THE RETREAT
The retreat struck us as breathlessly as though we had been whirled by
a wind-storm into midair on the afternoon of a summer day. At five
minutes to three we had been sitting round the table in the garden of
the house at M---- drinking tea. We were, I remember, very gay. We had
heard only the day before of the Russian surrender of Przemysl and
that had for a moment depressed us; but as always we could see very
little beyond our own immediate Division. Here, on our own Front, we
had at last cleared the path before us. On that very afternoon we were
gaily anticipating our advance. Even Sister K---- who, for religious
reasons, took always a gloomy view of the future, was cheerful. She
sipped her cherry jam and smiled upon us. Anna Petrovna, imperturbably
sewing, calmly sighed her satisfaction.
"Perhaps to-morrow we shall move. I feel like it. It will be splendid
to go through the Carpathians--beautiful scenery, I believe." Molozov
was absent in the town of B---- collecting some wagons that had
arrived from Petrograd. "He'll be back to-night, I believe," said
Sister K----. "Dear me, what a pleasant afternoon!"
It was then that I saw the face of the boy Goga. I had turned,
smiling, pleased with the sunshine, cherry jam, and a good Russian
cigarette straight from Petrograd. The boy Goga stared across the yard
at me, his round red cheeks pale, mouth open, and his eyes confused
and unbelieving.
He seemed then to jump across the intervening space. Then he screamed
at us:
"We're retreating.... We're retreating!" he shrieked in the high
trembling voice peculiar to agitated Russians. "We have only half an
hour and the Austrians are almost here now!"
We were flung after that into a hurry of movement that left us no time
for reasoning or argument. Semyonov appeared and in Molozov's absence
took the lead. He was, of course, entirely unmoved, and as I now
remember, combed his fair beard with a little tortoiseshell pocket
comb as he talked to us. "Yes, we must move in half an hour. Very
sad ... the whole army is retreating. Why, God knows...."
There arose clouds of dust in the yard where we had had our happy
luncheon. The tents had disappeared. The wounded were once more lying
on the jolting carts, looking up through their pain and distress to a
heaven that was hot and grey and indifferent. An old man whom we had
not seen during the whole of our stay suddenly appeared from nowhere
with a long broom and watched us complacently. We had our own private
property to pack. As I pressed my last things into my bag I turned
from my desolate little tent, looked over the fields, the garden, the
house, the barns.... "But it was ours--OURS," I thought passionately.
We had but just now won a desperately-fought battle; across the long
purple misty fields the bodies of those fallen Russians seemed to rise
and reproach us. "We had won that land for you--and now--like this,
you can abandon us!"
At that moment I cursed my lameness that would prevent me from ever
being a soldier. How poor, on that afternoon, it seemed to be unable
to defend with one's own hand those fields, those rivers, those
hills! "Ah but Russia, I will serve you faithfully for this!" was the
prayer at all our hearts that afternoon....
Semyonov had wisely directed our little procession away from the main
road to O---- which was filled now with the carts and wagons of our
Sixty-Fifth Division. We were to spend the night at the small village
of T----, twenty versts distant; then, to-morrow morning, to arrive at
O----.
The carts were waiting in a long line down the road, the soldiers, hot
and dusty, carried bags and sacks and bundles. A wounded man cried
suddenly: "Oh, Oh, Oh," an ugly mongrel terrier who had attached
himself to our Otriad tried to leap up at him, barking, in the air.
There was a scent of hay and dust and flowers, and, very faintly,
behind it all, came the soft gentle rumble of the Austrian cannon.
Nikitin, splendid on his horse, shouted to Semyonov:
"What of Mr.? Hadn't some one better go to meet him?"
"I've arranged that!" Semyonov answered shortly.
It was of course my fate to travel in the ancient black carriage that
was one of the glories of our Otriad, with Sister Sofia Antonovna, the
Sister with the small red-rimmed eyes of whom I have spoken on an
earlier page. She was a woman who found in every arrangement in life,
whether made by God, the Germans, or the General of our Division, much
cause for complaint and dismay. She had never been pretty but had
always felt that she ought to be; she was stupid but comforted herself
by the certain assurance that every one else was stupid too. She had
come to the war because a large family of brothers and sisters refused
to have her at home. I disliked her very much, and she hated myself
and Marie Ivanovna more than any one else in the world. I don't know
why she grouped us together--she always did.
Marie Ivanovna was sitting with us now in the carriage, white-faced
and silent. Sofia Antonovna was very patronising.... "When you've
worked a little more at the Front, dear, you'll know that these things
must happen. Bad work somewhere, of course. What can you expect from a
country like Russia? Everything mismanaged ... nothing but thieves and
robbers. Of course we're beaten and always will be."
"How can you, Sofia Antonovna?" Sister Marie interrupted in a low
trembling voice. "It is nobody's fault. It is only for a moment. We
will return--soon--at once. I know it. Ah, we _must_, we _must_! ...
and your courage all goes. Of course it would."
Sister Sofia Antonovna smiled and her eyes watched us both. "I'm
afraid your Mr. will be left behind," she said.
"Dr. Semyonov," Marie Ivanovna began--then stopped. We were all of us
silent during the rest of the journey.
And how is one to give any true picture of the confusion into which we
flung ourselves at O----? O---- had been the town at which, a little
more than a month ago, we had arrived so eagerly, so optimistically.
