Neither of them had learned to enjoy his war, as Chernega did.
Kotya insisted, and he was right, that no one need resent dying in a worthwhile action, one that influences the course of events, but that it was an affront to have to die in a shambles for no reason worth mentioning, the helpless victim of sheer muddle. You were in the grip of despair—it wasn’t cowardice—at the futility of it all, stuck there like helpless sheep.
It was, however, Konstantin’s firm conviction, never before expressed so clearly, that a man dies the death decreed for him, and that there is no escaping your fate.
“Staff Captain Sazontsev served in the same battalion from the beginning of the war, in the front line throughout, and never got a scratch. An excellent soldier. Then the division commander took pity on him and transferred him to division HQ. On his very first evening there a shell exploded nearby, Sazontsev opened the door of his dugout to see where the explosion was, and was killed instantly by shrapnel from a second shell.”
Ustimovich nodded. He wasn’t a bit surprised.
“Then again, there was a volunteer named Tilicheev in our battery, who had a very serious heart condition and wasn’t expected to live. He had bent our commander’s ear back in 1914, and been taken on contrary to regulations. And what a soldier he was! He seemed to court death: ‘Better me than you—I’m dying anyway.’ And he came out in one piece every time. Then, not so long ago, he was lying on the grass and a lieutenant from another unit came along and asked him the way to the battalion commander’s dugout. ‘It’s difficult to explain,’ Tilicheev says. ‘I’ll take you there.’ He jumped to his feet awkwardly, took two steps, and fell down dead.”
Of course, just as Ustimovich had expected.
“Or take Bombardier Denisov. He was fearless, stood his ground with shrapnel falling around him, didn’t even keep his head down. Then one day he suddenly went crazy and dashed for cover in a munitions trench. He had to run quite a way. He lay down flat—and a shell landed right behind him. It should have killed all of us. But it didn’t go off. Denisov, though, was fatally concussed. Oh no, you can’t escape your fate!”
Ustimovich nodded repeatedly.
Sanya felt bound to contradict: “Just think what you’re saying! It can’t be like that! If it were, what would become of our freedom of will? There would be nothing left of humanity.”
But the two of them were so involved by now that Sanya was more or less excluded from their conversation. Ustimovich described the grenadiers’ reconnaissance raid, and Kotya listened patiently. Then it was time for tea. They had some biscuits in their ration tins. The tea warmed and enlivened them. The main subject of conversation now was the State Duma: for all its fine talk it gave no help—real, substantial help, that is, not trains fitted out as bathhouses. Kotya began chopping the air again.
“I would plant all those Milyukovs, Maklakovs, Puryshkeviches, and Markovs in our Austro-Hungarian trench for half a day, give them a taste of what ‘fighting on to a victorious conclusion’ means. If they still feel like ranting in the Duma after that—let them!”
Ustimovich agreed completely. It was impossible to imagine anything more alien to him than this war. As far as he was concerned, the war could end in complete defeat tomorrow—just as long as he was discharged and sent home.
While he was having tea Ustimovich cleared his throat repeatedly, and his voice became warmer. He made some incoherent remarks about teaching school, how difficult it was to explain things to dunces, then switched to the common soldier, how he munched away at his rusks on the march, sitting down, lying down, until he fell asleep, and was incapable of saving anything for later.
Sanya started feeling melancholy. The conversation had developed as if Kotya had come to see Ustimovich, not himself. They would have only a few hours together, and there was so much he wanted to share, but as things were, they probably wouldn’t notice if he went away.
Sure enough, when they’d finished tea Ustimovich suggested a game of sixty-six or chemin de fer to the man he’d never seen before. (Chernega played for laughs, but Sanya couldn’t stand the sight of playing cards.) Kotya had begun to seem so much like Ustimovich that it was easy to imagine him agreeing. But not at all. He suddenly seemed to come to his senses, drew out his pocket watch, and looked at Sanya. And it was as though the veneer of harshness which had covered his face all evening had peeled away. The eyes that looked at Sanya now were as friendly as they always used to be—not just ordinary brown eyes flecked with yellow, eyes like no one else’s, if you covered the rest of his face you would know him, they were unique. Meditative eyes.
