SPECKS ON THE HORIZON
War as Russia has known it, war as they know it on the western front,
is a different thing from war as I saw it made in the dark forests in
July. Yet war as it came to me in flashes was real and terrible enough
to fix itself everlastingly.
One afternoon I sat in a bomb-proof observation station and looked
through a tiny round hole across a narrow strip of sand-dunes to a
tangle of barbed wire. No Man’s Land lay like a bone between two hungry
dogs. Less than two hundred feet away, beyond that last strand of
vicious metal, were the Germans.
I sat there, trying to believe it--trying to realize that here, a few
steps distant, so close that I could almost reach out my hands and
touch them, were the fighting forces of the man who stands to most of
the civilized world as the arch-enemy of liberty and peace.
Suddenly my wandering mind stopped short. Two black specks appeared
for a moment above that metal line. On the instant two rifles
cracked--short, sharp, and final.
The specks were gone. I caught my breath. It could not be true! I had
imagined it.
The officer beside me was speaking. I had not heard. I begged his
pardon abstractedly, and he repeated:
“A couple of Germans put their heads over the trench--bad thing to do.”
When I returned to the Colonel’s headquarters a few minutes later, I
found him surrounded by soldiers beaming with pleasure and being beamed
upon in return. The Colonel, a stocky little man, brisk and alert,
introduced me to his men, and pointed to a section of barbed-wire
entanglement that they had just brought in. It was not the crude
Russian entanglement fashioned from crossed logs sawed from the forest,
but the made-in-Germany kind with slender portable metal standards,
easy to fold and easy to carry. Under cover of the darkness of the
night before, they had brazenly helped themselves to this sample of
German efficiency, and before the enemy awoke to the situation the
successful raiders were chuckling happily in safety in their trenches.
When darkness came again, the scouting party once more ventured forth;
and this time, after a short sharp fight, they came back bringing a
German with a shattered hip--left by his comrades to die.
The prisoner, a lad of eighteen, was from Dresden, and he told me it
was his first night in the front-line trenches. I saw him on a cot
in the Siberian Hospital the next day. At the foot of his bed sat a
Russian officer, plying him with questions and filling long sheets of
foolscap with the answers. Occasionally the boy turned his head to the
pillow and sobbed with pain and exhaustion. The nurse looked at him
compassionately.
“Heaven knows, I don’t like the Germans,” she said, “but I can’t help
feeling sorry for that boy. He is suffering terribly.”
A woman doctor stepped up to the officer.
“He can stand no more,” she said.
I stooped to brush the flies from his feet and tuck the sheets around
them. He looked up at me and managed a feeble and a grateful English
“Thank you.”
The next night a deserter was brought in. He was from Alsace. He told
us that the Alsatians in the trenches were alternated with Germans
ordered to watch them. In addition, a German officer continually
patrolled the rear of the line. It was raining, and the officer was
apparently less vigilant. The man watched his chance, and slipped away
under cover of the storm.
Johanna Ivanovna, Peter, and I went frequently in the evenings to a
near-by village where a young Cossack captain, Vasaili Pestrakoff,
and a command of a hundred men operated an anti-aircraft battery. The
Captain was a living denial of all my preconceived ideas of Cossacks.
He was quiet and serious and almost puritanical in his denunciation of
the moral code preached and practised by some of his brother officers.
One evening we found the regimental band drawn up outside the entrance
to the village. It was St. John’s Day, and the occupants of the
straw-thatched huts were out in the brightest and best calico clothes
their meager wardrobes permitted. All of the soldiers within walking
distance of the battery were there. When they saw us coming, the
band proudly played an American march--“in honor of the Amerikanka,”
explained Johanna Ivanovna. A Russian waltz followed, then a lively
peasant tune.
Russia has danced little since the war, but the music was a real
temptation. A soldier grabbed a barefoot woman and whirled her into the
circle. Another followed his example, then another, and another. The
women danced with flying feet and tragic faces. Three years of living
in constant apprehension, fleeing from home in terror and straggling
back again to take up life within sound of enemy guns, had painted
fear and resignation into their great, soft eyes. The children huddled
together in a group on the edge of the ring, peeping shyly up at me
from under their kerchiefs when curiosity got the better of timidity.
