‘That’s true, Listnitsky.’
‘Russia has one foot in the grave.’
‘I say that when the coming struggle arrives … the civil war, I mean – and I’ve only just begun to realize that it is inevitable – we shall have need of trusty cossacks. We must struggle to win them away from the committees which are inclining towards the Bolsheviks. That is a bloody necessity! Remember that in the event of new disturbances the cossacks of the first and fourth regiments will shoot down their own officers …’
‘That’s true; they won’t stand on ceremony.’
‘… And by their experience – a very bitter one – we must profit. The cossacks of the first and fourth regiments (for that matter, they’re no longer cossacks!) will have to be dealt with summarily. The weeds must be cleared from the field! And we must save our own cossacks from mistakes for which they would afterwards have to pay.’
After Listnitsky one of the company commanders, an elderly officer who had been nine years in the regiment and had been wounded four times, spoke of the difficulties of service in the cossack regiments before the war. The cossack officers had been kept in the backyard, in the shade; promotion had been slow; and in his view this explained the inertia of the cossack leaders at the time of the Tsar’s overthrow. But even so it was necessary to support Kornilov at all costs, and to maintain closer contacts with him through the Soviet of the Alliance of Cossack Troops and the Chief Committee of the Officers’ Alliance. ‘Let Kornilov become dictator!’ he ended. ‘For the cossacks that will be salvation. Maybe we shall be better off under him than under the Tsar.’
The officers sat talking till dawn. It was decided to have talks with the cossacks three times a week on political subjects, and the troop officers were to occupy the troops daily with gymnastics and reading, in order to fill up spare time and to win the cossacks away from the disintegrating atmosphere of politics. Before breaking up, toasts were jestingly proposed to the ring of their glasses of tea, and Dolgov and Atarshchikov raised the tune of the old cossack song:
‘… But our Don is proud, our gentle Don, our father dear;
Never did he bow to heathen, never asked of Moscow how to live;
And the Turks – with the sword-point for ages he greeted them;
And from year to year the Donland steppe, our motherland,
For the Immaculate Holy Mother and its own true faith,
Yes, for the Don so free, with its billowing waves, battled with the enemies …’
Atarshchikov sat with hands crossed on his knees, singing without faltering, his face unusually stern. Only towards the end of the song Listnitsky noticed a tear running down his cheeks.
After the officers of the other companies had departed Atarshchikov came and sat down on Listnitsky’s bed, and fiddling with the faded blue braces on his chest, whispered:
‘You know, Eugene … I am devilishly fond of the Don, of all that old, age-old style of cossack life. I love my cossacks, and the cossack women. I love them all! I want to weep when I smell the scent of the steppe wormwood … And when the sunflower blossoms and the perfume of the rain-washed grape-vines is in the air, I love it all so deeply and painfully … you understand … And now I’m thinking: mayn’t we be fooling these same cossacks with all this? Is this the road we want them to take?’
‘What are you getting at?’ Listnitsky asked cautiously.
‘I’m wondering whether this is the best for the cossacks.’
‘But in that case what is best for them?’
‘I don’t know … But why are they so elementally turning away from us? The revolution has literally divided us into sheep and goats; our interests seem to be different.’
‘Don’t you see?’ Listnitsky began carefully. ‘Here we get a difference in the understanding of events. We have the greater culture, and we can critically estimate the situation, but for them everything is more primitive and simple. The Bolsheviks are continually driving into their heads that the war must be ended, or rather, must be transformed into civil war. They are poisoning the cossacks against us, and as they are tired, as there is more of the animal in them, and they don’t have that strong moral consciousness of their duty and responsibility to their fatherland which we have, it is natural that the Bolsheviks should find them a favourable soil for their doctrines. After all, what does the fatherland really mean to the cossacks? It is an abstract conception at the best. “The Don district is far from the front,” they reason, “and the Germans will never get as far.” That’s the whole trouble. We must explain to them the consequences that would follow from the transformation of the war into a civil war.’
