‘Company!’ The sabre was swung to the right, then to the left, and finally brought down in front of him, hanging in the air above the horse’s ears. ‘In file formation, forward!’ Gregor mentally executed the command. ‘Lances at the ready! Into the attack … gallop!’ The officer snapped out the orders, and gave his horse the rein.
The earth groaned heavily, crushed beneath a thousand hoofs. Gregor, who was in the front rank, had hardly brought his lance to the ready when his horse, carried away by a lashing flood of other horses, broke into a gallop and went off at full speed. Ahead of him the commanding officer rippled against the grey background of the field. A black wedge of ploughed land sped irresistibly towards him. The first company raised a shrieking, quivering shout, the fourth company took it up. Through the roaring whistle in his ears Gregor caught the sound of distant firing. The first shell flew high above them, furrowing the glassy vault of heaven. Gregor pressed the hot shaft of his lance against his side until it hurt him and his palm sweated. The whistle of flying shells made him duck his head down to the wet neck of his horse, and the pungent scent of the animal’s sweat penetrated his nostrils. As though through the misty glass of binoculars he saw the brown ridges of trenches, and men in grey running back to the town. A machine-gun incessantly spread a fan of whistling bullets at the cossacks; in front of them and under their horses’ feet they tore up woolly spurts of dust.
That which before the attack had sent the blood coursing faster through his veins now turned to stone within him; he felt nothing except the ringing in his ears and a pain in the toes of his left foot. His thought, emasculated by fear, congealed in a heavy mass in his head.
The ensign was the first to drop from his horse. Prokhor rode over him. Gregor glanced back, and a fragment of what he saw was impressed on his memory as though cut with a diamond on glass. As Prokhor’s horse leapt across the fallen officer it bared its teeth and stumbled. Prokhor flew out of the saddle as though catapulted, and falling headlong, was crushed under the hoofs of the horse behind him. Gregor heard no cry, but from Prokhor’s face, with its distorted mouth and calf’s eyes staring out of their sockets, he realized that he must be screaming inhumanly. Others fell, both horses and cossacks. Through the film of tears caused by the wind in his eyes Gregor stared ahead at the grey, seething mass of Austrians fleeing from the trenches.
The company, which had torn away from the village in an orderly stream, scattered and broke into fragments. Those in front reached the trenches, Gregor foremost among them.
A tall, white-eyebrowed Austrian, his forage cap drawn over his eyes, fired almost point-blank at Gregor. The heat of the bullet scorched his cheek. He struck with his lance, at the same time pulling on the reins with all his strength. The blow was so powerful that it pierced right through the Austrian and ran for half a shaftlength out of his back. Gregor was not quick enough to withdraw the lance. He felt a quivering and convulsion in his hand, and saw the Austrian, bent right back so that only the point of his chin was visible, clutching and scratching at the shaft with clawing fingers. Opening his hand, he dropped the shaft and felt with numbed fingers for his sabre-hilt.
The Austrians fled into the streets of the town. Over the grey clots of their uniforms the cossack horses towered.
Gregor struck at his horse with the flat of his sabre; shaking its neck, it carried him away down the street. Along by the iron railings of a garden an Austrian ran, swaying, without rifle, his cap clutched in his hand. Gregor saw the back of his head and the damp collar of his tunic around his neck. He overtook him, and, afire with frenzy, whirled his sabre around his head. The Austrian was running close to the railings on the left-hand side, and it was awkward for Gregor to hew him down. But, leaning over his saddle, holding his sabre aslant, he struck at the man’s temple. Without a cry the Austrian pressed his hand to the wound and spun round with his back to the railings. Without reining in his horse, Gregor jumped across him, turned round, and rode back at a trot. The square, fear-contorted face of the Austrian was already turning the hue of cast-iron. His arms were stretched down the seams of his trousers, his ashen lips were quivering. The sabre had slipped from his temple, and the flesh was hanging over his cheek like a crimson rag. The blood streamed on to his uniform. Gregor’s eyes met the mortally terror-stricken eyes of the Austrian. The man slowly bent at the knees; a gurgling groan came from his throat. Screwing up his eyes, Gregor swept his sabre down. The blow split the cranium in two. The man flung out his arms and fell; his head knocked heavily against the stone of the road. At the sound Gregor’s horse took alarm, and snorting, carried him into the middle of the street.
