November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  If a truehearted village doctor no longer has ears for the dread of men condemned to face frontal assault—not just one battalion for half an hour at a time, but all peasant Russia, week after week, month after month … cannot turn half an eye on all those Prussian, Polish, Galician, and Romanian fields strewn with the dead … Who will never rise again to complain and protest … There is no family in which prayers are not said for those who have gone, no village church in which memorial services are not held. They are long-suffering, of course—and we place our hopes on it. But maybe we should come to our senses sooner? Country doctors, parliamentarians, army officers—what excuse is there for any of us if we survive but leave the corpse of Novozhivotinnoye or Zastruzhe behind us? (Surely he can see this for himself?) If the fighting spirit of the army has already evaporated, if their bodies are worn out, how long can we go on trying the people’s patience? If the soldiers are already murmuring among themselves, “Of course we’ll defend ourselves, but when it comes to attacking, our legs don’t seem to move.” We mustn’t wait for this to flare up openly!

  Their condition is worse than fatigue: it’s one of paralyzed bafflement. And that’s how they die—baffled. For more than two years there has been no attempt to keep up morale by explaining anything, to inspire them, all they know is they have to die! Peasants believe firmly in some sort of higher justice. But during this war they’ve ceased to feel its existence: they are dying without knowing why. It isn’t fear that keeps them going, but they have to force themselves. They would be equal to any sacrifice, but must see the necessity for it. Our people are so good-hearted, so docile, but we have abused their docility. They struggle and strain to carry out a duty they do not understand—but can this go on forever? You say that the people will not forgive this war: true, but it is not just the government they won’t forgive, it is all of us!

  For a professional soldier to utter such words in such militant company was almost unthinkable, incomprehensible: but people must be made to realize that all things, even Russia, have limits. There is a limit to expansion. It makes itself known in the strength of the expansionist will, in the depth of tillage and lushness of vegetation on every square yard of land enclosed. Expansion cannot continue indefinitely. Surely Russia did not need to expand further. She needed intensive cultivation within her existing borders. Awkward for a colonel in the regular army to say it in so many words, but was the war necessary for the survival of the state, and not just for its own sake?

  What does it really mean to love your country? Those photographs of fallen “pious warriors,” which you all scan working your way through five newspapers over your morning coffee—let them sink in, try to imagine that you are the channel they have run through to soak into the ground, leaving nothing but those brown spots behind. Tell yourselves that these are the very, very best, those incapable of shrinking and hiding. That it will take Russia more than two generations to make good these losses!

  Try to feel what it’s like to be wounded in the stomach. To get a bullet through your chest. To have your jaw dislocated. Your cheek torn out by a dumdum bullet. A corner of your skull sliced off.

  If a man can feel none of this, what right has he to judge?

  I managed to visit the plastic surgery exhibition on the Field of Mars today. Have you seen it? It’s very near. Get down there, gentlemen, and you will feel something. There are no words for it in ordinary human language. Goya never drew anything like it. Faces so hacked up, so lacerated, so cruelly shattered—boneless faces, eyeless faces, no longer resembling anything human—and that’s how they’ll live the rest of their lives. Get down there, gentlemen.

  An officer does better not to think about the wounded, of course. It weakens him. But say you go along to a dressing station to see a hero from your own unit, wounded a couple of hours ago. It’s evening. In a dugout. There’s a small kerosene lamp, high up on a shelf, scorching the air. Gloomy half-darkness. A few trestle beds along the walls, with a wounded man on each. And this medical post little wider than any ordinary dugout, this ill-lit airless coffin, is the last he sees of this earth, his last picture of this life. To see the wounded man’s face you have to hold a candle near to it. In those two hours the brave young face has become unrecognizable: the eyes are enlarged, and there is such awareness in them, the mouth is sunken, the cheeks are yellow. He is wondering when the priest will come with the host.

