Part 10 (1/2)

By ten o'clock Pleshko was looking paler than ever. Two of his gunlayers, two drivers and one machine-gunner had vanished without trace. Every effort to get the three armored cars moving proved fruitless. Shchur, who had been ordered out on a mission by Captain Pleshko, never returned. Needless to say his motorcycle disappeared with him. The voices on the field-telephones grew threatening. The brighter grew the morning, the stranger the things that happened at the armored-car troop: two gunners, Duvan and Maltsev. also vanished, together with a couple more machine-gunners. The vehicles themselves took on a forlorn, abandoned look as they stood there like three useless juggernauts, surrounded by a litter of spanners, jacks and buckets.

By noon the troop commander, Captain Pleshko himself, had disappeared too.

Ten.

For three days a confused series of moves and counter-moves, some made in the heat of battle, others connected with the arrival of dispatch-riders and the squealing of field-telephones, had kept Colonel Nai-Turs' unit on the move among the snowdrifts and roadblocks around the City in a circuit that extended from Red Tavern to Serebryanka in the south and to Post-Volynsk in the south-west. By the evening of December 14th the unit was back in the City at a deserted barracks, half of whose window-panes were smashed in.

The unit commanded by Colonel Nai-Turs was a strange one. Everyone who saw it was surprised to find it so well equipped with the footgear - felt boots - so essential to winter campaigning. At its formation three days before the unit numbered a hundred and fifty cadets and three second lieutenants.

In early December an officer had reported to Major-General Blokhin, commander of the 1st Infantry Detachment. The officer was a cavalryman of medium height, dark, clean-shaven with a gloomy expression, wearing the shoulder-straps of a colonel of hussars, who had introduced himself as Colonel Nai-Turs, formerly squadron commander of No. 2 Squadron of the former Regiment of Belgrade Hussars. Nai-Turs' sad eyes had a look in them which had the effect of making anyone who met this limping colonel, with his grubby St George's Cross ribbon sewn to a worn enlisted-man's greatcoat, pay absolute attention to whatever the colonel had to say. After only a short conversation with Nai-Turs, Major-General Blokhin entrusted him with the formation of the Detachment's second infantry company, with orders that the task was to be completed by December 13th. Astoundingly, the job of mustering and organising the company was finished by December 10th, and on that date Colonel Nai-Turs, by nature a man of few words, reported briefly to Major-General Blokhin, distracted on all sides by the insistent buzz of telephones from headquarters, that he, Nai-Turs, and his cadets were now ready for combat, but only on the essential condition that his entire squad were issued with fur caps and felt boots for a hundred and fifty men, without which he, Nai-Turs, considered military action as totally unfeasible. When the laconic colonel had made his report, General Blokhin gladly signed him a requisition order to the supply section but warned Nai-Turs that with this piece of paper he was unlikely to obtain the equipment he wanted in less than a week's time, because both headquarters and the supply section were hotbeds of inefficiency, red tape and disorganisation.

Colonel Nai-Turs took the piece of paper and, with his habitual twitch of the left half of his clipped moustache, marched out of General Blokhin's office without turning his head to left or right (he could not turn it, because as the result of a wound his neck was rigid and whenever he needed to look sideways he was obliged to turn his whole body). At the Detachment's quarters on Lvov Street Nai-Turs collected ten cadets (armed, for some reason) and a couple of two-wheeled carts, and set off with them to the supply section.

At the supply section, housed in a most elegant villa on Kudry-avskaya Boulevard, in a comfortable office adorned with a map of Russia and a portrait of the ex-Empress Alexandra left over from the days of the wartime Red Cross, Colonel Nai-Turs was received by Lieutenant-General Makus.h.i.+n, a short unnaturally flushed little man dressed in a gray tunic, a clean s.h.i.+rt peeping over its high collar, which gave him an extraordinary resemblance to Milyutin, Alexander II's war minister.

Flinging down a telephone receiver, the general enquired in a childish voice that sounded like a toy whistle: 'Well, colonel, what can I do for you?'

'Unit about to go into action', replied Nai-Turs laconically. 'Please issue felt boots and fur hats for two hundred men immediately.'