It had been to us then the quietest retreat in the world--irritating,
provoking by reason of its peace. The little school-house, the green
well, the orchard, the bees, the long light evenings with no sound but
the birds and running water--those things had been a month ago.
We were hurled now into a world of dust and despair. The square market
place, the houses that huddled round it were swallowed up by soldiers,
horses, carts and whirling clouds. A wind blew and through the wind a
hot sun blazed. Everywhere horses were neighing, cows and sheep were
driven in thick herds through columns of soldiers, motor cars
frantically pushed their way from place to place, and always,
everywhere, covering every inch of ground flying, as it seemed, from
the air, on to roofs, in and out of windows, from house to house, from
corner to corner, was the humorous, pathetic, expectant,
matter-of-fact, dreaming, stolid Russian soldier. He was to come to
me, later on, in a very different fashion, but on this dreadful day in
O---- he was simply part of the intolerable, depressing background.
If this day were dreadful to me what must it have been to Trenchard!
We were none of us aware at this time of what had happened to him two
days before, nor did we know of his adventure of yesterday. O----
seemed to him, he has told me, like hell.
We spent the day gathered together in a large white house that had
formerly been the town-hall of O----. It had, I remember, high empty
rooms all gilt and looking-glasses; the windows were broken and the
dust came, in circles and twisting spirals, blowing over the gilt
chairs and wooden floors.
We made tea and sat miserably together. Semyonov was in some other
part of the town. We were to wait here until Molozov arrived from
B----.
There can be few things so bad as the sense of insecurity that we had
that afternoon. The very ground seemed to have been cut away from
under our feet. We had gathered enough from the officers of our
Division to know that something very disastrous "somewhere" had
occurred. It was the very vagueness of the thing that terrified us.
What could have happened? Only something very monstrous could have
compelled so general a retirement. We might all of us be prisoners
before the evening. That seemed to us, and indeed was afterwards
proved in reality, to have been no slender possibility. There was no
spot on earth that belonged to us. So firm and solid we had been at
M----. Even we had hung pictures on the walls and planted flowers
outside the dining-room. Now all that remained for us was this
horrible place with its endless looking-glasses, its bare gleaming
floors and the intolerable noise through its open windows of carts,
soldiers, horses, the smell of dung and tobacco, and the hot air, like
gas, that flung the dust into our faces.
Beyond the vague terrors of our uncertainty was the figure, seen quite
clearly by all of us without any sentiment, of Russia. Certainly
Trenchard and I could feel with less poignancy the appeal of her
presence, and yet I swear that to us also on that day it was she of
whom we were thinking. We had been, until then, her allies; we were
now her servants.
By Russia every one of us, sitting in that huge room, meant something
different. To Goga she was home, a white house on the Volga, tennis,
long evenings, early mornings, holidays in a tangled wilderness of
happiness. To Sister K---- she was "Holy Russia," Russia of the
Kremlin, of the Lavra, of a million ikons in a million little streets,
little rooms, little churches. To Sister Sofia she was Petrograd with
cafés, novels by such writers as Verbitzkaia and our own Jack London,
the cinematograph, and the Islands on a fine evening in May. To the
student like a white fish she was a platform for frantic speeches,
incipient revolutions, little untidy hysterical meetings in a dirty
room in a back street, newspapers, the incapacities of the Douma, the
robberies and villainies of the Government. To Anna Petrovna she was
comfortable, unspeculative, friendly "home." To Nikitin she was the
face of one woman upon whose eyes his own were always fixed. To Marie
Ivanovna she was a flaming glorious wonder, mystical, transplendent,
revealed in every blade of grass, every flash of sun across the sky,
every line of the road, the top of every hill.
And to Trenchard and myself? For Trenchard she had, perhaps, taken to
herself some part of his beloved country. He has told me--and I will
witness in myself to the truth of this--that he never in his life felt
more burningly his love for England than at this first moment of his
consciousness of Russia. The lanes and sea of his remembered vision
were not far from that dirty, disordered town in Galicia--and for both
of them he was rendering his service.
At any rate there we sat, huddled together, reflected in the countless
looking-glasses as a helpless miserable "lot," falling into long
silences, hoping for the coming of Molozov with later news, listening
to the confusion in the street below. Marie Ivanovna with her hands
behind her back and her head up walked, nervously, up and down the
long room. Her eyes stared beyond us and the place, striving perhaps
to find some reason why life should so continually insist on being a
different thing from her imaginings of it.
Lighted by the hot sun, blown upon by the dust, her figure, tall,
thin, swaying a little in its many reflections, had the determined
valour of some Joan of Arc. But Joan of Arc, I thought to myself, had
at least some one definite against whom to wave her white banner; we
were fighting dust and the sun.
Trenchard and Nikitin had left us to go into the town to search for
news. We were silent. Suddenly Marie Ivanovna, turning upon us all as
though she hated us, cried fiercely:
"I think you should know that Mr. Trenchard and I are no longer
engaged."
It was neither the time nor the place for such a declaration. I cannot
suggest why Marie Ivanovna spoke unless it were that she felt life
that was betraying her so basely that she, herself, at least, must be
honest. We none of us knew what to say. What _could_ we say? This
appalling day had sunk for us all individualities. We were scarcely
aware of one another's names and here was Marie Ivanovna thrusting all
these personalities upon us. Sister Sofia's red-rimmed eyes glittered
with pleasure but she only said: "Oh, dear, I'm very sorry." Sister
K---- who was always without tact made a most uncomfortable remark:
"Poor Mr.!..."
