“To make rafters,” Semka replied.
“And what about in the summer when the tree isn’t cut?” Tolstoy asked.
“It’s not worth anything then,” Semka replied.
“No really,” Fedka said, “why does a lime tree grow?”
They talked of the beauty of the lime tree. Then Pronka said, “Why, when we take the sap of a lime, it’s like taking blood.”
Chapter 8
USED-UP MEN
Washington, January 1862
GEORGE BRINTON MCCLELLAN was thirty-four years old when Lincoln summoned him to Washington and gave him the task of defending a revolution. He was a graduate of West Point and had served as an engineer under General Winfield Scott in the Mexican War; in civil life he had risen to high place in the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad. When war broke out, McClellan accepted a commission as a major general in the Department of the Ohio, though not without a pang. “The salary I gave up to re-enter the military service,” he said, “was ten thousand dollars per annum.” Once he received his stars, McClellan boldly crossed the Ohio. At a time when most Union generals were content to keep their camps, he won a victory before Rich Mountain in western Virginia which dazzled the North.
The adulation of the crowd went to his head, and McClellan began to fancy himself a man of destiny. The “crowds of the country-people who have heard of me and read my proclamations,” he wrote to his wife, “come in from all directions to thank me, shake me by the hand, and look at their ‘Liberator,’ ‘the General’! Of course I have to see them and talk to them. Well, it is a proud and glorious thing to see a whole people here, simple and unsophisticated, looking up to me as their deliverer from tyranny”.
In Washington, where pompousness was the rule of political life, McClellan’s vainglory could only become morbid. “By some strange operation of magic,” he said, “I seem to have become the power of the land. ... I went to the Senate and was quite overwhelmed by the congratulations I received and the respect with which I was treated. I suppose half a dozen of the oldest made the remark I am becoming so much used to: ‘Why, how young you look, and yet an old soldier!’ It seems to strike everybody that I am very young. They give me my way in everything, full swing and unbounded confidence.”
It was, McClellan conceded, “an immense task that I have on my hands,” but he did not think it beyond him. “I believe I can accomplish it.” Indeed, he told his wife, “I see already the recent causes of our failure, and am confident that I can lead these armies to victory once more.” He added, “I will endeavor to enclose with this [letter] the ‘thanks of Congress,’ which please preserve. I feel very proud of it. Gen. Scott objected to it on the ground that it ought to be accompanied by a gold medal. I cheerfully acquiesce in the thanks themselves, hoping to win the medal by some other action, and the sword by some other fait d’éclat.”
Lincoln was not a man easily imposed on, yet he fell, for a time, under the spell of the young General. He treated him with an elaborate deference, and he seems to have regarded his very fatuities as forming part of the mysterious equipment of military greatness. Here was élan, glamour, confidence. The “Young Napoleon,” as McClellan was called, seemed true to the type of the romantic hero, a type the age was predisposed, by its poets and its philosophy, to accept. He was a young man with an odor of mastery about him. A scion of the tribe of the eagle, perhaps. True, he was not, as eagles go, very intelligent; but possibly, Lincoln seems to have thought, the military hero must be somewhat limited mentally, to preserve vigor of decision. McClellan was vain; but had not Caesar himself, fussing with his receding hair, been equally so?
Lincoln was, in his spare time, devouring books of strategy and tactics; but he was a novice in the art of war, and he knew it. He needed a general. From Caesar to Washington, in every upheaval touching the free state, the civil authorities have scurried to find a commander. Was McClellan the man? Certainly the young General believed that he was. When he strained his ears, the sound he heard was unmistakable. It was the “call of destiny.” “When I was in the Senate chamber to-day,” he confided to his wife, “and found those old men flocking around me; when I afterwards stood in the library, looking over the capitol of our great nation, and saw the crowd gathering around to stare at me, I began to feel how great the task committed to me. Oh! how sincerely I pray to God that I may be endowed with the wisdom and courage necessary to accomplish this work. Who would have thought, when we were married, that I should so soon be called upon to save my country?”
