The guilty paralysis of the infantry officer who cannot help obeying orders. The paralysis of the prostrate infantryman—until his deathbed anguish explodes into the exhilarating desperation of the attack.
God forbid you should ever hear that “hurrah”—a pitiful wail from the inferno that is war, a cry not of triumph but of despair, wrung from them as they charge. Men fall like flies, the snow is pitted with them—which of them are dead, which waiting to die? The only survivors you’re sure of are those plain to see beside you, the rest may all be dead. At Kolomea the Trans-Amur Infantry Division—a dozen long-service soldiers to a company, the rest all bearded militiamen—were hurled head-on at fortified positions, and mowed down to a man.
And then those forage caps with little crosses on them, those defenseless home guards, how many of them have we lost in battle? A man charging against the enemy has one consolation—he can choose his stopping places, he can find a false reassurance in his zigzag progress, hiding behind hillocks, stones, or even a tussock of withered grass. But a telephone operator sent to disentangle a line under fire is denied this means of self-deception: his line is his fate.
History can never record every incident. Sometimes there are no participants left. Those capable of understanding don’t need to be told everything, or even very much, all they need to know about is, say, the village of Radzanovo, 190 feet above sea level, with a splendid view, fortified with barbed-wire fences, which at the time we lacked the ammunition to destroy. Besides, the approaches were marshy. But an infantry regiment was ordered to take it. The regimental commander judged it impossible to do so, and asked for the order to be canceled. Divisional HQ insisted. There was no way out. The following morning they attacked. They lost three hundred men, including irreplaceable officers. A day or two later you met dragoon officers whose regiments had been in that sector, had withdrawn and returned. They told us their story. They had come close to taking this wretched 190-foot mount, again without artillery, losing seven hundred men, infantry and cavalry, and had failed. We withdrew. After us a third regiment was deployed against Radzanovo—ordered to scale the same height.
Call it human sacrifice. When you have seen enough of it you lose all proper respect for wounds, for death, for corpses. A bloody cap on a lonely cross, or a trenching tool sticking up from a mass grave for infantrymen, is taken as a matter of course. You see a dead man lying on his side cradling his bloody head under his arm, as if he felt cold. You see people saying funeral prayers over a crumpled corpse without removing it from its stretcher. An even commoner sight is a cart with its side boards up, and half a dozen wounded men tossed and jolted on it, with whatever stumps they have preserved heavily bandaged and sticking up in the air, and their eyes, already aware of their irreparable mutilation, staring from the depths—just try to keep this sort of picture in mind, gentlemen. Not all of them will get treatment in time, before tetanus or gangrene sets in.
Or else a Cossack regiment is ordered to take an Austrian fortress, the approaches to which are girded with several barbed-wire barriers. But the whole regiment has only half a dozen pairs of wire cutters. (They can’t manage to make enough of the things. The War Ministry hasn’t done the arithmetic and is skeptical. So many soldiers have perished unnecessarily for lack of a pair of wire cutters!) What can you do? Use your swords. Without dismounting, remember. At night, remember. “Forward, boys, and the best of luck!”
It isn’t all failure. Sometimes, even up to our waists in January rainwater, holding our rifles over our heads, we’ve attacked machine-gun posts and taken them! That’s how we crossed the San.
Sometimes we take a position! We’re victorious! We rejoice! Then suddenly an inexplicable order: “Withdraw to your previous position.”
Why? Why did we take this one, then? Why didn’t you think in time?
You carry this whole pyramid of bemedaled, overpromoted, ungainsayable generals on your head, like an Oriental woman carrying a pitcher of water. You may think, because you’re a regimental commander, that you’re free to make decisions of your own? Oh, no. You can scarcely move your head to right or left. The least little show of independence, fall back just a few hundred yards, and you’re summoned to Corps HQ to make a statement on your “less than valiant conduct.” Who can endure this feeling of constriction by absurd but unalterable orders? You see the mistake, the miscalculation, the malice, or the lack of consideration behind them, but you are shackled, your honor, your own pride, and military discipline all forbid you to protest. And on your last day, on the eve of your death, there is no one to tell how it really was.
