‘Am I an animal? Won’t you let a man eat, you swines? Damn you, haven’t you ever seen a man before?’
The soldiers burst into a roar of laughter; but Piotra had hardly heard the first words when the identity of the man came back to him in a flash.
‘Fomin! Yakob!’ he shouted, pushing his way through the crowd.
The man put the mug down with a clumsy, bewildered movement, and, gazing at Piotra with smiling, embarrassed eyes, replied, as he chewed:
‘I can’t say I know you, brother!’
‘You’re from Rabiezhin, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. And you’re surely from Zhelanska?’
‘No, from Vieshenska. But I know you all right. You sold my father a bullock at the market four years ago.’
Still smiling the same childish smile, Fomin tried to remember.
‘No, I’ve forgotten it. I can’t remember you,’ he said with evident regret.
‘You were in the 52nd?’
‘Yes.’
‘You ran away? How could you, brother?’
Fomin took off his fur cap and fished out an ancient pouch. He bent and slowly pushed his cap under his arm, tore off a corner of paper, and only then fixed Piotra with a stern, moistly twinkling gaze:
‘Couldn’t stand any more, brother,’ he said gruffly.
Transfixed by the man’s stare, Piotra coughed and bit at his yellow whisker.
‘Well, finish your talk, or I’ll be getting into trouble through you,’ the soldier escort remarked, picking up his rifle. ‘Come on, old boy.’
Fomin hurriedly pushed the mug into his pack, said goodbye to Piotra with eyes averted, and with a heavy, bearish, swaying gait went with his escort towards the station commandant’s office.
Piotra found the regimental commander with the two company commanders bent over a table in the former first-class buffet.
‘You’ve kept us waiting, Melekhov,’ the colonel frowned with tired, irritable eyes.
Piotra listened to the information that his company was being placed at the disposition of the divisional staff, and that it was necessary to keep a sharp watch on the cossacks, informing the company commander of any noticeable change in their attitude. He stared unwinkingly at the colonel’s face, listening attentively, but Fomin’s twinkling eyes and the quiet ‘couldn’t stand any more, brother’, stuck ineradicably in his memory.
He left the warm, steaming buffet and went back to the company. As he approached his wagon he saw a group of cossacks gathered around the company smith. He promptly forgot Fomin and their conversation and hurried his steps, intending to have a word with the smith about the reshoeing of his horse. The petty cares and anxieties of the daily round rose uppermost. But it was only for a moment. From behind a wagon came a woman decked in a white, fluffy shawl, and dressed differently from the women in White Russia. The strangely familiar shape of her figure fixed Piotra’s attention. The woman suddenly turned her face towards him, and hastened in his direction, swinging her shoulders and her fine, youthful body. And, although not yet close enough to distinguish her features, by that light, crisp walk of hers Piotra recognized his wife. A pleasant, prickly cool penetrated to his heart. His joy was the greater because unexpected. Deliberately slowing his steps, so that the others should not think he was particularly pleased, he went to meet her. He embraced Daria, kissed her the customary three times, and was about to ask her something. But his deep, inward agitation broke through to the surface, his lips trembled, and he lost his voice.
‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ he choked up at last.
‘My dove! How you have changed!’ Daria clapped her hands. ‘You’re quite a stranger! You see I’ve come to visit you. They didn’t want to let me go at home. But I thought I must go and see my dear one.’ She tumbled out the words, pressing against her husband and gazing at him with moist eyes.
Around the wagons the cossacks crowded, staring at them, quacking and winking:
‘Piotra’s happy all right!’
‘My old wolf-bitch wouldn’t come to visit me!’
‘He might lend his wife to his own troop for a night. In pity on our poverty …’
At that moment Piotra forgot that he had promised himself to punish his wife ruthlessly, and he caressed her in front of everybody, stroking the arches of her eyebrows with his great, tobacco-stained finger, and rejoicing. Daria also forgot that only two nights previously she had slept in a wagon with a veterinary surgeon of the dragoons, who had been on his way from Kharkov to rejoin his regiment. The surgeon had unusually fluffy, black moustaches; but that had been two nights ago, and now with tears of sincere joy in her eyes she embraced her husband, gazing at him with true, clear eyes.
