by Pete Ayrton
In a green coat and a cap with no brim, I dragged myself, like a strange shadow, smiling, along the streams where the watermills sang. Oh, they sang, they sang to me; they knew where I came from, and I had a smile on my face. How narrow the lanes were. Old women looked at us sadly and pityingly. And the sun? Oh that wan sun, I shall never forget it. Something warm and passionate trembled on my hands. Oh, it was life, young life, playing billiards so skilfully in an unknown café in that town, not I.
*
Who are you?Who are you, with your warm, yellow eyes in the evening mist? Am I not still too sick and frail to touch you? How blurred and gentle your Polish language is! Why are you so good to me, when that’s not your trade. Why do you look at me so sweetly? The folds of your blouse brush my head, that burns and aches, fever shakes me. Who are you, wonderful, beautiful, passionate, among the mirrors and glasses in the twilight of the café? Ah, no, it is not here that I want you to be; I want to go outside, I want you to go outside. Look, have you seen these springs; ah, come and hear how charmingly they murmur, how tenderly they splash. I’m almost sorry I didn’t die, but that’s what autumn does to you. That weak sun pouring over the clean, white houses. What do those forests want of me; over there, behind the hills, they’re calling to me, they’re laughing cheerfully with me. Why do I touch the walls so tenderly? Where am I going? I have no one in this little town, I don’t know the way. Who loves me? Why are these old people looking at me like that?
Look, a cake shop. Let’s go in! Little girls sit, arranged with small-town elegance; my fingers fumble. Little knives, light, silver, are you ashamed of my hands? Ah, yes, they are caked with mud, which will not come off, and my crooked, cracked nails frighten you. And the slightly easy girls, the slightly bad girls giggled, and I smiled too. Oh, what do I know, what should I think about all of this. The earth danced – why don’t we dance? Autumn has danced with me – come on, let’s dance. I chose one. This one. Who’s laughing at me? She was called Lusja. She laughed a lot, at everything, her gloves were slightly torn. And I began to beg her comically and good-naturedly. I forgot desire and just looked at those warm, I knew in advance, warm lips. Her companions, full of laughter, left us alone. We walked beside the mills. She was afraid that someone would see her. ‘If I hadn’t seen from your badge that you’re a student, I wouldn’t have let you accompany me. Do you think I’m shameless?’ Oh, what did I think? I was full of laughter. She was just sad that I was ill, she thought I’d been wounded. She didn’t like the fact that I’m so wild. She said that with her more could be achieved by delicacy.
That evening, I recall, the sky was strange. Autumn skies are always strange. I found her in front of the hospital, waiting for me. With trembling hands she showed me her key, she could stay out until midnight. We set off through the streets, where russet leaves were swirling. She asked me whether Serbs had churches and pinched me passionately. She wanted to be driven somewhere; an old hackney carriage took us. She lay across my chest and loosened her hair, such lovely blond hair, with none of that heavy, intoxicating aroma of black hair in the darkness. Streetlights meandered around us. Under the yellow, gold woods on the hill, the carriage swayed and jolted. The sky was filled with stars. At that time, somewhere far away to the south, old women were praying for me. And somewhere far away to the north, my companions were lying dirty, louse-ridden and hungry in the mud, shivering with cold and waiting for a shell to destroy them.
‘Das Hundsregiment’, as we were known.
We reached the wood and continued on foot. She pressed against me fearfully. Some time before, a girl had been murdered by soldiers. We entered a forest that was dark, with red treetops. Leaves fell onto us, and pink moonlight spilled over the trees, moving us to tears, to a painful tenderness; I kissed her, as though I had no one else in the whole world. Crazed, troubled, breathing heavily, she whispered bitterly about how horrible everything was, how everyone was after her, how men were all scoundrels. Her mother tormented her all day long, but she wanted to stay respectable. The little town was glowing below us in the pink moonlight and the Prussian frontier, with its white markers, encircled us. Her white undergarments were scented. That naïve attention, that foresight touched me and I told her so. She was offended. In the dark I could just make out her head, but her arms were infinitely sweet; her only fear was that I would think badly of her. In the distance the little town lay white, its small white houses like children’s toys. Suddenly she gave a soft cry. A bird was startled and knocked into a tree. She wailed painfully and glanced behind her into the forest. In the moonlight she was terribly pale and beautiful. Down below in the little town military music was playing.
