It went through the lines like a taint of gas. The men were difficult
then even for Varsieff to hold.
You must get the picture. We revolutionists were cut off from the
world. The Germans and Austrians sent us messages--some friendly,
some derisive. They thought us fools or gods, but waited to see what
we would do. The old line of Russian troops all about--just as clean
peasantry as our forces--but officered by the straight military class,
impervious so far as a body to any shaft of the propagandist.
Varsieff whispered to me that those regular forces were honeycombed
with our comrades, but that they were being put to death under the
slightest suspicion--that two or three hundred were martyred each day.
The strangeness and horror of it all dawned upon me--the sense of the
whole world against us, even America from whom we had drawn the spirit
of our courage--a kind of holding of our army for slaughter. Listen,
I have seen tens of thousands of troops go down to the pits of white
and red, seen their opened veins colour the snows, seen the spots of
red on the brown earth turn black. I have seen the boys lean over the
trenches and the pools from each throat widen and deepen from one man
to another. I have seen a man grab his mate as he fell and say some
absurd whimsical thing that the soldier next didn't understand until
_his_ moment of death--a little sentence that folded them, not in
extinction, but in a new life. All the horrors of death--quantity and
quality--yellow and red and white--pure white passings that made a man
think of the lilies--all manner of death I had seen, and still it had
all been impersonal compared to now.
This was my own heart business. I shared leadership with Varsieff.
These lives were in my hands. I wanted to go down among the boys--one
by one and say that I was pure, that I loved them--that if they died
they were at least loved and not wasted.
I always wondered what those young peasant souls thought about death.
Once in a lot of pain when I was just a boy, I wanted badly to die and
was deterred from taking my life, because of a counter-desire to get
home and see my mother. I think it must be like that with the peasants.
Varsieff saw them in a strange mystic light. No man loved them as he
did. They looked like sons of God to him. That's what he saw when they
went down to death.
"There are no dreams too fine for them to answer," he whispered. "They
are pure--they come from the North like all invaders--glacially pure!
We'll warm their hearts--lead them home to God--teach them how to live!"
He was silent suddenly. I asked him to go on and then saw the queerest
look instead. Varsieff was torn by the thought, that now as a leader
of revolutionists he must teach his peasants how to _die_ as well....
A civilian, I repeat, does not realise this quite the same. In the
Capitol, we had worked for a Cause that meant the death of men, but now
we were the officers called upon to charge live troops to the fork and
the grill. I knew Varsieff to be more imaginative and tender than I,
yet I would not have mentioned my qualms, had I known how terribly he
was suffering. He caught my hands, whispering:
"You have it, too?"
It was the single hour of weakness that Varsieff had ever revealed to
me. I studied his face without speaking.
"I brought them to this," he muttered. "I have always thought of the
spirit of things. I was always pure enough, following that dream....
But, Lange, we're a little mad--we who dream.... I had to come here.
I had to see this fighting end. Perhaps Christonal knew what he was
doing."