  Just think: a month ago (Nanny had told him) a Japanese prince came to Petrograd, the main streets were decked with Russian and Japanese flags and ordinary people were asking, “Why were we at war with them? Was it worth our while getting killed in the Japanese war?” Will they be greeting the Germans in the same way in a few years’ time? (Meanwhile the Japanese despise us for not putting the lessons of that war to good use.)

  I don’t know—we might have been internally prepared for some other war, but not for this one. Now there’s nothing we can do to mend things except cut it short. I don’t know … maybe we could persuade the Allies to make peace. Or else … (must definitely not say this to anyone here present) … or else we could just leave the Entente and the Central Powers to sort it out between them, while Old Mother Russia cleans up, scrubs her floors, and lights her stove …

  Does all this seem strange from me? Well, only a man who has himself been an active cog in that army for twenty years, and missed not a single day of the last war, or of this one, will dare say such things. A career officer is supposed to do everything he can to win any and every war for his fatherland, isn’t he? But I’m not sure that I still am a professional soldier. One hundred and fifteen weeks, eight hundred days—after that the most inspired officer won’t want to take his profession in such large doses … Or am I just too sensitive? The weariness, the monotony of all those deaths, the longing to be out of it, the insult of it all have gnawed at me, left me hollow inside, and I cannot go on living in this trade. Your knees give way, you need to sit. Your arms dangle helplessly. Your head droops …

  Officers—what are they?

  Aren’t they part of the people? Yes, they are the mainspring and the will of our people. A gas attack has started, the soldiers already have their gas masks on, but somebody has to warn the line to the rear and Lieutenant Grushetsky from Tambov peels off his mask, telephones a warning, and is gassed. Or take Lieutenant Colonel Vevern, in command of a battery, he can’t locate the enemy battery, so he goes through the German defenses alone, to see for himself, then come back and shell it. And what has to be done is done. You have limited vision from an artillery observation post, so Captain Shigorin rises to his full height to direct his battery’s answering fire. Within a quarter of an hour he is struck on the temple by a shell fragment and killed. But what had to be done is done. It’s the best of them who get killed. Happy the officer whose soldiers say, “You’ll be all right with our man.” Happy the officer whose soldiers follow him into the attack as one man. Even if his soldiers take to their heels he is still not the unhappiest of men, just as long as he can lug home a couple of machine guns single-handed.

  Of every seven regular officers serving when war broke out there is now only one left. And the men despairingly sense that their new fledgling officers don’t know their business and will be the death of them all.

  If you’d known Lieutenant Skalon or Staff Captain Novogrebelsky (and stood over him, barely alive, face deathly pale, eyelashes still fluttering), or Lieutenant Colonel Chistoserdov, known them and lost them forever, you would realize that the Russian army no longer exists.

  It has ceased to exist.

  You needed only to see Captain Tarantsev, stark, staring mad, standing stiff as a post in a hail of bullets, five hundred yards from Radzanovo. People were shouting, “Captain Tarantsev! Get down! Get under cover!” and he shouts back, barely turning his head, “The company’s gone! Nothing matters now!”

  Are you still alive yourself when you surrender a village, watch it burning, and can see by the light of the flames Germans walking aro
und and putting a final bullet into your wounded soldiers? When the personnel of a regiment changes completely four times in one year, so that the regimental commander never lays eyes on some of his men, just sends them into battle and carries away afterward whatever there is left to carry—is he still a regiment commander, or has he become merely a murderer?

  What was it General Levachev used to tell us? An officer must be mercilessly strict only with himself. With fellow officers he must be gentler. And with other ranks gentler still.

  Race with them over impassable leagues of empty country, rejoice with them in some sudden rise in the ground, cower with them against its lifesaving shoulder, with shells crashing around you, press your ear to the ground and hear the soldier’s heart and your own heart flagging … And to that faltering rhythm you might tell them (tell whom? not the Kadets, not the right wing, not the government—tell whom?) that the best sort of victory now, the best way to preserve our honor is to save what is left of the Russian people. And there’s nothing more to be said.