Younger Guards officers have been known to get together and think up a way of protesting: Gentlemen! Let us make this hopeless attack with officers only, and not lead our soldiers into it!
Or take this one. The Rylsky Infantry Regiment couldn’t hold out on the Strypa. It was stunned and sent reeling. It had to be saved—but with what? There was something—the Kargopol Dragoon Regiment. This was, as it happened, their holiday, the anniversary of the regiment’s formation. Throughout the war no vodka had been brought anywhere near the front line; sobriety was strictly enforced even where men were stuck in subzero conditions. But the dragoons got hold of some, drank deep, and started singing. Toward sunset the division commander drives up. “We’re rescuing the Rylsky regiment, boys!” And, knowing what the attack would be like: “The Kargopol Regiment must not die! Leave behind one officer and ten dragoons from every squadron to mount guard!” They drew lots. Embraced as they said farewell. But their heads were still muzzy, and their legs wobbly. Darkness fell. And over the plain deserted by the infantry, scored with trenches, pitted with foxholes and craters, tangled in barbed wire, where even in the daytime nobody would go without wire cutters, on foot let alone on horseback, they advanced at a trot in the dark and without a murmur. (“Best of luck, boys!”) They fell into holes. Broke legs, broke ribs. Stumbled and were impaled on barbed wire. Galloping in the dark is always unnerving—more frightening for the horse than the man, not knowing what his next foot will fall on. The Germans were late spotting them. Rockets, searchlights. The Kargopol Regiment broke into a gallop! The searchlights chased gigantic spectral shadows over earth and sky, some tumbling head over heels, some looming ever nearer, even larger. The Germans couldn’t stand it! They fled! Victory!
After a battle soldiers are so dazed they’ll stand around in groups, in a village just taken and still burning, with Germans at the other end of the street, taking no precautions, ignoring their officer—if he wants them to lie low he will have to wrestle them to the ground one by one.
Worst of all, the idea has taken root, and is now generally accepted, that the more casualties there are, the better the battle and the greater the number of senior officers recommended for decorations. So that even when you could attack from the flank—no, charge head-on through the quagmire! The commander of the 49th Cossack Regiment exultantly reported to the ataman’s HQ that “the company advanced on a fortified position over open ground, under fire, and in cavalry formation.” One can only marvel at the heroism of this company, advancing according to orders to certain death, out of devotion to the throne!
With that sheeplike devotion we are recklessly shedding our blood, bleeding ourselves to death.
If contempt for death is the measure, there are many more authentic heroes than in all the magazine photographs together: “God-fearing warriors, crowned with blood and honor” (those whose relatives are quick to stake their claim). They greatly outnumber the George Crosses scattered to right and left. Two men, lightly wounded, lead a third with an abdominal wound, bent double, delirious, clutching his belly with both hands. The reserve unit in his path calls out ironical encouragement—"Hold on, don’t drop it!” and he manages to answer, “I’ll get it there—it’s all mine, you know.”
At the regimental level you have to grade commendations—often passing over genuine feats, which may not have resulted in victory—but then bravery in defeat is more st
riking. When a regiment has only three hundred bayonets left out of two thousand, and there is no relief in sight, and you are told that there will not be any for some days, but that the division commander is sure that the regiment will do its duty and that your positions must be held … while back at division HQ, and corps HQ, they strike out the recommendations you have made, to make room for the big brass and for the clerks.