You couldn’t imagine him playing cards. That was a variant of drunkenness.
Sanya took him for a walk before they turned in.
Now that Kotya had unburdened himself—twice, holding nothing back, and that was a good thing—he said no more, just strode along in silence. Yawning from time to time. As you do when you gradually calm down after an outburst.
It was a dark, but starry night. The sky had cleared. Beyond Golubovshchina there was a reddish glow where the moon was rising. Every day it rose one hour later, and farther to the left. When you live in the same place for a long time and your eyes are used to it, you know where, over which trees, the moon—full, almost full, waning—will rise. On quiet evenings, if the weather was fine, Sanya liked to leave the dugout for a stroll, near the battery or over toward Golubovshchina. These solitary walks by moonlight made him feel younger, cleared his thoughts, raised them to higher things.
This too was a night flooded with moonlight, and they could have strolled over the hardening ground till midnight if they had wished, but Kotya was too dazed, too tired, he could not stop yawning.
He was in a pitiable state.
Sanya did return to the fact that they had burdened their consciousness by volunteering. “You’re right, Kotya, it weighs on my conscience the whole time. But our brigade chaplain has a very convincing way of putting it. He says that logically the opposite of war is not peace but absence of war. The opposite of peace is the world’s bad conscience.”
He paused between phrases, giving Kotya time to join in with a word of protest or assent. But Kotya said nothing. He scraped the ground with his boots at every step. Something else in common with Ustimovich. Something he never used to do. He said nothing.
“So that war is not the worst form of violence. So you and I have not committed such a very grave sin in going to war … It was not such a great mistake as all that.”
No, Kotya would not be tempted to join in assembling and testing this ladder of arguments. His response, in fact, was one of irritation.
“Who’s talking about sin—it’s our lives we’re going to throw away here! We’ve made a present of them—to whom? For what stinking reason? You and I have read and reread everything the world’s philosophers have written—and I ask you, where does it get you? It’s all rubbish, waste of time. Words lead nowhere, do no good. Only action counts. The word is completely bankrupt, all over the world. And all those humanitarians, your Tolstoy included, and all those Dostoevskys, are just so many gasbags.”
The words came out in short, sharp bursts.
There was nothing more to be said.
The moon had risen over Golubovshchina, shedding its eternally mysterious, eternally enthralling light. Sanya could have talked the whole night through. But it wasn’t working out that way. They strolled around for a while in silence and went home to bed.
Ustimovich had already stretched his ungainly frame full length on the solid bank of earth that served him as a bed—on his back, of course, to help him snore. The only free time Ustimovich had in the army was in bed.
Sanya put Kotya to bed down below. He himself would be climbing up onto Chernega’s bunk.
While Sanya, stripped down to his underpants, was on his way to blow out the lamp, Kotya, perhaps seeing that he was upset, relented and said, with his old, good-natured laugh, “Listen—d’you remember going to a tavern w
ith that old eccentric, the Stargazer? Well there’s a pretty good library left behind in the manor house, the owner was obviously a reader. And would you believe it, there’s a little book by our Stargazer … Miscellaneous articles on the Ideal Society, how to inculcate virtue. I leafed through them all—bah, these people who’ve never been shot at …”
Kotya was lying flat on his back, with his head on two pillows. “Why,” he asked, “should you have to inculcate virtue? That’s nonsense. If goodness is part of human nature it will show itself without anyone inculcating it. And if it is not part of humanity’s makeup there’s no point in pretending it is.”
That was Sanya’s last sight of him as he blew out the lamp and climbed aloft.
Anyway, Kotya had changed his tune.