  Never mind what names people give to such a peace: no Constantinople, no Poland, no Livonia would mean fewer anxieties. Just as long as we remain ourselves.

  Whether you have yet reached this conclusion or not—the war has reached a stage at which to save Russia, to save ourselves, those who are left of us, before we are battered beyond all recognition, would itself be victory.

  Even if it takes—some sort of revolution. (But that is not for your ears.)

  * * *

  I hereby inform you that I am happy with the army, and my officers are good ones. So don’t you fret and don’t you grieve for me.

  (Soldier’s letter form)

  *

  * *

  We want no gold, orthodox Tsar, we want no silver.

  Just let us go, orthodox Tsar, home to where we come from.

  Home to our fathers, home to our mothers, home to Holy Russia.

  [23]

  As soon as a prolonged pause indicated that the speaker was disinclined to go on, the new listener with the nervously twitching eyebrows, bare chin, and pencil-line mustache was the first to break in before anyone else could comment or protest.

  “Tell me, what are your views on the Ivanov antiaircraft mount? Have you seen it in action?”

  In telling his agonizing story Vorotyntsev had taken a fateful step. The incrustation that had constricted body and mind seemed to have cracked and left a crevice through which he could escape. What he needed now was hours of unruffled stillness, without speaking or moving, just resting, perhaps just learning to sit casually in a chair as others did, and as he could not—he habitually sat so that he could spring up at the first alarm. Here was a blessed opportunity to let himself go and return to his long-lost and forgotten normal state. And for that what he very much needed was for the nice Professor Andozerskaya to go on sitting near him where he could see her, with those eyes that occasionally flashed green fire, enthusiastically approving. So that for the time being he did not want to take part in conversation. Here was the recognition so coveted after all his misfortunes. He had lugged his heavy burden to the right place at the right time, had shared it and was liberated. He had no wish now to answer any political rejoinder, any repetition of the need, as the Kadets saw it, for “speedy and decisive victory,” or the impossibility of winning “with this Tsar” (or any other?). He had, he hoped, made it plain enough that what was needed was not to win the war but to get out of it quickly. Anyway, this company was capable only of repeating the same arguments: however often you told them that the army’s war-weariness had passed all limits they still stuck to their old tune—that only the war held the country together, that without it discontent with the Tsar would have caused a general collapse. They were more deeply mired in the war than the Tsar himself.

  Whatever else he had expected, it was not this question about the Ivanov mount. Vorotyntsev’s neck tensed and he forced himself to raise his head. Was there lurking among these alien Petersburgers one of his own kind, camouflaged in a city suit? He couldn’t have roused himself to answer any of the expected questions, but this …?!

  “It can be transferred from traveling position to operational with remarkable speed. If a column is on the move and enemy aircraft appear, the gun carriage is pulled over to one side and the piece is ready to fire in a matter of minutes. It’s hard-wearing too. Better than the Radzivilovich model.”

  “What about its firing performance?”

  “Well, none of them fire at the full angle of elevation. And the recoil dislodges the sights, so you have to replace them every time … which means that …”

  This earnestly probing man with the anxious eyes, the rapid speech, the questioning mind racing ahead of the unavoidable polysyllables leaned toward Vorotyntsev, and Vorotyntsev toward him, until they were talking tête-à-tête across the room, and when drawings were needed the other man produced his notepad, his fountain pen, and offered them to the colonel.

  Just as if all that had been said was of no importance to these two, as though Vorotyntsev was only pretending, and the rest of them could please themselves, because this was what really mattered. Things could hardly have been more awkward.

  Andrei Ivanovich saved the situation, coming over to them with a friendly laugh—"Gentlemen, gentlemen!” (but unsmiling, his face as gray as that of a shell-shocked soldier surfacing from a fall of earth, his eyes unfocused, his voice uncertain of itself). “Gentlemen, before we go any further, let me introduce you … Pyotr Akimovich Obodovsky … A sort of soldier himself, you might say: not long ago he put down a miners’ mutiny in the Lysva region with the resoluteness of a colonel, but without a drop of blood spilled, just by speechifying.”