Infrequent shots sounded in the streets. Past Gregor a foaming horse carried a dead cossack. One foot had come out of the stirrup, and the horse was dragging the bruised and battered body over the stones. Gregor saw only the red band on the trousers and the torn green shirt drawn in a bundle over the head.
Gregor’s head felt as heavy as lead. He slipped from his horse and shook his head vigorously. Some cossacks of the third company trotted past him, carrying a wounded man in their overcoats, and driving a crowd of Austrian prisoners before them. The men ran in a dense grey herd, their iron shod boots clattering joylessly on the stones. In Gregor’s eyes their faces blended into a gelid patch of clayey hue. He dropped his horse’s reins and went across to the Austrian soldier he had cut down. The man lay where he had fallen, by the wrought-iron work of the railings, his dirty brown palm stretched out as though begging. Gregor glanced at his face. It seemed small, all but childlike, despite the hanging moustaches and the tortured expression of his harsh, distorted mouth.
‘Hey, you!’ a strange cossack officer shouted as he rode down the middle of the street.
Gregor looked up and stumbled across to his horse. His steps were burdensomely heavy and tottering, as though he were carrying an unbearable weight on his back. Loathing and perplexity crushed his spirit. He took the serrated stirrup in his hand, but for a long time he could not hoist his heavy foot into it.
Chapter Three
It was usual for the cossacks of the upper districts of the Don, including Vieshenska, to be drafted into the Eleventh and Twelfth Cossack regiments and the Ataman’s Lifeguards. But for some reason part of the enrolment of 1914 was assigned to the Third Cossack regiment, which was composed mainly of cossacks from the Ust-Medvedietz district. Among those so drafted was Mitka Korshunov.
The Third Don Cossack regiment was stationed at Vilno, together with certain sections of the third cavalry division. One day in June the various companies rode out from the city to take up country quarters. The day was dull but warm. The flowing clouds coursed in droves across the sky and concealed the sun. The regimental band blared at the head of the column, and the officers in their light summer caps and drill uniforms rode in a bunch at the back, a cloud of cigarette smoke rising above them.
On each side of the road the peasants and their womenfolk were cutting the hay, stopping to gaze at the columns of cossacks as they passed. The horses sweated with the heat, a yellowish foam appeared between their legs, and the light breeze blowing from the south-east did not cool, but rather intensified the steaming swelter.
Arrived at its destination, the regiment was broken up by companies among the estates in the district. During the day the cossacks cut the clover and meadow grass for the landowners, at night they grazed their hobbled horses in the fields assigned to them, and played cards or told stories by the smoke of the camp-fires. The sixth company was billeted on the large estate of a Polish landowner. The officers lived in the house, played cards, got drunk, and paid attentions to the steward’s daughter; the cossacks pitched their tents a couple of miles away from the house. Each morning the steward drove out in a drozhki to their camp. The corpulent, estimable gentleman would get out of the drozhki and invariably welcome the cossacks with a wave of his white, glossy-peaked cap.
‘Come and cut hay with us, sir; it’ll shake your fat down a bit,’ the cossacks call
ed to him. The steward smiled phlegmatically, wiped his bald head with his handkerchief, and went with the sergeant-major to point out the next section of hay to be cut.
In the hot dusk of the June evening the cossacks sang around the camp-fires:
‘A cossack went to a distant land,
Riding his horse o’er the plain;
His native village he left for aye’;
A silvery tenor voice pined and drooped, expressing a heavy, velvety sorrow:
‘He’ll ne’er come back again.’
Now the tenor rose a tone higher:
‘In vain did his youthful cossack bride
To the north-west gaze each morn and eve;
Waiting in hope that her cossack dear
Would return from the land he ne’er will leave.’
