IRRECONCILABLE BED-FELLOWS
War and revolution are irreconcilable bed-fellows. Mars is a jealous
god, demanding more and ever more sacrifice. Revolution cries
incessantly for larger freedom. Out in that nebulous land, beyond the
edges of civilization, for which all nations have a common name--“the
front”--I came close, very close, to the staggering reality of war. I
came to know how revolution wars on war, and war on revolution, and
both on freedom and democracy. Conflict is the characteristic element
of revolution, as of war. Democracy languishes, and freedom sickens in
the midst of conflict.
On that dismal gray day when I slipped quietly away from Petrograd, the
capital was celebrating in a mild, half-hearted fashion the offensive
on the southwestern front.
With me went Peter Bukowski, carrying in his pockets two of those most
coveted of all documents to the war-time correspondent--the pass that
entitles the bearer to safe-conduct into that forbidden territory where
visitors are discouraged at the point of the bayonet. Only slightly
less important than the permits was Peter himself; for he was my voice,
my ears, and my bodyguard--though in this last capacity he proved
entirely superfluous.
Polish grandparents bequeathed to Peter a foreign name and an aptitude
for languages. Somebody--it must have been a fairy, for every one
else disclaimed all responsibility--put a map of Ireland on his face.
Two generations of Chicago, U. S. A., did the rest. The result was a
typical American, one hundred and seventy pounds of bounding vitality,
irrepressible good nature, and plain boy. Peter won the heart of every
one from Johanna Ivanovna to the Division Chief, and paved my way from
the lazaret to the trenches. Peter, upon the night of our departure,
was torn with conflicting emotions. The American colony was going
to honor the Fourth of July by consuming quantities of white-bread
sandwiches from the Ambassador’s pantry. Peter wanted desperately to
see the Russian front. The vision of stacks of sandwiches--white-bread
sandwiches--appeared before him, but Peter would not be there.
We went early to the station, in the hope of claiming two upper berths.
There were no longer any sleeping-car reservations in Russia, but there
was an unwritten law that the person who first put his belongings into
the upper berth was entitled to sleep there, while the other occupants
huddled together on the seat below or stood in the aisles. We poked
inquiring heads into one compartment after another, but the earlier
birds, to make assurance doubly sure, had thrown not only their baggage
but their persons in the coveted places.
When I dozed off to sleep, a girl who had fled from Riga at the German
advance was sitting beside me. I awoke an hour later, and she was gone.
In her place was a round-faced, blue-eyed boy drawing shiny black
cavalry boots over blue breeches with a golden stripe down each bulging
side. He looked too young for war, but five red stripes on his sleeve
proclaimed as many wounds.
All night long the stream of life flowed in and out. All night long a
changing procession filed through the compartment. Men stayed for an
hour or two, and dropped off at wayside stations. Some, just out of
the hospital, were home on sick leave. Some were returning to their
positions at the front. All were tired--tired to death; yet sleep
was out of the question. Each man unfolded his own scrap of story,
expressed his opinion about the war, and dropped out to make room for
another.
The boy stayed longer than the others. Peter offered him a cigarette,
and soon he was relating a round, unvarnished tale. Smirnoff Brusiloff
was his name, and his age eighteen. He was in school at Petrograd when
the war broke out, and he made up his mind to enlist. His father, a
Russian general, promptly ordered him to stick to his books. He as
promptly rejected parental commands and ran away to join the army.
From his pocket he drew a handful of medals. They were the four Orders
of St. George. Each of them marked some daredevil adventure and
hairbreadth escape. The last, the Gold Cross, highest award in the gift
of the Tsar, was given for blowing up a railroad bridge used by the
Germans for transport of provisions and war supplies.
To him, war was a great game. The abstract ideas of revolution meant
nothing. The theories that were keeping his peasant brothers in the
trenches awake at night passed him by entirely. “There is no sport left
in fighting with the Russian army,” he said. “I am going to cut down
south and try to break into the English lines.”
He left--and toward morning there sat in his place a simple fellow with
a strange look in his vacant eyes. He unwrapped a big hunk of black
bread, and with a pocket-knife pared off scraps and ate them. When he
had finished his breakfast, he nodded to sleep. The soldier beside him
drew the wabbling head down to his shoulder, as he might have done to
a tired child. “The war,” he said, laying a gentle hand on the boy’s
hair--“he is not right here.”
