The following morning was deathly quiet. For some undoubtedly sinister reason, the Japanese had stopped shelling us. Could it be that the war had finally ended, but only the enemy knew it? It was more likely that they were only waiting for the inhumanly efficient Japanese government to send them more ammunition.
During the lull, we received orders to continue heading north. The men cheered. What else could that mean but that the war was truly over? Yet the Japanese, unpredictable as ever, kept right on our heels while their snipers picked off those who couldn’t keep up.
The man next to me stumbled and fell with a sharp gasp of pain. He had a deep hole in his back, and purple blood squirted out of his mouth. I felt helpless; no one had ever taught me how to apply a tourniquet for a back wound. After a time, a sudden, ugly, wheezing gasp escaped from his mouth, and his arms went slack. I quickly relieved him of his rifle and his remaining bullets, and searched his pockets. He had been hoarding two cubes of sugar! I grabbed them, popped one into my mouth and immediately felt a surge of energy. I briefly debated whether to save the other sugar cube for later, but decided that I needed the energy now.
The second cube, however, was covered with blood. As hardened as I had become by the war, this blood came from a soldier I knew. Plus, Jewish law forbade consuming blood – animal or otherwise. I held the sugar cube between my fingers, turning it to examine it from all sides. Not even a small corner was unstained. But God is merciful, and His laws made it clear that it was permissible to violate almost any one of them to save a life. Was this not a matter of life and death – my own?
Saliva pooling in my mouth, I closed my eyes and tried to think of the taste of faworki, the sugary, fried pastries that bakeries in Warsaw prepared every spring, and lay the cube on my tongue. But as I had never had enough money to buy any of those treats, my imagination failed me. The taste in my mouth became bitter and metallic, and I spat it out cube. But a second sugar cube wouldn’t save my life any more than a single one would.
Some hours later, the remnants of my platoon decided to rest for the night. It did no good to point out that the Japanese were only a rifle shot behind us. But since the men had made it plain that they no longer accepted my authority, I continued walking on my own.
It was at least another hour before I felt safe enough, for the first time in weeks, to abandon myself to a full night’s sleep. While dreaming of such miracles as feather beds, my eyelids were ripped open by enormous flares bleaching the sky. In the distance, a couple of machine-guns spat at each other. Numb in every limb, I wondered stupidly whether it was safe to go back to sleep.
When the flares died down, I knew it was time to move on, no matter how sleepy I was. Near dawn, I spotted the fires of a large encampment. Theirs or ours? For some moments, I wasn’t sure it mattered. If the Japanese took me prisoner, I assumed they would give me something to eat. That was more than I could count on from our own kitchens. On the other hand, there were ugly rumors of Russian prisoners being used for bayonet practice.
As there were no visible sentries, I watched the fort from a distance for half the morning before I felt certain that the camp was Russian. How could I be sure? It was full of soldiers whom no one had told what to do as their officers had saddled up and ridden off.
I begged for some food and, after enduring a variety of insolent and foolish questions about what I was “doing” there, I was given some hardtack and hot water. It was my first hot meal in over two weeks.
In the evening I met a Polish clerk who had been in my battalion. My heart pounding, I asked if he had seen Glasnik.
He had not. On the other hand, he had also not seen his corpse. I tried to find some consolation in his words. Glasnik may have been only a mediocre soldier, but he had a talent for getting out of tight spots.
In the morning, I cadged another breakfast and continued heading north, part of an endless column of what had once been soldiers. Although the roadside was littered with gear our men had gotten tired of carrying, no one had the strength, or will, to stop and scavenge any longer.
To break the monotony, some of us paused long enough to turn and fire at the dim shadows behind us. Our pursuers signaled their annoyance at this by sending back a hundred bullets for every one of ours. One afternoon, I felt a violent blow against my neck. I was ready to hit back but the man beside me said, “Fool, your neck is bleeding. I think you were hit by a bullet.”
He said this so casually, I assumed he was joking. Then I touched my neck; my hand came away wet. If my comrade had kept his mouth shut, I would have kept right on going, and maybe the wound would have closed up by itself. Instead, my eyes grew dim and my knees began to buckle. I tried to keep running, but the other fellow had ruined my concentration.
I awoke in a field hospital, heavily bandaged around the neck and shoulder. A nurse was stroking my forehead and trying to get me to drink some water. I wanted to thank her but my throat was on fire.
When I saw a doctor hurrying past. I stretched out my arm to stop him and asked, “Doctor, how am I?”
He said, “Don’t you know?”
“What?”
“How you feel.”
“I mean, how serious is it?”
“You were lucky,” he admitted in what sounded like a critical tone. “The bullet came from a great distance; it didn’t bite very hard. You were also lucky that it stayed in your neck and kept you from losing more blood.”
The nurse held him back a moment longer. She showed him my bandage, which was soaked through. “He needs a clean bandage.”
“From where? Take it off and wash it.”
Vanya, as usual, had planned well. There were no more clean bandages left in all of China, so wounded men who came in after me were bandaged with whatever kind of soiled rag could be scrounged.
