AT THE CZAR'S COMMAND.
Ivan Ivanovitch lived on the outskirts of a small village about one
hundred miles north-east of Moscow. Like his father and grandfather and
many generations before, he was a _moujik_, a peasant, with this
difference: they had been serfs; Ivan was freeborn. His father now owned
the hut in which he lived with his family of wife and three
children--two girls, besides Ivan; he also owned a small patch of land,
and an acre or two of tillable soil had been allotted to him when the
serfs were emancipated, with a condition of slow payment to the
Government, a few roubles at a time.
Up to the autumn of 1903 Ivan worked in the fields, bare-headed and
blue-bloused, beside his father. The girls worked, too, for the father
was lame and needed all the help he could get. He had leaned upon Ivan
more and more as the years went by and his son grew from boyhood to
sturdy young manhood. Every evening the family knelt before the crucifix
on the wall of the living-room, and prayed for themselves, their
country, and their "Little Father," the Czar, who spent all his time in
far-off St. Petersburg, they were sure, in thinking of his "children,"
the people of the great Empire, and loving them and planning for their
good. In return they almost worshipped him, as they did the figure on
the crucifix.
"Soon you will have to serve as a soldier, Ivan," said his father one
day. The older man had a great tawny beard and mane of hair like a
lion's; Ivan resembled him more and more.
"That is true, my father."
"You are nearly of age."
"True, my father."
"But," put in his mother anxiously, "surely our boy will not have to
fight?"
"Nay, Matouschka," said Ivan tenderly but manfully, "if the Czar
commands, my life is his!"
Two months later he reported at the barracks at Moscow, and was duly
enrolled in the 11th Regiment of Infantry, Third Division, First
Reserves, of the Imperial Army.
At first the novelty was amusing, and Ivan enjoyed the companionship of
his comrades in the ranks, the smart uniform and big fur cap, the music
of the band, when they paraded in the great square and the crowds
gathered to see. But the drill, drill, drill became tedious, and it was
with rather a sense of relief that in the latter part of the following
January he heard that the regiment was to leave Moscow for the Far East.
There was no time to say good-bye to his parents, nor could he have paid
his fare to and from the village had permission been given. So Ivan took
out his little brass cross, his "ikon," which, like every other Russian
soldier, he carried in his bosom, and murmured a prayer for father and
sisters and the little mother. Then he buckled on his belt, adjusted his
clumsy cap, shouldered his musket and was ready.
"Where are we going, comrade?" he asked of his next neighbour in the
ranks, as they marched to the railway station.
"I do not know. They say there is to be war."
"War--against whom?"
"The Japanese."
"Japanese? Who are they? Are they savages or white like us?"
"I can't tell you, Ivan. We shall know when we see them."
"Why do we fight against them? Where do they live?"
But his comrade could only shrug his shoulders. He had not the least
idea of the answer to either question; nor had any man in the company,
only a half-dozen of whom could read or write.
"It is the Czar's command."
Silently they plodded on, the snow whirling about them as they marched.
Here and there a knot of people cheered them. This was pleasant. Ivan
felt that he was really a soldier. When a lump came into his throat at
the thought of the little hut in the lonely white waste far to the
north, he gulped it down and broke into a hoarse laugh which brought
down a reprimand from the nearest officer.
The troops were packed into a long transport train like cattle. When the
cars stopped or started suddenly they fell against each other. Some
swore and even struck out, but most were as mild and phlegmatic as the
cows and sheep whose places they had taken. Ivan was of this sort.
"Never mind," he said to a man who trod upon his foot; "it is nothing.
My foot is iron"; and when he was thrown against a neighbour: "Ah, what
a blockhead I am! Will you not hit me, to pay the score?"
Most of the soldiers said nothing. As verst after verst of desolate
snowy landscape was left behind they stood or squatted in the cars,
silent, uncomplaining. Why should they find fault with cold and hunger
and fatigue? It was the Czar's command. The Little Father in his palace
was caring for them. It was theirs not to complain, but to obey.