That, I believe, was what we were all feeling. I had an impulse to run
out into the street, find Trenchard, and make him comfortable. I felt
furiously indignant with the girl. We all looked at her, I suppose,
with indignation, because she regarded us with a fierce, insulting
smile, then turned her back upon us and went to a window.
At that moment Molozov with Trenchard, Nikitin and Semyonov, entered.
I have said earlier in this book that only upon one occasion have I
seen Molozov utterly overcome, a defeated man. This was the occasion
to which I refer. He stood there in the doorway, under a vulgar bevy
of gilt and crimson cupids, his face dull paste in colour, his hands
hanging like lead; he looked at us without seeing us. Semyonov said
something to him: "Why, of course," I heard him reply, "we've got to
get out as quickly as we can.... That's all."
He came over towards us and we were all, except Marie Ivanovna,
desperately frightened. She cried to him: "Well, what's the truth? How
bad is it?"
He didn't turn to her but answered to us all.
"It's abominable--everywhere."
I know that then the great feeling of us all was that we must escape
from the horrible place in some way. This beastly town of O---- (once
cursed by us for its gentle placidity) was responsible for the whole
disaster; it was as though we said to ourselves, "If we had not been
here this would not have happened."
We all stood up as though we felt that we must leave at once, and
while we stood thus there was a report that shook the floor so that we
rocked on our feet, brought a shower of dust and whitewash from the
walls, cracked the one remaining pane of glass and drove two mice
scattering with terror wildly across the floor. The noise had been
terrific. Our very hearts stood still. The Austrians were here
then.... This was the end....
"It's the bridge," Semyonov said quietly, and of course ironically.
"We've blown it up. There'll be the other in a moment."
There was--a second shock brought down more dust and a large scale of
gilt wood from one of the cornices. We waited then for our orders,
looking down from the windows on to what seemed a perfect babel of
disorder and confusion.
"We must be at X---- to-night," Molozov told us. "The Staff is on its
way already. We should be moving in half an hour."
We made our preparations.
Trenchard, meanwhile, had had during this afternoon one driving
compelling impulse beyond all others, that he must, at all costs,
escape all personal contact with Marie Ivanovna. It seemed to him the
most awful thing that could possibly happen to him now would be a
compulsory conversation with her. He did not, of course, know that
she had spoken to us, and he thought that it would be the easiest
thing in all the confusion that this retreat involved that he should
be flung up against her. He sought his chief refuge in Nikitin. I am
aware that in the things I have said of Nikitin, in speaking both of
his relation to Andrey Vassilievitch's wife and to Trenchard himself,
I have shown him as something of a sentimental figure. And yet
sentimental was the very last thing that he really was. He had not the
"open-heartedness" that is commonly asserted to be the chief glory and
the chief defect of the Russian soul. He had talked to me because I
was a foreigner and of no importance to him--some one who would be
entirely outside his life. He took Trenchard now for his friend I
believe because he really was attracted by the admixture of chivalry
and helplessness, of simplicity and credulity, of timidity and courage
that the man's character displayed. I am sure that had it been I who
had been in Trenchard's position he would not have stretched out one
finger to help me.
Trenchard himself had only vague memories of the events of the
preceding evening. He was aware quite simply that the whole thing had
been a horrible dream and that "nothing so bad could ever possibly
happen to him again." He had "touched the worst," and he undoubtedly
found some relief to-day in the general distress and confusion. It
covered his personal disaster and forced him to forget himself in
other persons' misfortunes. He was, as it happened, of more use than
any one just then in getting every one speedily out of O----. He ran
messages, found parcels and bags for the Sisters, collected sanitars,
even discovered the mongrel terrier, tied a string to him and gave him
to one of our soldiers to look after. In what a confusion, as the
evening fell, was the garden of our large white house! Huge wagons
covered its lawn; horses, neighing, stamping, jumping, were dragged
and pulled and threatened; officers, from stout colonels to very young
lieutenants, came cursing and shouting, first this way and that. A
huge bag of biscuits broke away from a provision van and fell
scattering on to the ground; the soldiers, told that they might help
themselves, laughing and shouting like babies, fell upon the store.
But for the most part there was gloom, gloom, gloom under the evening
sky. Sometimes the reflections of distant rockets would shudder and
fade across the pale blue; incessantly, from every corner of the
world, came the screaming rattle of carts, a sound like many pencils
drawn across a gigantic slate--and always the dust rose and fell in
webs and curtains of filmy gold, under the evening sun.
At last Trenchard found himself with Molozov and Ivan Mihailovitch,
the student like a fish, in the old black carriage. Molozov had "flung
the world to the devil," Trenchard afterwards said, "and I sat there,
you know, looking at his white face and wondering what I ought to talk
about." Trenchard suddenly found himself narrowly and aggressively
English--and it is certain that every Englishman in Russia on Tuesday
thanks God that he is a practical man and has some common sense, and
on Wednesday wonders whether any one in England knows the true value
of anything at all and is ashamed of a country so miserably without a
passion for "ideas."
To-night Trenchard was an Englishman. He had been really useful at
O---- and he had felt a new spirit of kindness around him. He did not
know that Marie Ivanovna had made her declaration to us and that we
were therefore all anxious to show him that we thought that he had
been badly treated. Moreover he suspected, with a true English
distrust of emotions, that the Russians before him were inclined to
luxuriate in their gloom. Molozov's despair and Ivan Mihailovitch's
passionate eyes and jerking white hands irritated him.