The telephone had tinkled out the information that three enemy
aëroplanes were headed that way, and while the crowd danced the Cossack
Captain’s observers searched the heavens with powerful glasses.
The band struck up the Russian Mazurka, and Captain Pestrakoff, at the
urging of his soldiers, whirled me into the circle. One and another of
the dancers dropped out and marked time on the side-lines. The Russian
steps were as strange to my feet as the language was strange to my
ears, but the music was irresistible. What relation there was between
what we danced and the Russian Mazurka I do not know; but we danced and
the crowd cheered. Suddenly the Captain became conscious that we were
alone in the circle. He colored and abruptly stopped. Half a dozen men
grabbed him up on their shoulders and tossed him in the air again and
again. A dashing little soldier from the Ural Mountains caught me and
whirled me through a succession of spirited steps to the end of the
music.
As I left the crowd, another soldier saluted and slipped something into
my hand with a shy _pashalasta_ (please). I looked down and found two
tiny emblems, the crossed wings and propellers of the aviation corps,
cleverly fashioned from the aluminum cap of a German shell.
The telephone tinkled the news that the enemy aëroplanes were avoiding
the battery, and had passed far to the south. From the dance we went
to the Captain’s brown canvas _palatka_ (tent), where a tiny brass
samovar bubbled. There was candy from Moscow, an almost unheard-of
luxury in those days, and wild blueberries gathered by the villagers
and presented in gratitude for the security that the Captain was
bringing. I noticed a _balalika_ in one corner, and at our urging our
host clicked off the favorite folk-songs of the Don Cossacks.
The following night we were again drinking tea in the little _palatka_.
The hour was late. The sky was hung with clouds. A drizzle pattered on
the canvas roof. It was the last possible time and place to expect an
aërial caller. The Captain jumped suddenly from his chair.
“We have a visitor,” he said.
“What?” asked Peter.
“There is an aëroplane in the vicinity,” he said.
We listened, but our untrained ears distinguished nothing but the rain
on the roof. We followed the Captain to the square. Deserted a moment
before, it was now filling quickly with barefoot men in various stages
of night-dress. The Captain ordered all lights in the village out, and
sent the men--who were targets in their white night-clothes--back to
dress. He gave the command to load the guns and stand ready.
In low tones the men speculated as to whether they were in for a bomb
attack on the battery or a Zeppelin raid on the railway junction. By
this time the purr of the motor was audible even to Peter and to me.
Alternatives were discussed in whispers. The Captain might fire a
random shot; but if it were a bomb attack, this would merely disclose
the position of the battery. He waited and said nothing.
A deathly hush fell upon the square. For an interminable half-hour we
listened to the humming of the motor, momentarily expecting a message
from the bird-man and quite oblivious of the softly falling rain.
Then gradually the sound diminished in volume, and finally ceased
altogether. The _rat-tat-tat_ of the machine-gun of the adjoining
battery announced that the fate of the visitor had passed beyond the
possible control of our Captain. We went back to the samovar and fresh
glasses of tea.
Fair weather had departed. The crisp, clear days of blue and gold were
gone. Rain came down in torrents, and dry boots and I became utter
strangers. The first wet day I spent in the hospital. In the morning I
slipped on a nurse’s smock and went to the surgery.
It was not war out there in the moonlight. The tinkling telephones,
the captured Austrian machine-gun, the cellar full of American
ammunition,--even the whirring of the motors and the boom of the guns
to the west,--could not make it seem real. But here in the surgery were
shattered bones and tortured flesh, the agonized faces of patient men,
and the terrible stench of gangrene. This was war.
The first anguished cry of “Gaspadin docteur” sent me to the
operating-table. It was impossible to stay in that room and do nothing.
