And Quiet Flows the Don

by Mikhail Sholokhov

  ‘I knew you’d make a good cossack, Gregor,’ old Pantaleimon had said, stroking his black and silver beard, as they parted. ‘When you were twelve months old I carried you out into the yard and sat you bareback on a horse as is the good old cossack custom, and you, you little devil, you just seized him by the mane with your tiny hands; I said then you’d make good. And so you have.’

  Gregor returned to the front a good cossack. Mentally still unreconciled to the senselessness of war, none the less he faithfully defended his cossack honour.

  In May, 1915, the thirteenth German Iron regiment had advanced over a brilliantly green meadow close to the village of Olkhovshchik. The machine-guns rattled away like cicadas. The heavy machine-gun of the Russian regiment ensconced along the rivulet stuttered powerfully. The Twelfth Cossack regiment bore the brunt of the German attack. While waiting for the oncoming enemy Gregor glanced back and saw the molten orb of the sun in the mid-day sky, and another sun in the reedy rivulet. Beyond the river, beyond the poplars were the cossack horses, and in front was the German line, the yellow gleam of the copper eagles on the helmets. A wind billowed the bluish wormwood smoke of the gunfire. Gregor fired unhurriedly, taking careful aim and listening between his shots to the troop commander shouting the range. He cautiously dislodged a ladybird that settled on his sleeve. Then came the attack. With his rifle-butt Gregor knocked a tall German lieutenant off his feet, took three prisoners, and firing over their heads, forced them to run towards the rivulet.

  In July, 1915, with a cossack troop he had recovered a battery captured by the Austrians. During the same battle he had worked his way to the rear of the enemy and had opened fire on them with a portable machine-gun, putting the advancing Austrians to flight. Then he had taken a corpulent officer prisoner, flinging him across his saddle-bow as if he had been a sheep.

  As he lay on the hillside Gregor particularly remembered one incident in which he had met his deadly enemy Stepan Astakhov. The twelfth regiment had been withdrawn from the front and flung into Eastern Prussia. The cossack horses had trampled the orderly German fields, the cossacks had fired the German habitations. Along the road they travelled a ruddy smoke had risen, and the charred walls and the tiled roofs had crumbled to dust. Near the town of Stolypin the regiment went into attack at the side of the 27th Don Cossack regiment. Gregor caught a momentary glimpse of his brother, of clean-shaven Stepan and other cossacks from his own village. The regiments suffered defeat and were surrounded by the Germans. When the twelve companies, one after another, were flinging themselves into the attack in order to break through the enemy ring, Gregor saw Stepan leap from the horse killed beneath him and circle around like a wolf. Fired by a sudden joyous resolve, Gregor reined in his horse, and when the last company had galloped past, all but trampling Stepan, he rode up to him and shouted:

  ‘Catch hold of my stirrup!’

  Stepan seized the stirrup-strap and ran for half a mile at the side of Gregor’s horse. ‘Don’t ride too fast, not too fast, for the love of Christ!’ he pleaded, his mouth gaping and panting.

  They passed successfully through the breach in the German ring. Not more than two hundred yards separated them from the forest to which their companies had retreated when a bullet whipped Stepan off his feet, and he fell headlong. The wind tore the cap from Gregor’s head and sent his hair into his eyes. Brushing it back, he looked round, and saw Stepan limp towards a bush, tear off his cossack cap, sit down, and hurriedly unbutton his trousers. From beyond the hill the Germans came running. Gregor realized that Stepan had no wish to die, and so was tearing off his trousers, knowing that the Germans would show a cossack no mercy. Mastering the beating of his heart, he turned his horse round and galloped back to the bush, jumping off while the horse was moving.

  ‘Get on my horse!’ he ordered Stepan.

  Unforgettable was the curt sweep of Stepan’s eyes as Gregor helped him to mount, then ran at his side, holding on to the stirrup. A stream of bullets whistled over their heads, and on either side and behind them sounded the spurting shots, like the splitting of over-ripe acacia pods.

  In the forest Stepan, his face twisted with pain, slipped down from the saddle and limped away. Through the leg of his right boot blood was flowing, and at every step a cherry-red little stream spurted from his broken sole. He leant against the trunk of a spreading oak and beckoned to Gregor.