He smiled a practical English smile and looked about him at the
swaying procession of carts and soldiers with a practical eye.
"Come," he said to Molozov, "don't despair. There's nothing really to
be distressed about. There _must_ be these retreats, you know. There
_must_ be. The great thing in this war is to see the whole thing in
proportion--the _whole_ thing. France and England and the Dardanelles
and Italy--_everything_. In another month or two--"
But Molozov, frowning, shook his head.
"This country ... no method ... no system. _Nothing._ It is terrible....
_That's_ a pretty girl!" he added moodily, looking at a group of
peasants in a doorway. "A _very_ pretty girl!" he added, sitting up a
little and staring. Then he relapsed, "No system--_nothing_," he
murmured.
"But there _will_ be," continued Trenchard in his English voice. (He
told me afterwards that he was conscious at the time of a horrible
priggish superiority.) "Here in Russia you go up and down so. You've
no restraint. Now if you had discipline--"
But he was interrupted by the melancholy figure of an officer who hung
on to our slowly moving carriage, walking beside it with his hand on
the door. He did not seem to have anything very much to say but looked
at us with large melancholy eyes. He was small and needed dusting.
"What is it?" asked Molozov, saluting.
"I've had contusion," said the little officer in a dreamy voice.
"Contusion ... I don't feel very well. I don't quite know where I
ought to go."
"Our doctors are just behind," said Molozov. "You can come on with
them."
"Your doctors ..." the little officer repeated dreamily. "Very
well...." But he continued with us. "I've had contusion," he said. "At
M----. Yes.... And now I don't quite know where I am. I'm very
depressed and unhappy. What do you advise?"
"There are our doctors," Molozov repeated rather irritably. "You'll
find them ... behind there."
"Yes, I suppose so," the melancholy little figure repeated and
disappeared.
In some way this figure affected Trenchard very dismally and drove all
his English common sense away. We were moving now slowly through
clouds of dust, and peasants who watched us from their doorways with a
cold indifference that was worse than exultation.
When we arrived, at two or three in the morning, at X----, our
destination, the spirits of all of us were heavily weighted. Tired,
cross, dirty, driven and pursued, and always with us that harassing
fear that we had now no ground upon which we might rest our feet, that
nothing in the world belonged to us, that we were fugitives and
vagabonds by the will of God.
As our carriage stopped before the door of the large white building in
X---- that seemed just like the large white building in O----, the
little officer was again at our side.
"I've got contusion ..." he said. "I'm very unhappy, and I don't know
where to go."
Trenchard felt now as though in another moment he would tumble back
again into his nightmare of yesterday. The house at X---- indeed was
fantastic enough. I feel that I am in danger of giving too many
descriptions of our various halting-places. For the most part they
largely resembled one another, large deserted country houses with
broken windows, bare walls and floors, a tangled garden and a tattered
collection of books in the Polish language. But this building at X----
was like no other of our asylums.
It was a huge place, a strange combination of the local town-hall and
the local theatre. It was the theatre that at that early hour in the
morning seemed to our weary eyes so fantastic. As we peered into it it
was a huge place, already filled with wounded and lighted only by
candles, stuck here and there in bottles. I could see, dimly, the
stage at the back of the room, and still hanging, tattered and
restless in the draught, a forgotten backcloth of some old play. I
could see that it was a picture of a gay scene in an impossibly highly
coloured town--high marble stairs down which flower-girls with swollen
legs came tripping into a market-place filled with soldiers and their
lovers--"Carmen" perhaps. It seemed absurd enough there in the
uncertain candlelight with the wounded groaning and crying in front of
it. There was already in the air that familiar smell of blood and
iodine, the familiar cries of: "Oh, _Sestritza_--Oh, _Sestritza_!" the
familiar patient faces of the soldiers, sitting up, waiting for their
turn, the familiar sharp voice of the sanitar: "What Division? What
regiment? bullet or shrapnel?"
I remember that some wounded man, in high fever, was singing, and that
no one could stop him.
"He's dead," I heard Semyonov's curt voice behind me, and turning saw
them cover the body on the stretcher with a sheet.
"Oh! Oh!... Oh! Oh!" shrieked a man from the middle of whose back
Nikitin, probing with his finger, was extracting a bullet. The candles
flared, the ladies from "Carmen" wavered on the marble steps, the
high cracked voice of the soldier continued its song. I stood there
with Trenchard and Andrey Vassilievitch. Then we turned away.
"We're not wanted to-night," I said. "We'd better get out of the way
and sleep somewhere. There'll be plenty to do to-morrow!" Little
Andrey Vassilievitch, whom during the retreat I had entirely
forgotten, looked very pathetic. He was dusty and dirty and hated his
discomfort. He did not know where to go and was in everybody's way.
Nikitin was immensely busy and had no time to waste on his friend.
Poor Andrey was tired and terribly depressed.
"What I say is," he confided to us in a voice that trembled a little,
"that we are not to despair. We have to retreat to-day, but who knows
what will happen to-morrow? Every one is aware that Russia is a
glorious country and has endless resources. Well then.... What I say
is ..."; an officer bundled into him, apologised but quite obviously
cursed him for being in the way.