Several voices struggled with the song, and it grew brisk and heady like homebrewed beer:
‘But beyond the hills where the snow lies deep,
The icefields crack and the tempests blow,
Where angrily bow the pines and firs
The cossack’s bones lie beneath the snow.’
Whilst they told one another simple stories of cossack life the tenor would sing in an undertone, like a skylark soaring above the thawed earth of April:
‘As the cossack lay dying he pleadingly asked
That above him a mound should be piled for his tomb,
And a hazel tree from his native land
Should be planted in brilliant flower to bloom.’
At another camp-fire the company’s story-teller was spinning stories. The cossacks listened with unflagging attention. Only occasionally, when the hero of the story cleverly extricated himself from an awkward intrigue plotted against him by the Muscovites and the unclean powers, did someone’s hand gleam white in the firelight as it was slapped against the leg of his boot, or a voice would utter a rapturous exclamation. Then the flowing, unbroken tones of the story-teller would continue.
A week or so after the regiment’s arrival at its country quarters the company commander sent for the smith and the sergeant-major.
‘What condition are the horses in?’ he asked.
‘All in good order, your Excellency; in very good order indeed,’ the sergeant-major replied.
The captain twisted his black moustaches and said:
‘The regimental commander has issued instructions for all stirrups and bits to be tinned. There is to be an Imperial Review of the regiment. Let everything be polished until it gleams, the saddles and the rest of the equipment. When can you be ready?’
The sergeant-major looked at the smith; the smith looked at the sergeant-major. Then both of them looked at the captain. The sergeant-major suggested:
‘How about Sunday, your Excellency?’ and respectfully touched his moustache with his finger.
The preparations for the review were put in hand the same day. The cossacks groomed their horses, cleaned the bridles, rubbed the snaffles and the other metal parts of the horses’ equipment with bathbrick. By the end of the week the regiment was shining like a new threepenny piece. Everything glittered with polish, from the horses’ hoofs to the cossacks’ faces. On the Saturday the regimental commander inspected the regiment and thanked the officers and cossacks for their zealous preparations and splendid appearance.
The azure thread of the July days reeled past. The cossack horses were in perfect condition; only the cossacks themselves were uneasy and consumed with questionings. Not a whisper was to be heard of the Imperial Review. The weeks passed in unending talk, continual preparation. Then like a bolt from the blue came an order for the regiment to return to Vilno.
They were back in the city by the evening. A second order was at once issued to the companies. The cossacks’ boxes were to be collected and stored in the barracks, and preparations made for a possible further removal.
‘Your Excellency, what is it all about?’ the cossacks implored the truth from their troop officers. The officers shrugged their shoulders. They themselves would have been very glad to know.
But on the first of August the regimental commander’s orderly managed to whisper to a friend:
‘It’s war, my boy!’
‘You’re lying!’
‘God’s truth! But not a word to anyone!’
Next morning the regiment was drawn up in company order outside the barracks, awaiting the commander. He came round a corner of the barrack buildings, and riding his horse to the front of the regiment, turned the animal sideways. The adjutant drew out his handkerchief to wipe his nose, but had no time to accomplish the manoeuvre. Into the soundless, jarring silence the colonel threw his voice:
‘Cossacks!’
‘Now it’s coming!’ everyone thought. An impatient agitation kept them all on tenterhooks. Mitka Korshunov’s horse was stepping from hoof to hoof, and he irritatedly brought his heel against its flank.
‘Germany has declared war on us …’
Along the ranks ran a whisper as though a puff of wind had run across a field of ripe, heavy-eared oats. A horse’s neigh cut the cossacks’ ears. Round eyes and gaping mouths turned in the direction of the first company where the animal had dared to neigh.
The colonel said much more. He chose his words carefully, seeking to arouse a feeling of national pride. But before the mental eyes of the thousand cossacks it was not the silk of foreign banners that fell rustling at their feet, but their own everyday life, hard, yet native, that fluttered and called: their wives, children, lovers, ungathered grain, orphaned villages.
‘In two hours we entrain …’ was the only thought that penetrated all minds.