Chapter Three
On his return from leave Eugene Listnitsky did not report to his old regiment, but went straight to the divisional staff. The chief of staff, a young general from a famous Don cossack noble family, willingly arranged for his transfer to the 14th Don Cossack regiment, in view of his difficulties with the cossacks of his previous regiment.
Listnitsky was glad of the transfer. The same day he travelled to Dvinsk, where the 14th regiment was stationed, and reported to the regimental commander. He was satisfied to find that the majority of the officers were monarchists, while the cossacks were by no means revolutionarily disposed. They had taken the oath of allegiance to the Provisional Government very reluctantly, and took no part in the events seething around them. Cringing and peaceable cossacks had been elected to the regimental and company committees. Listnitsky breathed more easily in his new circumstances.
The regiment had been stationed some two months in Dvinsk, assembled into a single unit, and resting. Previously the two companies had been attached to infantry divisions and had wandered about the front from Riga to Dvinsk, but in April a careful hand had brought the companies together, and the regiment was now prepared for anything. Protected by the officers’ strict supervision, the cossacks spent their days at exercise, fed their horses well, and lived a temperate, sluggish existence, removed from all outside influence. Unpleasant rumours circulated among them as to the future purpose of the regiment, while the officers talked openly of their intention, guided by reliable hands, to turn back the wheel of history in the not distant future.
The front extended a little farther to the west. There, the armies breathed in a mortal fever, there was a shortage of military supplies, of food. With innumerable hands the soldiers reached out to the phantasmal word ‘peace’. In the armies a ripened anger flowed and bubbled like water in a spring … But in Dvinsk the cossacks lived peaceably, quietly, and the miseries they had endured at the front were overgrown in their memories. The officers regularly attended the officers’ meetings, lived well, and ardently discussed the future of Russia.
So till the early days of July. On the sixteenth the order came to advance without losing an instant. The regiment moved towards Petrograd. On the twentieth the hoofs of the cossack horses were clattering over the wood-paved streets of the capital.
The regiment was quartered in houses on the Nevsky Prospect, and Listnitsky’s company was assigned an empty commercial building. The cossacks had been awaited with impatience and joy; the care which the city authorities had taken to fit up the quarters assigned to them witnessed eloquently to that. The walls gleamed with fresh whitewash, the clean floors shone like new pins, it was almost comfortable in the light, tidy semi-basement. Listnitsky carefully examined the quarters and decided that they could hardly have been better. Satisfied with his inspection, he turned towards the door leading to the yard, accompanied by the little, elegantly dressed representative of the city administration who had been assigned to show him the building.
Listening inattentively to the chatter of the city representative, he crossed the yard and inspected the warehouse allotted for stables.
‘We must have another doorway made in these stables,’ he pointed out. ‘Three doors for a hundred and twenty horses are insufficient. In the event of an al
arm it would take us half an hour to get the horses out. It’s strange that this circumstance was not taken into consideration beforehand. I shall have to report the matter to the regimental commander.’
He left the man making protestations that the work would be put in hand at once, and went upstairs to the rooms temporarily assigned to the company officers. He threw himself down on his camp-bed and lay silent, feeling the damp sweat of his shirt cooling pleasantly on his skin. Worn out with his journey, he was disinclined to rise and wash, but mastering his lassitude, he rose at last, stripped, and washed thoroughly, then rubbed himself dry with the towel. The wash freshened him, and he was about to pick up the newspaper to read about the disturbances of a few days before in the city, when an invitation came for him to call on the regimental commander. Rising unwillingly from his bed, he dressed and went on to the Nevsky Prospect. Lighting a cigarette, he strolled along the pavement. A dense throng foamed with men’s straw hats, bowlers, and caps, and women’s artifically simple and trimmed hats. Occasionally the democratic green cap of a soldier appeared and disappeared, engulfed in the flood of colours.