When I opened the door of the compartment in the morning, the aisle
was filled with soldiers asleep on the floor. I picked my way over one
human bundle after another to the platform, to negotiate the purchase
of wild strawberries, bottles of fresh milk, and prim little round
bouquets of wild flowers which the barefoot peasant children were
offering for sale.
Late that afternoon we moved into the compartment of a kindly colonel,
with whom Peter had made friends. We were all bound for the same
section of the front, and the only other occupant of the compartment
was Corporal Kuzma, of the proud age of fourteen. Already he had seen
two and a half years of service, and had been twice wounded. He had a
wonderful red pencil, which he fingered affectionately as he took us
into his confidence. This pencil had been given him by a nurse in the
hospital where he had been convalescing from his last injury.
The corporal’s father, according to his story, was a captain of staff,
and his mother a first-aid nurse. Both had been killed at the beginning
of the war. An older brother, an officer in the army, had been killed
in action; and a sister, seventeen years old, who was a nurse, was
drowned while swimming the Niemen River to get away from the Germans.
The corporal, lone survivor of his family, naturally joined the army.
Two promotions were the reward for valor under fire. His uniform
confirmed his story.
The corporal did not say that he was pressed for funds, but he offered
to dispose of his treasured red pencil for a consideration. Peter
bought it for a ruble, and presented it again. Then the Colonel bought
it for a ruble, and he too followed the rest of Peter’s example.
“But,” added the Colonel, “if I ever hear of you selling it again, I
will not only take it away, but I will have you dismissed from the army
in disgrace.”
I wanted to see more of this astounding child; but when we changed
trains at the next station, he too dropped into the stream of the
procession and disappeared.
The next part of the journey we made sitting upon a wooden bench in a
fourth-class carriage. That night we picked up a sleeper again, and the
Colonel insisted on stowing me away in the upper berth, with a tiny
pillow that his daughter had made for him tucked under my head. He
confided to Peter that I was the first American woman he had ever met.
“My father was in the army before me, and my grandfather before him,”
he said, with a sigh; “but I am going to send my boy to America to be
educated for some other profession.”
He understood the revolutionary soldier no more than young Brusiloff
did. This lusty new thing that had come crashing into the ordered ways
of his military life, and snapped its fingers in the face of all the
traditions upon which his world was founded, left him hurt and helpless
and bewildered. I fell asleep still listening to his voice. The next
thing I knew, it was daylight, and he and Peter were hurrying me off
the train.
Not a note of war jarred the quiet of this landscape. Nothing in the
wooded slopes or in the deep meadows remotely suggested war. The
Colonel sniffed the morning air. “It smells like the front,” he said,
with a sense of real satisfaction.
We parted. He was to continue on the main line for another station,
while we shot off in a different direction. The rest of the journey we
made squatting on the floor of a box-car. The only other passengers
were two soldiers and a tiny pansy-faced girl of six with great gray
eyes, shy and wistful. She sat upon the edge of my skirt, spread out
for that purpose, and seriously crunched sunflower seeds.
Our way led through fields of rye, yellowing in the sunshine, and
potato patches, green and promising. On the edge of the distant
clearing a herd of cattle grazed, and along the road-bed women,
barefooted and in calico dresses, worked with picks and wooden shovels.
An army motor-truck, driven by a woman, chugged across our path.
At ten o’clock the branch line came to an end in a cleared space in the
forest, and we stepped into a huge tent canteen with a Red Cross sign
above the door. Soldiers, a hundred or more, slouched over the tables,
slicing off hunks of black bread with their pocket-knives, and washing
the bread down with tea drunk from tin cans. They were of the earth,
these men. Their dun clothes were heavy with the brown mud of the
trenches, their faces weathered to the color of the soil, their tawny
hair sun-bleached. Only their eyes, sky-blue or shining black, lifted
them out of the monotone.
One of them brought us tin cups of steaming tea, and explained that he
and his comrades were just out of the first-line trenches. Peter asked
him to direct us to the lazaret, which was to provide us with sleeping
quarters. He pointed toward the forest, where a thin wisp of gray smoke
curled slowly up into the blue sky, and volunteered to take us there.
We started across the fields on foot. It was a crisp and clear morning.
A recent rain had washed and polished every blade of grass. A little
wind stirred gently the feathery tops of the distant pines, and rippled
the field of blue corn-flowers, white buckwheat, yellow mustard, and
purple clover-bloom.
