‘He’s got a strong face!’ Merkulov remarked, turning to Listnitsky.
‘Well, what do you think?’ Eugene asked.
‘The devil knows!’ Merkulov replied, guessing the significance of the question. ‘He’s a strange fellow. He’s given himself away completely now, but previously I didn’t know how to decipher him. You know he enjoys tremendous popularity with the cossacks, especially among the machine-gunners. Have you noticed that?’
‘M’yes,’ Listnitsky answered, a little indefinitely.
‘The machine-gunners are Bolsheviks to the last man. He’s certainly succeeded in winning them over. I was astonished when he showed his hand today. What did he do it for? He knows that none of us can share his views. Yet he gives himself away like that. And he isn’t a hot-head either. He’s dangerous.’
Still pondering on Bunchuk’s strange behaviour, Merkulov pushed away his drawing and began to undress. He hung his grey stockings over the stove, wound up his watch, and lay down, smoking a cigarette. He quickly fell asleep. Listnitsky sat down on the stool Merkulov had vacated, and on the other side of the drawing of Bunchuk wrote in his flowing hand:
Your Excellency,
The suppositions which I previously communicated to you have now been completely confirmed. In a talk today with the officers of our regiment (captain Kalmikov and subaltern Chubov of the fifth, and lieutenant Merkulov of the third company being present in addition to myself) cornet Bunchuk, for reasons which I have to admit I do not fully understand, explained the tasks which he is carrying out in accordance with his political convictions, and undoubtedly on the instruction of his party. He had with him a number of papers of an illegal nature. Without doubt cornet Bunchuk is carrying on underground activities in our regiment (we may suppose that that is why he joined the regiment as a volunteer) and the machine-gunners have been the first object of his attentions. They have been demoralized. His dangerous influence is beginning to tell on the morale of the regiment. There have been cases of refusal to carry out military tasks, as I have already informed the divisional staff. He has only just returned from leave, bringing back with him a large quantity of subversive literature. He will now endeavour to carry on his work with greater intensity.
On the basis of the foregoing I come to the conclusions: 1. That cornet Bunchuk’s guilt is fully established. 2. In order to stop his revolutionary activities it is necessary to arrest him immediately and to bring him before a field court-martial. 3. The machine-gun detachments must be broken up quickly, the more dangerous of them being removed and the others either sent to the rear or dispersed over other regiments.
I ask you not to overlook my sincere desire to serve my country and the monarchy.
Captain Eugene Listnitsky.
Sector No. 7.
2nd November, 1916.
Early next morning Listnitsky sent his report by orderly to the divisional staff, and after breakfast went out into the trenches. Beyond the slippery bank of the earthworks a mist was swaying over the marsh, hanging in shreds as though caught on the barbs of the wire entanglements. A sticky mud covered the bottom of the trench to the depth of an inch. Little brown streams were crawling out of the embrasures. The cossacks, in wet, mud-plastered greatcoats, were boiling pots of tea on sheet-iron from the earthworks, smoking and squatting on their heels, their rifles leant against the walls of the trench.
‘How many times have you been told not to dare to light fires on the sheet-iron? Don’t you understand, you swine?’ Eugene shouted as he reached the first group of cossacks.
Two of them rose unwillingly; the others continued to squat and smoke, the edges of their greatcoats gathered up under them. A swarthy, bearded cossack, with a silver ear-ring swinging at his ear, replied as he thrust a handful of brushwood under the pot:
‘We’d be very glad to do without the sheet-iron. But how are we to light a fire otherwise, your Excellency? Look at the mud.’
‘Pull that iron out at once!’
‘What, so we’re to sit here hungry? Is that it?’ a broad-faced, pockmarked cossack asked, frowning and not looking the officer in the face.
‘I tell you to pull that iron out!’ With the toe of his boot Eugene kicked away the burning brushwood from under the pot.