Even while he spoke, Eugene felt that his words were not reaching their aim, and that Atarshchikov was closing into himself again like an oyster. When he had finished, the other man sat for a long time without speaking, and try as he would, Listnitsky could not discover the secret train of thought Atarshchikov was pursuing. ‘I should have let him speak his mind out to the end …’ he thought regretfully.
Atarshchikov wished him a good night, and went to his own bed. Listnitsky lay smoking for a while, troubled and angered by his inability to get to the bottom of what was disturbing his friend. As he stared tensely into the grey, velvety darkness he suddenly remembered Aksinia, and his days of leave, filled to the brim with her. He fell asleep, soothed by the change of thought and the fortuitous, fragmentary recollection of the women whose roads at various times had crossed his road.
In Listnitsky’s company was a cossack, Ivan Lagutin, who had been one of the first to be elected to the regimental military revolutionary committee. Until the regiment arrived in Petrograd he displayed no outstanding characteristics, but at the beginning of August the troop officer informed Eugene that the man was in the habit of attending the military section of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, was always talking to the other cossacks of the troop, and had an unfortunate influence over them. There had been two cases of refusal to undertake guard and patrol duty, and the troop officer attributed them to Lagutin’s influence. Listnitsky decided that he must get to know the man better, and find out what he was thinking. An opportunity quickly presented itself. A few nights later Lagutin’s troop was assigned patrol duty in the streets around the Putilov works, and Listnitsky informed the troop officer that he would take charge on this occasion. He gave instructions to his orderly to get his horse ready, and went out into the yard.
The troop was already mounted and waiting. He led it out, and they rode along several streets through the misty darkness. Eugene deliberately dropped behind, and called Lagutin to him. The man turned his horse and rode up, glancing inquiringly at the captain.
‘Well, what’s the latest news in the committee?’ Listnitsky asked.
‘Nothing much just now,’ the man replied.
‘What district are you from, Lagutin?’
‘Bukanovsk.’
‘And the village?’
‘Mitkin.’
‘Are you married?’ the captain asked, after a silence during which he studied the man’s face.
‘Yes. I’ve got a wife and two children.’
‘And a farm?’
‘A farm, do you call it?’ Lagutin replied, with a sneer and a note of self-pity in his voice. ‘We live from hand to mouth, and all our life is one long grind and struggle.’ He paused for a moment, then added harshly: ‘Our land is sandy.’
Listnitsky had once driven through the Bukanovsk district, and he vividly remembered the remote, isolated region, bounded on the south by level, worthless marshland, and belted by the capricious windings of the river Khopra.
‘I expect you’d like to get back home,’ he asked.
‘And why not, sir? Of course I’d like to get back as soon as I can. We’ve had to put up with a lot through this war.’
‘I’m afraid you won’t be getting back yet awhile, my lad.’
‘I think we shall,’ Lagutin answered.
‘But the war isn’t
ended yet.’
‘It’ll be over soon. We’ll be going home soon,’ the cossack replied obstinately.
‘We’ll be fighting among ourselves first. Don’t you think so?’
Without raising his eyes from his saddle-bow, Lagutin replied after a moment:
‘Who are we going to fight, then?’
‘We’ll have plenty on our hands … The Bolsheviks perhaps.’
Again Lagutin was silent, as though he were dozing to the firm, rhythmic clatter of the hoofs. Then he slowly answered:
‘We haven’t any quarrel with them.’
‘But what about the land?’
‘There’s enough land for everybody.’
‘You know what the Bolsheviks are after?’ Eugene inquired.
‘I’ve heard a little about it.’
‘Well then, what ought we to do if the Bolsheviks attack us in order to seize our land and to enslave the cossacks? You’ve been fighting the Germans in defence of Russia, haven’t you?’
‘The Germans are different.’
‘And the Bolsheviks?’