The regiment rode singing to the station. The cossacks’ voices drowned the band, and it lapsed into disordered silence. The officers’ wives rode in drozhkis, a colourful crowd foamed along the pavements, the horses’ hoofs raised a cloud of dust. Laughing at his own and others’ sorrow, twitching his left shoulder so that his blue strap tossed hectically, the leading singer sang a bawdy cossack song. Deliberately running the words into one another, to the accompaniment of newly shoed hoofs the company carried its song along to the red wagons at the station. One of the cossacks winked cynically at the crowd of women seeing them off.
On the track the engine bellowed warningly as it got up steam.
Echelons … Echelons … Echelons innumerable.
Along the country’s arteries, over the railway lines to the western frontier, distracted Russia was driving its grey-coated blood.
At a little town on the line the regiment was broken up into its respective companies. On the instructions of the divisional staff the sixth company was assigned to the disposition of the third army infantry corps, and went by forced marches to Pelikalia.
On August 9th the company commander sent for the sergeant-major and a cossack named Mrikhin, from the first troop. Mrikhin returned to the troop late in the afternoon, just as Mitka Korshunov was bringing the horses back after watering.
Mrikhin, a massive, swarthy cossack, went into the hut. At the table Shchegolkov was mending a broken rein by the light of a guttering oil lamp. Kruchkov was standing by the stove with his hands behind him, talking to Ivankov.
‘Tomorrow, boys, we go out at daybreak to an outpost at Liubov,’ Mrikhin announced.
‘Who’s going?’ Mitka inquired, entering at that moment and setting the pitcher down at the door.
‘Shchegolkov, Kruchkov, Rvachev, Popov and Ivankov.’
‘And what about me?’ Mitka asked.
‘You stay here, Mitry.’
‘Well, then the devil take the lot of you!’
The party set out at dawn. After riding steadily for some time, from a rise they saw the large village of Liubov lying stretched along a river valley. Mrikhin chose the last farm in the village for their observation post, as it was nearest to the frontier. The master of the farm, a clean-shaven, bandy-legged Pole in a white sail-cloth hat, showed the cossacks a shed in which they could stable their horses. Behind the shed was a
green field of clover. Slopes rolled away to a neighbouring wood, and a white stretch of grain was intersected by a road, grassland lying beyond. They took turns to watch with binoculars from the ditch behind the shed. The others lay in the cool shed, which smelt of long-stored grain, the dust of chaff, of mice, and the sweetish, mouldering scent of earth.
In the evening Ivankov relieved Shchegolkov, who had been on duty all the afternoon, and adjusting the binoculars, stared in the direction of the north-west, towards the wood. He could see the snowy stretch of grain waving in the wind, and a ruddy flood of sunlight bathing the green headland of fir wood. Beyond the village he saw the white, glowing forms of the lads bathing in the stream. A woman’s contralto voice called: ‘Stassia, Stassia! Come here!’ Shchegolkov lit a cigarette, and remarked as he went back to the shed:
‘Look how the sunset is burning! It’s blowing up for wind.’
That night the horses stood unsaddled. In the village all lights were extinguished and all sound died away.
The following day passed in idleness. In the afternoon Popov was sent back to the company with a report.
Evening. Night. Over the village rose the yellow brim of the young moon. From time to time a ripe apple dropped with a soft thud from the tree in the garden.
About midnight, while Ivankov was on guard, he heard the sound of horses along the village street. He crawled out of the ditch to look, but the moon was swathed in cloud, and he could see nothing through the impenetrable darkness. He went and awoke Kruchkov, who was sleeping at the door.
‘Kozma! Horsemen coming! Get up!’
‘Where from?’
‘They’re riding into the village.’
They went out. The clatter of hoofs came clearly from the street, some hundred yards away.
‘We’ll go into the garden. We can hear better there,’ Kruchkov suggested.
They ran past the hut into the tiny front garden, and lay down by the fence. The jingle of stirrups and creak of saddles came nearer. Now they could see the dim outline of the horsemen riding four abreast.
And Quiet Flows the Don Page 24