Smiling angrily and confusedly, the cossack with the ear-ring poured the water out of the pot, muttering:
‘You’ve had your tea, boys …’
The cossacks stared silently after the captain as he strode off. Little fires gleamed in the bearded cossack’s eyes.
In the sector manned by the first troop Listnitsky was overtaken by Merkulov. He came up panting, his new leather jerkin creaking, and exuding the strong scent of home-grown tobacco. He called Eugene aside and said hurriedly:
‘Heard the news? Bunchuk deserted last night.’
‘Bunchuk? What’s that?’
‘Deserted … Understand? The commander of the machine-gun detachment, who is in the same dugout, told me he didn’t return after leaving us. So he must have cleared out on leaving our dugout. What d’you think of that?’
Listnitsky stood polishing his pince-nez and frowning.
‘You seem to be disturbed,’ Merkulov stared inquisitively into his face.
‘I? Are you in your senses? Why should I be disturbed? I was only taken aback by the unexpected news.’
A couple of days later the sergeant-major came with a worried look on his face into Listnitsky’s dugout, and with much humming and hahing informed him:
‘This morning, your Excellency, the cossacks found these papers in the trenches. It’s a bit awkward … And I thought it best to report to you …’
‘What papers?’ Listnitsky asked, rising from his bed.
The sergeant-major handed him some crumpled typewritten leaflets. Listnitsky read:
Proletariat of all countries, unite!
Comrade Soldiers,
Two years this accursed war has lasted. Two years you have rotted in the trenches, defending other men’s interests. Two years the blood of the workers and peasants of all nations has been poured out. Hundreds of thousands of killed and wounded, hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans: these are the results of this slaughter. What are you fighting for? Whose interests are you defending? The Tsarist government has sent millions of soldiers into the firing line in order to seize new lands, and to oppress the peoples of those lands as it already oppresses enslaved Poland and other nationalities. The world industrialists are dividing the markets by armed force, and you, in the struggle for their interests, are going to death, and are killing toiling men like yourselves.
Enough of shedding your brothers’ blood! Awake, toilers! Your enemy is not the Austrian and German soldiers, but your own Tsar, your own industrialist and landowner. Turn your rifles against them. Fraternize with the German and Austrian soldiers. Across the wire entanglements which separate you as though you were animals stretch out your hands to one another. You are brothers in labour, the bloody callouses of your toil are still on your hands. Down with the autocracy! Down with the imperialist war! Hurrah for the unity of the toilers of all the world!
Listnitsky read the leaflet with rising anger. ‘Now it’s begun!’ he thought, gripped by a senseless hatred and overwhelmed with his presentiments. He at once communicated the discovery by telephone to the regimental commander.
‘What are your instructions in the matter, your Excellency?’ he asked.
‘Take the sergeant-major and the troop officers and carry out a search at once. Search everybody, not excluding the officers. I’ll ask the divisional staff today when they propose to relieve the regiment. I’ll hurry them up. If you find anything in the course of the search inform me at once.’
‘I think it’s the work of the machine-gunners,’ Eugene said.
‘You do? I’ll order the commander at once to search his cossacks.’
Assembling the troop officers in his dugout, Listnitsky informed them of the regimental commander’s order.
&nb
sp; ‘How monstrous!’ Merkulov exclaimed indignantly. ‘Are we going to search one another?’
‘Your turn first, Listnitsky,’ a young subaltern remarked.
‘No, we’ll throw dice for it.’
‘Joking aside, gentlemen,’ Listnitsky interrupted. ‘Our old man’s gone too far, of course; the officers in our regiment are as pure as Caesar’s wife. There was only cornet Bunchuk, and he’s deserted. But we must search the cossacks. Someone fetch the sergeant-major.’
The sergeant-major, an elderly cossack with three bars to his Cross of St George, entered. He coughed and glanced uneasily from one to another of the officers.
‘Who are the suspicious characters in the company? Who do you think would have left these leaflets about?’ Eugene demanded.
‘There’s no one in our company, your Excellency,’ the man replied confidently.