Miloš Crnjanski was born in Csongrád, Hungary, in 1893. A controversial figure in Tito’s Yugoslavia because of his perceived ‘bourgeois’ views, Crnjanski served in the diplomatic service, ending his career in Berlin and Rome, from where he was evacuated to London in 1941, living there as an émigré until his return to Belgrade in 1965. At the outbreak of the First World War, Crnjanski, a Serb, was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and sent to the Galician front, where he was wounded in 1915. He spent most of the war in hospital in Vienna. After the war, he stayed on to study art history and philosophy. Best known for his lyrical ‘diary’ about the First World War, Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću (Diary about Cˇarnojević), published in 1921, and his novel Migrations (English translation, 1994), Crnjanski infuses his works with a sense of nostalgia and lost illusion. He interprets Serbian destiny as tragically influenced by foreign powers. Valued as a stylist and for the elegiac tone of his two most important works, Crnjanski remained outside the literary life of Belgrade during his years of exile. In 1971, he published Roman o Londonu (A Novel about London), a bitter account of the life of the émigré. He died in Belgrade in 1977.
VIKTOR SHKLOVSKY
THE DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLE OF DISCUSSION
from A Sentimental Journey
translated by Richard Sheldon
LATER ON, I REALIZED that all these groups meant nothing in the army – neither the small-time ones nor the other kind. Moral authority was held by the Petersburg Soviet, not by any of the parties. Everyone recognized the Soviet, believed in it, followed it.
True, it was standing still; consequently, everyone who followed it had gone on past.
We didn’t stay long in Czernowitz. Filonenko gave his first public address here and we had our first falling-out. He arrived at the army committee and gave the troops a briefing in which he touched mainly on external policies and painted a glowing picture of the relations between the Allies and revolutionary Russia. It was so irresponsible and, in fact, so detrimental even from a practical standpoint – because you can’t fool a man forever – that I sent him a note pointing out the folly of such statements. Then he abruptly changed the subject and launched a frenzied attack on the bourgeoisie and on the idea of not being able to get along without them. All this was done very vividly and clearly; it struck the committee as a revelation – a complete clarification of the issue. But the committee at this moment was not concerned primarily with information.
Everyone knew that there would be an offensive and the representatives of the units sent around a questionnaire asking if their men were willing to fight. The answers were lacking in assurance. I remember one especially: ‘I don’t know whether the field committees will fight, but the regimental committee will fight.’ But this was not the important thing. The men were complaining because the units were under strength, because each company was only forty strong, and because these forty men were barefoot and sick. Only the representative of the so-called ‘Savage Division’, made up of mountaineers, answered with conviction: ‘We will fight anytime and against anyone.’ Kornilov cleared things up. His words amounted to this – that despite the units’ being under strength, we had a fivefold advantage over the enemy at the point of the proposed attack and that our military objectives could be attained on the basis of the actual strength of the units. But some divi
sions were only nine hundred strong!
The apprehensions of the soldiers – that they would be assigned military objectives based not on the actual number of troops, but on the regulation strength of the unit – were not unfounded. I knew a case under the old regime when an infantry regiment (the Semyonovsky) was replaced at the front by a dismounted cavalry regiment about one-fifth its size.
One other general complaint was heard in all the speeches of the delegates and to this complaint, of course, Kornilov could say nothing – this was the complaint about being completely cut off from any signs of life. I already knew the front a little and I could imagine the anguish of the man in the trenches, where nothing was visible, not even the enemy – only snow in winter, blades of grass in summer.
At one session, a very detailed report was given about the strength of the army and its weapon supply. The only thing not designated was the point for the breakthrough, but everyone knew it would be Stanislau.