Surely this could not be war--these painted fields, those dark,
peaceful woods! The thought had barely registered, when a dull _boom!
boom! boom!_ came suddenly to my ears. Peter looked at the soldier and
at me.
“It’s war, all right,” he said.
Beyond the first row of trees we came abruptly upon a cluster of low
frame buildings, log cabins, and brush-covered dugouts. From the top
of a tiny log bungalow, with blue curtains at the windows, an American
flag was flying. A frisking colt kicked up its heels on the edge of the
clearing, and a flock of friendly geese came waddling to meet us.
We stopped in front of a large building, and a Sister of Mercy in the
Russian Red Cross uniform opened the door. She led the way to the
dining-room, and ordered coffee with warm milk from the lazaret’s own
dairy.
Suddenly we heard a whirr above our heads. The nurse ran to the
door, excitedly motioning to me to follow. An aëroplane,--a German
aëroplane--was outlined against the cloudless sky. A battery opened
fire to the right of us, and another to the left. The shots came in
quick succession, like the beating of a drum. A tiny cloud of smoke
appeared in the wake of the flyer. Another broke just above him. A
third and a fourth shell exploded below. The gunners had missed. The
German sailed safely on his destructive way.
“You had better get inside,” said a Russian doctor, who joined the
group. “There will be a shower of shrapnel fragments in a minute.”
“We have been rather expecting an aëroplane raid to-day,” he continued,
lighting a cigarette. “Our fellows celebrated the victory on the other
front yesterday by peppering the Germans with artillery fire, and we
thought they might retaliate with bombs.”
We spent the day exploring the hospital, built upon ground once
occupied by the Germans, and from trees felled there in the forest and
sawed on the premises with a primitive two-man-power Russian saw.
With the exception of one hospital captured from the Austrians,
there was not a more complete plant along the entire length of the
great front; and the flag flying over the tiny bungalow had a real
significance--an American was responsible for that hospital.
Dr. Eugene Samuelevitch Hurd, the Russians called him, and, though he
was already on his way to France to help his own countrymen, he had
left a record that made me realize what one unofficial American can do
in the matter of diplomacy. Peter and I in the days to follow had cause
to be profoundly grateful; for on this sector of the front one needed
only to be American to have all ways opened unto him.
At dinner we sat down to excellent Russian fare: _shchee_ (sour cabbage
soup), _kasha_ (boiled buckwheat), stewed meat, potatoes, and bread at
least three shades lighter than any we had seen in Petrograd.
After dinner, Johanna Ivanovna, head nurse for the military hospital
next door, took me for a walk through the woods. Johanna Ivanovna
was young, fresh, and softly, sadly pretty in her Sister’s garb. She
was lonesome out there on the edge of the forest. She spoke a little
English, rusty from long disuse. She was the only person in all those
fields and forests who understood even a stray word of my native
language.
As we turned back toward the lazaret, a Russian rocket flashed into the
western sky. It was followed by another, and another.
“A German scouting party had been sighted outside the barbed-wire
entanglements,” Johanna Ivanovna explained from long experience at the
front. “The rockets are torches to help trace their movements.”
I slept that night on a narrow army cot in a typical camp room, the
only unfamiliar feature of which was a strange contraption like a
knapsack hanging on the wall. It proved to be a gas-mask, and bore the
warning: “Keep your gas-mask always with you--it will save your life.”
I put the mask back on its nail, and turned down the gray army
blankets, to find white sheets. My clothes had not been off for two
nights, and those sheets were alluring. My last recollection was the
sound of the low grumble of artillery on the firing line to the west.
Division Staff Headquarters was our immediate objective next morning. A
_breechka_, with one horse in the shafts and another to run alongside
in the strange Russian fashion, was at the door of the lazaret when
we finished our coffee. The road led over a hillside and through a
typical Russian village: a cluster of wooden houses huddled together
in the center of fields of grain and flax. They were pitiful little
homes, weather-grayed, straw-thatched, and dilapidated. The main street
was thronged with soldiers, who had come to buy picture post-cards,
cigarettes, and candy from the meager store. Beyond the village we
headed into the forest, bumping our way over a military corduroy road
of rough logs laid together like the boards in a floor.