‘But the leaflets were found in our sector. Have any men from another company been in our trenches?’
‘No, sir.’
‘We’ll go and search every man,’ Merkulov waved his hand and turned towards the door.
The search began. The cossacks’ faces expressed every shade of feeling. Some frowned in amazement, others looked at the officers in alarm, yet others laughed as the officers rummaged in their miserable belongings. The search yielded almost no results. Only one cossack had a crumpled copy of the manifesto in his greatcoat pocket.
‘Have you read this?’ Merkulov demanded.
‘I picked it up for a smoke,’ the cossack smiled without raising his downcast eyes.
‘What are you grinning at?’ Listnitsky shouted furiously, turning livid and striding towards the man. His eyelids blinked nervously beneath his pince-nez.
The cossack’s face turned crimson, and the smile vanished as though swept away by the wind:
‘Excuse me, your Excellency. I can hardly read. I picked it up because I haven’t any paper for cigarettes, and I saw this lying about and I picked it up.’ The man spoke in a loud, aggrieved, almost angry tone.
Listnitsky spat and turned away, the other officers trailing after him.
The next day the regiment was withdrawn and stationed some seven miles behind the front line. Two of the machine-gun detachment were arrested and court-martialled, some of the others were transferred to reserve regiments, and some distributed over the regiments of the second cossack division. After some days’ rest the regiment was brought into comparatively good order. The cossacks washed and cleaned themselves up thoroughly, and even shaved. Nor did they have to resort to the method used in the trenches, which consisted of setting light to the hair on the face, and as soon as the flame began to burn the cheek a wet towel was passed over it and the burnt hair wiped off. This method had come to be called ‘singeing the pig’, after a troop barber had asked one of his clients: ‘Shall I singe you like a pig, or how?’
The regiment rested, and the cossacks seemed outwardly light-hearted and in splendid fettle. But Listnitsky and the other officers knew that the mood was only superficial and fleeting, like a fine day in November. As soon as any rumour of a return to the front ran through the regiment the facial expressions changed, and discontent, strain, and morose unfriendliness came uppermost. The mortal weariness and strain made themselves felt, and engendered moral instability and apathy.
Listnitsky knew well how terrible man can be when, dominated by such a mood, he struggles to some purpose. In 1915 he had seen a company of soldiers sent five times into attack, suffering terrible losses and still receiving again and again the command to renew the offensive. The remnants of the company had at last arbitrarily withdrawn from the sector and had marched towards the rear. Listnitsky’s company had been ordered to stop them, and when, spreading out in a chain, the cossacks had attempted to halt the movement, the soldiers had opened fire. Not more than sixty of them were left, and Listnitsky had noted the senselessly desperate bravery with which these sixty had defended themselves, had fallen under the cossacks’ sabres, marching on to death, to destruction, resolved that it mattered not where death came to them.
The incident had left its menacing memory, and Listnitsky anxiously and fearfully studied the cossacks’ faces, wondering whether they also would turn round one day and retreat, restrained by nothing but death. And as he noticed their tired, sullen glances he had to admit that they would.
The cossacks had changed radically since the early days of the war. Even their songs were new, born of the war, and expressing a sombre joylessness. As he passed by the spacious shed of the factory in which his company was quartered he most frequently heard one yearning, indescribably mournful song. Listnitsky would stop to listen, and the simple sorrow of the song would move him strongly. A string was tautened with the increasing beat of his heart, and the low timbre of the voice plucked the string, setting it vibrating painfully. Listnitsky would stand a little way off, staring into the autumnal gloom of the evening, and feeling his eyes moisten with tears.
Only once during the whole time the regiment was resting did Listnitsky hear the brave words of an old cossack song. He was returning from his usual evening stroll, and as he passed the shed a noise and the sounds of half-drunken voices reached his ears. He guessed that the quartermaster-sergeant, who had been to the neighbouring town for provisions, had brought back some illicit spirits and had treated the cossacks. And now they were quarrelling and laughing at something or other. He heard the wild and piercing whistle of the cossacks and the strong melody of the song when still some way off.