It was strange to hear the plan for the offensive discussed in such detail: at the meeting, more than a hundred men talked about roads, about the number of weapons. The democratic principle of discussion was carried here to the absurd, but we managed eventually to extend and elaborate this absurd. At Stanislau, right before the offensive, all members of the company committees representing the shock troops – the Nineteenth Corps – were gathered together and at this gathering they were still discussing the question: to attack or not to attack. This is not to mention the meetings right in the trenches – sometimes held a few dozen steps from the enemy. But that didn’t seem strange to me then. I don’t think that even Kornilov clearly understood the hopelessness of the situation. He was first and foremost a military man. A general charging into the fray with a revolver. He viewed the army as a good driver views his automobile. The most important thing to the driver is that the car runs, not who rides in it. Kornilov needed the army to fight. He was surprised at the strange methods used by the revolution to prepare the offensive. He still wanted to believe that it was possible to fight that way – just as a driver, trying a new fuel, very much wants the car to run as well as it does with gasoline and can get carried away with the idea of using carbide or turpentine.
This wasn’t the first time I had met Kornilov. I had seen him during the April days when the Petersburg regiments were demonstrating aginst Milyukov. At that time he had called up to order some armored cars from our division. We had already unanimously resolved to place ourselves directly under the command of the Soviet. Therefore the resolution was ‘not to consider it under any circumstances.’When I went to convey the news to him, Kornilov spoke very softly, obviously not understanding at all how it was that he, a commander, had no troops and wondering who needed him as a commander. He found it unpleasant to see me in the army; later he reconciled himself to me, but began to take me for a madman.
The army committee firmly believed in Kornilov at that moment. When he appeared after giving a report to the officers, he was welcomed enthusiastically. But no one liked ‘Kornilov’s men’. That’s what they called the men of the first ‘Death Battalion’, which was being formed in Czernowitz of volunteers – for the most part, men from the service units and company clerks who had decided to see some action.
I can testify that this battalion fought no worse than the best of the old regiments. But these shock battalions, already sewing the skull and crossbones on their sleeves, hurt the unity of the army and made the highly mistrustful soldiers fear that now certain special units were being created to act as policemen. The most loyal committee members were against the shock troops. They got on the soldiers’ nerves; it was said of them that they received a big salary and had special privileges. I was unconditionally against the shock battalions, because to make them up, men with energy and enthusiasm, men of relatively high intelligence, were taken out of the regiment. What drove them from the regiments was the grief of seeing the army already beginning to decay. But they were even more needed in these regiments, like salt in corned beef.
On the committee, ‘Kornilov’s men’ were violently attacked; they justified themselves rather peevishly.
By the way, I remember the women’s battalions. This idea was undoubtedly hatched on the home front and thought up expressly as an insult to the front.
I wandered around Czernowitz. A clean little town resembling Kiev. We ate very well there – in the European style, which is cleaner than ours. The soldiers hadn’t pillaged the town; in the apartment where I bunked there were even some pillows, rugs and silver things around. The apartment was of the usual, rather plush, old-gentry type. The streetcars were running; people weren’t hanging onto them and they paid for the ride. Reinforcements were leaving town for the front, although hardly any troops ever arrived from the rear; and when they did arrive, they badly demoralized the regiments. As far as the condition of the garrison went, the town was, all in all, not bad. But none of this depended on conscious will, which could not exist among men who had not yet truly gone through the revolution; in other words, all hung precariously on good intentions.
Filonenko and his secretary Vonsky, a cheerful, sturdy and, in his own way, good guy, very energetic and resourceful, remained in Czernowitz. Anardovich and I left for the front, where the offensive was supposed to begin at any moment. And so, for the fourth time, my automobile drove through the fields of Galicia with their Polish cemeteries, where the crosses are melodramatically huge in the Polish style, the Jewish painted tombstones overgrown with dry grass, the marble statues battered by the wind and rain. At the crossroads, the dear, blue, orthodox crucifixes of Galicia, with saints fastened to the diagonals of the crosses. With sharp turns, the road kept going along the same narrow but smooth way.