'H'mm', said the general, pursing his lips and crumpling Nai's requisition order in his hand. 'Can't issue them today I'm afraid, colonel. Today we're taking an inventory of stores issued to all units. Come back again in about three days time. And in any case I can't issue a quant.i.ty like two hundred.'

He placed the requisition order at the top of a pile under a paperweight in the shape of a naked woman.

'I said felt boots', Nai-Turs rejoined in a monotone, squinting down at the toes of his boots.

'What?' the general asked in perplexity, staring at the colonel with amazement.

'Give me those felt boots at once.'

'What are you talking about?' The general's eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.

Nai-Turs turned to the door, opened it a little and shouted out into the pa.s.sage: 'Hey there, platoon!'

The general turned a grayish white, his glance swivelling from Nai-Turs' face to the telephone receiver, from there to the ikon of the Virgin hanging in the corner, then back to the colonel's face.

There was a clinking and shuffling in the pa.s.sage, then several red-banded cadets' forage caps of the Alexeyevsky Military Academy and some black bayonets appeared in the doorway. The general started to rise from his padded armchair.

'I have never heard anything like it . . . this is mutiny . . .'

'Please countersign the requisition order, sir', said Nai. 'We haven't much time, we move off in an hour. The enemy is right outside the city.'

'What on earth do you mean by . . .'

'Come on, hurry up', said Nai-Turs in a funereal voice.

Hunching his head between his shoulders, his eyes starting from his head, the general pulled the piece of paper from under the naked woman and with a shaking hand, spattering ink, scrawled in the corner: 'Issue the above stores.'

Nai-Turs took the paper, tucked it into the cuff of his sleeve, turned to his cadets and gave the order: 'Load up the felt boots. Look sharp.'

Clumping and rattling, the cadets began to file out. As Nai waited for them to leave, the general, purple in the face, said to him: 'I shall immediately ring the commander-in-chief's headquarters and raise the matter of having you court-martialled. This is unheard-of . . .'

'Go ahead and try', replied Nai-Turs, swallowing his saliva. 'Just try. Just out of interest, go ahead and try.' He put his hand on the revolver-b.u.t.t peeping out of his unb.u.t.toned holster. The general's face turned blotchy and he was silent.

'If you pick up that telephone, you silly old man,' Nai suddenly said in a gentle voice, 'I'll give you a hole in your head from this Colt and that will be the end of you.'

The general sat back in his chair. The folds of his neck were still purple, but his face was gray. Nai-Turs turned around and went out.

For a few more minutes the general sat motionless in his armchair, then crossed himself towards the ikon, picked up the telephone receiver, raised it to his ear, heard the operator's m.u.f.fled yet intimate voice . . . suddenly he had a vision of the grim eyes of that laconic colonel of hussars, replaced the receiver and looked out of the window. He watched the cadets in the yard busily carrying gray bundles of felt boots out of the black doorway of the stores, where the quartermaster-sergeant could be seen holding a piece of paper and staring at it in utter amazement. Nai-Turs was standing with his legs astraddle beside a two-wheeled cart and gazing at it. Weakly the general picked up the morning paper from the table, unfolded it and read on the front page: On the river Irpen clashes occurred with enemy patrols which were attempting to penetrate towards Svyatos.h.i.+no . . .

He threw down the newspaper and said aloud: 'Cursed be the day and the hour when I took on this . . .' The door opened and the a.s.sistant chief of the supply section entered, a captain who looked like a tailless skunk. He stared meaningly at the folds of purpling flesh above the general's collar and said: 'Permission to report, sir.'

'See here, Vladimir Fyodorich', the general interrupted him, sighing and gazing about him in obvious distress, 'I haven't been feeling too good ... a slight attack of.. . er . .. and I'm going home now. Will you please take over?'

'Yes, sir,' replied the skunk, staring curiously at the general. 'But what am I to do? The Fourth Detachment and the engineers are asking for felt boots. Did you just give an order to issue two hundred pairs?'

'Yes. Yes, I did,' replied the general in his piercing voice. 'Yes, I gave the order. I personally allowed it. Theirs is an exceptional case! They are just going into combat. Yes, I gave the order!'

A look of curiosity flashed in the skunk's eyes.

'Our total stock is only four hundred pairs . . .'