  ‘My boot’s full of blood,’ he said, when Gregor went across to him.

  Gregor was silent, gazing aside.

  ‘Grishka! When we went into the attack today … Do you hear, Gregor?’ Stepan said, attempting to look into his enemy’s eyes. ‘When we went into the attack I fired three times at you from behind … God stopped me from killing you.’

  Their eyes met. Stepan’s keen pupils gleamed insufferably in their sunken sockets. He spoke almost without stirring his lips.

  ‘You’ve saved me from death … Thank you … But I can’t forgive you for Aksinia … my soul won’t try … Don’t force me, Gregor …’

  ‘I shan’t force you,’ Gregor answered. They had parted enemies as before.

  In May the regiment with other sections of the Brusilov army had broken through the front at Lutsk, and had carrouselled in the enemy’s rear, striking and being struck. By Lvov Gregor had himself drawn his company into an attack and had beaten back an Austrian howitzer battery. One night nearly a month later he had swum across the Bug river and had sent a sentry flying, and they had struggled a long time in the darkness before Gregor could bind him.

  Strongly had Gregor defended his cossack honour, seizing every opportunity of displaying immortal prowess, risking his life in madcap adventures, changing his clothes and making to the rear of the enemy, capturing outposts, and feeling that the pain for other men which had oppressed him during the first days of the war had gone for ever. His heart had grown hard, dry like a salt-marsh in drought; as a marsh will not absorb water, so Gregor’s heart would not absorb compassion. With cold contempt he played with his own and others’ lives, and covered himself with glory. He had won four St George crosses and four other medals. On the occasional parades he stood by the regimental banner, seasoned with the gunpowder smoke of innumerable wars. But he knew that he no longer laughed as in former days, that his eyes were sunken and his cheekbones stood out sharply. He knew what price he had paid for his crosses and medals.

  He lay on the hillside, the edges of his greatcoat turned under him, resting on his left elbow. His memory obediently resurrected the past, and among the throng of memories some distant incident of his youth was entwined like a fine blue thread. For a moment he rested his mental eye upon it sadly and lovingly, then returned to the present. In the Austrian trenches someone was playing a mandoline. The fine, wind-billowed strains hurried across the Stokhod river, scattering lightly over the earth so often washed with human blood. In the zenith the stars flamed, but the darkness was deepening and a midnight mist was bowed over the marsh. He smoked two cigarettes in succession, then rose from the hospitable earth and went back to the trenches.

  In his dugout the men were still playing cards. Gregor dropped on to his pallet and fell off to sleep. In his sleep he dreamed of the parched, interminable steppe, the rosy lilac of the immortelles, the traces of unshod horses’ hoofs among the shaggy lilac thyme. The steppe was empty and terrifyingly quiet. He was walking over the hard, sandy ground, but he could not hear his own footfalls, and this alarmed him … He awoke for a moment and raised his head, chewing his lips like a horse that has momentarily caught the aroma of some unusual herb. Then he fell asleep again, into an untroubled, dreamless sleep.

  Next day he awoke with an inexplicable, sucking yearning troubling him.

  ‘What are you fasting for today? Dreamed about home last night?’ Uriupin asked him.

  ‘You guessed right. I dreamed of the steppe … I’m so worn out in spirit … I’d like to be back home. I’m fed up with the Tsar’s service …’

  Uriupin smiled condescendingly. H
e had lived continually in one dugout with Gregor, and had that respect for him which one strong animal feels for another. Since their quarrel in 1914 there had been no conflict between them, and Uriupin’s influence was clearly discernible in Gregor’s changed character and psychology. The war had strongly modified Uriupin’s outlook. He dully but unswervingly turned towards an anti-war attitude, talked a great deal about traitor generals and the Germans in the Tsar’s palace. Once he had muttered: ‘Don’t expect any good to come of it when the Tsaritsa herself is of German blood …’ Gregor had tried to explain Garanzha’s teaching to him, but Uriupin would have none of it.