Sometimes we drove past clumps of trees; then the measured knock of the car was echoed in the trees by a sound that resembled the sound of a whip cracking through the leaves. We arrived at some dark little town. This was the headquarters of the corps which was assigned to make the breakthrough.
It was the Twelfth Corps. We were greeted by the chief of staff, who was dead-tired (it was night). He looked as if he had been working for a week, had not slept for a week and had a toothache besides. He didn’t have a toothache, but he must have felt like a man with paralyzed legs ordered to jump or a man with frozen fingers ordered to pick up silver coins off a stone floor. He began to talk hopelessly about how the regiments refused to dig parallels – a parallel is a trench dug in front of the main trench and joined to it by a passageway; its purpose is to get closer to the enemy in order to minimize losses during an attack. Some vagabond regiment had just made its appearance in this area – without officers or transport, with only its field kitchen. It had detached itself from a nearby army and was homeward bound – and the offensive only a few days off. While he talked, in the next room, dimly lit with a kerosene lamp, telegraph machines feebly clicked and threw off blue sparks; narrow paper ribbons slowly crept out of the machines.
From headquarters, we waded through dark, deep mud over to see the commander of the corps, General Cheremisov. Cheremisov resembled Kornilov, also short with a yellow Mongolian face and slanted eyes, but somehow rounder, less dried up. He seemed smarter and more talented than Kornilov. He had been in this area during the previous offensive as chief of staff and had a really superb knowledge of Galicia and Bukovina. He instinctively liked the revolution and war because of the wide opportunities they gave him. Cheremisov was not afraid of the soldiers: I know for a fact that when one company decided to kill him and set up a mortar in front of his house, he came out to see what all the noise was and very calmly pointed out to the soldiers that it was improper to use the mortar in this position, since the explosion of the shell would destroy the neighboring houses. The soldiers agreed and took away the mortar. Cheremisov was not very put out, but he did indicate one thing that was certainly true: what upset the soldiers most of all was the clamor in the newspapers – the loud cries from the home front, ‘Attack! Attack!’ At the
moment in question, this is how things stood: in the area of Stanislau, we had concentrated up to seven hundred heavy guns; the buildup of this sector of the front had begun. Troops were being withdrawn from the sectors of the front previously assigned to them and new units were being poured in to take their places. Then came the first hitch. The Eleventh Division, which was in good condition, didn’t want to go to the front, not because it was against the offensive – I hardly ever ran across direct repudiations of the war – but because it had been taken from another sector of the front; moreover, it had been promised a rest. The Sixty-first Division, I think (I don’t remember the exact number; I know that it included the Kinburg Infantry Regiment), didn’t want to dig parallels; some other division also wanted this and didn’t want that. And the enemy in front of us had almost nothing – some barbed wire, machine guns and almost empty trenches. We decided to go without delay to Stanislau. We went at night. It was still a long way to the town, which was right in the line of trenches. But the front was already outlined by the uninterrupted flights of rockets, which the Germans burned in fear of a night attack. The cannons weren’t firing, or at least we didn’t hear them. The car noiselessly pursued the road, left it behind and rushed straight for those blue fires. We passed some quietly running, heavy vehicles of the ordnance depot, carrying shells. The stream of vehicles kept getting thicker, becoming solid as we drew nearer to the town. The drivers, tired from the lateness of the hour, sat silently on the jolting, heavy wagons; the horses pulled silently at the traces.
We reached the town. Stayed at a hotel – the Astoria, I think. The town of Stanislau had changed hands several times. The Russians and the Austrians had taken it from the right and from the left, then from the front and from the rear. This was already the third time I had entered it during the war and each time by a different road. It had been a prosperous town; the houses were still intact; the shooting had damaged them very little. The outlying area, as well as the gasworks, had suffered most of all. But this is not surprising: some of the small houses on the outskirts stood a few steps from the trenches. People were living in these houses. Our lines began just on the other side of the Bistritsa River. Everyone said this was an awkward disposition of the troops. It had been done this way so that that the dispatch could say: ‘Our troops have crossed the Bistritsa.’The town was overflowing with troops.