I put my first-aid knowledge timidly to work, and before the morning
was over two or three patients were calling me “Sestra” and taxing my
meager knowledge of Russian and my intuition to its limit. Once the
doctor beckoned me to look at a horrible mass of decayed flesh that had
been a leg.
“Dum-dum bullet,” he told me.
At luncheon Peter was in high spirits. War had taken hold of his
imagination. He saw it as a great game.
“You’d better see the surgery,” I suggested.
He refused, but he spent the afternoon with me in the hospital wards,
to which we took a supply of cigarettes and matches.
All of Russia was gathered under that roof. There were Little Russians,
merry-souled chaps, blue-eyed and fair-haired, who came from a land
where the sun shines much and the earth yields plentifully. There were
Veliko’rus, or Big Russians, inured to hardship, their sterner struggle
with the soil photographed upon their determined faces. Scattered among
them were fair-haired Cossacks from the Don and dark-skinned Cossacks
from the Urals with a strain of Tartar marked in the slant of their
eyes and the color of their skin. Sometimes it was an Esthonian who
looked up from the pillow, a Pole, a Lett, a Lithuanian, or a member of
one of the numerous Caucasian or Siberian tribes. There were three who
stood above the others: Hamid Galli, Vasilli, and Ivan Markovitch.
Hamid Galli had a great joke on himself. All day long he lay on his
back and laughed about it. He laughed with his eyes, black and shining
like jet beads, and with his mouth, spread wide across a row of
gleaming white teeth. He was a Cossack from the Urals, small, brown,
and wiry. He and his pony from the Urals, wiry, dark, and spirited like
the master himself, had been at the front for three years. Time after
time they had both gone into that mad rush of man and horse and steel
called a cavalry charge, and come out without a scratch. Three weeks
before, the pony had climbed up on his hind legs and toppled his master
off. For a Cossack to be thrown from any horse is either a swearing or
a laughing matter. Hamid Galli swore, then he tried to pick himself
up. To his amazement, he could not move. His leg was broken--broken by
his own pony. To Hamid Galli that was a hundred-percent joke. He began
to laugh. He was still laughing when the stretcher-bearers carried him
away. He laughed while the doctor was setting it. And the nurse told me
that even in the night, when the ache of it kept him awake, he laughed
quietly to himself.
Vasilli, who was in the next bed, smiled also; but Vasilli’s smile was
the feeble effort of bloodless lips and trusting blue eyes, deep sunken
from long suffering. Vasilli’s smile was the courageous effort of the
spirit, and there was no mirth behind it. Vasilli’s deathly white hand
rested on the bandaged stump of a once serviceable young leg.
One day they wheeled him in to the operating-table, where the doctor
was coming to dress his wounds. Vasilli had had one previous experience
with operating-tables. A frightened look came into his eyes. He said
nothing until the doctor left the room; then in a whisper to the nurse:
“Seestra, is he going to cut off my other leg?”
“No, no; he is going to dress your leg to make you feel more
comfortable,” she answered.
The feeble, patient smile crept into Vasilli’s blue eyes.
“Isn’t he good to me?” he said.
Ivan Markovitch, in the ward beyond, neither smiled nor laughed. Ivan
lay on the pillow, his face ghastly gray and his breath coming in
short, quick gasps. When Peter offered him cigarettes, he shook his
head, and we had to stoop low over the bed to catch the faint words
that came in whispers from his lips.
In the whole wide world Ivan could find no cause for laughing. He had
tuberculosis; and the pity in the eyes of the sister, when she looked
at him, confirmed my worst fears.
Ivan was twenty, and the only boy in a large family of girls. His
people were peasant farmers, and until he was drafted for a soldier,
he spent all his days in the fields, cultivating the hemp and flax and
planting potatoes. The winter before in the trenches he took cold. His
lungs began to pain, and he applied several times to be allowed to see
the doctor.
“It was before the Revolution,” he whispered. “They wouldn’t listen to
me. The officers told me to go back to my regiment where I belonged.
Now look at me.”
Peter said something intended to be cheering; but there was a note in
the voice of the American boy of the bubbling spirits that I had not
heard there before.