  ‘The song’s all right, but the voice is throaty,’ he had said with a humorous smile. ‘Misha Koshevoi is always crowing the same story like a cock on a wall. There’s no sense ever comes from these revolutions, only mischief. You remember that what the cossacks need is their own government, and not any other! We need a strong Tsar like Nicholai Nicholaitch; we’ve got nothing in common with the peasants, the goose and the swine are not comrades. The peasants want to get the land for themselves, the workers want to have higher wages. But what will they give us? Land we’ve got in plenty … Oho! And what else do we need? Our Tsar’s a horse-radish, there’s no use denying it! His father was stronger, but this one will wait till revolution is knocking at the door as it did in 1905, and then they’ll go rolling down to the devil together. That’s not to our hand; once they’ve driven the Tsar out they’ll be coming down on us. Here the old fights will break out again, there they’ll begin to take our land away for the peasants. We must keep our ears pricked.’

  ‘You always think one-sidedly,’ Gregor frowned.

  ‘You’re talking nonsense. You’re young yet, you’ve not seen the world. But you wait a little and you’ll find out who’s right.’

  The argument usually ended at that, Gregor lapsing into silence and Uriupin attempting to talk about something else.

  That day Gregor was drawn into an unfortunate incident. At midday the field-kitchen stopped on the farther side of the hill as usual. The cossacks pressed on one another along the communication trench to the kitchen. Misha Koshevoi went to get the food for the third troop, and came back carrying the steaming pots on a long pole. He had hardly entered the dugout when he shouted:

  ‘This isn’t good enough, brothers! Are we dogs, or what?’

  ‘What’s up?’ Uruipin asked.

  ‘They’re feeding us on dead horse,’ Koshevoi exclaimed indignantly. Throwing back his head of golden hair, he set the pots down on a bed, and suggested, glancing sidelong at Uriupin:

  ‘Smell for yourself what the soup stinks like!’

  Uriupin bent over his pot and distended his nostrils. He started back and pulled a wry face. Koshevoi also frowned, and his nostrils quivered in involuntary imitation of Uriupin.

  ‘The meat’s gone bad,’ Uriupin decided.

  He pushed the pot away fastidiously, and looked at Gregor. Gregor rose from his bed, bent his already hooked nose over the soup, then flung himself away and with a lazy movement sent the nearest pot to the ground.

  ‘What have you done that for?’ Uriupin asked irresolutely.

  ‘Don’t you see what for? Look! Are you half-blind? What’s that?’ Gregor pointed to the muddy wash oozing over the floor.

  ‘Here! Worms! My old mother! And I didn’t see them! There’s a fine dinner for you! That’s not cabbage soup, that’s vermicelli. Worms instead of giblets!’ Uriupin exclaimed.

  For a moment there was silence. Gregor spat through his teeth. Then Koshevoi drew his sabre and said:

  ‘We’ll arrest this soup and report it to the company commander!’

  ‘That’s the idea!’ Uriupin approved. ‘We’ll take the soup, and you, Gregor, must come behind and make the report.’

  With their bayonets Uriupin and Koshevoi picked up a pot of soup, then drew their sabres. Gregor followed behind them, and as they passed along the trenches a line of inquisitive cossacks gathered in a grey-green wave and followed them. They halted outside the officers’ dugout. Gregor stooped, and holding his cap on with his left hand, entered the ‘fox-hole’.

  After a moment the company commander came out, buttoning up his overcoat and looking back at Gregor in astonishment with a hint of anxiety.

  ‘What’s the matter, boys?’ the officer ran his eyes over the assembled cossacks.

  Gregor stepped in front of him and replied:

  ‘We’ve brought a prisoner.’

  ‘What prisoner?’

  ‘That …’ He pointed to the pot of soup at Uriupin’s feet. ‘There’s the prisoner. Smell what your cossacks are being fed on.’

  ‘They’ve started to serve out dead horse,’ Misha Koshevoi exclaimed fiercely.

  ‘Change the quartermaster! The soup’s got worms in it,’ other shouts arose.

  The officer waited until the howl of voices had died down, then said sternly:

  ‘Silence! You’ve said enough! I’ll change the quartermaster today. I’ll appoint a commission to investigate his activities. If the meat isn’t good …’

  ‘Court-martial him!’ came a shout from behind, and the officer’s voice was drowned in a new storm of cries.

