he had gone blind before his death, but then he looked at the stream and made sure that the dragonflies were indeed not visible.
Thinking that he had been deceived, the boy was upset and silently closed his eyes. The upset storyteller looked at the stream more attentively and noticed a dragonfly reflected in the water - it simply could not be seen against the background of a darkening forest, "but the water - these eyes of the earth remain bright when it gets dark: these eyes seem to see in darkness." The narrator joyfully showed the boy a dragonfly, and he smiled.
The boy survived, apparently, doctors helped him. But the narrator believes that "they, the doctors, helped the song of the stream" and the blue dragonfly flying in the dark over the backwater.