"Come along," said Trenchard, putting his arm on Andrey
Vassilievitch's sleeve. "We'll find somewhere to sleep. Of course
we're not in despair. Why should we be? You'll feel better to-morrow."
They departed, and as they went I wondered at this new side in
Trenchard's character. He seemed strong, practical, and almost
cheerful. I, knowing his disaster, was puzzled. My lame leg was
hurting me to-night. I found a corner to lie down in, rolled myself in
my greatcoat and passed through a strange succession of fantastic
dreams in which Trenchard, Marie Ivanovna, Nikitin, and Semyonov all
figured. Behind them I seemed to hear some voice crying: "I've got you
all!... I've got you all!... You're caught!... You're caught!...
You're caught!"
On the following day there happened to Trenchard the thing that he had
dreaded. Writing of it now I cannot disentangle it from the
circumstances and surroundings of his account of it to me. He was
looking back then, when he spoke to me, to something that seemed
almost fantastic in its ironical reality. Every word of that
conversation he afterwards recalled to himself again and again. As to
Marie Ivanovna I think that he never even began to understand her;
that he should believe in her was a different matter from his
understanding her. That he should worship her was a tribute both to
his inexperience and to his sentiment. But his relation to her and to
this whole adventure of his was confused and complicated by the fact
that he was not, I believe, in himself a sentimental man. What one
supposed to be sentiment was a quite honest and naked lack of
knowledge of the world. As experience came to him sentiment fell away
from him. But experience was never to come to him in regard to Marie
Ivanovna; he was to know as little of her at the end as he had known
at the beginning, and this whole conversation with her (of course, I
have only his report of it) is clouded with his romantic conception of
her. To that I might add also my own romantic conception; if Trenchard
never saw her clearly because he loved her, I never saw her clearly
because--because--why, I do not know.... She was, from first to last,
a figure of romance, irritating, aggressive, enchanting, baffling,
always blinding, to all of us.
During the morning after our arrival in M---- Trenchard worked in the
theatre, bandaging and helping with the transport of the wounded up
the high and difficult staircase. Then at midday, tired with the heat,
the closeness of the place, he escaped into the little park that
bordered the farther side of the road. It was a burning day in
June--the sun came beating through the trees, and as soon as he had
turned the corner of the path and had lost the line of ruined and
blackened houses to his right he found himself in the wildest and most
glittering of little orchards. The grass grew here to a great
height--the apple-trees were of a fine age, and the sun in squares and
circles and stars of light flashed like fire through the thick green.
He stepped forward, blinded by the quivering gold, and walked into the
arms of Marie Ivanovna. He, quite literally, ran against her and put
his arms about her for a moment to steady her, not seeing who she was.
Then he gave a little cry.
She was also frightened. "It was the only time," he told me, "that I
had ever seen her show fear."
They were silent, neither of them knowing the way to speak.
Then she said: "John, don't r-run away. It is very good. I wanted to
speak to you. Here, sit down here."
She herself sat down and patted the grass, inviting him. He at once
sat down beside her, but he could say nothing--nothing at all.
She waited for a time and then, seeing him, I suppose, at a loss and
helpless, regained her own courage. "Are you still angry with me?"
"No," he answered, not looking at her.
"You have a right to be; I behaved very badly."
"I don't understand," he replied, "why you thought in Petrograd that
you loved me and then--so soon--found that you did not--so soon."
He looked at her and then lowered his eyes.
"What do you know or I know?" she suddenly asked him impetuously. "Are
we not both always thinking that things will be so fine--_seichass_--and
then they are not. How could we be happy together when we are both so
ignorant? Ah, you know, John, _you know_ that happy together we could
never be."
He looked at her clearly and without hesitation.
"I was very stupid," he said. "I thought that because I had come into
a big thing I would be big myself. It is not so; I am the same person
as I was in England. I have not changed at all and I shall never
change ... only in this one thing that whether you go from me or
whether you stay I shall never love anybody but you. All men say that,
I know," he added, "but there are not many men who have had so little
in their lives as I, and so perhaps it means more with me than it does
with others."
She made no reply to him. She had not, I believe, heard him. She said,
as though she were speaking to herself: "If we had not come, John, if
we had stayed in Petrograd, anything might have been. But here there
is something more than people. I don't know whether I love or hate any
one. I cannot marry you or any man until this is all over."
"And then," he interrupted passionately, touching her sleeve with his
hand. "After the war? Perhaps--again, you will--"
She took his hand in hers, looking at him as though she were suddenly
seeing him for the first time:
"No--_you_, John, never. In Petrograd I didn't know what this could
be--no idea--none. And now that I'm here I can think of nothing else
than what I'm going to find. There is something here that I'd be
afraid of if I let myself be and that's what I love. What will happen
when I meet it? Shall I feel fear or no? And so, too, if there were a
man whom I feared...."
"Semyonov!" Trenchard cried.
She looked at him and did not answer. He caught her hand urgently.
"No, Marie, no--any one but Semyonov. It doesn't matter about me. But
you _must_ be happy--you _must_ be. Nothing else--and he won't make
you. He isn't--"
"Happy!" she answered scornfully. "I don't want to be happy. _That_
isn't it. But to be sure that one's not afraid--" (She repeated to
herself several times _Hrabrost_--the Russian for "bravery.") "That is
more than you, John, or than I or than--"
She broke off, looked at him suddenly as he told me "very tenderly and
kindly as though she liked me."
