The cossacks paused at the gate, where the entire Women’s Battalion was drawn up in a solid mass. One of the men mounted the stockade, and persuasively and significantly shaking his dirty finger, declared:
‘You listen to me! We’re going out, but you in your women’s foolishness are staying here. Well then, no tricks! If you start firing at our backs we shall turn and cut you all into little bits. Is that clear? Well then, goodbye for the present.’
He jumped down from the stockade and ran to catch up with his troop, occasionally looking back. The cossacks had almost reached the centre of the square when one of them glanced round and anxiously cried out:
‘Look, boys! There’s an officer running after us!’
Many of the men turned their heads. Over the square a tall officer was running, holding his cap on and waving his hand.
‘It’s Atarshchikov of the third company.’
‘Surely he wants to come with us?’
‘He’s a brave lad!’
Atarschikov ran swiftly after the company, a smile flickering on his face. The cossacks waved their hands and laughed.
‘Run, captain! Quicker!’ they shouted.
From the palace gates came the single dry crack of a shot. Atarshchikov threw out his hands and stumbled, then fell on his back, kicking out his legs and struggling to get up. As though by command the whole company turned back towards the palace. The machine-gunners trained their guns on the gates. There was a rattle of belts. But not a soul was visible behind the pine beams. The company hastily drew up in ranks again and marched away at a hurried pace. Two cossacks from the last troop, who had gone back to Atarshchikov, caught up with them, and loudly, so that all the company could hear, one of them shouted:
‘They caught him under the left shoulder. He’s done for!’
The companies’ steps rang out firmly and strongly. The black whiskered sailor gave the order:
‘Left shoulder forward … march!’
They wheeled and marched away to the left, leaving the deserted, huddled mass of the palace wrapped in silence.
Chapter Seven
The Twelfth Cossack regiment had been retreating for two days. Slowly, and fighting all the way, but retreating. The transport wagons of the Russian and Roumanian armies rolled over the raised, unpaved roads. The combined Austrian and German divisions embraced the retiring armies with a deep enveloping flank movement, and sought to close the ring.
Towards evening the news was general that the twelfth regiment and the Roumanian brigade next to it were threatened with encirclement. In the night the twelfth regiment, reinforced by a battery of the mountaineers’ division, received the order to occupy rear-guard positions in the lower levels of a valley. Setting guards, the regiment prepared for the advancing enemy.
The same night Misha Koshevoi and another man from Tatarsk village, Alexei Bieshniak, were posted on secret guard. They concealed themselves in the open close to a disused well, and breathed in the frosty air. From time to time a flock of wild geese sped over the clouded sky, marking their flight with anxious cries. Angry at the order that there was to be no smoking, Misha quietly whispered to his companion:
‘It’s a strange life, Alexei! Men walk along groping, as though they were blind; they come together and part again, and sometimes they tread on one another … Here you are living on the edge of death, and you can’t but ask yourself savagely, what is it all about? I don’t think there is anything more terrible in the world than human beings; do what you like you can’t get to the bottom of them … Here am I lying by your side, and I don’t know what you’re thinking, and never did know, and what sort of a life lies behind you I don’t know, and you know no more about me … Maybe I am wanting to kill you now, and here you are giving me a biscuit and haven’t any idea of what I’m thinking … People know little about themselves. In the summer I was in hospital. At my side was a soldier from Moscow. And all the time he was asking how the cossacks live, and the Lord knows what else. They believe the cossacks think of nothing except knouts; they think the cossack is a savage, and that instead of a soul he’s got bottle-glass. And yet we’re men like them, and we’re just as fond of women and girls; we weep over our sorrows, but don’t rejoice at others’ gladness. What do you think, Alexei? I’m only a lad, but I’m hungry for life; when I remember how many beautiful women there are in the world my heart begins to pinch … I’ve grown so tender to women that I could love them all to pain. I could lie with them all, tall or short, lean or fat, so long as they were pretty. And life only lets you have one at a time, and you’ve got to keep with her till death, until you’re fed up with her. And then they thought of making war, and …’
He threw himself on his back and was silent, staring up at the emptiness of sky and dreamily smiling, his hands caressing the cold, inaccessibly tranquil earth.
