Our repeating rifle was actually superior to those with which the Japanese were armed. Unfortunately, the invention of smokeless powder, about which no one had bothered to inform our officers, had increased the range, accuracy, and penetrating power of rifle bullets. This allowed the Japanese foot soldiers to be armed with lighter rifles while carrying twice as many bullets.
Unlike the Japanese, we had almost no mountain artillery, nothing but heavy stuff, useless for mobile warfare. It soon was obvious that most of our officers still visualized ground combat in terms of the last war they had fought – against the Turks thirty years earlier.
Add to these lapses the fact that the Russian infantryman, for all his stubbornness and bravery, was obviously not insane enough to try to outdo his Asiatic enemy. Especially in our regiment where the majority of soldiers were not Russians at all, but Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Balts, and even Germans, all of whom felt toward the Czar about as much warmth as a chicken has for a fox. Throughout the army, the only force able to stir the average czarist soldier out of his brutish apathy, aside from self-preservation, was talk of revolution.
On our first night’s excursion in search of the battlefield, there was a lot of grumbling about the cold, the lack of food, and, more perfunctorily, about the ‘Japs,’ a term that, for us, also included Siberians, Manchurians, Koreans, and Chinese. Despite all the “inspirational” talks about Japanese atrocities we’d been given en route, we didn’t really hate them. The Japanese we merely feared, although not as much as we feared the villainous incompetence of our own junior officers.
Even I, a squad leader, found it difficult to work up much enmity. I knew that for each official enemy in Japanese uniform, I had a far more dedicated enemy at my side or behind my back. Prominent among these was Pyotr, the Ukrainian sergeant to whom I’d had such a murderous introduction almost as soon as I arrived in Petersburg. Having been demoted as a result of the trial, he was now under my command, and Glasnik frequently warned me that “the sheep-faced katzap” remained determined to settle old scores. And since I now outranked him, he was merely biding his time until the chaos of battle would make it quite impossible to determine precisely whose bullet had killed whom.
Meanwhile, I was quite content for our blundering general not to find the battlefield.
Tired, footsore and having gone without hot food for some twenty hours, some of my men were audibly grumbling. I advised them to shut up and count their blessings: if our commander knew his business, we would have been in battle already and possibly dead.
We plodded on past devastated villages and frozen, long-unburied corpses until, at sunrise, our general, perplexed, halted the column and politely asked some blank-faced Manchurian peasants if they could tell him where to find the battlefield. They glanced, open-mouthed, at his map and professed not to know what he was talking about. Meanwhile, the treacherous Japanese remained the Devil-only-knows where. By noon, we were totally exhausted, but also relieved to know that we had been granted another day of life.
Out of the icy morning fog that smothered the ground, we saw a convoy grinding toward us. Each wagon was piled high with dead or wounded soldiers, some of the latter still capable of moans and shrieks that scarcely seemed human. This, it turned out, was the unit at whose flank we were to have fought this morning.
None of us said a word, but it was easy to guess what each man was thinking. Those were men, full of life like us, and look at what had happened to them in only a few short days, perhaps only hours. Following the convoy was a file of stretcher-bearers carrying those wounded men whom they still had some wild hope of saving. Some of the stretcher-bearers seemed to make a professional assessment of us, as though estimating how heavy we would be to carry after the next encounter. I could hear a few of the men wishing they were already wounded and on their way back; at least they would escape something worse.
It was not until I recognized one of the walking wounded that it suddenly hit me: this was my younger brother’s company! With a beating heart, I fell in beside one soldier and asked about Avrohom.
He made a negative gesture and averted his eyes.
I clawed at the front of his coat. “What happened to my brother?”
He shrugged.
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me.”
“Half the company is missing.”
“Captured?”
“I don't know!”
In the end, all I could get out of him was that he had not actually seen Avrohom’s body, but my brother’s platoon was the first to be thrown into the attack, and hardly a man among them had survived. I held out little hope for my younger brother, who had never shown any interest in physical exertion, and I suspected hadn’t taken well to soldiering.
I dropped to the ground, choked with tears, and bitterly regretted having enjoyed our reprieve. If only our imbecile of a general had found the battlefield in time, my brother’s platoon might not have been wiped out. I darkly consoled myself with the thought that it mattered little which one of us was the first to die when it was plain that, eventually, we all would end up buried forever in this strange soil.
Some of my squad tried to console me. But I was most conscious of the one man who stood aloof and grinning.
We were suddenly halted and ordered to start digging trenches. I noticed that our officers had us deployed on the back slope of a hill in such a way that, while we wouldn’t see the approaching enemy, we would, at least, be able to run away more easily. It was nice to see how much faith they had in the Russian infantry’s ability to stand fast under frontal attack.
The trenches were to be about twenty feet apart and four-and-a-half-feet deep. The digging went easily because the ground was soft and muddy. But, for the same reason, the sides of the trenches kept caving in.