  Obodovsky frowned, looked pained. What did all that matter? His hand was hot and dry.

  “Russians being full of surprises, Pyotr Akimovich has more or less given up the mining industry and is interested only in artillery. He has set up a Subcommittee for Military-Technical Aid, under Guchkov’s committee.”

  Everything was happening at once. How wonderfully well it had worked out! An engineer specializing in artillery was pretty much the same as an Academy-trained officer. And a collaborator of Guchkov? The second time he’d stumbled on that trail—on this first unplanned evening.

  “Do you see Aleksandr Ivanovich often? Does he …?”

  They would have gone into a rapturous huddle over the notepad, although it was impolite to ignore the rest of the company, had not another of Vorotyntsev’s eager listeners, the little professor in the stiff lace collar, brought them back into the company.

  “Tell me, is the émigré Obodovsky, one of the Kropotkin circle, a relative of yours?”

  The sound of her voice was happiness: it told Vorotyntsev that she was not preparing to leave, not turning her attention elsewhere. How he wished … how good it would be if she knew his whole history, how he had fallen from grace … She was the one he wanted to hear his story.

  Obodovsky looked around abruptly, took a while to understand.

  “Who d’you say? Oh, yes. That’s me.”

  And back to business. Vorotyntsev was drawn in again, willy-nilly—how could you refuse this engineer? But Andozerskaya, not to be put off, said, laughing at them, “Forgive me, my interest is merely theoretical …”

  (How melodious her voice was. And how prettily the sinews in her neck moved.)

  “How can you combine the beliefs of your first and second lives? Anarchism and artillery?”

  Anarchism? Vorotyntsev had never seen a real-life anarchist. This engineer with the voracious need to know …?

  Obodovsky shied away, looking for cover. “Somebody pinned that label on me, and I’m stuck with it. When I was abroad I had the good fortune to become friendly with Pyotr Alekseevich. So people got it into their heads that I was an anarchist.”

  Minervin came to the rescue, forcefully, unanswerably. “The fragmentation of the Russian intelligentsia into parties is merely fortuitous. We all grew
from the same root—from the need to serve the people, and we share the same view of the world. We all of us serve the cause as best we can—whether as anarchists or as gunners.”

  The answer had been given, and further insistence would be impertinent. But Andozerskaya, who was a head shorter than the chair back, was like a little girl invited to join in a grown-up conversation. She persisted. Her voice was light and quiet, but she had a commanding manner.

  “Yes, but you had a revolutionary reason for emigrating?”

  “People have made too much of it,” Obodovsky said. “We had to run.”

  His wife finished his story for him—a smooth, quiet woman, also nearing forty, she explained to Andozerskaya and to anyone who would listen that “he was just half an hour ahead of the police. I went to the station to see him off, and when I got back the local policeman arrived to get an undertaking not to leave the district.” Her dress was more than modest, it was frugal. She was plumpish and comfortable in her movements, to make up for her husband’s lean restlessness. She had worn well, with her dark hair and her quiet Russian, rustic even, beauty—Tatyana Larina might have looked like that at forty. Obodovsky used the Public Library, but Vera had not seen his wife before.

  Vera was very pleased. Proud of her brother. It had worked out even better than she had intended. Although in his impetuous way he had committed a few political indiscretions, his hair-raising story had made up for it. They had listened eagerly to every word. Vera had always thought her brother an outstandingly able man: if he had not risen to high position it was because of his own straightforwardness and the crookedness of the way to the top. He and Andrei Ivanovich had taken to each other. And look how readily he was now answering Obodovsky’s questions. And he obviously had all Andozerskaya’s attention.

  This was more like business. Vorotyntsev answered readily. He hadn’t known about the Subcommittee for Military-Technical Aid! Meeting Obodovsky could be invaluable. There was plenty of advice he should be given. He could be asked to give attention to things the army at the front couldn’t get across however loud it shouted.