Two days later I met Ivan’s nurse coming from the field with her arms
full of white daisies.
We took them, wet with raindrops, and made a wreath and a long garland,
and when we had finished we went to the crude little chapel on the edge
of the wood.
Leaning against the wall was a wooden cross, sawed that morning from a
freshly cut pine. Inside, the light from a tiny altar lamp fell across
a white pine coffin and upon the face of Ivan. We arranged the garland
upon the coffin, and tied a bow of white gauze on the wreath. Then
we stood back and looked silently a minute at the peasant boy from
the distant country who had not lived to know either the joys or the
limitations of freedom.
Two other nurses slipped through the door and stood beside us. Tears
came into the eyes of one and another, and they gave me a strip of
white gauze because I had forgotten my handkerchief.
It was a common language that we spoke--the only one we had in common.
Ivan was Ivan, to us: a peasant boy who died in the years of his
strength and youth, alone and far from home. Ivan was all the boys of
the world to each of us, and a special boy or two in some particular
corner of the world.
I doubt if I could have danced that night, however tempting the music
or importune the partner. Yet one must dance! The sun and the moon
rise and the current of life flows on, heedless of tortured flesh,
unmindful who lies dying.
For two days I stayed away from the trenches. The rain oozed through
the cracks in the rough pine boards in my room and spread in puddles
over the floor. It showed no signs of ceasing. One morning, regardless
of Peter’s protest, we set out to cover the three miles to the staff. A
very much astonished young Russian met us at the door.
“How did you get here?” he asked.
I explained that we had come with much ease and some exhilaration on
our own feet, and were none the worse for the walk.
“But surely you don’t want to go to the trenches on a day like this!
You will be up to your knees in mud. You can’t imagine what it is
like,” he said.
“I have a very strong desire to find out at first hand,” I answered.
He consulted two brother officers, who in turn consulted the telephone.
Finally they decided: “It is possible, but foolish.”
Still smiling, but frowning indulgently upon me, they put me in the
General’s big gray motor-car, and we started for the forest.
Twice the heavy car stuck in the mud, and Lieutenant Gustaroff told me
to tell my government to send some American Fords parcels post.
Just as we reached headquarters the sun came slashing through the heavy
clouds, and for three hours the downpour ceased.
The officers were waiting for us, curious to see these strange
Americans who didn’t stay indoors when it rained. We made our way
through sandy trench roads, untimbered ditches bordered with shaggy
lavender poppies, green oats, and blue cornflowers clinging close to
their sloping sides. Then we went into the trenches. There were miles
and miles of them, zigzagging back and forth like the Greek border on
a guest towel. At intervals big metal plates were placed near the top,
flanked on each side by sand-bags. Through the observation holes I
peeped out on No Man’s Land with the barbed-wire entanglements of the
Germans beyond. Once they told me we were within a hundred and sixty
feet of the enemy’s first-line trench.
[Illustration: Bessie Beatty in the “dark forests at the front”]
[Illustration: Lake Narach--a part of No Man’s Land]
[Illustration: A soldiers’ shrine behind the lines]
[Illustration: Captured barbed wire entanglement--Peter at the left]
[Illustration: Blessing of the banners of the Battalion of Death]
[Illustration: The Woman’s Regiment on review before its departure for
the trenches]
Our friends at the staff had not exaggerated the mud. The first time
we came to a puddle, one of the officers lifted me up in his arms and
carried me over. I protested that I was prepared for mud and did not
mind it. Not understanding, he paid no attention. While I continued
to protest, he carried me across three other puddles. Soon puddles
disappeared--the trench became a continuous river of red mud. I
escaped, and plunged in up to the top of my high boots.
Twice we lost our way in communication-trenches and had to retrace
our steps. Intermittent artillery fire punctuated the journey, and an
officer who spoke a little English taught me to distinguish between
“Baba-yaga” and the “flutes,” the “trunks” and the “suit-cases.”
