November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  In a way they were right. It didn’t affect them. It affected their women. They didn’t have to shell out the extra rubles at the counter—the women did. Theirs was the heartbreak.

  “What d’you mean, shell out?” Evdokim retorted from his stool. “That’s if they get as far as the counter. We go to work, and we’re warm and dry, we eat in the co-op canteen. It’s called work, but it’s a cinch. But a woman has to wrap herself as warm as she can in her shawl and go and stand out in the freezing cold, two or three hours at a time—and there’s still no knowing if she’ll get anything. And who’s looking after the kids? And the house is going to hell.”

  Evdokim Ivanych spoke with a depth of feeling for his wife that comes only with age. When you can put yourself in her place. His fine wrinkles were darkened by iron dust, his eyes were dim, he always looked and sounded glum, even when he was half smiling under his mustache.

  “Warm, hooray!” one of the apprentices said cheerily, moving over to put more wood in the stove. “There’s not much coal at home, you can’t get really warm.”

  He had the stove door open, but the wood was too big and needed breaking up.

  “Haven’t you got eyes?” Sozont asked sternly. He had taken his time about checking the young man.

  Whether or not the kid understood, he obediently dropped the wood, already charred, and threw in some skimpier, rougher cutoffs.

  They were in favor of sugar coupons: what’s fair is fair. Not so long ago the rich hogged the sugar whatever the price, and the poor got sweet nothing. Now every consumer got the same, and that was the right way to do it.

  If everybody was equally hungry, nobody need feel aggrieved. There’d be no cause to moan. The really vexing thing was that people weren’t equal, that some did well at the expense of others. They ought to put meat on coupons as well. They had it all fixed once, why did they drop it? Beef, now? Who’d believe it? Makes you giddy to think of it. Forty-five kopecks a pound! Have we gone crazy? Who could keep up with that?

  They ought to do the same with milk. Life in Petersburg is all haywire: if no milk’s brought in, there’s none for the kids, and you can’t go out to the stall and milk the cow. There are some skinny cows in the village of Michael the Archangel, but there’s never enough hay in this present mess. It takes more than twenty-five years to get used to living like this.

  Yet nowhere in Russia could workers’ wages compare with those paid in Petersburg. At first they used to add up the figures on the quiet and tell each other, “We’ll make a bundle out of the war.” Since then wages had more or less doubled. But prices had beaten them to it and raced out of sight.

  But whatever position you’re in, some are better off, some worse. The soldiers envy you, Dmitriev reminded them. Here you only have to lift a shell off the bench and load it; there they put their heads in the way of it. Want to join them, for half a pound of meat?

  True enough. Life in Petersburg was terribly hard, but just about bearable. Try living bent double in the trenches. Here you might have to put in ten or even twelve hours at work, but you went home and slept under your own roof at night.

  “Only they’ll be packing us off out there soon.”

  “The more we strike, the sooner we’ll be there.”

  “Oh yes—and who’s going to take our place?”

  “The Chinese, that’s who!”

  “Chi-nese?” The agile carpenter left his bench for the first time and opened his arms wide. “What can they do, the Chinese? Which bench can they work at?”

  “They can be taught,” Malozemov said, from down on his log. He’d seen all sorts of people taught in his time.

  “He’d fold up in no time, your Chinaman would, even just on unskilled labor,” the carpenter said, shrill with indignation. “D’you think two Chinamen could lift your ladle in the foundry?”

  “What about you—are you tougher than a Chinaman?” Sozont asked, from above.

  “I don’t do any lifting,” the carpenter said, seizing the gauge and starting in on some new lengths of wood. He was hard at it, because he was on piecework.

  The others were in no great hurry.

  They all knew that there was to be a meeting, and who would be there—but they avoided the subject, and the engineer was gleaning less than he had expected from their conversation.

  Should he mention it himself? He somehow couldn’t get the words out.

  Malozemov, from his log, kept glancing at the engineer with his knowing old eyes. He realized that Dimitriev had come looking for support but that the conversation had taken the wrong turn.

