No Man's Land

by Pete Ayrton

  The headquarters of nearly all the divisions of the Twelfth Corps, which at that time constituted nearly a whole army in itself, were crowded into the town. The members of the headquarters operations section lived in the hotel where I was staying. In the courtyard was a gun battery, on the roof an artillery observation point; below, in a Polish café doing a lively business, sat the officers; and in the air hung a two-colored haze, brown and bluish, from the shell-bursts of the Austrian shrapnel. At night you could hear the boom of our heavy guns; they resounded right in your ear, reflecting off the walls of the courtyard with a hollow sound – the same sound you make when you throw a large ball with all your strength against a stone floor.

  Stanislau was the only place at the front where I had occasion to sleep on a bed – with real blankets and sheets. I didn’t stay long in Stanislau this time. I was summoned to the Aleksandropol Regiment, which occupied a rather unusual position.

  The enemy forces stood facing our troops on a round, wooded fountain called Kosmachka. Our regiment was encamped on another mountain. Between us and the German troops was a distance of not less than two miles. There wasn’t really a war going on here. Planks had been thrown over the trenches and the trenches themselves were half filled up. The men had fraternized long and assiduously; the soldiers had been getting together in the villages situated between the lines and here they had set up an exclusive, neutral brothel. Even some of the officers took part in the fraternization – among them a brave and capable man, bearer of the Cross of St. George and apparently once a student – one Captain Chinarov. I think that Chinarov was fundamentally an honest man, but he was so incredibly muddled that when we occupied the village of Rosulna, the inhabitants informed us that Chinarov had repeatedly driven to Austrian headquarters, where he went on sprees with the officers and accompanied them on trips behind the Austrian lines.

  When we took Rosulna, we found in the Austrian headquarters building a German manual on fraternization, published by German headquarters on very good paper – in Leipzig, I think.

  Chinarov had been arrested by Kornilov and was in the guardhouse with a certain second lieutenant K., who later turned out to be an agent provocateur from Kazan.

  I tried to get Chinarov out, because our conceptions of the freedom of speech and action belonging to each individual citizen were fantastically broad then. I didn’t get Chinarov out. His regiment wanted him back, so I set off to calm the men down.

  I drove a long time, apparently through the little town of Nadworna. You could already begin to feel the Carpathians. The road was paved with slabs of wood. Over it was placed something on the order of triumphal arches decorated with fir boughs – a technique of camouflaging roads borrowed from the Austrians. First we stopped by corps headquarters (the Sixteenth Corps); here a perplexed General Stogov met us. He understood nothing. ‘All these Bolsheviks, Mensheviks,’ he complained to me, ‘I’ve come to consider you all – excuse the expression – traitors.’ He didn’t hurt my feelings. It was very hard for him. His corps consisted entirely of reserve divisions, with six or seven hundred men in each, brought together out of several regiments during the regrouping, when the divisions had shifted from four battalions to three.

  These hastily assembled units, with no traditions, with the commanders quarreling among themselves, were, of course, very bad. General Stogov was very fond of ‘his men’ and it pained him that the soldiers were in such bad shape. He had no influence with the soldiers, though they knew and appreciated him.

  After seeing Stogov, I went to division headquarters. There too everything was complete confusion. Although everyone knew that no military objective had been assigned to this corps, still it was strange to see troops in such a state; it was impossible to count on them even for simple garrison duty in the villages abandoned by the enemy.

  I went to the regiment. I assembled the soldiers without organizing a rally, so as not to heat up the atmosphere, and simply talked to them in an ordinary voice. I said that Chinarov would be tried and that I couldn’t return him to them. The soldiers obviously thought very highly of him and lost no time in giving me some false testimony about him.

  But anyway the regiment quieted down a little simply from having unburdened themselves to an outsider. Later this regiment gave Filonenko and the army committee a lot of trouble. Finally it was disbanded.

  From the Aleksandropol Regiment, I returned to Stanislau. There I was asked to go to the Kinburg Regiment. Things were also very bad in that regiment, which was stationed about a mile from Stanislau. These troops were in a battle zone and were refusing to dig parallels – consequently they were not preparing for the offensive. I set off again. This time it wasn’t a trip but an automobile race the whole length of our positions. The Germans could see the road and kept it under fire. They were hitting all around the car, but it looked possible to get through and we got through.