Perhaps if, among the many gifts that had been showered on McClellan, a sense of humor had also been granted him, he would have known a happier fate. As it was, he rode about Washington with a flashing eye, drilling his regiments and listening to the sound of popular applause. His days were crowded. “Had to work until nearly three this morning,” he wrote to his wife. “I am getting my ideas pretty well arranged in regard to the strength of my army; it will be a very large one. I have been employed in trying to get the right kind of general officers. . . . Rode over the river, looked at some of the works, and inspected three or four regiments; worked at organizing brigades—just got through with that. I handed to the President to-night a carefully considered plan for conducting the war on a large scale. ... I shall carry this thing en grand and crush the rebels in one campaign. I flatter myself that Beauregard has gained his last victory.”
Yet already there was, in McClellan’s letters, a disconcerting note; he could not conceal the contempt he felt for those with whom he was obliged to work. Generals, senators, diplomats—even presidents—were so many figures to despise. “I dined at the President’s today,” McClellan wrote. “I suppose some forty were present—Prince Napoleon and his staff, French Minister, English ditto, cabinet, some senators, Gen. Scott, and myself. The dinner was not especially interesting; rather long, and rather tedious, as such things generally are. ... It made me feel a little strangely when I went in to the President’s last evening with the old General [Scott] leaning on me; I could see that many marked the contrast. . . . Rose early to-day (having retired at three A.M.), and was pestered to death with senators, etc., and a row with General Scott until about four o’clock.”
It soon appeared, however, that the young General was busy without being active. He was not quite so heroically fashioned as he appeared, and he was desperately afraid of subjecting his fame to the hazard of a battle. The weeks, and at length the months slipped by, while he suffered his troops to remain in idleness in their camps around Washington.
McClellan at first pretended that General Scott was responsible for this pusillanimity. He would, he said, gladly fight, but old “Fuss ’n Feathers” envied his fame and was determined to hold him back. Scott had formerly been his patron and his mentor; but McClellan now described him as “the great obstacle” to victory. The older man had won more battles than the younger one was even to fight; but McClellan regarded the aging hero as deficient in his knowledge of the military art. The “old General always comes in the way,” McClellan told his wife. “He understands nothing, appreciates nothing.” He would “not comprehend the danger. I have to fight my way against him.” The man was “a perfect incubus. ... I don’t know whether he is a dotard or a traitor.” But McClellan was confident that he would be given “absolute control independently” of Scott. “I suppose it will result in enmity on his part against me; but I have no choice. The people call upon me to save the country. I must save it, and cannot respect anything that is in the way.”
General Scott withdrew from the contest with his former protégé; he retired from the army and took a house at West Point. McClellan, however, found new excuses for lethargy. He resented, with a bad grace, every effort to spur him into fighting. Did the civilian chiefs not understand that it took time to mold an army? Were they intent on squandering, in a hasty battle, the instrument which he was slowly and methodically bringing to perfection? The President was especially bothersome. His manners were primitive; McClellan thought hi
m a “well meaning baboon.” He told of going to the White House one day after tea and finding “ ‘the original gorilla,’ about as intelligent as ever.” (Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species had been published in 1859.) “What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now!” McClellan exclaimed. And the dreadful man insisted on calling on him at his house! He would put a stop to that. One night McClellan came home and was informed by the servant that the President was waiting for him. He turned on his heel and, ascending the stairs, went to his bedroom. He sent word to the President that he had gone to bed.
Such was Lincoln’s temperament that he could accommodate himself, in his work, to men of the most disparate habits and dispositions. But he was baffled by the problem of co-operation with a timid egotist. At the end of January 1862, the President issued General War Order No. 1. He wrote it out, his private secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, said, “without consultation with any one, and read it to the Cabinet, not for their sanction, but for their information.” The order directed that a “general movement of the land and naval forces of the United States against the insurgent forces” be made in the last week of February 1862.
Saint Petersburg, February-May 1862
NICHOLAS MILYUTIN, fresh from Rome and Paris, thought the menace palpable. “Everyone,” he said, “appears to be waiting for something, fearing something. . . .”