  The conversation floundered while Dmitriev sat among them for half an hour, getting, if anything, more timid all the time. This was their life. What hope was there that five hundred hands would suddenly take hold of the trench mortar?

  Only when they were summoned by a shout, and started moving, did Evdokim Ivanych take the engineer by the elbow, out in the foundry, and speak with feeling as he had a little while back about his wife and the cows in the village of Michael the Archangel.

  “The main thing is, Mitrich, talk boldly, like the agitators do. Don’t let anybody interrupt. If they shout, you shout back. With us workers, you see, it’s this way—all for one and one for all. We’re like a single block of stone, we’re all either to one side or to the other. To split is something we just can’t do. You can win us over—but it has to be one and all. So let’s see you do it.”

  [33]

  Thus encouraged, Dmitriev went into the big engineering shop, where the crane hook, detached and drawn up into the roof, would still be oscillating for some time. He had to exchange a few words with the chief engineer and return greetings from foremen, but his mind was elsewhere. He was carefully studying the gathering.

  Every worker there, left to himself, would probably respond to a simple approach. But when five or six hundred at once poured out into the yard at the end of the shift, black-faced, indistinguishable, mysterious, alien, it was no good trying to remember what you could say to or expect from any single man. Instead, you automatically looked away, lowered your eyes, and helplessly acknowledged the undeniable gap between “you” and “us.”

  An indelible line had been drawn. Would he ever learn to cross it effortlessly, or at least without letting them see the effort it cost?

  It was no different this time as they crossed the floor and found seats, jumping up onto the ledges of their workbenches or other flat surfaces, or placing benches across the trolley track in the central aisle for those coming from other shops. He had no experience with them in such numbers, and in this context, and found them rather intimidating. Massive pieces of iron, cast iron and steel lay around and were moved from place to place, in this shop as everywhere in the Obukhov factory, but there were established formulas, immutably fixed engineering procedures, grips and cranes, to deal with them. Two hundred or two hundred and fifty live, soft-bodied, loosely packed people became a huge, unknown object governed by unknown formulas. This was different from engineering. It was wrong to call politicians empty wafflers. The tension made them talk so much.

  And Evdokim Ivanych was right. Workers could only be thought of in the mass, that was what you had to take into account. A single peasant can do two hundred jobs, he and his family together have two hundred skills, and he is most complete when he is alone. A single worker is nothing, even the most skilled of metalworkers, like Evdokim: whatever the job, he has only one operation, or part of an operation, to perform, and for completeness two hundred must gather together.

  The policeman was there, of course. With his fat face and the self-importance of one who knows it all better than any of them. Without a word to anyone he sat down on a stool to the side and slightly to the rear of the speaker.

  He spoiled the whole scene, spoiled Dmitriev’s appearance in the eyes of the workers.

  The foremen sat in a little group of their own.

  Komarov, dark-skinned and unshaven, sat aloof, leaving it to someone else to open th
e meeting.

  They were all taking their seats now, men in dark blouses, worn outside and unbelted, in tunics, or in old jackets, whatever they wore to work. Except for the caps, which they all wore while working, but had now, even those who were at home here, removed, as custom dictated, without being told or asked to. Someone had started it, the rest had followed suit, and now they were bareheaded to a man. But what did you do with your cap? Hold it on your knees. Or knead it in your hands.

  The doffed caps and the silence hardly broken by subdued conversation showed that they realized the exceptional importance of this gathering.

  Of the bared heads a few were close-shaven, soldier fashion, some were balding, perhaps the result of soft living, most had the bushy hair of a still inexhaustibly vigorous stock. There were haircuts of all sorts, some done with the kitchen scissors to save money on barbers.

  No, they weren’t prospering. They looked careworn, anxious, sullen. When prices raced ahead of wages, what good was overtime to them? Just a waste of effort. From their point of view they were right to refuse it.