Sanya could hear in the darkness that Kotya was not asleep. He thought regretfully that he had expressed himself badly, and wanted even now to strike up a worthwhile conversation. Hanging over the edge of the top bunk in the darkness he said, “You can’t settle it with a stroke of the ax and say either goodness exists or it doesn’t. It does—and it doesn’t. It is there in our nature—and it isn’t. It is what we have to evolve toward. Otherwise what is the sense of our earthly existence?”
Kotya did not reply. But he was not asleep.
“I started telling you about Trubetskoy’s article on the dispute between Tolstoy and Vladimir Soloviev on the meaning of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is very instructive. Some of the finer points of Christianity are not highlighted in the Gospels, but only hinted at, and they get lost sight of completely in everyday life. For instance: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.’ Are we to take this to mean that Christ is expressing approval of the Roman Empire, and of the state in general? Of course not! But he knows that people will not be able to live without the state for a very long time to come. That the state, with all its deficiencies, its law courts, its wars, and its policemen, is still a lesser evil than chaos. But a time will come when every state will have to depart this earth and give way to a higher order—the Kingdom of Heaven. Only here Trubetskoy himself loses sight of the problem. Because if we place our hopes on the transformation of the world by the Second Coming, it does not matter whether or not we gradually evolve toward it: the transition cannot be effected gradually.”
Kotya had had enough. “Stop talking crazy, Sanya old friend. What’s this Kingdom of Heaven you keep on about? We could burble about it in our student days, when we were young pups who hadn’t seen war. But now that all the nations of Europe have been making mincemeat of each other, gassing each other, spewing fire at each other for nearly three years, does this look as if the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand? You and I will be polished off well before that, never fear!”
* * *
Dear (Frau, Fräulein)
The office of the Commandant at Altdamm POW Camp regrets having to inform you that your (husband, father, son, brother, fiancé), prisoner of war … born … 18 … died on … 1916 in the local military hospital at … and was buried with full Christian rites in the local cemetery.
Lieutenant Colonel …
Commandant Altdamm, … ember 1916
[56]
Sanya and Kotya went to sleep still at cross-purposes. But when they woke up a new day was beginning, they were full of life, there were the usual horsey noises. They bounded out of the dugout stripped to the waist, outside there was a light frost, the sun was rising, they poured water from mugs down each other’s backs. No more perplexities. No time for them, duty called. And anyway, if your head’s only too likely to be blown off why overtax it? It’ll all come right in the end if we get out of this alive.
Tsyzh brought them buckwheat, braised just enough, every grain separate, smelling of lard. They scraped the dish clean with their wooden spoons.
Then the battery commander’s telephone operator came running to warn the gentlemen officers that Brigade HQ had rung—some kind of inspection team was on the way, better get ready for it. Get ready—how? I don’t know. Who gave you your orders? The senior telephone operator. They all laughed.
Kotya told the story—acting all the parts—of the captain from the General Staff who had grilled an elderly colonel in the presence of his juniors: How would he deal with a gas attack? But what if this, and what if that? Radiating modesty throughout, the honest old colonel was sweating blood: he always knew what to do in a combat situation, but confronted with this popinjay in shiny harness … Joking aside, if there was one set of people Kotya disliked it was General Staff officers: those gods of war imagined heaven knows what, as if it was possible to theorize about this hopeless muddle, understand it and control it. Who could make any sort of prediction when the behavior of a whole company might be affected by one soldier tripping up?
But they weren’t allowed to drink their tea in peace. Captain Sokhatsky wanted to see his gentlemen officers! Don’t leave yet, Kotya, we won’t be long! … No, friends, they mean to keep you hopping. The best of luck to you! Where’s my orderly, where are the horses?
So they didn’t even say goodbye properly, Sanya couldn’t see Kotya off, they embraced hurriedly, left yesterday’s discussion in the air. But what did it matter? They had gone through so much together.