Better to be wounded, to be killed even, in victorious battle than in some hugger-mugger. This summer one regiment was planning to use gas—three emissions of a hundred canisters, beginning at midnight—and then attack. But they dilly-dallied too long and released the first wave only at 3 a.m. The Germans detected it—rockets went up, trumpets and horns sounded the warning, iron sheets were hammered, beacons were lit. Our meteorological station then reported that the wind was becoming changeable, but the division commander ordered the release of the second wave. Men in the neighboring regiment, in a slightly forward position, were gassed. The wind became less favorable—but the third wave was ordered. This one traveled a little way, stopped, and was blown onto our own trenches. To make things worse—the canisters should have been placed in front of the trenches, with their pipes pointing toward the enemy, instead of which, contrary to instructions, the canisters were left in the trenches, with their pipes resting on the parapets. The Germans opened fire on our trenches, smashed the canisters, and panic-stricken men had to tug on gas masks in a hurry. Three hundred of them, officers and men, were buried in a common grave. The division commander’s suspension was a poor consolation.
The casualty here was Shingarev. He had taken Vorotyntsev’s story full in the chest, and was crawling back into the attack like those unfortunates who had advanced, without wire cutters, head-on against a hardened position. Slumped sideways, head in hand, elbow on table, he scanned the dark clods for a glimmer of hope.
Someone new appeared in the room. Someone with an anxious, wary face and nervous eyebrows. His eyes bored into the speaker.
Nor could Vorotyntsev be unaware that the iridescent gaze of Professor Andozerskaya was fixed unwaveringly upon him. Had she never seen a soldier before? Was he her first? She drank in all that he said. Looking him full in the face, never by so much as a pursing of the lips or a twitch of an eyebrow protesting against his most brutal and startling words. With her listening it was very easy to tell his story.
Vera was there too, silent, motionless, all eyes, dear, sweet Vera, even as a child a better listener than anybody.
But—morale? Was the fighting spirit of the army intact? Shingarev’s burning eyes demanded an answer to the unspoken question. What strange passion had hoisted this country doctor to the parliamentary heights? If he could not believe in the divinely favored Russian people, in the men of Novozhivotinnoye now at the front—what was the point of all his efforts? Of the Duma itself? The former doctor could go on counting cartridges, fixing bread prices, delivering sizzling speeches on behalf of all Russia at the Sorbonne and at Oxford only for as long as he believed that the spirit of Novozhivotinnoye was intact and undimmed.
He asked the question. But was sure that he knew the answer himself.
Fighting spirit? When a regiment may number three hundred bayonets and a division eight hundred? When the sight of burnt-out villages and campfires stoked with village fences can no longer disturb even a peasant’s heart? When the men look for excuses to avoid battle—escorting the wounded to the rear, for instance, or shooting their own fingers? And what of the inordinate number of prisoners? Are you not aware, gentlemen, that we have already surrendered more than two million men? The longer the war goes on, the readier our soldiers are to surrender. Glad just to be alive. They’ll even work for the Germans—as wagoners or in bakeries and kitchens. This war is the first in which orders have been given—by General Smirnov and his like—to open fire on men attempting to surrender, shoot those who have forgotten their oath, report capitulators so that their families’ allowances will be stopped, and announce that at the end of the war all who allow themselves to be taken captive will be put on trial. Of course, none of this is actually being carried out … but it is still a fact that such orders were previously unknown in the Russian army.
Now wait a minute! Let’s be more precise! Minervin, deft Duma duelist, peered sharply through his pince-nez. The will to win has surely not been lost? The ordinary Russian soldier, the army as a whole, still surely believes in victory? And what about you, Colonel?
Such irony!
When we are crouching in slimy trenches, mopping the clay up with our greatcoats, or when we spend forty-eight hours in the open with no sleep, in a frost so hard that the lubricant freezes in the machine gun, and we have to warm it over the fire—we at the front share one common grievance: that back in Russia they have forgotten us! In such a protracted war, who would not hanker after some distraction, after peacetime pleasures, restaurants, women in elegant dresses! They send us “comforts”—tobacco pouches and candy—while they themselves …
But no! It seems they aren’t indifferent to us after all! In fact they look to us for victory! They ask: Where’s your will to win? We ought to throw ourselves into their arms and say we have wronged you!