  The quartermaster had to be changed while the regiment was on the march. A few hours after the cossacks had arrested the soup and brought it before the company commander, the order was received to withdraw from the front and to move by forced marches into Roumania. During the night the cossacks were relieved by Siberian Sharpshooters. The next day the regiment was mounted and on its way.

  The march took seventeen days. The horses were exhausted by shortage of fodder. There was no food anywhere along the devastated zone immediately behind the front; the inhabitants had either fled into the interior or hidden in the forests. The gaping doors of the huts gloomily revealed bare walls. Occasionally the cossacks would fall in with a sullen, terrified villager in a deserted street, but as soon as he saw the soldiers he hastened to hide himself. Worn out with their unbroken march, frozen, and irritable because of all they had had to endure, they tore off the straw roofs of the buildings. In villages still unrifled by others they did not hesitate to steal the miserable food, and no threats on the part of their officers could stop them.

  Not far from the Roumanian frontier Uriupin succeeded in stealing some barley from a barn in some more affluent village. The owner caught him in the act, but he knocked the peaceable, elderly Bessarabian down and carried the barley to his horse. The troop officer found him filling his horse’s basket and with trembling fingers stroking the animal’s sunken, bony sides.

  ‘Uriupin! Hand over that barley, you swine! You’ll be shot for this!’ the officer shouted.

  Uriupin gave the officer a sidelong glance and threw his cap down on the ground. For the first time during all his life in the regiment he raised a heart-rending cry:

  ‘Court-martial me! Shoot me! Kill me on the spot, but I won’t give up the barley … Is my horse to die of hunger, ah? I won’t hand over the barley, not a single grain!’

  The officer stood without replying, staring at the horse’s terribly emaciated flanks and shaking his head. Finally he remarked, with a note of perplexity in his voice:

  ‘What are you giving the horse grain for when he’s still hot?’

  ‘But he’s cooled down, now,’ Uriupin replied almost in a whisper, gathering up the grains fallen on the ground and putting them back in the basket.

  The regiment arrived at its new position in the middle of November. The winds were howling over the Transylvanian mountains, a freezing mist gathered in the valleys, and the traces of animals were frequently seen on the early snows. Terrified by the war, the wolves, elks and goats were abandoning their wild fastnesses and making for the interior of the country.

  On November 20th the regiment attempted to storm height ‘320’. The previous evening the trenches had been held by Austrians, but on the morning of the attack they were relieved by Saxons freshly transferred from
the western front. The cossacks marched on foot up the stony, slightly snow-covered slopes, sending the stones rolling down and raising a fine snowy dust. As Gregor strode along he smiled guiltily and sheepishly, and told Uriupin:

  ‘I’m quite nervous this morning, for some reason. I feel just as though I was going into battle for the first time.’

  The cossacks marched up the slope in irregular chain formation. Not a shot was fired. The enemy trenches were ominously silent. Gregor was smiling anxiously. His hook-nose and his sunken cheeks with their black harvest of whisker were a yellowish blue; his eyes gleamed dully like pieces of anthracite beneath his rime-covered brows. His accustomed composure had deserted him. Today as never before he was anxious for himself and for his comrades. He felt as though he wanted to throw himself on the ground and weep, complaining with childish phrases to the earth as if it were his mother. He fixed a distrustful gaze on the grey, snow-fringed line of trenches ahead, and struggling with the terrible feeling, mastering his tears, he talked away to Uriupin.

  The very first volley from the enemy knocked Gregor over, and he fell to the ground with a groan. He tried to reach the first-aid dressing in his pack, but the hot blood pouring from the elbow inside his sleeve left him too weak. He lay flat, and shielding his head behind a boulder, licked the downy fringe of snow with his parched tongue, and thirstily caught at the snowy dust with quivering lips. He listened with unusual fear and trembling to the dry, sharp crack of the rifles and the dominating thunder of the guns. Raising his head, he saw the cossacks of his company running back down the slope, slipping, falling, aimlessly firing backward and upward. An inexplicable and irrational fear brought him to his feet, and forced him also to run down towards the serrated edging of the pine forest whence the regiment had opened the attack. The companies poured in torrents into the forest. On the grey slopes behind them lay little grey bundles of dead; the wounded crawled down unaided, whipped along by the fierce machine-gun fire.