'What can I do?' squeaked the general. 'Do you think I can produce them like rabbits out of a hat? Eh? Issue them to anybody who asks for them!'

Five minutes later General Makus.h.i.+n was taken home in a cab.

During the night of December 13th to the 14th the moribund barracks on Brest-Litovsk Street came to life. In the vast, dirty barrack-rooms the lights came on again, after some cadets had spent most of the day stringing wires from the barracks and connecting them up to the streetlamps. A hundred and fifty rifles stood neatly piled in threes, whilst the cadets slept sprawled fully dressed on dirty cots. At a rickety wooden table, strewn with crusts of bread, mess-tins with the remains of congealed stew, cartridge pouches and ammunition clips, sat Nai-Turs unfolding a large colored plan of the City. A small kitchen oil lamp threw a blob of light on to the maze-like map, on which the Dnieper was shown like a huge, branching, blue tree.

By about two o'clock in the morning sleep began to overtake Nai-Turs. His nose twitched, and occasionally his head nodded towards the map as though he wanted to study some detail more closely. Finally he called out in a low voice: 'Cadet!'

'Yes, sir', came the reply from the doorway, and with a rustle of felt boots a cadet approached the table.

'I'm going to turn in now', said Nai. 'If a signal comes through by telephone, waken Lieutenant Zharov and depending on its contents he will decide whether to waken me or not.'

There were no telephone messages and headquarters did not disturb Nai-Turs' detachment that night. At dawn a squad armed with three machine-guns and three two-wheeled carts set out along the road leading out of the City, past rows of dead, shuttered suburban houses . . .

Nai-Turs deployed his unit around the Polytechnic School, where he waited until later in the morning when a cadet arrived on a two-wheeler and handed him a pencilled signal from headquarters: 'Guard the Southern Highway at Polytechnic and engage the enemy on sight.'

Nai-Turs had his first view of the enemy at three o'clock in the afternoon when far away to the left a large force of cavalry appeared, advancing across an abandoned, snow-covered army training-ground. This was Colonel Kozyr-Leshko, who in accordance with Colonel Toropets' plan was attempting to penetrate to the center of the City along the Southern Highway. In reality Kozyr-Leshko, who had met no resistance of any kind until reaching the approaches to the Polytechnic, was not so much attacking as making a victorious entry into the City, knowing full well that his regiment was being followed by another squadron of Colonel Gosnenko's cossacks, by two regiments of the Blue Division, a regiment of South Ukrainian riflemen and six batteries of guns. As the leading hors.e.m.e.n began trotting across the training-ground, shrapnel sh.e.l.ls, like a flock of cranes, began bursting in the heavy, snow-laden sky. The scattered riders closed up into a single ribbon-like file and then, as the main body came in sight, the regiment spread itself across the whole width of the highway and bore down on Nai-Turs' position. A rattle of rifle-bolts ran along the lines of cadets, Nai pulled out a whistle, blew a piercing blast and shouted: 'At cavalry ahead! Rapid . . . fire!'

Sparks flickered along the gray ranks as the cadets loosed off their first volley at Kozyr. Three times after that the enemy batteries sent a salvo of shrapnel raining down against the walls of the Polytechnic and three times more, with an answering rattle of musketry Nai-Turs' detachment fired back. The distant black lines of hors.e.m.e.n broke up, melted away and vanished from the highway.

It was then that something odd seemed to happen to Nai-Turs. No one in the detachment had ever seen him frightened, but at that moment the cadets had the impression that Nai either saw, heard or sensed something in the distance ... in short, Nai gave the order to withdraw toward the City. One platoon remained behind to give covering fire to the other platoons as they pulled out, then withdrew in turn when the main body was safely ensconced in a new position. Like this they leap-frogged back for two miles, throwing themselves down and making the broad highway echo with rifle-fire at regular intervals until they reached the intersection where Brest-Litovsk Street crossed the highway, the place where they had spent the previous night. The crossroads were quite dead, not a soul was to be seen on the streets.

Here Nai-Turs selected three cadets and gave them their orders: 'Run back to Polevaya Street and find out where our units are and what's become of them. If you come across any carts, two-wheelers or other means of transportation retreating in a disorganised fas.h.i.+on, seize them. In case of resistance threaten the use of firearms, and if that doesn't work, use them . . .'