"John, I'm your friend. I've been bad to you, but I'm your friend. I
don't understand why I've been so bad to you because, I would be
fur-rious--yes, fur-rious--if any one else were bad to you. And be
mine, John, whatever I do, be mine. I'm not really a bad
character--only I think it's too exciting now, here--everything--for
me to stop and think."
"You know," he answered with a rather tired gesture (he had worked in
that hot theatre all the morning) "that I am always the same--but you
must not marry Semyonov," he added fiercely.
She did not answer him, looked up at the sunlight and said after a
time:
"I hate Sister K----. She is not really religious. She doesn't wash
either. Let us go back. I was away, I said, only for a little."
They walked back, he told me, in perfect silence. He was more unhappy
than ever. He was more unhappy because he saw quite clearly that he
did not understand her at all; he felt farther away from her than ever
and loved her more devotedly than ever: a desperate state of things.
If he had taken that sentence of hers--"I think it's too
exciting--now--here--for me to stop and think," he would, I fancy,
have found the clue to her, but he would not believe that she was so
simple as that. In the two days that followed, days of the greatest
discomfort, disappointment and disorder, his mind never left her for a
moment. His diary for these four days is very short and unromantic.
"_June 23rd._ In X----. Morning worked in the theatre. Bandaged
thirty. Operation 1--arm amputated. Learn that there has been a battle
round the school-house at O---- where we first were. Wonderful
weather. Spent some time in the park. Talked to M. there. Evening
moved--thirty versts to P----. Much dust, very slow, owing to the
Guards retreating at same time. Was with Durward and Andrey
Vassilievitch in a _Podvoda_--Like the latter, but he's out of place
here. Arrived 1.30.
"_June 24th._ Off early morning. This time black carriage with Sisters
K---- and Anna Petrovna. More dust--thousands of soldiers passing us,
singing as though there were no retreat. News from L---- very bad. Say
there's no ammunition. Arrived Nijnieff evening 7.30. Very hungry and
thirsty. We could find no house for some hours; a charming little town
in a valley. Nestor seems huge--very beautiful with wooded hills. But
whole place so swallowed in dust impossible to see anything. Heaps of
wounded again. I and Molozov in nice room alone. Have not seen M. all
day.
"_June 25th._ This morning Nikitin, Sister K----, Goga, and I
attempted to get back to P---- to see whether there were wounded.
Started off on the carts but when we got to the hill above the village
met the whole of our Division coming out. The village abandoned, so
back we had to go again through all the dust. Evening nothing doing.
Every one depressed.
"_June 26th._ Very early--half-past five in the morning--we were
roused and had to take part in an exodus like the Israelites. Most
unpleasant, moving an inch an hour, Cossacks riding one down if one
preferred to go on foot to being bumped in the haycart. Every one in
the depths of depression. Crossed the Nestor, a perfectly magnificent
river. Five versts further, then stopped at a farmhouse, pitched
tents. Instantly hundreds of wounded. Battle fierce just other side of
Nijnieff. Worked like a nigger--from two to eight never stopped
bandaging. About ten went off to the position with Molozov. Strange to
be back in the little town under such different circumstances. Dark as
pitch--raining. Much noise, motors, soldiers like ghosts
though--shrapnel all the time. Tired, depressed and nervous. Horrid
waiting doing nothing; two houses under the shrapnel. Expected also at
every moment bridge behind us to be blown up. At last wagons filled
with wounded, started back and got home eventually, taking two hours
over it. Very glad when it was over...."
We had arrived, indeed, although we did not then know it and were
expecting, every moment, to move back again, at the conclusion of our
first exodus. Our only other transition, after a day or two longer at
our farmhouse, was forward four versts to a tiny village on a high
hill overlooking the Nestor, to the left of Nijnieff. This village was
called Mittövo. Mittövo was to be our world for many weeks to come. We
inhabited once again the large white deserted country-house with the
tangled garden, the dusty bare floors, the broken windows. At the end
of the tangled garden there was a white stone cross, and here was a
most wonderful view, the high hill running precipitously down to the
flat silver expanse of the Nestor that ran like a gleaming girdle
under the breasts of the slopes beyond. These further slopes were
clothed with wood. I remember, on the first day that I watched, the
forest beyond was black and dense like a cloud resting on the hill;
the Nestor and our own country was soaked with sun.
"That's a fine forest," I said to my companion.
"Yes, the forest of S----, stretches miles back into Galicia." It was
Nikitin that day who spoke to me. We turned carelessly away. Meanwhile
how difficult and unpleasant those first weeks at Mittövo were! We had
none of us realised, I suppose, how sternly those days of retreat had
tested our nerves. We had been not only retreating, but (at the same
time) working fiercely, and now, when for some while the work
slackened and, under the hot blazing sun, we found nothing for our
hands to do, a grinding irritable reaction settled down upon us.
I had known in my earlier experience at the war the troubles that
inevitably rise from inaction; the little personal inconveniences, the
tyrannies of habits and manners and appearances, when you've got
nothing to do but sit and watch your immediate neighbour. But on that
earlier occasion our army had been successful; it seemed that the war
would soon find its conclusion in the collapse of Germany, and good
news from Europe smiled upon us every morning at breakfast. Now we
were tired and over-wrought. Good news there was none--indeed every
day brought disastrous tidings. We, ourselves, must look back upon a
hundred versts of fair smiling country that we had conquered with the
sacrifice of many thousands of lives and surrendered without the
giving of a blow. And always the force that compelled us to this was
sinister and ironical by its invisibility.