The wagon path bristled on both sides with barbed-wire entanglements,
and the woods were honeycombed with trenches. They were timbered with
logs, and the roofs were covered with moss and delicate wild flowers.
The sentries glanced curiously at me. Women, even Red Cross nurses,
seldom penetrated this far into their domain. But they allowed me to
pass unchallenged. We stopped in front of an old-fashioned farm-house
with a passion-vine growing over the veranda, and a rustic summer-house
built around an aged tree in the front yard.
The General’s aide came out to meet us. He took us to the commanding
officer, and we drank tea while plans and permits were being made and
horses saddled. Once permission was granted to visit the Russian front
the military host left nothing to be desired.
The General offered me his aide as a guide; and he, Lieutenant
Gusaroff, mounted me on his beautiful black “Arabka.” The pony and I
covered eighteen miles through the dark forests that day, and before I
left we were thoroughly familiar with that sector of the front. Every
mile of the way was bounded by trenches running off into the depths of
the woods. Here and there we passed a pine snapped in the middle as if
it had been a match, and great cavities in the earth marked the havoc
of enemy artillery fire.
We lunched with the Colonel and a group of young officers in a
log-lined dugout, with flowers upon the table and an elaborate hanging
lamp made from pine cones suspended above it. In one corner of the
living-room was a tiny wire pen in which three baby chickens were being
carefully reared.
Table conversation turned to the question of the offensive on the
southwestern front. Most of the men were hopeful that it might once
more mean active participation of all the Russian troops. Some were
dubious. It was evident that none of them liked the new committee
system of managing the army. It was hardly to be expected that they
would, for it meant a complete overturn of all their training.
Many were sympathetic with the Revolution; a few were revolutionists:
but most of them wanted revolution to behave according to their own
well ordered plan and not according to the nature of revolution.
The quiet of the morning departed. The rumble of the guns seemed quite
close now. When luncheon was over, we all mounted horses and rode
off in the direction they called. We came to a halt on the shores of
another and much larger lake, a great inland sea nearly fifteen miles
long. The wind had lashed its surface into whitecaps, and waves came
beating noisily against the barbed-wire entanglements that poked their
heads formidably above the water.
Here we dismounted, and they led me to an observation station cleverly
screened by trees. Young Gusaroff adjusted the glasses and turned them
over to me; then--“Bvistra, Miss Beatty, bvistra!” he shouted.
I looked, and at the opposite side of the lake a great cloud of sand
rose suddenly into the air. A section of a German trench blew up in a
puff of smoke.
Stretched out before me, beyond that powerful lens, were the Russian
and German trenches. Above the ground the barbed-wire entanglements
zigzagged across the gray hillsides. Under the surface, facing each
other with watchful eyes and ears and ready trigger-fingers, were two
long lines of silent men.
In the reserve trenches beyond were more men--thousands of them,
talking, sleeping, playing cards, brewing tea, living their lives like
so many ants--who were of the earth and knew no other world.
A flotilla of tiny armored water-craft guarded the Russian end of the
lake, and between it and the little German lake-craft was a stretch of
mined water, which either would hesitate to cross.
It was hard to realize, looking through those glasses at the clouds
of dust now on the German side of the line, now on the Russian, that
every time the slim young lieutenant called “Bvistra!” the reaper of
battlefields was shouting a more final command to some one or more of
the dwellers under the earth.
Back at staff headquarters again, we sat down at a table with military
maps spread before us. Gusaroff was an engineer, and loved every line
of the complicated maps.
“If we had had enough ammunition in 1915 you would not have to be
fighting to-day,” he said.
“Here”--pointing to a spot in Poland now in the possession of the
Germans--“sixteen thousand of us went into battle in 1915, and only
five hundred of us returned. The artillery retreated, not because it
did not want to go on fighting--not because it was beaten--but because
it had only two rounds of ammunition left.”
He moved his finger to another point on the map. “There is a hill
here,” he said, “which our men charged forty-eight times. On the
forty-ninth attack there were only four survivors out of three
thousand, and they shot themselves rather than surrender to the
Germans. Reserves arrived in time to rescue the situation, but too late
to save the men.”
“Yes,” said another officer; “if we had had the ammunition in 1915, I
would be back with Mother Moscow, practising law, and all this business
would be over. What will happen now--I don’t know. It is very bad.”
“War and revolution do not get on well together; yet we younger men
realize that revolution had to come. Things could not go on as they
were.”