Saint Petersburg hung in anxious suspense, but even in a revolutionary age young officer-candidates must select their regiments. A number of Prince Kropotkin’s brother cadets chose the Preobrazhensky Guard, the élite regiment attached to the Tsar’s household. Others looked for commissions in the Horse Guards or Her Majesty’s Cuirassiers. “But you, Kropotkin?” his friends asked him. “The artillery? The Cossacks?”
No—the Prince was determined, he said, not to “enter a regiment of the Guard, and give my life to parades and court balls.” While his brother cadets chose prestigious regiments near the capital, Kropotkin dreamed of assignment to a remote post, one where the heavy hand of the Tsar’s government was less keenly felt.
He wanted to go to Siberia.
The Amur region had recently been annexed by Russia, and Kropotkin, who had obtained special reading privileges in the Imperial Library, got hold of every book he could “about that Mississippi of the East.” He reasoned that “there is in Siberia an immense field for the application of the great reforms which have been made or are coming,” and he accordingly put his name down for the Mounted Cossacks of the Amur.
His comrades in the Corps of Pages were appalled. “Kropotkin must always have his joke!” one cried. “It is so far,” said another. A third, who looked up the uniform of the Mounted Cossacks of the Amur in the Officers’ Handbook, found that it was atrocious. He read the description aloud, “to the horror,” Kropotkin said, “of all present”: “Uniform, black, with a plain red collar without braids; fur bonnet made of dog’s fur or any other fur; trousers, gray.” “Only look at the uniform!” Kropotkin’s friend said. “Bother the cap!—you can wear one of wolf or bear fur; but think only of the trousers! Gray, like a soldier of the Train!”
Kropotkin’s interests differed from those of his fellow cadets. He had grown into a high-minded, serious young man, intensely intellectual; he was becoming near-sighted and would soon require spectacles. He had been carried away by the liberal ideals that were fashionable in the early years of Tsar Alexander’s reign. He had read Alexander Herzen, the expatriate writer, whose journals, The Pole Star and The Bell, though written in London, made a stir in Russia, where they were widely circulated in secret. “The beauty of the style of Herzen,” Kropotkin said, seduced him, and in 1859 he had begun to edit a paper of his own. He wrote out the copies himself and slipped them into the desks of fellow cadets. He professed himself a free-state man, and he advocated the adoption, in Russia, of the rule of law and a written constitution.
Kropotkin’s liberalism was the liberalism of the Decembrists, the noblemen who on a December day three and a half decades before had risen up in arms against Tsar Nicholas. The serfs, the Decembrists believed, could be citizens; Russia could be a republic. Some of the conspirators possessed wilder sympathies: they exalted the French revolutionary tradition and talked of a dictatorship of virtue. (Tolstoy, who several times tried to write a novel about the Decembrists, gave up because he found them too French.) For the most part, however, the movement was a liberal one, grounded in the ideals of the free state. Adam Smith’s writings on economic freedom enjoyed a special vogue among educated young Russians of this generation; the poet Pushkin, who was closely connected to the Decembrists, celebrated Smith’s work in Eugène Onegin. The lofty moral and intellectual qualities of the Decembrists, however, concealed their practical weakness. Their revolt in the capital was unskillfully executed, and in Senate Square their clamors for a constitution were promptly silenced by the guns of Nicholas. The liberal idealists perished on the gallows or were exiled to Siberia.
Kropotkin at first aspired to revive the Decembrist tradition of liberal heroism; but he soon began to doubt whether the flame which had once gone out could ever be rekindled. The free-state ideas propounded, at the beginning of the 1860s, by scholars like Boris Chicherin had a musty air: they stank of the study and the lecture hall. Kropotkin and those who thought like him yearned for “the grand, the elevating inspirations.” They did not find such inspirations in the free state. The liberal imagination lost ground to a new sensibility, one which, though it sprung from a philosophy of coercion, possessed an appeal that the creed of freedom lacked. In March 1862, while Kropotkin was finishing up his course in the Corps of Pages, a book appeared which dramatized the new sensibility. The author was Ivan Turgenev; the novel was Fathers and Children. In it Turgenev described what happens when Bazarov, a young man imbued with the new spirit, encounters an older generation of liberals. “Well, and this Moniseur Bazarov, what is he exactly?” one of the characters in the novel asks his nephew.