An hour before they were due to be relieved the Germans caught them. Bieshniak managed to fire one shot, then fell, grinding his teeth and writhing in his death-agony. A German bayonet minced his entrails, pierced his bladder and quivered as it struck against his backbone. Koshevoi was sent down by a butt-end. A stout conscript carried him on his back for half a mile. Misha came to, felt the blood choking him, sighed, and, collecting his strength, had little difficulty in dropping off the German’s back. They fired a volley after him, but the darkness and clumps of bushes helped him, and he escaped.
After the retreat had been stayed and the Russo-Roumanian forces had extricated themselves from the enveloping movement, the twelfth regiment was withdrawn to the rear. It was instructed to block the roads, setting outposts on them in order to prevent deserters from getting through. If necessary they were to be halted by fire, and any caught were to be sent under guard to the staff.
Misha Koshevoi was among the first to be sent on outpost duty. He and three other cossacks left their village in the morning and disposed themselves at the end of a maize-field, close to the road. The road ran along the edge of a wood and vanished into a rolling, well-cultivated valley. They took turns to watch. In the afternoon they saw a group of some ten soldiers coming along the road towards them. As they came up to the wood they halted and lit cigarettes, evidently discussing their route, then came on and turned sharply to the left.
‘Shall we shout to them?’ Koshevoi asked the others as he rose from the maize-stalks.
‘Fire over their heads.’
‘Hey you! Stop!’
The soldiers, now some hundred yards away from the cossacks, heard the shout and halted for a moment, then again slowly moved on.
‘Stop!’ one of the cossacks shouted, firing into the air.
With rifles trailed they ran to overtake the slowly moving soldiers.
‘Why the devil didn’t you stop? Where are you from? Where are you going? Show us your documents!’ the cossack sergeant in charge of the outpost shouted.
The soldiers halted. Three of them slowly unslung their rifles. One man bent and refastened the wire holding the sole on to the upper of one of his boots. They were all incredibly ragged and filthy. Evidently they had spent the night in the undergrowth of a forest, for there was a dense brush of brown burrs on their greatcoats. Two of them were wearing forage caps, the others had fur caps with unbuttoned ear-flaps and fluttering strings. His sunken cheeks trembling, a tall, bowed soldier, evidently their leader, shouted in an evil voice:
‘What do you want? Have we done you any harm? What are you following us for?’
‘Your documents!’ the sergeant interrupted, assuming a stern tone.
One soldier, blue-eyed and as ruddy as a freshly baked brick, drew a hand-grenade from his pocket. Shaking it in the face of the sergeant, he looked round at his comrades and said hurriedly in Yaroslav dialect:
‘There’s my document, my lad! There! That will serve as a mandate for all the year. Look after yourself, for if I throw it there’ll be no collecting your lights afterwards. Understand? Did you understand? Is that clear?’
‘Don’t play
about!’ the sergeant frowned and dug him in the breast. ‘Don’t play about and don’t try to frighten us, we’re frightened enough already. But if you’re deserters, come back with us to the staff. They’re collecting men like you there.’
Exchanging glances, the men unslung their rifles. One of them, dark-haired and lean, and evidently a miner, turned his desperate eyes from one to another of the cossacks and whispered:
‘We’ll give you a taste of the bayonet, by God! Clear off! By God, I’ll put a bullet through the first one to come on.’
The blue-eyed soldier waved his grenade around his head; the tall bowed man in front scraped with his rusty bayonet against the cloth of the sergeant’s greatcoat; the miner measured and swung his butt-end in Misha Koshevoi’s direction. One of the cossacks seized a little soldier by the edge of his greatcoat and dragged him along at arm’s-length, nervously looking back at the others in his fear of a blow from behind.
The dry leaves rustled on the maize stalks. Beyond the rolling valley emerged a blue, undulating line of hills. Ruddy brown cows were wandering over the pasture land close to the village. The wind sent a frozen dust whirling beyond the wood. Sleepy and peaceful was the dull November day; a blessed calm and silence lay over the pallidly sunlit countryside. But just off the road men were trampling in meaningless anger, preparing to poison the seeded, fertile, rain-satiated land with their blood.
Their passions died down a little, and the soldiers and cossacks began to talk more peaceably.
‘It’s only three days since we were withdrawn from our positions,’ Koshevoi said indignantly. ‘We haven’t run away to the rear! And you’re deserting, shame on you! You’re leaving your comrades! Who will hold the front? My own comrade was bayoneted at my side, and you say we haven’t tasted war! Taste it as we have tasted it!’
‘What is there to talk about?’ another of the cossacks interrupted him. ‘Come on to the staff, and without any argument.’
