Part 6 (1/2)

It was then that I saw the face of the boy Goga. I had turned, smiling, pleased with the suns.h.i.+ne, 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 tortoisesh.e.l.l pocket comb as he talked to us. ”Yes, we must move in half an hour. Very sad ... the whole army is retreating. Why, G.o.d 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 pa.s.sionately. 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.surance 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 n.o.body'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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 h.e.l.l.

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-gla.s.ses; 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-gla.s.ses, 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 cafes, 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 gra.s.s, 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-gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.s 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 Va.s.silievitch'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 a.s.serted 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sionate 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.”