“He is a nihilist!” the nephew replies.
Turgenev’s nihilist dismisses the free-state solutions—“parliamentarianism, the bar, and the devil knows what.” Our “clever men, our so-called progressives and reformers,” Bazarov says, have “never accomplished anything.” The nihilist disparages even the emancipation reforms which “the government is making such a fuss about.” Insofar as Turgenev gives Bazarov a creed, it is a creed of violence and terror. The time has come, Bazarov argues, for Russians to stop talking and start acting. “We must,” he declares, “smash people!”
The confessors of the new faith went under a variety of nommes de guerre, and they drew on a variety of intellectual traditions. At its core, the new sensibility was a form of romanticism, grafted on more or less bogus forms of mid-nineteenth-century science. The creed of the red romantics was utopian and coercive; it appealed to wellborn young Russians who, though they would have rejected with indignation the accusation that they were collaborating with a new species of despotism, had not broken with the spirit of noblesse in which they had been brought up.
In the spring of 1862, the red brigades went on the offensive. First came the leaflets. Scattered broadcast in the streets of Saint Petersburg, they bore the title “Young Russia.” “Russia is entering the revolutionary stage of its existence,” the leaflets proclaimed. A “revolution, a bloody and pitiless revolution,” would follow, a “revolution which must change everything down to the very roots, utterly overthrowing all the foundations of present society and bringing about the ruin of all who support the present order.” In language that blended the millennial impulses of Holy Russia with the romantic aspirations of scientific socialism, the leaflets declared that the
day will soon come when we will unfurl the great banner of the future, the red banner. And with a mighty cry of “Long live the Russian Social and Democratic Republic,” we will move against the Winter Palace to wipe out all who dwell there. It may be that we will only have to destroy the imperial family, i.e., about a hundred pe
ople. But it may also happen . . . that the imperial party will rise like a man to follow the Tsar, because for them it will be a question of life and death. If this happens . . . we will cry, “To your axes,” and then we will strike the imperial party without sparing our blows. . . . We will destroy them in the squares ... in their houses, in the narrow streets of the towns, in the broad avenues of the capital. . . .
Next came the fire.
The Feast of Pentecost, which commemorated the descent, upon the Apostles, of the Holy Ghost, was one of the most sublime in the calendar of the Orthodox Church. In the churches clouds of incense poured forth from the censers of the priests; the Pentecostal Icon, which showed tongues of flame illuminating the souls of the Virgin and the Apostles, was carried in solemn procession; and at Great Vespers the faithful knelt for the first time since Easter.
The Monday following Pentecost was specially consecrated to the Holy Ghost; shops and businesses in Saint Petersburg were closed. Prince Kropotkin, in the Corps of Pages, was dining in the apartment of one of the officers. At about four o’clock he looked out the window and saw plumes of smoke rising from the Apraxin Dvor. The market quarter, filled with wooden shops and shanties, lay in the heart of the capital. The Prince went out to the narrow lane that bounded the Dvor. “The sight,” he said, “was terrific.” “Like an immense snake, rattling and whistling, the fire threw itself in all directions, right and left, enveloped the shanties, and suddenly rose in a huge column, darting out its whistling tongues to lick up more shanties with their contents.” The fire rapidly consumed the market, and a struggle commenced to prevent it from destroying the city.
It was not only the flames themselves, but their symbolic import that made the fire in the Apraxin Dvor so terrible an event in the psychology of Russia. In a country that had emerged from a forest, one in which most people dwelt in houses made of wood, fire, the “red rooster,” was a dreaded agent of destruction. Yet in a cold climate fire was also the principal source of warmth, and it had early become connected, in the superstition of the people, with spiritual heat, prophetic illumination, and apocalyptic transformation. The revolutionist Michael Bakunin described the “childish, almost demoniac delight of the Russian people in fire.” In the onion domes of their churches the Russians reproduced a stylized image of the visionary flame: the apex of a Russian church was “a tongue of fire crowned by a Cross. ...”
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