There were many delays on the ill-constructed, overcrowded Siberian
Railway, the black cord that stretched across a continent to Port Arthur
and Vladivostok, seven thousand miles away. But whether it was seventy
miles or seven thousand the rank and file of the army hardly knew or
cared. Cold, hungry, stiff from constrained position, they bore all
privations with calmness and even a sort of jovial good-humour. At night
every soldier fumbled under his furs and heavy winter coat for his ikon,
and his bearded lips murmured the sacred Name.
At length the rugged shores of Lake Baikal were reached, in Farther
Siberia. Here there was another halt, for the railway itself came to an
end, and the troops were ordered out of the train at early dawn.
"How can we go on?" asked Ivan stupidly. Before him a white plain
stretched away to the horizon line. To the right were mountains; to the
left, mountains. The ice-bound surface of the lake was swept by a bitter
gale, which heaped up huge drifts and flung them away again, like a
child at play. Behind the regiment of fur-capped soldiers, huddled on
the frozen shore, was home; before them, what seemed an Arctic sea. The
snow fell heavily, and drifted around their feet. "How can we go on?"
asked Ivan; and a subaltern, breathing through his icy moustache,
replied: "I do not know, private, but we must advance. It is the Czar's
command."
When Russia, determined to establish a port on the open sea, though it
were thousands of miles from her capital, built the great Trans-Siberian
Railway, she progressed rapidly with her fragile, light-rail,
single-track road until she came to Lake Baikal. Here Nature had placed
what might well be deemed an impossible obstruction: a huge inland lake
four hundred miles in length, eighteen hundred feet deep, bordered with
mountains, whose sheer granite cliffs rose from the water to a height of
fifteen hundred feet, and in their turn were overshadowed by snow-capped
peaks. The lake at this point is forty miles wide. No bridge could span
its storm-swept surface, no tunnel could be driven beneath its sombre
depths. How was the obstacle to be surmounted? A weaker nation would
have given up the task, as the French tired of working at the Panama
Canal; Russia, ponderous, tireless, determined, almost irresistible,
moved on. In the science of Physics, the momentum of a moving body is
thus analysed and expressed: M = _m_ × _v_. In other words, it equals
the mass of the body multiplied by its velocity. If either factor be
increased, the momentum becomes correspondingly greater. When Russia
moves, the velocity is slight, but the mass is enormous. When the
soldier, in the time-worn anecdote, tried to stop with his foot the
slowly rolling spent cannon-ball, it snapped his leg like a pipe-stem.
The nation that opposes Russia must itself be of iron mould, or it will
snap. Lake Baikal was a trifle, a mere incident to the civil engineers
who laid out the Trans-Siberian Railway.
In the summer-time huge steam ferry-boats plied from shore to shore,
transferring passengers and freight from the western to the eastern or
Trans-Baikal section. From November to April the lake is frozen over,
but during at least half of that time enormous ice-breakers, like the
heaviest ocean-going tug-boats, crashed through the ice and kept open a
canal from side to side.
These were temporary expedients. The engineers meanwhile had not been
idle. They attacked the cliffs bordering the southern end of the lake,
and began cutting a path through the solid rock for advancing Russia.
Twenty-seven tunnels were to be bored, and have since been completed.
While Ivan waited by the shore a dull boom came now and then to his ear,
from the blasting. It was the relentless, unfaltering tread of Russia's
iron heel.
But other means had to be provided, in that terrible winter of 1903, for
the passage of troops and supplies, for although the great mass of
soldiers did not understand, their leaders and the counsellors of state
in St. Petersburg knew there was urgent need. A railroad was begun upon
the ice itself, and before March was in actual operation. A thousand
feet of water gloomed beneath the thin ice bridge. Once or twice there
was an accident--a locomotive went through, or a few cars, and,
incidentally, a few human beings. This was nothing. "Forward, my men! It
is the Czar's command!"
The ice railway not yet being complete, there was but one way to cross
Lake Baikal--by horse-power or on foot. High officials and favoured
travellers secured sledges; the main body of infantry, including Ivan's
regiment, having hastily swallowed a breakfast of army rations, set out
on the march across the forty miles of ice plain, at "fatigue step." The
bands were forbidden to play, lest the rhythmic tread of the soldiers,
instinctively keeping time to the music, should bring too great and
concentrated strain upon the ice.