But the human heart has its faults, and the resentment is not dispelled, it lingers, it simply revolves on its own axis. Gentlemen liberals! Gentlemen of educated Russian society! (This bit not out loud.) Can I believe my ears? Have I perhaps misheard? Who was it who a mere twelve years ago shouted, shrieked that a great power had no need of war, that it was criminal to send our precious young men with their social idealism to the slaughter? That the only problems were internal ones, and that abroad it didn’t matter if we retreated, if we lost, in fact the sooner the better! Whose fault was it that we lost that war? Whose nerve if not yours snapped so quickly, letting Russia down with a bang? How could the country fight with the whole of educated society openly (and in the enemy’s hearing) calling for defeat? And when our hapless infantry, for the benefit of the world at large, were having the novel tactics of twentieth-century warfare etched on their hides, when they still marched in formation, and even in step, under artillery fire, instead of hiding one man to a foxhole, why did you not inquire then about our morale and our will to win?
Granted that arrogant underestimation of the untried Japanese, and the vested interests of the useless Admiral Alekseev, played a part … but Vorotyntsev, stuck in the present war, had changed his mind about the last. After the Japanese war Germany was trying to set a “Russian course” and we rejected her, preferring an unreliable friendship with Edward VII. But why, oh, why this trial of strength just because Germany is our neighbor to the west? Why do we need this war in particular, what can we possibly gain by it? Do you imagine you can escape retribution for the body blow you struck at our country then? That defeat, in a distant war, was bound to be followed by others nearer home. Of course, if you reckon on Russia ending with our generation you can permit yourself anything. Who, if not Stolypin, whom you so hate, dragged us out of the hole you had pushed us into? Gentlemen, gentlemen (these words were not spoken aloud), when did this great change take place, to make you all so belligerent? We “Young Turks” were abused as liberals, when we were in fact merely patriots. But it is too late, gentlemen, by the time these patriotic sentiments came over you, our army … our army … had ceased to … how can I put it?
Andrei Ivanovich, propped up awkwardly, head in hand, almost down to table level, said: Still, our soldiers aren’t just victims driven to the slaughter? Our fellow countrymen in gray greatcoats do after all understand our war aims? The objectives of Russia and of universal freedom are not surely alien to the Russian soldier? The Dardanelles, now—that is not just a wild idea of Petersburg—they are necessary to the economy of the whole Russian South.
Vorotyntsev was embarrassed. Not for want of an answer, but simply to hear such a question from a statesman whom he had been admiring all evening.
You want it both ways. At the very t
op, you think: The worse things are, the better. But the army must have the will to fight and win, must set its heart on Constantinople.
Only, even before the war, we forbade the army to utter a single word on any political matter—for fear of upsetting the German and Austrian emperors. And what would you have it say today? That “the Germans are the age-old enemies of Slavdom”? I believe we’re over the hump and into an age when such antitheses will cease to exist. Our soldiers’ hearts are ahead of ours. Except for the gas attacks they bear the enemy no grudge. Besides, some of the “Austrians” speak the same sort of lingo as we do. Carry on to final victory, remain loyal to our allies—all that is easy enough to say back here. You know so much about the fatherland, gentlemen, but nobody has ever told the soldiers any of it. They have no such obsessive vision of “a country called Russia.” They don’t wake up and fall asleep thinking of it. The common soldier has no concept of victory like yours—only of making peace—let everybody stop shooting, nothing else matters. They can be youngsters or old reservists, all they want is to come safely out of battle, they no longer fight like the old regulars. An infantryman languishes at the front from one wound to the next, and will have nothing to remember, he was just there as a target. Instead of fighting spirit he has a sense of doom. In 1914 the infantry were self-confident and cheerful. Now they’re resigned, apathetic, and smaller in build. That’s why I say our army is no longer … no longer …
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