Captain Sokhatsky, the oldest officer in the battery, an even taller man than the battery commander, as long in the leg as an artillery range finder—no infantry trench was deep enough for him—and as bright as a new pin, from his boots to his cockade, was waiting with one foot on a tree stump too high for other feet, nervously plucking at his sword knot and anxiously surveying the battery positions as if expecting an attack. All right. He had sent for them because of the upcoming inspection, Lieutenant Colonel Boyer being away on a mission, it was always the same at critical moments.
“All we know is that there’s one general and one colonel, that they are theorists, but theorists of what we haven’t been told. Why in God’s name did they have to start with No. 3 Battery!”
In the pale early light of a low, almost wintry sun, Sokhatsky’s eyes wandered anxiously over the battery’s untidy comings and goings. They had only very recently changed into winter uniform, there were still adjustments to be made, and Sokhatsky was wondering what faults could be detected and corrected in half an hour. His troubled gaze passed over their heads, and he did not at first notice that only two, not three platoon commanders stood before him.
“Where’s Chernega?” (Damn his eyes!) “Why is he absent from roll call? If he thinks this is a tea party he’s in for a rude awakening!”
They were getting into bad habits, sitting around, lying around, discipline gets sloppy. It didn’t matter when all was quiet, but in an emergency …
Ustimovich, his bushy black eyebrows in a frown of concentration, did his best not to stoop in the captain’s presence. That was all he could do to help.
The gunners, in army issue, fur caps with flaps, jerkins and padded trousers, went to and fro on their normal business, but their sharp eyes had spotted the commotion among the officers, and they knew that the other ranks would shortly feel the effect of it.
“Zakovorodny!” The captain’s long arm swung the battery sergeant major around as he was tiptoeing by. This bustling, round-shouldered Ukrainian rarely strayed from the gun carriages and the baggage train, where he was as busy as he would be at home on the farm. He had turned up by chance, but joined in the officers’ discussion.
There had been inspections before—of the commissariat, of medical services—the object of each inspection team being to spend just enough time “under fire” to collect medals—but the thought of this “theoretical general,” whatever that might mean, gave them goose-flesh. The supply side, which was the captain’s main concern, presumably didn’t come into it; although that too had its theoretical aspect. In any event, the general appearance of the battery, its manpower, the smartness of its turnout, the state of its weapons and of the dugouts, would not be irrelevant, whatever the commission’s concern.
&
nbsp; Things which seemed quite normal when you took your daily stroll past gun emplacements and dugouts were suddenly flagrant examples of slovenliness, of neglect, of incorrect placing, of general disorder—and most glaringly unsatisfactory of all was the appearance of the soldiers. It was not humanly possible for Sanya to pull up Khomuyovnikov, say, day in and day out, to nag him because his collar was always unbuttoned and awry, his belt was not straight but fastened slantwise, his cap did not sit squarely and firmly on his head but perched precariously to one side, ready to fall off any minute. Or there was Sarafanov, who kept his belt slack, like a pregnant woman, afraid to wear anything tight around her belly. While Ulezko and Gormotun didn’t feel themselves to be soldiers at all: they were “locals” taken from nearby villages, bypassing the recruiting officer, and behaved as though they were not performing military service themselves but waiting on temporary guests. They liked retailing local lore, they knew the history of every apple tree. (“Why plant that tree when you’ve got no children?” “There were people before us, weren’t there? And there’ll be people after us.”) After a year in the army they still weren’t used to the fact that it was always on the move, eastward or westward, and that they too had to tear themselves away from their brick cottages and storks’ nests. Anyway, Sanya himself heartily disliked military punctilio: why bother if belts were slack or awry, why not let the men enjoy a bit more freedom while they can? Then there were the touchy ones like Pecherzewski, and the educated ones like Barou: Sanya would have been too embarrassed to rebuke these people. Barou wore a university badge on his greatcoat—his whole uniform was merely a dismal temporary backdrop for it. You couldn’t even ask him, politely, to keep his thumbs along his trouser seams—his eyes frankly reminded the second lieutenant that he, Barou, was not just his equal, but his superior.
November 1916 Page 109