Before sunset, we were summoned together at the foot of the hill, where our commanding general delivered a talk. He was unquestionably a talented orator, at least as measured by his effect on the Russian and Ukrainian boys. He recounted the greatness of Holy Mother Russia, of how we had never lost a war, and of how devoted our Little Father, the Czar, was to the welfare of his people, regardless of their nationality or religion. Therefore, each man, whatever his origins, should consider it an honor to give his life for the Czar. After the war, things would be different: peasants would receive more land, workers would get higher wages, and even the Jews would have the right to own land wherever they wished to live.
Glasnik was the first to grasp that there was a small catch to these wonderful promises: to see them carried out, one merely had to get killed, first.
Our general had reassurances for skeptics like Glasnik. Our enemy, he said, was more monkey than man, so puny and primitive and so laughably unaccustomed to modern warfare or true Russian patriotic fervor that all we needed to do was scarcely more than throw our caps into the air to send him into headlong flight. I thought of the men who had passed us earlier today and wondered why they hadn’t thought of that.
With evening, it grew piercingly cold. We lined up at our soup wagons. The food did little more than warm our stomachs for a moment. The real hardship was that we couldn’t smoke because our lit matches might reveal our location to the enemy. I suspected, however, that the Japanese knew exactly where we were, probably better than we did.
Presently, we were issued bales of straw to spread on the muddy floor of the trench where we lay down to sleep.
By morning, all of us were furiously hungry, but nowhere was there so much as a glimpse of food. What I did see were hundreds of soldiers, roaming around in defiance of orders, collecting clean snow to boil for tea and to wash themselves. I ordered my men not to leave the trench, and to take just enough water from their canteens to rinse their mouths and eyes. So we waited and yawned and scratched ourselves, and cursed the bitter cold that knifed right through to our bones. By now the frost was so sharp that spittle turned to ice even before it dribbled down your chin.
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After lying all night on the damp, muddy straw, my uniform and even my underwear were frozen stiff, as though they’d been heavily starched. I jumped around and thrashed my arms to work up some body heat. If the Japanese had attacked at that moment, I'm quite sure I would not have been able to hook a finger around the trigger. I could only hope that they were as uncomfortable as we were.
Toward noon, as an emaciated ray of sun broke through the grey, we heard shouts of joy. The soup wagons had arrived. Wild with eagerness, the men started to dance around in total abandonment. But, just as we lined up for the soup, without a thought for cover or concealment, our uncivilized enemy decided to open up with his heaviest artillery. In spite of General Zasulich’s aristocratic contempt for geography and terrain maps, the accommodating Japanese, whether out of Oriental courtesy or simple impatience, had come looking for us.
Before we knew it, we were in the midst of a formidably accurate barrage. I saw horses, wagons, and men flung through the air like toys. All around me, soldiers, torn by shrapnel, were screaming. We rushed back to our trenches, full of hatred for the Japanese. But they were too far away for us to reach with our rifles.
We were, however, consoled by the promise of an opportunity to make a bayonet charge on the enemy’s trenches, as soon as we knew where his main strength was concentrated. Meanwhile, far behind us, dispatch riders were hurrying in all directions to call for reinforcements, and our adjutant was telegraphing frantically for counter-battery fire. (This skirmish, I learned later, was known as the Battle of Liao-Yang, and it involved more men than any battle fought in modern times, including Waterloo. And yet, no one in America seemed to have heard of it, which, for the sake of Russian honor, may be just as well.)
Our artillery finally came to life, dropping its first rounds on our own forward positions. This was done, I was told, to help them find their range. The shelling continued sporadically until nightfall while we cowered, starved and useless, in our trenches. After dark, we received a small ration of hardtack that would barely sustain us for the night. With our stomachs feeling dry and shriveled, we huddled together and tried to sleep. Each squad had been issued a large straw torch and a bottle of kerosene. If attacked, we were to light the torch so the unit behind us would know to counterattack. That wouldn’t help us any, but at least there was the plan.
But the Japanese, as usual, didn’t wait for a formal invitation. At two o’clock in the morning on September 2, 1904, while I dreamed about sitting with a girlfriend in an ice cream parlor in Warsaw, someone shook me and yelled, “Brother, get up!” I jumped to my feet and immediately had to duck again. Machine guns were raking our position, and bursts of shrapnel squealed over our heads. Our batteries replied stingily and without much visible effect.
As the shelling grew steadily more intense and more accurate, I feared we wouldn’t survive the night. I’d never had any romantic notions of combat being anything other than terrible, but I had not expected it to be this frightening.
I prayed for daylight, although that offered no guarantee that the shelling would stop. Suddenly my lieutenant screamed, “Lord, have mercy!” and fell on top of me. Covered with his blood, and unable to support his weight, I grew dizzy and, within a moment, found myself lying pinned to the bottom of the trench.
