When the door burst open, I spun around. Behind Colonel Lakheff were a number of other field-grade officers, including an unfamiliar general and two high-ranking ancient specimens with whom I did not usually slurp out of the same trough. All looked at me as though I had been caught selling the High Command’s secret plans for the defense of Moscow.
I sat on my bed of nails while a battery of piercing eyes demanded to know for what world-shattering purpose I had interrupted them at their frolics. Suddenly, I stopped worrying about my doomed comrade: now I was worried about myself.
The colonel broke the silence. “Gentlemen, we are all familiar with the conditions in the infamous 14th Company.”
“Getting no worse than they deserve,” muttered the general.
“Quite so. But there have been times when the company was under strength, and regular conscripts were assigned to it, some of them valuable men, such as this soldier here.”
The general finally disfavored me with a direct glance. “He wants a transfer? Let him apply through regular channels.” Having said this and been roundly seconded, he and his aides seemed ready to return to the dance floor.
Unasked, I finally made myself heard. “No, sir. I got my transfer, thank Heaven, some time ago. I now ask the same for a friend, an engineer, expert in the design of fortifications.” I saw no profit in mentioning that Vasya had also committed the indiscretion of being a Jew. “His company commander has vowed publicly that my friend will not live out this month.” That seemed rather feeble, even to me. But, to my surprise, the other officers began now, with some circumspection, to admit that they had heard similar tales. I could see the general was not pleased to hear such matters aired in front of a common soldier. But in the end, impatient to be done with it, he instructed his adjutant to cancel Captain Fedorenko’s promotion and arrange for Vasya’s transfer by noon tomorrow. He punctuated his ruling with a terrible look in my direction that dared me to object that that was not soon enough.
As a consequence of my tampering with the time-honored way in which things were done, Haman was duly removed from command of the 14th. I suspected he had a fairly good idea who had been responsible for blocking his promotion. And neither I nor my friend doubted his ability to settle scores.
By this time, Vasya was no longer quite such an innocent and didn’t leave his survival to fate. He promptly cabled an influential relative named Brodsky, the sugar magnate and philanthropist. And shortly Vasya found himself snatched out of his sleep and hauled off to the hospital where a civilian specialist, likewise uprooted from his bed, determined that my comrade had an “inflammation of the heart,” and should never have been accepted as a volunteer in the first place.
While Vasya waited nervously for his discharge papers to be processed, his father, although still displeased by his son’s show of independence, relented enough to send him the money for train fare home.
Unfortunately, Vasya’s months in the Convicts’ Company had turned him into a somewhat reckless gambler. And on the very night before he was to leave for home, his luck ran stubbornly against him. Although he waged a tenacious battle until dawn, he ended up with his pockets cleaned out to the last kopek.
Given his history with his father and his own idiot stubbornness, Vasya was naturally too proud to cable him for additional money, even to save his own life. This left him with a choice between remaining in the army, nakedly exposed to Haman’s whims, or borrowing the immense sum of 50 rubles for train fare.
As it happened, I had a little money saved up. And as our unit had already been placed on alert for shipment to Manchuria, I lent Vasya the money and told him he could pay me back when and if I returned. Or, if I were killed, he should send the money to my parents. He swore, again, that he owed me his life and that if I ever needed anything . . .
Once Haman no longer had Vassily Divanovsky on whom to exact his sadistic intentions, he turned his attention to me and asked if I’d like to be sent to the front lines in Manchuria. Since it was obvious that he was not making this offer out of kindness, I gracefully declined, and told him that, all things considered, I would prefer to go with my own regiment. At which he smiled and allowed that he’d long had his eye on me; oh, yes, he knew I was behind his cancelled promotion as well as other misfortunes that had befallen him since assuming command of the 14th. And if I thought that being out from under his direct authority afforded me any kind of protection, I should be aware that the clerks who handled the paperwork that kept our army operating so inefficiently would fall over themselves to fulfill his demands in order to ensure that they didn’t become of the next objects of his attention.
Fortunately, before Haman could sign my transfer order, one of my Ukrainian comrades made an unnecessary remark about Jews lacking the proper warlike spirit, and by the time they pried us apart, he was bleeding admirably from the head, and I had deep and painful teeth marks in my right hand, which I couldn’t take to the hospital because they would have wanted to know how I had acquired them.
As a result, the day before I was due to board the train to the front, my hand was swollen like a sausage. I could barely pick up a rifle, let alone fire it. With uncharacteristic concern for a soldier’s welfare, the general in charge of medical services decreed that I should remain in Petersburg, so that when the hand had to be amputated it could be done under the best conditions.
In a few weeks time, thanks to the fact that I’d been afraid to go to the hospital for treatment, my hand recovered. And Haman, for the moment, had other things than me to worry about.