‘Why, sir,’ Lagutin spoke up. Evidently he had come to some decision. He raised his eyes and tried to catch Listnitsky’s gaze. ‘The Bolsheviks won’t take my last bit of land from me. I’ve only got one share, and they won’t need that … But … only you won’t be offended, will you …? There’s your father now, he has twenty thousand acres …’
‘Not twenty but eight …’
‘That doesn’t make any difference. Eight thousand isn’t a little. And where’s the right of that? And there’s a lot like your father all over Russia. Then you think what every mouth needs. You want to eat and everybody else wants to eat. Under the Tsar everything was wrong, and the poor had a lean time. They gave your father eight thousand as his share of the pie, but he can’t eat two men’s food any more than I can. It’s a shame. And the Bolsheviks are on the right track, yet you want us to fight them.’
At first Listnitsky listened with inward agitation. But as the cossack developed his argument he could not control himself, and lost his temper.
‘Are you a Bolshevik, then?’ he demanded.
‘The name doesn’t matter,’ Lagutin replied. ‘It’s not a question of names, but of right. The people want their rights, but they’re always being buried and the earth heaped over them.’
‘It’s obvious what the Bolsheviks are teaching you! You haven’t wasted the time you have spent in their company.’
‘Ah, captain, it’s life itself that has taught us patient ones, and the Bolsheviks have only set fire to the tinder.’
‘You can drop those stories,’ Listnitsky ordered, now thoroughly angry. ‘Answer me! You were speaking just now of my father’s land, and of the landowners’ land generally, but you know as well as I do that it is private property. If you have two shirts and I haven’t even one, do you think I ought to take one from you?’
Eugene could not see the cossack’s face, but from his reply he guessed that he was smiling.
‘I’d give up my extra shirt of my own accord. At the front I gave up not one extra shirt, but my very last shirt, and wore my greatcoat against my bare back. And nobody would be hurt by losing a little bit of land.’
‘Haven’t you enough land already?’ Listnitsky raised his voice.
Lagutin almost shouted his answer:
‘And do you think I’m only thinking about myself? We’ve been in Poland … you saw how the people were living there? And how the peasants are living all around us in the Don? I’ve seen it! It’s enough to make your blood boil! Do you think I’m not sorry for them?’
Eugene was about to make a biting reply, but from the looming grey buildings of the Putilov works ahead came a sudden shout of ‘Hold him!’ There was a clatter of hoofs and the sound of a shot. Plying his whip, Listnitsky put his horse to a gallop. He and Lagutin rode up side by side and found the troop halted and gathered at a corner. Several of the cossacks were dismounted, and in the middle of the ring a man was struggling. The troop-sergeant, Arzhanov, was hanging out of his saddle and holding a little man in a Russian shirt by his collar, while three dismounted cossacks were twisting his arms.
‘What’s the matter?’ Listnitsky thundered, urging his horse into the crowd.
‘This serpent has been throwing stones …’
‘He struck one of us and ran away.’
‘Give it him, Arzhanov!’ another cossack shouted.
Almost beside himself with rage, Listnitsky shouted at the man:
‘Who are you?’
The prisoner raised his head, but in his white face the lips remained pressed firmly together.
‘Who are you?’ Eugene repeated his question. ‘Throwing stones were you, you scum? Silence! Arzhanov, give it to him!’ he ordered, turning his horse away.
Three or four of the dismounted cossacks threw the man down and swung their knouts. Lagutin flung himself out of the saddle and ran to Listnitsky.
‘Captain … What are you doing …? Captain!’ He seized Listnitsky’s knee with his trembling fingers and shouted: ‘You can’t go on like that! He’s a man … What are you doing?’
Eugene shook his reins over his horse’s neck and made no reply. Running back to the cossacks, Lagutin seized Arzhanov around the waist and tried to drag him away. But the sergeant resisted, muttering:
‘Don’t take on so! Don’t take on! Is he to throw stones and us not say a word? Let me go! Let me go, I tell you for your own good!’