  But only from the point of view of one who could pull his sheepskin tight around his chest, ram his cap down over his eyes, and run against the biting wind from the Neva home to his own apartment.

  Dmitriev had been rehearsing his opening words in his mind and so missed the beginning of the proceedings. He stood there, upright and braced, aware only of his eyes fixed on the workers and the hammering in his breast. They were all waiting, looking at him, and he had forgotten to seek advice on the very first step, hadn’t even thought about it. This assembly, two hundred strong. What should he call them? Comrades? No, that would be cheap toadying, and anyway with the policeman there it was impossible, he didn’t want to strike the revolutionary note. Gentlemen? That would sound ridiculous. The Russian language was immense but there was nothing for it except: “Brothers! Some of us …” He glanced at his own people sitting in a bunch. Little Malozemov was invisible, screened by the man in front, but Sozont’s austere, hairless pumpkin of a head shone out over the crowd. “Some of us know that the factory has produced a successful prototype of a trench mortar and is about to go on to mass production. The time has come for some machines and some whole shops to be put on this job exclusively. So I have asked the management … and the representatives of the Workers’ Group … to assemble you, who will be taking part in this, in order to …” (Was this really necessary? Why all this “in order to”? Why not just say, “Do what you’re told”?) “In order to explain to you what sort of gun it is and what it is for.”

  They pricked up their ears. Men with shaggy heads, heavy jaws, knitted brows, nearly all beardless, here and there a mustache, but mostly barefaced, cheeks sucked in, mouths pursed distrustfully, wondering what there was to explain. What’s this pig in a poke they’re offering us now? Better watch out.

  How could they be any different in stony Petersburg? Neither strength nor refreshment nor sound counsel seeps through its stones to you. And your ears are assailed with tales of … “Elisei’s night.”

  But Dmitriev was pleased with the sound of his own voice. It had a clear, firm ring.

  “You have to realize that in this war things have often taken a turn that no army ever expected. And that goes for the artillery. Ever since it was first invented it has led a sort of separate existence: it always stood apart from the other arms, it fired from a distance, it didn’t get mixed up with the infantry. But in modern warfare the battlefield is so congested, and the situation changes so rapidly, that the artillery cannot stand apart and at a distance from the infantry. Machine-gun posts, for instance, spring up and disappear so quickly, they have to be dealt with in a few short minutes, so that an artillery observer, even if he is in the thick of the infantry, cannot inform a battery well to his rear over lines that keep breaking, find the range and pinpoint the target.”

  Was he making it too complicated? Apparently not. Some faces showed interest: might as well listen, can’t get skinned for that.

  “We do have our three-inch field gun, as you know. A splendid gun, very good for grazing fire, does a beautiful job.” (He demonstrated with his hand how effective it was.) “So a single battery can wipe out a battalion of infantry in close formation, or a cavalry regiment, in a matter of minutes.”

  (A beautiful job!)

  “But because it’s a low firer it has to keep quiet when our infantry closes to within a hundred and fifty sazhens of the enemy, so as not to fire on our own troops. That means you can neither position it close nor fire over the heads of our own infantry. The result is that at the most difficult and dangerous moments, when our infantry is being mowed down by enemy machine guns, it is denied the support of our own artillery.”

  How was it going? He thought he was getting through to them. They were all looking fixedly, silently, more and more gravely at the engineer. Who wouldn’t be affected? It could be the fate of any one of you … any one of us, tomorrow. They’d been on war work for over two years, and for over two years the threat of punishment hanging over them had been—the draft, the training depot, relegation to the trenches. Yet what did they know about this war? About the cannon produced in their factory? How they were positioned, how they were shifted from place to place, how they fired?

  “Or more difficult and dangerous still: when our infantry, with a great effort and heavy losses, breaches enemy lines and breaks into his trenches, at the very moment when all is muddle and confusion, when nobody is in the right place and not everybody has an officer of his own at hand and there is no hope of communication by telephone—at that very moment the infantry is deprived of artillery support: with no communications link, unable to see from a distance because of the smoke and dust, and amid the general confusion—who would ever dare open fire? The upshot is that as a reward for its victories and all the losses it incurs our infantry lands in a particularly vulnerable situation, and may easily be rolled back with heavy casualties.”