The big twelve-inch shells that carried wholesale destruction to the
soldier and his carefully built trenches were named after the evil
old Russian witch. The two-inch shell, whizzing through the air with
a shrill whistle, was the flute. The nine- and ten-inch shells were
trunks and suit-cases.
At one point we discovered that a “suit-case” had preceded us and
caved in the timbers. Once, when the lay of the land permitted, I was
allowed to put my head over the trench to see the remains of a Russian
village. All that was left were the skeletons of two Russian brick
stoves and their chimneys.
Electric light and kindred comforts such as they have in the enemy
trenches were utterly lacking here. Mud! Mud! Here was nothing but mud!
In one small trench-house--a burrow in the ground in the back-wall of
the trench--three soldiers were playing cards; another was washing his
shirt. Here and there we found men polishing their guns, and others
brewing tea in aluminum pails over tiny fires. More of them were
snatching a little sleep in order to be vigilant for the night.
Though none of them saluted the officers, there seemed little to
indicate disorganization here; but the commanding Colonel told me that
some of his men had deserted, and more were sick. Scurvy was making
frightful inroads in the Russian ranks on every front, and to the
north, in the vicinity of Riga, the men were in a pathetic condition as
a result of poor food.
The dirt, the flies, the vermin, the monotonous round, the endless soup
and _kasha_, the waiting--these are the things that take the last ounce
of a man’s courage and faith. The Russian, like the Frenchman, the
Englishman, and the Belgian, had had three years of it. The others knew
for what they fought. Each had a cause; each had a country standing
behind him and trying to send some fragment of comfort into his meager
life. The Russian went to the front and stayed there simply because he
was told to. It was tragic that he should be leaving his trenches, but
it was understandable.
The danger of warfare made little impression on me that afternoon, but
I came out knowing that men who have stood three years of trench life,
whether they be English, French, Italian, Russian, or any other, can
not be dismissed as “cowards” by those who stay at home. An hour later
eight of us were gathered at dinner in the officers’ mess. The Colonel
had just asked for a second helping. Suddenly, as one man, we dropped
our forks and listened. _Boom! Boom! Boom!_ The big guns crashed in our
ears. Baba-yaga, the flutes, the trunks, the suit-cases--all of them
at once. The sounds of the afternoon were like silence in comparison.
Two men rose and hurried away. The Colonel left his plate untouched.
One of the officers hurried back and said something in Russian to his
commanding officer. He turned to me.
“You got out just in time,” he said. “They are bombarding the
trenches--down where you were.”
And this was war! I had seen the trenches--walked safely through them
with men whose chief concern was that I, a woman, should not get my
feet wet. Hardly an hour later, the guns of the enemy were crashing
them to pieces.
Always the German was there, waiting, playing the diabolical game of
war just as effectively in the silence as when the guns were pounding
death into the trenches. Sometimes it was a newspaper printed in
Russian that found its way down from Berlin and into the Russian
trenches; sometimes it was a proclamation signed by German soldiers.
The newspaper contained accounts of British and French defeats and
German victories, with profuse proffers of aid sprinkled through its
news item.
“You are finished, Russia, but we will try to help you,” one of them
read. “It will be good for you and good for us to make a separate
peace. We are not your enemies. We do not want to spoil your
Revolution. We want to help you save it.”
One afternoon, while a crowd of us were sitting at tea in the officers’
dug-out not far from the front-line trenches, a soldier appeared at the
door and called the commanding Colonel out. When the Colonel returned
he had a sheet of yellowish paper covered on both sides with neat
Russian script. A scouting party outside the barbed-wire entanglement
had suddenly come upon a group of Germans hiding in a hole in the sand.
The Russians expected to be fired upon, but instead the Germans ran up
a white flag and motioned them to come forward.
“This,” said the Colonel, “is what they gave them.”
It was a German proclamation, compiled with thorough knowledge of the
psychology of the Russian soldier. The Colonel read it aloud, pausing
between sentences to permit Peter to translate.