A fresh, stimulating breeze was blowing from the sea, but it broke against the blocks of buildings and was scattered into thin, unequal gusts. Clouds were floating southward over the steely, violet-tinted heaven; their milky-white masses were sharply and distinctly serrated. A steaming sultriness heralding rain hung over the city. The air was scented with the smell of warm asphalt, burnt petrol, the nearby sea, the indefinite aroma of perfumes, and the myriad other odours characteristic of every large town.
The sunblinds of the shops cast lazy, olive-yellow patches on the pavement. The wind sent the blinds billowing and bellying, and the patches stirred, tearing away from the feet of the passers-by. Despite the afternoon hour, the Nevsky was crowded with people. With joyous satisfaction Listnitsky, grown unaccustomed to towns during the years of war, drank in the myriad-voiced roar, the motor-horns, the shouts of the newspaper sellers. Feeling among his own people in this crowd of well-dressed, well-fed people, nevertheless he could not but think:
‘How satisfied, how glad and happy you are now! All of you: merchants, stockbrokers, officials, landowners, people of blue blood! But how did you feel only three days ago, when the workers and soldiers were pouring in a molten stream along this very street? Truly, I am glad for you, yet not glad. And I don’t know how to rejoice in your well-being …’
He tried to analyse his mingled feelings, to find their source, and had no difficulty in deciding that he thought and felt so because the war and all he had had to live through had drawn him apart from this crowd of well-fed and satisfied men and women.
‘Now you, for instance,’ he thought, as his eyes met those of a plump, rosy-cheeked young man. ‘Why aren’t you at the front? I suppose he’s the son of a factory owner or some commercial giant, and has got out of military service, the scum! And he’s growing fat in work “for the defence of the fatherland”.’
He went slowly up the steps of the house in which the regimental staff was quartered. On the landing of the second floor he smoked a cigarette, cleaned his pince-nez, and then ascended to the third floor where the staff was quartered.
The regimental commander opened a map of Petrograd before him, and pointed out the area in which Listnitsky’s company was to guard the government offices. He specified the buildings one by one, and informed him with the utmost detail of the time and manner of posting the guards. He concluded with:
‘In the Winter Palace Kerensky …’
‘Not a word of Kerensky!’ Listnitsky muttered fiercely, turning a deathly pallor.
‘Eugene Nikolaivitch, you must take yourself in hand.’
‘Colonel, I ask you …’
‘Now, my dear …’
‘I ask you!’
‘Your nerves …’
‘Am I to send out patrols in the direction of the Putilov works immediately?’ Eugene asked quietly, breathing heavily.
The colonel bit his lips, smiled, shrugged his shoulders and replied:
‘At once! And invariably in charge of a troop officer.’
Listnitsky turned and went out, crushed by the memory of his talk with the colonel. Almost outside the main door he saw a patrol of the Fourth Don Cossack regiment. Fresh flowers drooped gloomily from the snaffles of the officer’s horse, and a smile twisted the man’s flaxen-whiskered face.
‘Hurrah for the saviours of the country!’ some sententious elderly gentleman shouted, stepping off the pavement and waving his hat.
The officer courteously saluted, and the patrol trotted on. Listnitsky stared at the agitated, slobbering-lipped face of the civilian who had cheered the cossacks, at the man’s carefully tied, coloured cravat, and frowning, huddled hurriedly into the gateway of his company quarters.
General Kornilov’s appointment as commander-in-chief of the south-western front was highly approved by the officers of the Fourteenth Cossack regiment. They spoke of him with esteem and respect as a man with an iron character, and undoubtedly capable of getting the country out of the mess into which the Provisional Government had plunged it. Listnitsky especially welcomed the appointment. Through the younger officers of the company and trusted cossacks he tried to find out how the lower ranks reacted to it, but the information he obtained hardly pleased him, for the cossacks were either silent or replied apathetically:
‘It makes no difference to us.’
‘If he tried to bring peace, then of course …’
‘We shan’t be any the better off by his advancement.’