  Best of all, the glow and the steady beat in his chest told him that he had almost surmounted the barrier of excruciating embarrassment, more or less unthinkingly, self-assuredly even, as he saw first one face, then another, a fifth, a seventh, brighten. He had after all stolen nothing from them, he was guilty of no offense against them, why shouldn’t he look them in the eye?

  More and more eyes were fixed on him. With interest, and close attention. The kitchen haircuts were endearing. Out there, brothers, you get your head shaven—and maybe lose it altogether.

  “So it’s been demonstrated, in combat and at the cost of blood, that we need an artillery escort, to accompany its infantry as closely as possible, able to open fire immediately, and with perfect visibility whatever the circumstances. How can we manage that? Our three-inch gun is not adapted to the purpose. Dismantled for transportation it weighs over one hundred and twenty poods. Which means that on a firm, smooth road it takes six horses to pull it. And if the going is just a bit more difficult—where there are ruts or mud or furrows—you need eight or even ten horses, and the gunners still have to give an occasional push. What would you expect the road to be like on a battlefield? As bad as can be. You’ll never get all those horses, and if you did they’d all be wounded in no time. In short, if the artillery is to accompany its infantry in battle it can’t rely on horses.”

  They were a very good audience. Those whose view was blocked craned around from behind other men’s shoulders. Openmouthed, or frowning, or drawn and tense, they were all receptive, they all understood, and Dmitriev saw no sign of resistance or mockery. He could draw support not only from his own little group but from almost any face in the crowd. How to account for the viciousness, the wild cries, the shaking of fists, in those street clashes, like the one five days earlier on Great Sampsonyevsky Prospect? Their faces were not particularly intelligent, they were rather duller, less varied than peasant faces—but they were faces with Russian features and responsive to Russian speech. What kind of contemptuous or callous treatment
had it taken to alienate them so completely?

  “So then, our artillery must become still lighter and smaller. Easier to dismantle and reassemble. Our guns must learn not to ride behind, but to march shoulder to shoulder with the infantry and do what is required immediately. Our guns must be such that the men can spring off them like goats and slip into the same trenches as the infantry. In other words, we need a trench gun. Just such a gun as we, our group of skilled workers, have now made.”

  They smiled. Not his own men—they knew it all of old—but the other two hundred. Because they were given a clear and simple message: see what clever fellows there are in our factory, just look what we can do.

  “Our gun is precisely that, easy to dismantle and reassemble. Dismantled for transportation it weighs seven poods. Any three of you could move it, right? In a tight spot maybe two could handle it?”

  The engineer seemed to be asking their opinion. There was a subdued buzz of interest and men turned to look at their neighbors: would it take three? or only two?

  “The gun carriage weighs another four poods, which two men can manage at a run if necessary. Add a pound and a quarter for the shell—you can practically put that in your pocket! And this gun can fire eight rounds a minute.”

  “And what’s its range?” one of the youngest skilled men asked brightly, unaggressively.

  “It can manage as much as three versts!” Dmitriev answered unhesitatingly.

  A buzz of astonishment went around the shop.

  “But it doesn’t need to. More often than not it will be firing at targets visible to the naked eye, up to three hundred sazhens away. And as soon as the Germans spot it our gunners can dismantle and shift it, bent double along the bottom of the trench if necessary.”

  They showed their approval of the gun. A cheerful murmur spread through the audience and grew louder.

  By now Dmitriev had got into his stride and would have gone on to explain how this gun differed from ordinary mortars. And tell them that the Germans and the French already had small-caliber trench artillery and that only the Russians were lagging behind. But he sensed that this was superfluous and might even put them off: knowing that only Russia was without such artillery might arouse either eagerness to compete or—who knows?—the bitter thought that Russia was … like that.