Glasnik pulled me free and kept shouting in my ear, “Marateck, are you wounded?” I stood up and checked where my uniform was bloody, but it was all the lieutenant's blood.
The wounded man whimpered, “Mother! Mother!” None of us knew how to tie a bandage that would stop his bleeding. I tried to give him some water, but his mouth was tightly clenched from the pain. I knew if we didn’t get him to an aid-station at once, he’d die from loss of blood.
Above us, the bombardment was thicker than before. But four of us decided to risk it. Crawling on our bellies, we dragged our lieutenant toward the rear. After slithering like this for about an hour, we dropped into an empty trench to catch our breath. The sweat had congealed on our bodies, and we started to shiver from cold. I struck a match to see how the lieutenant was doing. He was without a head, and probably had been for some time. Two of the soldiers began to cry.
Returning with some stretcher-bearers to pick up wounded men, we saw that many no longer needed assistance. Too weak to keep warm by moving around, they had frozen to death.
Later, during a letup in the shelling, one of our regimental staff officers came by on horseback and told us that we had won a great victory. Despite heavy losses, we had held our position. I was too tired to point out to him that the hill belonged to China, not to us, and that the Japanese infantry had not as yet made an actual effort to take it. Further down the line, a cheer went up as the next platoon was informed of its “victory.” I sat on the damp straw and prayed to be spared any more such military triumphs.
In mid-afternoon, there was a fresh artillery duel, but the enemy had shifted its interest to another sector, and we were able to sleep. Toward evening, I crept out of the trench to see whether there was any soup left. With a shock, I discovered that all the nearby trenches were empty. Our battalion, it seemed, had been ordered to retreat while we slept, no doubt by the very same officers who had confirmed our “victory,” and no one had bothered to wake us. The wind and sleet had covered all tracks, and it was impossible to tell in which direction they had gone. As it was getting dark, we knew that if we went looking for them we could easily stumble into enemy hands.
There we were, alone on a huge sloping field, surrounded by the twisted bodies of men and horses, piles of empty ammunition boxes, boots, shovels, mess tins, broken carts, fur hats, blankets, and scraps of clothing. To my great disappointment, I saw that Pyotr, my devoted enemy, hadn’t fled and was, in fact, full of vigor. But he had the excellent idea of searching the dead for any hardtack, sugar, or tobacco they might have on them. Soon the rest of us were doing it. We found very little, until we searched the pack of an officer, which yielded a small bottle of vodka. It was quickly shared, no more than a lick for each man, but it left us somewhat more cheerful.
A machine gun suddenly opened up on us and we raced back to our trench, surprising a number of large rats that had been gnawing on a body we had been too tired to bury. One of our men got a bullet through his thigh, but he was so numb with cold he didn't even feel it.
Night fell, and we were not sure of what to do. Stay there, or try to find our battalion? It was a serious question, not only because we might, at any time, be overrun by the Japanese, but also because if we rejoined our unit after we had been officially listed as dead or missing, we would automatically be declared deserters. Which could mean the firing squad.
We decided to stay put, at least for the night. But it wasn’t safe to sleep. I don’t know which we dreaded more, the Japanese or the rats. To keep warm, we huddled together, helping one another stay awake. Sometime during the night, however, sleep won out.
By morning, snow had covered us with such a thick blanket that we might have been in a feather bed at the Hotel Bristol in Petersburg. My first thought was that I had died and been buried; it was a miracle that we hadn’t frozen to death. The only reason I knew I was alive was because I was hungry. And because I heard my comrades’ snoring.
It took all my strength to dig myself out. By now the snow had nearly filled the trenches. Above me, there was no sky, and almost no air. Around me, I saw not another living soul. Where had they all gone?
It was impossible to breathe without inhaling snow. The wind was like a dagger in my lungs.
I took a little of the crisp, dry snow and washed my eyes. My watch had stopped, and I didn’t know if it was morning or afternoon. Somewhere in the distance, cannons were booming. Apparently not even the Japanese were interested in our little group.
I envied my comrades who were still sleeping, and thought about burying myself once again in the snow. But with bloodstained clothes frozen to my body, I couldn’t loosen anything without tearing off patches of skin.
Fed
up with being alone in my misery, I tried to awaken Glasnik. But even after I had removed his heavy covering of snow, he continued to snore. Finally, I had to pull his hair to get his attention.
It took him some time to recall where he was. Then he helped me dig out the others. The boy who had taken a bullet in his thigh absolutely refused to budge. I pressed my ear against his heart; it was silent as a stone. We managed to awaken only three more soldiers. As far as I could tell, the others had died during the night.
One of the live ones was Pyotr. He had a slightly insane glimmer in his eyes, the kind of a look you might see on a man who is ready to kill himself . . . or you. Meanwhile, the storm piled snow into our trench as fast as we could shovel it out. We finally decided to abandon the dead (they were as well protected as if we had buried them properly), and try to find the rest of our battalion.
The Accidental Anarchist Page 5