Within a few days of Kornilov’s appointment, rumours were circulating among the officers that he was putting pressure on the government to restore the death sentence at the front, and to introduce other resolute measures on which the successful prosecution of the war depended, but that Kerensky was resisting him and was trying to have him replaced by a more compliant general. So the government communiqué of August 1st, appointing Kornilov as supreme commander-in-chief, came as a great surprise. On the evening of the same day Listnitsky, in conversation with other officers of the regiment, raised the question sharply and directly: ‘On whose side were they?’
‘Gentlemen!’ he said, restraining his agitation, ‘we are living like one family, yet so far a number of important questions have remained unsettled among us. And now that we are clearly moving towards a clash between the supreme command and the government, we must settle the question on whose side we are. Let’s talk like comrades, hiding nothing from one another.’
The first to reply to his invitation was lieutenant Atarshchikov:
‘For general Kornilov I am ready to give my own blood, and that of others also. He is a man of transparent honesty, and only he is capable of putting Russia on her feet. Look what he’s done already with the army. Thanks to him the hands of the commanders have been untied somewhat, whereas before it was continual committees, fraternizations, desertions. How can there be any discussion about it?’
He spoke fierily, and when he had ended looked around the group of officers and tapped a cigarette challengingly on his case.
‘If we’ve got to choose between the Bolsheviks, Kerensky, and Kornilov, of course we’re for Kornilov,’ said another.
‘It’s difficult to judge what Kornilov wants: is it the restoration of order, or the restoration of something else …’ a third remarked.
‘That’s no answer! Or if it is, it’s a silly one! What is it you’re afraid of: the restoration of the monarchy?’
‘I’m not afraid of that; on the contrary.’
‘Well then, what are you arguing about?’
‘Gentlemen!’ spoke up Dolgov, who had only recently been raised from corporal to cornet for his military distinction. ‘What are you quarrelling about? Say frankly that we cossacks must hold by general Kornilov as a child clings to its mother’s skirt. If we break with him, we’re lost. Russia will bury us in dung. The position is clear: where he goes, we go also.’
&n
bsp; ‘That’s exactly it!’ Atarshchikov exclaimed, clapping Dolgov on the back. ‘Now, gentlemen!’ he raised his voice. ‘Are we for Kornilov, or aren’t we?’
‘Why, of course we are.’
Laughing and kissing one another, the officers drank their tea. The tense feeling which had prevailed was dissipated, and the conversation turned to the events of the past few days.
‘We’re all for the commander-in-chief, but the cossacks are a bit down in the mouth,’ Dolgov remarked irresolutely.
‘How “down in the mouth”?’ Listnitsky asked.
‘Why, they’re in the dumps, and that’s all there is to it. The swines want to go home to their wives. Their life isn’t too easy or pleasant.’
‘It’s up to us to carry the cossacks with us,’ another officer declared, bringing his fist down with a bang on the table. ‘That’s what we’re officers for.’
Listnitsky rattled his spoon against his glass, and when he had secured attention, said deliberately:
‘I ask you to remember, gentlemen, that our work at the moment consists of explaining to the cossacks the true state of affairs. We must get the cossacks away from the influence of the committees. We must have a different approach to them now. Formerly, in 1916 for instance, I could thrash a cossack, and risk his sending a bullet through my back in the next battle. But after the March revolution we had to act differently, because if I struck some idiot he might easily have killed me on the spot without waiting for a convenient opportunity. And now the situation has changed again. Now we must fraternize with the cossacks. Everything depends on that,’ he declared emphatically. ‘You know what is happening at present in the first and fourth regiments? Their officers continued to cut themselves off from the cossacks with the old walls, and as a result the cossacks almost to a man have come under the influence of the Bolsheviks. It’s clear that we shall not be able to avoid the menacing events that are coming. The risings of July 16th and 18th were only a harsh forewarning to all who are heedless … Either we shall have to struggle with Kornilov against the army of the revolutionary democracy, or the Bolsheviks will bring about yet another revolution. They are having a breathing-space, a concentration of their strength, and meantime we are slacking. Is that good enough?’
And Quiet Flows the Don Page 40