  We crossed the Bistritsa River and soon reached the regiment’s position. We assembled the soldiers, using a dugout for the speakers’ platform. One soldier said to me, ‘I don’t want to die.’With desperate energy, I spoke about the right of the revolution to our lives. I didn’t despise words then, as I do now. Comrade Anardovich told me that my impassioned speech had made his hair stand on end. The audience was deciding the question of its own death, an immediate death, and the necessity of ordering men to renounce themselves, the silence of this sad crowd of thousands and the vague uneasiness caused by the proximity of the enemy stretched nerves to the breaking point.

  After I got through, a short, very dirty soldier spoke – all decked out in his uniform. His talk was simple and to the point, about the most elementary things. From his words, I realized that he was among the half-dozen men who had decided the previous night to work up ahead of our trenches.

  Later on, after the rally, I went up and started to talk to him. He turned out to be a Jew, an artist who had returned from abroad to enlist. This was almost saintliness. Neither the soldier in a service unit, nor the infantry officer, nor the commissar, nor any man who has an extra pair of boots and underwear can comprehend all the anguish of the common soldier, all the heaviness of his burden.

  This Jewish intellectual carried the weight of the earth in his boots.

  Then Anardovich spoke. He spoke convincingly; he was intoxicated through and through by the spirit of the Soviet; he was happy, not knowing how difficult and complicated our situation was. His convictions made him simple and convincing. All the commonplaces of all the speeches given at the Soviet were included in his hour-long speech. The revolution had engraved its norms on his soul. He was like an Orthodox Christian.

  Afterwards we went down some dark narrow streets and again talked, this time to a dark, invisible crowd of men with shovels who didn’t know whether to go or not to go.

  We convinced the Kinburg Regiment.

  We were spending the night somewhere at regimental headquarters. That same night, sleepy and rumpled like a soldier’s overcoat, we drove on to talk to the Malmyzh Regiment.

  More conversations. Here I encountered something new. A group of soldiers announced with a happy smile: ‘Don’t talk to us; we don’t understand anything; we’re deaf as Mordvinians.’Afterwards, I guess, we went to the Urzhum Regiment. The hardest thing was having to appear everywhere as exponents of pure reason and at the same time operate in the places where conditions were the most serious.

  The Urzhum Regiment – or whatever this regiment was called – was living in the trenches. The men wandered around in the narrow crevice of the trench. Two huge gray heaps of earth inclined toward each other; between them, seated in a hole, the men wearily bided their time. The regiment extended out over nearly half a mile. The men in the trenches were making themselves at home. Some were cooking rice kasha in their small field mess-tins; others were digging themselves a hole for the night.

  When you stuck your head out of the trench, what you saw was blades of grass, what you heard was the occasional leisurely whistle o
f bullets.

  Making the rounds, I talked to the soldiers; they sort of huddled together.

  Along the bottom of the trench, a narrow little stream ran under the boards you walked on.

  We followed its course. As the terrain descended, the walls got damper, the soldiers gloomier.

  Finally the trench broke off. We came out in a swamp. Only a low wall made of bags of dirt and sod separated us from the enemy.

  A company consisting almost entirely of Ukrainians was sitting there. It was impossible to stand – dangerous. The wall was too low.

  We felt the utter confusion of these men. It seemed to me that they had been sitting that way the whole war.

  I started to talk to them about the Ukraine. I had thought that this was a major and important question. At least the people in Kiev could talk of nothing else. They stopped me:

  ‘Don’t bother us with that!’

  For these troops, the whole question of an independent or a dependent Ukraine did not exist. They hastened to inform me that they were for the commune. What they meant by that, I don’t know. Perhaps only communal pastures. The soldiers were talkative; they were evidently overjoyed to talk to someone new, but they didn’t know they had to argue if they wanted the answer that would instantly banish all their doubts.

  The ability to ask questions is an important ability. A noncommissioned officer, obviously popular with his company, stood among the sitting soldiers like a chairman and asked me:

  ‘Our boys are upset. Is it true that Kerensky’s a Socialist Democrat instead of a Socialist Revolutionary? That’s why they’re upset.’