Unfortunately, my doctor was so proud of the job he had done that, long before I felt like giving up my comfortable bed, he pronounced me “cured” and sent me back to the field.
Chapter 12: The Loneliest Place on Earth
Spoiled by days of lying in bed, I left the hospital and attached myself grudgingly to another column of stragglers. One of the officers who hadn’t abandoned their units explained that we were not running away: we were “regrouping” to make a stand at Mukden. Assuming it had not already fallen. He readily agreed that, from a strategic point of view, it was not desirable to have the enemy both in front of and behind us.
The closer we got to the railroad in Mukden, the more bewildering the chaos became. At one point, I came upon sacks of mail lying piled behind a telegrapher’s shed, all waiting to be returned as “undeliverable.” Rummaging through them, I found a letter from my parents.
They wrote that my brother, Mordechai, not long after being reported dead, had come home. He had been discharged early on account of some undiagnosable illness. But once safely out of the hands of Army doctors, he recovered. Within days, he left for Warsaw. I gathered from their reticence about the reason for his departure that he had gone for some illegal or ‘revolutionary’ purpose. They also asked me if it was true that Glasnik was dead.
It had been three weeks since I’d last seen my friend. Yet each time I glimpsed a soldier with the hunched over, nearsighted posture of someone threading a needle, my heart skipped, and my imagination leapt to pin Glasnik’s features onto his body. While the Russians have a saying, “What lies under the earth is best forgotten,” my memory of his mother’s tears wouldn’t allow me to forget.
I also worried about facing his father, a man of so little personal force I wondered how he ever managed to express the wish to have a child. How could I return in the full glory of all my limbs and organs to explain to this shadow of a man that one moment his son was at my side and the next moment he was gone? That I had “lost” my friend the way one might forget a newspaper on a train?
Yet my father said that Glasnik’s father urged him to write to me because, with a stubbornness one would not have expected of him, Glasnik’s father
refused to believe that his son was dead. He wanted The Truth.
My father’s controlled handwriting also pleaded with me to make inquiries about a number of other soldiers from Vishogrod and nearby villages who had been similarly reported dead or missing. Out of seven boys he named, I knew for certain that four were dead, and one was badly wounded. What would I say to their families? I suddenly dreaded the thought of going home.
Toward daybreak, after another night on our feet, we came to a stagnant body of water covered with a thick green scum that smelled worse than it looked. An order was passed down the line not to drink the water. By the time word reached our group, many men already were lying face down in the water, slurping like dogs. I tried, forcibly, to get them to stop drinking. One of the men threatened to kill me. Moments later, he doubled over in agony.
I, too, suffered terribly from thirst and for a moment, I almost decided that cramps would be the lesser torture. But then I saw corpses lying upstream. And the man who had just threatened me was wriggling like a half-crushed worm. He suddenly kicked, and then became still.
Later that day, I ran into Semyon, a Russian friend from my days in Petersburg, who had also lost his regiment but not his resourcefulness. As tens of thousands of famished and thirsty soldiers had already preceded us on this highway, he said, any Chinese farmer who might have had any food had long since been stripped of it. If we wanted to avoid starving, we needed to strike out cross-country.
We made sure that our revolvers were loaded, and slipped away from the column without anyone so much as turning his head.
Semyon had a fine sense of direction, and the hilly path on which he led us rose gently. Near the top, he claimed to hear the sound of mooing or bleating in the valley below us. “Milk!” he said. “Why should only officers drink milk?”
I heard nothing and saw no sign of any animal, but by this point, my thirst was unbearable, and that was reason enough for me to believe him.
We stumbled downhill toward a flowering meadow blanketed in ghostly shreds of fog. In the failing light, we spotted the burned and roofless huts of a Chinese farm. An ominous puff of smoke escaped from one of the ruined buildings. I hoped we had not stumbled into a nest of Chinese bandits, many of whom our boys had treated rather badly on the way to the front.
Darkness began to flood the sky, yet no matter how fast we walked, the meadow remained as far away as ever. Discouraged, I sat down to rest for a moment. By the time Semyon was able to rouse me, it was five o’clock in the morning. I shook off his hand and lost consciousness, again.
Later, I was awakened by a loud noise. “That is a goat or a cow crying to be milked,” Semyon said. He licked his lips.
Ecstatic, and forgetting the risk of running into bandits, we ran toward the jumble of ruined clay huts. I stopped when I came face to face with a cow, its udders swollen with milk.
We searched around for a pail, any sort of container. This was no time to be particular. We were going to have milk, all we could drink!
Then I remembered the gasp of smoke from one of the huts. Even as I fumbled for my Browning, a ragged Chinese woman materialized between us carrying a small, crying child. In addition to wailing, she repeatedly bowed so deeply that I feared she would drop the child.
“She’s afraid we’ll steal her cow,” Semyon said.