He involuntarily smiled as he listened, and tried to bring his steps into time with the rhythm. ‘I don’t suppose the infantry yearn for home so strongly as the cossacks,’ he thought; but cold reason objected that the infantry soldier was no different. Yet undoubtedly the cossacks reacted more painfully to the enforced sitting in the trenches, for the very nature of their service had accustomed them to continual movement. And for two years they had been engaged in trench warfare, or in marking time in one spot, in continual, fruitless attempts to advance. Even so they would hold out; if they did break down, they would be the last to do so. They were a little nation in themselves, military by tradition, and not factory or peasant riffraff.
As though deliberately to undeceive him, a strained voice began to sing another song. Other cossacks took it up, and once more Listnitsky heard the cossacks’ yearning translated into song.
‘The young officer prays to God.
The young cossack asks to go home.
“Oh, young officer,
Let me go home,
Let me go home
To my father.
To my father and mother,
And my young wife.”’
Chapter Eleven
The zone from Vladimir-Volhynsk to Kovel in Volhynia was held by the Special Army. The ‘Special Army’ was really Number Thirteen, but as even generals of high rank suffered from superstitious prejudices it was called the ‘Special Army’. During the early days of October, 1916, plans were made for an advance in this area, and the way was prepared with artillery operations.
The command of the eightieth army corps of the Special Army was instructed to throw two divisions into the area of the offensive. Among those transferred was the 318th Chornogorsk Regiment. The regiment was withdrawn from the front line on the Stokhod river at night, and after a demonstrative movement in the opposite direction, turned round and marched back behind the lines towards the active zone.
Next morning the regiment was distributed through a forest, in abandoned dugouts, and here for four days they were instructed in the French method of attack, advancing in half-companies instead of battalions. Then they marched on again. For three days they passed through forests, through glades, along wild woodland paths scarred with the marks of cannon wheels. A light, patchy mist, stirred by the wind, flowed and clung to the tops of the pines, and eddied among the firs over the blue-green of the steaming marshes. A drizzling rain fell continually, and the men were wet through and in sulle
n mood. They reached a village not far from the zone of the offensive, and rested for some days, preparing for the mortal journey.
At the same time a special cossack company, accompanied by the staff of the eightieth division, was moving down towards the scene of the battle. In the company were second-reserve cossacks from Tatarsk village, and the second troop was entirely composed of them. There were the two brothers of armless Alexei Shamil, the former mill engine-man Ivan Alexievitch, Afonka Ozierov, the former ataman Manitskov, and many others.
Early on the morning of October sixteenth the company entered a village just as the first battalion of the Chornogorsk regiment was preparing to march out. The soldiers were running out of the abandoned, half-ruined huts and assembling in the street. The cossacks came down the left side of the street. Ivan Alexievitch the engine-man was on the outside file in one of the ranks of the second troop. He was marching with his eyes fixed on the ground in an attempt to avoid the puddles. Someone called to him from the ranks of the infantry, and he turned his head and passed his eyes over the soldiers.
‘Ivan Alexievitch! Old friend …’
A little soldier broke away from his platoon and came running towards him, throwing his rifle back over his shoulder. But the sling slipped and the butt jangled against his mess tin.
‘Don’t you know me? Forgotten me already?’ the soldier cried.
With difficulty Ivan Alexievitch recognized Valet in the soldier with mouth and chin covered with a bristling, smoky-grey beard.
‘Where’ve you sprung from?’ he asked.
‘I’m in this regiment, the 318th Chornogorsk. I never, never hoped to meet any of my old friends here.’
Still gripping Valet’s dirty little hand in his own bony fist, Ivan Alexievitch smiled gladly and agitatedly. Valet hurried to keep up with the cossack stride, and began to trot, looking up into Ivan’s eyes, while the gaze of his own close-set, evil little eyes was unusually tender and moist.
And Quiet Flows the Don Page 34