  I answered his question. Although my answer did seem to dispel his doubts, he wasn’t satisfied with its brevity.

  It seemed to me that the soldiers would listen to such a noncom, who didn’t understand anything himself and who couldn’t be understood, and then they would say ‘So what’ and go their own ways.

  I went over to the officers’ meeting. ‘Our regiment is in poor shape,’ said the officers, ‘bad, unreliable.’

  So it seemed to me. But what could be done?

  They look at your hands and wait for a miracle. But I performed no miracle – I left for Stanislau.

  Back to the same town. Polish, secretly hostile. Clean, pillaged. They told me that I had to go to the Eleventh Division. There, things were still worse. This fresh, recently replenished division didn’t want to stay in the trenches. Sitting in trenches is generally difficult, but here it was worse than usual. I took off. Everything went wrong on the road. The tires blew out, the rims flew off, the complete breakdown of the car seemed imminent, though the driver clearly was trying to get us there no matter what. We made it. First of all, if I’m not mistaken, to headquarters of the Forty-first Yakut Regiment – a small Galician hut, rather clean and brightly colored inside. The commander of the regiment reported that his men categorically refused to fight. We called a rally. A cart was placed in the middle of a field; felled birches and maples were put around it; next to it, still unfaded, a red-and-gold banner. Heat. The sun beat down. High in the air, a German plane watched closely as the Russians got ready for the offensive. Anardovich spoke first – the usual speech, along the lines of Izvestia. He spoke without a cap; the sun glared on his shaved head. Someone in the crowd said, ‘That’s right!’ His neighbors jabbed him and he shut up. The regiments knew nothing about freedom of speech; they regarded themselves as a single voting entity. Those who opposed the majority were beaten up. In the Malmyzh Regiment a telegraph operator was beaten so unmercifully for a speech urging continuation of the war that he crawled away on all fours.

  I spoke after Anardovich finished. I have the strange habit of always smiling when I talk. This irritates a crowd, especially when it’s in a menacing mood. ‘Laugh, you toothless wonder!’Then a soldier got up; he spoke badly, but was no demagogue. His arguments went like this: ‘In the first place, why not let the Germans alone? Once you stir them up, they’ll be hard to handle. In the second place, why not let the Eleventh Division alone? We just got out of the trenches and were promised a rest before moving out. The general even said, “Congratulations, comrades, on getting a rest.”’We talked and got nowhere. We went to the next regiment. The same thing. The regiments stood fast and said they weren’t going anywhere. We stopped by division headquarters. The company was staying at a large, fairly clean farmhouse. There we found the division commander, who felt guilty though he didn’t know of what – also the chaplain, some staff members and some who were apparently members of the Simferopol Soviet. They had come to the front with presents for the troops and were astonished that all this was nothing like what they had expected. They too had been talking about the offensive and the troops had nearly beaten them to death. We joined this coalition and sadly ate dinner.

  It was raining and we had left our overcoats back at the regiment. But the division had to be mobilized at all costs. The words ‘at all costs’ were running through my brain so furiously that later on, in Persia, I felt that ‘Atallcosts’ was one word and ‘Atallcos’ a city in Kurdistan. We left to mobilize the division. Filonenko was summoned. Even before his arrival, we found out that the machine-gun, grenadier and engineer companies were in favor of carrying out the order, that they had even formed a separate camp and were keeping watch over the rest of the infantry. I should say that all the trained units of the army were for the offensive and, above all, for maintaining order and discipline. City people are more unselfish, but they have more imagination and can’t conceive of an ‘Eleventh Division’ or a ‘Fifth Company’ as something autonomous. But what we needed was a division, not separate outfits. We assembled, via the regimental committee, all the leaders who disagreed with us. We told them that it was impossible to sit still and rot: we had to fight or disperse. The life of everyone who spoke was at stake. We promised to hold an inquest to find out why the Eleventh Division had been deceived – lured to the trenches with the promise of a rest. We all parted with broken hearts, very unhappy with each other. But, still, the Eleventh Division did ‘move out’.