It was the Russian temperament to declare exactly what it felt, to
give free rein to its moods and dislikes and discomforts. The weather
was beginning to be fiercely hot, there were many rumours of cholera
and typhus--we, all of us, lost colour and appetite, slept badly and
suffered from sudden headaches.
Three days after our arrival at Mittövo we had all discovered private
hostilities and resentments. I was as bad as any one. I could not
endure the revolutionary student, Ivan Mihailovitch. I thought him
most uncleanly in his habits, and I was compelled to sleep in the same
room with him. Certainly it was true that washing was not one of the
most important things in the world to him. In the morning he would
lurch out of bed, put on a soiled shirt and trousers, dab his face
with a decrepit sponge, take a tiny piece of soap from an old tin box,
look at it, rub it on his fingers and put it hurriedly away again as
though he were ashamed of it. Sometimes, getting out of bed, he would
cry: "Have you heard the latest scandal? About the ammunition in the
Tenth Army! They say--" and then he would forget his washing
altogether. He did not shave his head, as most of us had done, but
allowed his hair to grow very long, and this, of course, was often a
subject of irritation to him. He had also a habit of sitting on his
bed in his nightclothes, yawning and scratching his body all over,
very slowly, with his long (and I'm afraid dirty) finger-nails, for
the space, perhaps, of a quarter of an hour. This I found difficult to
endure. His long white face was always a dirty shade of grey and his
jacket was stained with reminiscences of his meals. His habits at
table were terrible; he was always so deeply interested in what he was
saying that he had not time to close his mouth whilst he was eating,
to ask people to pass him food (he stretched his long dirty hand
across the table) or to pass food to others. He shouted a great deal
and was in a furious passion every five minutes. I also just at this
time found the boy Goga tiresome; the boy had not been taught by his
parents the duty that children owe to their elders and I am inclined
to believe that this duty is almost universally untaught in Russia. To
Goga a General was as nothing, he would contradict our old
white-haired General T----, when he came to dine with us, would
patronise the Colonel and assure the General's aide-de-camp that he
knew better. He would advance his father as a perpetual and faithful
witness to the truth of his statements. "You may say what you like,"
he would cry to myself or a Sister, "but my father knows better than
you do. He has the front seat in the Moscow Opera all through the
season and has been to England three times." Goga also had been once
to England for a week (spent entirely on the Brighton Pier) and he
told me many things. He would forget, for a moment, that I was an
Englishman and would assure me that he knew better than I did. He was
a being with the best heart in the world, but his parents loved him so
much that they had neglected his education.
These things may seem trifling enough, but they had, nevertheless,
their importance. Among the Sisters, Sister K---- was the unpopular
one. I myself must honestly confess that she was a woman ill-suited to
company less worthy than herself. She had an upright virtuous
character but she was narrow (a rare fault in a Russian),
superstitious, dogmatically religious, and entirely without tact. She
quite honestly thought us a poor lot and would say to me: "I hope, Mr.
Durward, you don't judge Russia by the specimens you find here," and
was, of course, always overheard. She was a strict moralist, but was
also generous with all the warmth of Russian generosity in money
matters. She was a marvellous hard worker, quite fearless, accurate,
and punctual in all things. She fought incessant battles with Anna
Petrovna who hated her as warmly as it was in her quiet, unruffled
heart to hate any one. The only thing stranger than the fierceness of
their quarrels was the suddenness of their conclusion. I remember that
at dinner one day they fought a battle over the question of a clean
towel with a heat and vigour that was Homeric. A quarter of an hour
later I found them quietly talking together. Anna Petrovna was showing
Sister K---- a large and hideous photograph of her children.
"How sympathetic! How beautiful!" said Sister K----.
"But I thought you hated her?" I said afterwards in confusion to Anna
Petrovna.
"She was very sympathetic about my children," said Anna Petrovna
placidly.
Then, of course, Sister Sofia Antonovna, the sister with the red eyes,
made trouble when she could. She was, as I discovered afterwards, a
bitterly disappointed woman, having been deserted by her fiancé only a
week before her marriage. That had happened three years ago and she
still loved him, so that she had her excuse for her view of the world.
My friends seemed to me, during those first weeks at Mittövo, simply a
company of good-hearted, ill-disciplined children. I had gone directly
back to my days in the nursery. Restraint of any kind there was none,
discipline as to time or emotions was undreamed of, and with it all a
vitality, a warmth of heart, a sincerity and honesty that made that
Otriad, perhaps, the most lovable company I have ever known. Russians
are fond of sneering at themselves; for him who declares that he likes
Russia and Russians they have either polite disbelief or gentle
contempt. In England we have qualities of endurance, of reliability,
of solidity, to which, often enough, I long to return--but that warmth
of heart that I have known here for two long years, a warmth that
means love for the neglected, for the defeated, for the helpless, a
warmth that lights a fire on every hearth in every house in
Russia--that is a greater thing than the possessors of it know.
Through all the little quarrels and disputes of our company there ran
the thread of the affair of Trenchard, Marie Ivanovna and Semyonov.