Before they were half a league from shore the wind pounced upon its new
playthings; it blew upon their sides, their backs, and their faces. It
pelted them with ice-drops, with whirling masses of snow. They leaned
forward and plodded on, unmurmuring. It roared like a cataract, and
howled like wolf-packs; the air was so filled with drift that each man
simply followed his file-leader, with no idea of the direction of the
march, the van being guided by telegraph-poles set in the ice at short
intervals of space. Hands and feet became numb; beards were fringed with
icicles; the men in the disordered ranks slipped and stumbled against
one another. With the mercury 23° below zero, and a northerly gale,
hurled down the entire four hundred miles of unbroken expanse of the
lake, the cold was frightful.
Ivan turned his head stiffly to mumble something to his neighbour in the
ranks. He was no longer there. The subaltern who had answered him on the
shore was also missing. Like scores of others he had wandered off the
line of march, to fall and die unseen.
Ivan bent his head to a fierce blast, muttering "Courage, comrades!" No
one replied to him as he staggered uncertainly onward. "Courage,
comrades!" shouted Ivan again. His voice was lost in the ceaseless roar
of the gale. Ivan peered out from under the mask of ice which had formed
across his eyes, from his shaggy brows to his moustache. No one was near
him. He was alone with the storm.
It seemed an easy thing to lie down in the snow and go to sleep. It
would be a joy merely to drop the heavy musket. Nobody knew where he
was; the lake would swallow him up, and who would be the wiser? Ivan
halted a moment, pondering in his dull way. Suddenly he remembered. That
would be disobedience of orders. His officer had said, "It is the Czar's
command!" What madness, to think of disobeying the Little Father at St.
Petersburg! The peasant-soldier gripped his breast, where the ikon lay,
and, taking his course as well as he could from the direction of the
wind, staggered on.
Whether it was five minutes or an hour he could not tell; but now he saw
dim figures around him, plodding silently onward. Whether they were
comrades of his own regiment he neither knew nor cared. He was once
more, after that moment of individuality, a part of the Russian army,
and moved mechanically forward with it.
The men huddled together like sheep, as they marched. When one of their
number staggered aside and disappeared they closed the gap; when one
fell, they stepped stiffly over him.
"Halt!"
Each man stopped by stumbling abruptly against the one before him. They
asked no questions. They remained standing, as they had moved, by sheer
inertia, letting the butts of their muskets rest on the ice.
The column had halted by a rest-house, marking half-way across the lake.
A few officials of highest rank, a newspaper man or two, half a dozen
merchant travellers with special passes, refreshed themselves with soup
and steaming tea. A steady stream of open sleighs passed slowly by the
silent, immovable column. The troops were fed where they stood, without
shelter from the fierce blast and whirling snow.
Soon the order came down the line, "Forward!"
Once more the fearful march across the ice was resumed. At long
intervals there were more halts, when tea was served; but the cold
increased. The men now began to suffer less. Some of them hoarsely
roared out a snatch of song; these soon dropped or wandered away. When
the winter storm of Siberia first assaults it is brutal in its blows,
its piercing thrusts, its agonising rack-torment of cold. Gradually it
becomes less rude and more dangerous. Its wild shriek of rage becomes a
crooning cradle-song; it strokes away the anguish from the knotted
joints of hand and foot and limb. It no longer repels, it invites.
When the long column of staggering, ice-covered forms reached the
eastern shore of the lake its numbers had lessened by five hundred, who
would never face the unknown enemies of the Far East. Ivan was among the
survivors. His huge frame, his iron constitution, his allegiance to the
Czar, had carried him through.
He found his company half a verst ahead, and as night fell he joined a
group of grim figures around a blazing camp-fire. Tea was made and
served out, with regular army rations. The men's drawn faces relaxed.
They warmed their half-frozen limbs. Rough jokes passed. The terrors of
the lake-crossing were forgotten. "On to Harbin!" they roared out in
chorus, as their colonel passed. "Long live the Czar!"