  The first to get under way were the machine gunners, who moved out pulling their machine guns behind them, ready for the attack. That night a machine-gun company deserted from the regiment; the rest went after them to Stanislau, where they all remained, keeping each other guarded. But still the division had been mobilized. I bring in this story with such detail to show how problems of moderate difficulty were solved.

  We arrived at Stanislau ahead of the Eleventh Division.

  Here, in a movie theater, Filonenko organized a huge meeting of the delegates from all the regimental and company committees of the Twelfth Corps – the shock troops. It was unanimously decided to attack. Battle committees were chosen to assist the commanders; the rest of the committee members were to fight in the ranks. It may very well be that all the men who voted for this were mistaken, but their sacrifice was based on an honest mistake. They decided on death if it would only tear the noose of war from the neck of the revolution. While we were having troubles with the Twelfth Corps, things in the nearby corps were also a mess. News came that the Glukhov Regiment of the Seventy-ninth Division – I’ve forgotten its number, but I’ll never forget its name – was in complete disarray. The officers had scattered; the regimental committee had been changed three times and no longer had the confidence of the soldiers; the committee members had been forbidden to talk in the barracks, so they had to hold their meetings on the street. In another regiment of the same division, the soldiers had mercilessly beaten the chairman of the regimental committee, Doctor Shur, an old member of the Bund; provocation by the police sent to the front was assumed. The beaten doctor had been placed under arrest. Filonenko went to rescue him, which he succeeded in doing without artillery or cavalry. Three of us went to the Glukhov Regiment – Filonenko, Anardovich and I – leaving Tsipkevich to organize the corps for the offensive. Tsipkevich was a superb organizer, having formerly worked in a workers’ brigade, then in the Nik
olaevsky ship-building yards and finally in the Eighth Army, where the committee members revered him.

  His method of operation was as follows. In the evening the corps commander informed him of our army’s objectives for the next day. That night Tsipkevich would assign sectors of the front to the committee members and send them off; the next day they would telegraph the results. They paid special attention to our troop movements and the flow of matériel. And while Tsipkevich was using his revolutionary methods to unsnarl bottlenecks on the railroad, we went to the Glukhov Regiment.

  The Glukhov Regiment stood on our left flank in the Carpathians, not far from Kirlya-Baba. Even during the reign of Nicholas, this regiment had deserted their positions two or three times – or so they boasted. They were camped in a dismal, rainy, godforsaken place with no roads. The road kept climbing higher and higher; at times we could see below us villages and hills descending gradually into the valley.

  Finally we came to the burned remains of two small towns, divided by a shallow but swift river. Dangling from the railroad bridge over the river was a tiny locomotive. The retreating troops had pushed it off the bridge and it still hung there. These little towns are called Kuty and Wiznitz; they stand right at the gates of the Carpathians. Farther on, the road went along a river, as is generally the case in the Carpathians. On the opposite side, a train was rolling slowly along the narrow-gauge tracks. An agonizing road. Steep inclines, log surfaces – the only thing able to withstand the rains of the Carpathians – all this combined to make our trip terribly difficult. Beside the road were slopes covered with the dark fur of gloomy spruce trees and occasionally an almost vertical field: it seemed that a man and horse could climb and plow such a steep slope only on all fours – and then only by clinging to the rocks with their teeth. From time to time we encountered old mountaineers in their short, bright-colored sheepskin coats, with black umbrellas in their hands. Squads of girls were repairing the road; they smiled readily at the car. It was raining; every few minutes, it would not exactly clear but sort of turn gray and the rain would stop. Halfway there, the car gave out completely; the tires were torn to shreds. It was dark. We forded the river and spent the night in a mountaineer’s cabin. It looked like Peer Gynt’s abode. In the morning we patched the tires somehow, stuffing one of them with moss. We finally arrived at the regiment. Headquarters was deserted. Some second lieutenant met us – a suspicious-looking type. No doubt he had conducted a campaign against the officers and committees and had joined up with the Muravyovs, as I would now say; then when everything started shaking and falling apart, he got cold feet. Now he had just one ambition – to go on leave. The regiment was unbearable. Its noncommissioned officers had almost all run off to join the shock troops. It had no bottom and no top.