Trenchard was lighted now with the pleasure of their affection, and
Marie Ivanovna, who had been at first so popular amongst them, was
held to be hard and capricious. She, at least, did not make it easy
for them to like her. She had seemed in those first days in O---- as
though she wished to win all their hearts, but now it was as though
she had not time to consider any of us, as though she had something of
far greater importance to claim her attention. She was now very
continually with Semyonov and yet it seemed to me that it was rather
respect for his opinion and admiration of his independence than liking
that compelled her. He was, beyond any question, in love with her, if
the name of love can be given to the fierce, intolerant passion that
governed him.
He made no attempt to disguise his feelings, was as rude to the rest
of us as he pleased, and, of course, flung his scorn plentifully over
Trenchard. But now I seemed to detect in him some shades of
restlessness and anxiety that I had never seen in him before. He was
not sure of her; he did not, I believe, understand her any more than
did the rest of us. With justice, indeed, I was afraid for her. His
passion, I thought, was as surely and as nakedly a physical one as any
other that I had seen precede it, and would as certainly pass as all
purely physical passions do. She was as ignorant of the world as on
the day when she arrived amongst us; but my feeling about her was that
she would receive his love almost as though in a dream, her thoughts
fixed on something far from him and in no way depending on him. At any
rate she was with him now continually. We judged her proud and
hard-hearted, all of us except Trenchard who loved her, Semyonov who
wanted her, and Nikitin, who, as I now believe, even then understood
her.
Trenchard meanwhile was confused and unsettled: inaction did not suit
him any better than it did the rest of us. He had too much time to
think about Marie Ivanovna.
He was undoubtedly pleased at his new popularity. He expanded under it
and became something of the loquacious and uncalculating person that
he had shown himself during his confession to me in the train. To the
Russians his loquacity was in no way strange or unpleasant. They were
in the habit of unburdening themselves, their hopes, their
disappointments, their joys, their tragedies, to the first strangers
whom they met. It seemed quite natural to them that Trenchard, puffing
his rebellious pipe, should talk to them about Glebeshire, Polchester,
Rafiel, Millie and Katherine Trenchard.
"I'd like you to meet Katherine, Anna Petrovna," he would say. "You
would find her delightful. She's married now to a young man she ran
away with, which surprised every one--her running away, I mean,
because she was always considered such a serious character."
"I forget whether you've seen my children, 'Mr.'" Anna Petrovna would
reply. "I must show you their photograph."
And she would produce the large and hideous picture.
He was the same as in those first days, and yet how immensely not the
same. He bore himself now with a chivalrous tact towards Marie
Ivanovna that was beyond all praise. He always cherished in his heart
his memory of their little conversation in the orchard. "How I wish,"
he told me, "that I had made that conversation longer. It was so very
short and I might so easily have lengthened it. There were so many
things afterwards that I might have said--and she never gave me
another chance."
She never did--she kept him from her. Kind to him, perhaps, but never
allowing him another moment's intimacy. He had almost the air, it
seemed to me, of patiently waiting for the moment when she should need
him, the air too of a man who was sure, in his heart, that that moment
would come.
And the other thing that stiffened him was his hatred for Semyonov.
Hatred may seem too fierce a word for the emotion of any one as mild
and gentle as Trenchard--and yet hatred at this time it was. He seemed
no longer afraid of Semyonov and there was something about him now
which surprised the other man. Through all those first days at
Mittövo, when we seemed for a moment almost to have slipped out of the
war and to be leading the smaller more quarrelsome life of earlier
days, Trenchard was occupied with only one question--"What was he
feeling about Semyonov?"--"I felt as though I could stand anything if
only she didn't love him. Since that awful night of the Retreat I had
resigned myself to losing her; any one should marry her who would make
her happy--but he--never! But it was the indecision that I could not
bear. I didn't know--I couldn't tell, what she felt."
The indecision was not to last much longer. One evening, when we had
been at Mittövo about a week, he was at the Cross watching the sun,
like a crimson flower, sink behind the dim grey forest. The Nestor, in
the evening mist, was a golden shadow under the hill. This beauty
made him melancholy. He was wishing passionately, as he stood there,
for work, hard, dangerous, gripping work. He did not know that that
was to be the last idle minute of his life. Hearing a step on the path
he turned round to find Semyonov at his side.
"Lovely view, isn't it?" said Semyonov, watching him.
"Lovely," answered Trenchard.
Semyonov sat down on the little stone seat beneath the Cross and
looked up at his rival. Trenchard looked down at him, hating his
square, stolid composure, his thick thighs, his fair beard, his
ironical eyes. "You're a _beastly_ man!" he thought.
"How long are you going to be with us, do you think?" asked Semyonov.
"Don't know--depends on so many things."
"Why don't you go back to England? They want soldiers."
"Wouldn't pass my eyesight."
"When are they going to begin doing something on the other Front, do
you think?"
"When they're ready, I suppose."
"They're very slow. Where's all your army we heard so much about?"
"There's a big army going to be ready soon."
"Yes, but we were told things would begin in May. It's only the
Germans who've begun."
"I don't know; I've seen no English papers for some weeks."
There was a pause. Semyonov smiled, stood up, looked into Trenchard's
eyes.
"I must go to England," he said slowly, "after the war. Marie Ivanovna
and I will go, I hope, together. She told me to-day that that is one
of the things that she hopes we will do together--later on."
Trenchard returned Semyonov's gaze. After a moment he said:
"Yes--you would enjoy it." He waited, then added: "I must be walking
back now. I'm late!" And he turned away to the house.