Chapter 5: Ministry of Misinformation
We had long been hearing talk about the inevitable war with Japan, and our company’s five-man revolutionary committee, of which I was a member, was well aware that if the revolution were put off much longer, we might soon all find ourselves fighting for the Czar’s honor in a far-distant Chinese province called Manchuria, where we had as little business being as the Japanese had being in Korea.
But the despised Japanese attacked, and crippled our navy at Port Arthur. Our Little Father, whom, I suspected, had been praying devoutly for the enemy to do him just such a favor, quickly declared war, confident that the resulting upsurge of patriotic fervor would take people’s minds off such nonsense as revolution.
In the days that followed, we learned about the enemy we were about to fight. We were shown pictures that emphasized his smallness, and his brutish, simian features. It was surprising to realize that such a scarcely human creature actually had hands like us, capable of firing a modern rifle, and not mere paws for swinging from trees.
The job of driving these overbearing little creatures back into the sea was not sufficient reason for a great power like Russia to exert her full might. As a result, all the regiments being shipped to Manchuria were under-strength, half-trained, and not even fully equipped.
Meanwhile, our newspapers and officers regaled us with such golden good news about how easily we would win the war that all of Petersburg became infected with war fever. Any thought of revolution went out the window.
So on a frosty summer morning, we lined up for the train to Manchuria. Our lieutenant, a moody graybeard in his sixties, told us that we were lucky. How were we lucky? We would get to ride to the battlefield in comfort while the enemy, primitive little beasts that they were, would have to walk. He made The Battlefield sound like a scheduled stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
My nearsighted friend, Glasnik, suggested that I let the lieutenant know that we, too, would be happy to walk, and with a little luck the war would be over by the time we got there. But I was a one-striper, a corporal, so I kept my mouth shut.
The train had 96 cars, each packed to at least three times its capacity. This way the railroad was able, on one track, to deliver its quota of thirty thousand replacements a month. I tried not to think about the men we were replacing.
We sat in our compartments, barely able to stir an elbow, everyone hoarding his own fears and memories. For the moment, Ru
ssians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews sat packed together in a pleasant atmosphere of revolutionary harmony. Until somebody wondered aloud how many of us would return alive.
Days passed in such comfort. The half-blind windows of our car offered us only the brutal monotony of barren hills, rotting fields, and mute, hollow-eyed villagers. We were all stiff and irritable from the lack of space, and no one talked revolution any longer because by now we hated the stink of one another.
Soon, however, we came to appreciate our crowded compartments. The train had to cross Lake Baikal on rails laid over the ice, which at times suddenly cracked open into yawning rifts and crevices. To keep the cars from being too heavy, the officers were taken across by horse-drawn sledges. The rest of us walked forty miles across the windswept ice, our rifles, with their eternally fixed bayonets, resting on one shoulder, with only brief pauses for hot soup from our mobile kitchens. By morning, a number of men had disappeared, either deserted or drowned, and many more suffered from frostbite.
Then back into the unheated boxcars for another week of crowding and starvation, another week of wallowing not only in our own filth, but in that of the boxcar’s previous, four-legged passengers.
One morning, we awakened to a strange landscape in which the roofs of the houses curved upward like boats, and the trees put me in mind of things that might grow on the moon. This was Asia. The people here had darker skins and narrow, villainous, Oriental eyes. Most of the men believed them to be ‘Japs,’ having little notion that we were almost as far from Japan as we were from Moscow.
We were headed straight for the battlefield, somewhere between Mukden and Port Arthur, where heavy fighting was taking place. We were said to have lost over sixty thousand men in one battle alone.
Officers came through the cars now to deliver inspirational talks. About how our Little Father, the Czar, was counting on every one of us. But mainly about the enemy’s cruelty to Russian prisoners. This was to inflame our thirst for blood. In actuality, it had the opposite effect. Most of us were left subdued and depressed. Who wanted to get involved with such uncivilized savages? We all knew what we were in for, but there was no way back except in some condition we’d rather not think about.
The next day, our train lumbered to a halt near a village used as a transfer point for the wounded. I heard no sound of guns yet, but our commandant said we were very close to the battlefield.
Our hearts beat more quickly as we were marched through the village. Its principal building served as a field dressing station, and the streets were full of haggard men in Red Cross armbands wearing smeared butchers’ aprons. The huts, wherever you looked, were filled with men groaning, gasping, or horribly still. Some of them also lay on the ground outside, listlessly waiting to die.
I asked why the wounded weren’t taken to hospitals. Answer: because there were none, at least in this sector. Our high command had expected to engage the enemy much farther to the east, near the Yalu River. The Japanese, however, had treacherously refused to cooperate. There was a hospital train on the way, but it had been due several days ago and seemed to have disappeared.
Spending a couple of idle and oppressive days among the piteous cries and foul smell of the injured and dying left most of us praying for a quick death, rather than the slow one of a serious wound.