Addressing us in a bird-like chatter, she pulled us into a small, wrecked building, which gave off a ghastly sweet stench. Before us lay two bodies. Judging by their age and her grief, I assumed they were her son and his wife. Both seemed freshly dead. Who was to say that the murderers were not still close by? It may only have been our arrival that kept them from killing the old woman and making off with the cow, too.
My friend gagged and ran outside to be sick. I followed, but kept my revolver in my hand. The woman tried to pull us into yet another small ruin, but the smell made it horribly obvious what we would find there.
Semyon said, “See if you can explain to her that all we want is some milk.”
I was close to having lost my appetite, but for my friend’s sake, I pointed to the cow. Even as the woman began to cry, again, I pumped my hands in what was meant to illustrate the way one milked a cow. It took a while before she fell silent and reacted to my pantomime. Then I tried to gesture to her that we needed a container.
She hesitated, then ran inside and brought out a small, muddy trough, the kind from which the poorer Polish farmers back home fed their pigs. She wiped it out with an equally muddy rag. Then, with trembling hands, she drew the first gush of milk.
Semyon and I fell to our knees. Bumping heads, we began to slurp up the milk. Thirsty and starved as I was, I could not help noticing that the milk had a peculiar taste. Yet neither one of us was able to stop drinking. We left just enough milk to cover the bottom of the trough, hoping not to find out exactly what had flavored it.
I tried to offer the old woman some money. Fearful that I meant to buy the cow, she slapped my hands away, then sank to the ground and kissed our boots. The infant, meanwhile, toddled over to the trough and sat on it to demonstrate the use to which it was normally put.
We waited until late afternoon to start up the next hill. That way, the sun’s long shadow would blur our silhouettes to anyone who may have, for whatever reason, wanted to shoot at us.
Halfway up the summit, both of us began to get the very cramps we had escaped earlier by not drinking the polluted water. After all those months, we agreed, it must be that our insides were no longer able to digest milk.
Later, the cramps returned once more and nearly drove us mad. Semyon begged me to shoot him. But even had I wanted to, the pain in my gut would have made it impossible to aim straight.
Semyon cursed both me and the Czar with impartial ferocity. In between, he made the terrible sounds of a man dying. It tormented me not to know what to do for him. He was a fine young man from a noble family who could easily have become an officer. And in all the months of our acquaintance until this moment, I had never heard him say a bad word against either the Jews or the Czar.
In desperation, I rubbed some snow on his stomach. The cold seemed to ease his pain, and I continued rubbing his belly until he fell asleep. Only then did I feel darkness smother me like a cloak.
Curled up against my friend’s body, I didn’t awaken until the sun was high overhead. Semyon lay beside me in the same position I had left him last night. I tried to wake him. There was no response. In panic, I tugged at him so hard he rolled over, his eyes lifeless as marbles. At that moment, surrounded by blinding white silence, I felt like the last man on earth.
A savage burst of pain reminded me that my insides were still knotted with cramps. It was pure chance that he died and I, for some reason, was still alive. For now.
Searching Semyon’s pockets, I removed his papers as well as the gold medallion from his neck. I also took his revolver and his bullets. Ignorant of Russian Orthodox ritual, I dug a hole for my comrade’s body, and wished him a speedy transfer to whatever paradise he believed in. So that he would not journey alone, I also wished for him to have the Czar and his family for company.
Surrounding me in a limitless ocean of land were the four points of the compass, but nothing that would tell me which way was north. I was no longer sure whether, so close to the Arctic Circle, the sun set in the east or the west. Never had I seen a landscape so bitterly empty of human life, so naked of landmarks, so oppressed by a leaden sky in which neither sun nor stars could tell me if I was headed in the right direction.
For hours, I hauled my feet up and down those white, deserted hills. I knew China had a population in the hundreds of millions. Where had they all gone? And more urgently, where was my army?
On a path rutted by the wheels of heavy guns, I came upon a trickle of ragged Russian soldiers who were as lost as I. Some of them looked and sounded like rough characters. One of them kept insisting that he had heard there was a ten-day cease-fire, but was not sure when the ten days began. For all we knew,
they may have just ended.
The sight of this disorderly crew made me wonder if I would not be better off on my own. But when the others groaned to their feet and, bunched together in a totally unmilitary cluster and started to walk, I found myself, out of sheer loneliness, drifting along with them
At nightfall, we were raked by a thunderstorm that wiped out all traces of the road. There was no shelter anywhere. Several of us took branches and braided them together into a kind of mattress that kept us from sleeping in the mud, although with little more comfort than a bed of nails. I found myself amidst a jumble of uniforms, some soldiers without boots, others without firearms, one armed with nothing but an axe, but all determined to fight to the last breath for a dry place to sleep.
I awoke in total darkness in a gutter carved by a small, icy river that rushed down from a nearby slope. It seemed that, during the night, a number of new men had joined us and I had been elbowed off the mattress. A savage argument was boiling up around me. Everyone was fighting to capture or retain a sliver of space on our common bed. Now there were close to thirty men struggling over a space that could barely hold ten.
The Accidental Anarchist Page 11