“Russian soldiers!” [he began]. “The chief commander of the Western
Army tells you that the army of the southwest front has broken our
lines and achieved a great victory, and that we are defeated. This
victory is called the beginning of a fight upon the outcome of which
depends the freedom of the Russian people. Asking you not to be
traitors, he tells you that you must defend the freedom, the fortune,
and the honor of the Russian nation.
“All this is not true. Our lines were not broken. They are very
strong, and the divisions were forced to retreat with losses greater
than ever before.
“It is known that the Russian soldier is always ready to shed his
blood, but it is also known that your commanders shed your blood for
causes that are not worth it--for ideals that can never compensate for
loss of life on the field of battle.
“We presume that you have not forgotten the place of the people’s
sacrifice! The order of the commander of the western front is
interesting because it does not correspond with what is printed in
your papers.
“Have you forgotten what was said on the day of the Holy Easter? That
represented the holy ideal of the Russian Revolution. It seems that
peace, a general honorable peace, without war and indemnities, is the
ideal of the Russian people and was the cause of the fall of Nicholas.
This advance, these horrors, seem the only result of the sacrifice of
those who sleep in the brothers’ sepulcher.
“Do you hear the cry of the suffering workmen? Do you hear the cry of
the blood of the soldiers? Does this appear to be your wish for peace?
“Has the blood of the Revolution been spilt for nothing? The sacrifice
of blood was little to what will now be spilt.
“Freed from the old régime, you have fallen into the hands of
the English, French, and Americans. Remember, we welcomed your
freedom, did not interfere with your internal affairs, and offered
you a brother’s hand. We offered you peace and asked you to send
representatives from your government to talk over peace. Swindled and
bought by English gold, you refused to believe us, but in numberless
instances your brothers have proved the historical fact: We are not
your enemies. We do not wish you to perish, or your freedom.
“Those who fear separate peace furnish you with money and all kinds
of material, and all this is a proof of your unbelief in us, which
will bring you to your ruin. We stand firm and quiet, and await your
advance. The advance of English and French has been defeated, and we
will also defeat you.
“THE GERMAN SOLDIERS.”
“How shall you answer it?” I asked, when the Colonel had finished.
A lieutenant from Moscow, whom we had christened _enfant terrible_
because of his bounding spirits and irrepressible pranks, raised his
arms to imitate an aimed gun.
“_Boom! Boom! Boom!_ we shall answer them,” he said.
But it was not so easily done as said. Those verbal gas-bombs, falling
upon the simple, trusting mind of the Russian soldier, worked more
havoc than heavy artillery and hand-grenade.
“My men are behaving pretty well, but I wouldn’t dare order an
offensive,” one of the generals told me, just before I left the front.
The hereditary distrust between the officer class and the private was
growing continually. Old and ancient grievances were unforgotten, and,
as always, many of the innocent paid the price of the guilty. There
were all kinds of Russian officers, just as there were all kinds of
common soldiers. The soldiers were sometimes undiscriminating, even as
the officers in their day of absolutism had been undiscriminating.
The memory of punitive expeditions that followed the Revolution of
1905, when thousands upon thousands of revolutionists were shot and
sometimes brutally tortured by order of Russian officers without even
the pretense of a trial, still lingered. The soldiers generally looked
upon their officers as the natural enemies of revolution, and regarded
orders with suspicion. Tragedy followed tragedy on the Russian front,
and enemy treachery and pitiful misunderstanding on all sides were
chiefly to blame.
Militarism was a product of autocracy, and the Russian front,
at terrible cost, demonstrated that the larger freedom and the
militaristic ideal can not live in the same world. The Russian
revolutionist knew this. He knew in the summer of 1917 that freedoms,
large or small, were not safe, in Russia or elsewhere, as long as one
militaristic power lived to menace the others. He knew that the sword
of militarism must be broken beneath the feet of the peace-hungry
multitudes of the world before even the most limited of the freedoms
are safe.
What the Russian did not know was that his brothers in Germany are
themselves enslaved to the military ideal, and that the only way to win
freedom is to defeat them and the power that keeps them in bondage. He
did not realize that the only way to give constructive Germany back to
the world is to destroy destructive Germany.