Then it turned out that our commandant had read his map incorrectly and stopped the train in the wrong place. A dried-up, snowy-haired little man, General Zasulich consulted, by the flicker of a trembling candle, a large, tattered old map from which he seemed to extract as much enlightenment as a chicken studying the commentaries of Rashi.
The fighting was said to be at least another half-day’s journey away. They packed us back into the train, and all ninety-six cars continued on their blind search for the war. But we still didn’t reach our destination. This time it was because the Japanese had blown up a bridge about ten minutes before we got there. We were saved only because God is good and our train, as usual, was late.
The adjutant cabled a message to Harbin for engineers and materials to repair the bridge. He was told that we were needed urgently at the front, and he should find boats and ferry us across, then force-march us the rest of the way, some hundreds of miles, with no mention of food.
Fortunately, none of the boats we were able to commandeer was big enough to carry our field pieces, ammunition, or horses, and our commandant, bless him, refused to send us into combat empty-handed.
We soldiers were quite content to remain where we were, and wouldn’t have cared if they never fixed the tracks. Except that another troop train now arrived, and suddenly there were thousands of us stranded with barely enough food for a day or two.
Being on a single-track line with no nearby spurs for detours, we couldn’t even send the second train back to get us food. Meanwhile, more trains would be arriving daily, all filled with hungry men.
We were given ammunition for our rifles and told to live off the land. While the Russian soldier, with his peasant background, was a natural-born forager, nothing edible had been growing in this rocky, frozen soil for the last hundred miles. In fact, the only cultivated fields we’d seen all day were of poppies, grown for the Chinese opium trade.
Some men formed hunting parties. They were warned not to go too far afield. The area was notorious for bands of “Chunchus” (“Red Beards”), Chinese brigands who were so powerful, and so well organized, that they didn’t hesitate to attack and rob even armed Russian patrols.
A day or two later there was more bad news. Thirty miles behind us, the Japanese had blown up the train carrying food. None of us had known it was coming, but they did.
Meanwhile, an engineer had arrived and told the adjutant that the bridge couldn’t be repaired. A bypass would have to be built on pontoons, farther downstream. Although no building materials had arrived yet and the tracks behind us now were torn up as well, we were assured that the job would be done in two weeks. A silent cheer rose from the company when we heard the news. Not a man believed that we would be out of there in less than two or three months. By now, even the most patriotic Russian blockhead knew that in Vanya’s army nothing ever went in a straight line.
Chapter 6. The Lost and Found Battlefield
When you consider that we had come from the opposite corner of the world for no reason other than to liberate the Chinese empire from Japanese domination, it was strange that even the Manchurian coolies our army employed as laborers along the Trans-Siberian Railway appeared, with some mad sense of Asiatic solidarity, to be spying for the Japanese against us, their liberators. This bizarre loyalty explained how the enemy knew about our imminent arrival before we did. To no one’s regret, the blown-up bridge postponed our arrival at the battlefield by nearly a month, giving many of us four weeks longer to live.
Unfortunately, in time, our engineers managed to put up some sort of temporary bridge, which it was best not to examine too closely, and our train resumed its breathless progress toward the theater of war. This time, we traveled with leaden hearts, knowing we were in for a fight to the death against an enemy who had no appreciation for Europe’s civilized traditions of warfare.
Meanwhile, we heard from soldiers guarding the railroad station at Mukden that our losses on retreating – or to be accurate, escaping – from Port Arthur had run into the tens of thousands. Thus, our train was needed to evacuate an endless stream of torn and broken men for whom no hospital beds were available locally, while its current, human freight was needed to fill the gaping holes in what was left of our front lines. So we were ordered out of the damp and airless train cars and were obliged to continue on foot. We were headed for the battlefield, and this time, nothing but a miracle could delay us.
From what I saw as we reached Manchuria, the best proof of how little the Russians actually expected a Japanese attack was how totally and nakedly unprepared our army and navy were, both for the fighting and its natural consequences. (To be fair, I am not certain that, even if our generals h
ad been diligently planning this war, day and night, for the past ten years, they would have done much better.).
To begin with, we had learned nothing about modern advances in infantry tactics, while the despised Japanese, in their shameless eagerness to be westernized, were up on all the latest tricks. Our leaders were also smugly ignorant about the Japanese mentality, their fanaticism, their patriotic fervor, their incredible endurance, their horribly unpredictable methods of attack, and willingness to squander 100,000 lives for the capture of Port Arthur.
Meanwhile, the doctrines of infantry combat had been totally overturned several decades earlier by the American invention, or perfection, of the machine gun. Not that our Maxim wasn’t at least as good as the Hotchkiss used by the Japanese. The difference was they knew how to employ it with some tactical effectiveness, while to us it was just another burden some poor donkey or foot soldier had to haul over the frozen ground.
The Accidental Anarchist Page 4