One of the cossacks bent, and swinging his rifle from his shoulder, brought the butt down against the man’s soft body. A low, primitively savage cry crept over the roadway. ‘Ah-ah-ah-ah! They’re killing me!’ There was silence for a few seconds, then again the voice arose, but now young and choking, quivering with pain. After each blow he muttered curt exclamations between his groans:
‘Swines! Counter- … revolutionaries! Beat on! O-oh!’
Lagutin ran back to Listnitsky, and pressing against his knee, scratching with his finger-nails at the saddle he choked:
‘Let him go!’
‘Stand back!’ Eugene ordered.
‘Captain … Listnitsky! Do you hear …? You’ll answer for this!’ He turned and ran to the cossacks standing apart from the group around the man. ‘Brothers!’ he shouted. ‘I am a member of the revolutionary committee … I order you to save that man from death …! You will have to answer for it! It’s not the old days now!’
An unreasoning, blinding hatred carried Listnitsky away. He struck his horse between the ears with his whip and rode at Lagutin. Thrusting his black, well-greased pistol into the cossack’s face, he howled:
‘Silence, traitor! Bolshevik! I’ll shoot you!’
With a supreme effort of will he mastered himself, removed his finger from the trigger, swung his horse round on its hind legs and rode off.
A few minutes later three cossacks set out after him. Two of them dragged the prisoner along between their two horses. The man’s blood-soaked shirt was sticking to his body. Supported under the armpits by the cossacks, he swayed helplessly, his feet dancing over the cobbles. His bloody face, beaten almost to a pulp, hung back loosely between his raised shoulders. The third cossack rode some distance away. At the corner of a street he saw a drozhki driver, and standing in his stirrups, cantered towards him. Expressively striking his boot-leg with his knout, he gave the man a curt order, and with servile haste the drozhki driver drove up to the two cossacks halted in the middle of the street.
The next morning Listnitsky awoke with the feeling that he had committed a great and irreparable blunder. He bit his lips as he recalled the scene of the previous night, and all that had passed between himself and Lagutin, As he dressed he decided that for the present Lagutin had better be left alone, in order to avoid any worsening of relationships with the regimental committee. It would be advisable to wait until the other cossacks of the troop had forgotten the incident, and then quietly remove him.
‘And that’s w
hat we mean when we talk about fraternizing with the cossacks,’ he thought with bitter irony.
One fine, sunny day in the middle of August Listnitsky and Atarshchikov went into the city. Since the conversation after the officers’ meeting nothing had happened to resolve the uncertainty which had arisen between them. Atarshchikov kept his own counsel, and whenever Eugene attempted to draw him into the open, he dropped the impenetrable curtain which most men employ to protect their true features from other eyes. Eugene could only conclude that in his struggle to find a way out from the antagonisms dividing the various sections of the nation, Atarshchikov was linking up the cossack national aspirations with those of the Bolsheviks. And this supposition led him to cease his attempts to become more friendly with Atarschchikov.
They strolled down the Nevsky Prospect, exchanging casual remarks.
‘Let’s go and have something to eat,’ Listnitsky proposed, with his eyes indicating a restaurant.
‘All right!’ the other man agreed.
They entered and sat down at a table by the window. Through the lowered curtain the broken sunrays stuck like yellow needles into the table-cloth. The smell of cooking overpowered the subtle perfume of the flowers set out on the tables. Listnitsky ordered some iced beetroot soup, and sat thoughtfully fiddling with the rusty-yellow nasturtium he had taken from the vase. Atarshchikov wiped his perspiring brow with his handkerchief. His drooping, weary eyes, blinking incessantly, watched the sunlight playing on the legs of the neighbouring table. They had not finished eating when two officers, talking loudly, entered the restaurant. As the first looked for a free table he turned his sunburnt face in Listnitsky’s direction, and his black eyes lit up gladly.
And Quiet Flows the Don Page 41