‘Stand out of the road, cossacks! Or we’ll shoot, by God, we’ll shoot!’ one of the soldiers said persuasively.
The sergeant helplessly flung out his arms:
‘We can’t do it, brother! Kill us if you like, but all the same you won’t get through; our company is quartered in that village there …’
The tall, bowed soldier now threatened, now cajoled, now began to plead humbly. At the end he bent, drew a bottle out of his filthy pack, winked at Koshevoi and whispered:
‘We’ll give you money, cossacks; and look … German vodka … And we’ll collect something more. Let us pass, for the love of Christ. We’ve got children at home, you know how it is yourselves … We’re all beaten down, eaten up with yearning … How long are we to stand it? God! Surely you won’t stop us?’ He hurriedly pulled his pouch out of the leg of his boot, shook two soiled Kerensky rouble notes out of it, and insistently pushed them into Koshevoi’s hand. ‘Take them! Take them! My God …! Don’t you worry … We’ll break through somehow. The money is nothing … We can do without it. Take it! We’ll gather some more …’
Flaming with shame Koshevoi stepped back, hiding his hand behind him and shaking his head. The blood flushed into his cheeks and tears started to his eyes. ‘Bieshniak’s death has made me mad!’ he thought. ‘Here am I myself against the war, and I’m trying to arrest these men. What right have I got? What am I doing here? What a low swine I am!’
He went to the sergeant, drew him aside, and said, not looking into his eyes:
‘Why not let them go? What do you think? Let them go, by God!’
His eyes wandering as though he were doing something shameful, the sergeant replied:
‘Let them go …! What the devil shall we do with them? We’ll be doing the same ourselves soon … Why try to hide it?’
Turning to the soldiers, he angrily shouted:
‘You scum! We treat you decently, with all respect, and you offer us money! Do you think we’re short ourselves?’ He turned livid and shouted: ‘Put your pouches away, or we’ll drag you to the staff.’
The cossacks stepped aside. The soldiers walked on. Glancing back at the distant empty streets of the village, Koshevoi shouted after the retreating deserters:
‘Hey! You fillies! What are you marching along in broad daylight for? There’s a wood over there; get into it for the day, and go on at night. Or you’ll run into another outpost and they’ll take you!’
The soldiers glanced around irresolutely; then, like wolves, in a dirty grey chain they dragged towards the aspen wood.
About the middle of November rumours of the revolution in Petrograd began to reach the cossack troops. The staff orderlies, who were usually better informed than the others, confirmed that the Provisional Government had fled to America; Kerensky, they said, had been captured by sailors, who had shaven him absolutely bare, tarred him as though he were a prostitute, and dragged him for two days through the streets of Petrograd.
Later, when the official news of the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the transfer of power to the Bolsheviks arrived, the cossacks grew anxiously quiet. Many were glad, in the expectation that the war would be ended. But the echoes of rumours that the third cavalry corps was marching with Kerensky on Petrograd and Kaledin was pressing the cossack regiments from the south, instilled alarm.
The front broke to pieces. In October the soldiers had deserted in scattered, unorganized groups; but by the beginning of December entire companies, regiments, divisions were retiring from their positions in good order, sometimes marching with only light equipment, but more frequently taking the regimental property with them, breaking into the warehouses, shooting their officers, pillaging en route, and pouring in an unbridled, stormy flood-tide back to their homes.
In the new circumstances the twelfth regiment’s task of holding up deserters became senseless. After being flung back into the front in the useless attempt to close the holes and breaches formed by the infantry abandoning their sectors, in December it was again withdrawn, marched to the nearest station, and loading all the regimental property, machine-guns, reserves of ammunition, and horses into wagons, set off into the heart of struggle-racked Russia.
Through the Ukraine the troop trains of the twelfth regiment dragged towards the Don. Not far from Znamenka the Bolsheviks endeavoured to disarm them. The negotiations lasted half an hour. Koshevoi and five other cossacks, the chairmen of the company revolutionary committees, asked for permission to pass through with their arms.
‘What do you want the arms for?’ the members of the station Soviet asked.
‘To kill our own bourgeoisie and generals! To twist Kaledin’s tail!’ Koshevoi answered for them all.
The trains were allowed to go on. At Kremenchug a further attempt was made to disarm them. They were allowed to pass only when the cossack machine-gunners set up their guns at the open doors of the wagons and directed them against the station, whilst one of the companies lay in a chain along the lines and made ready to fight. By Yekaterinoslav not even an exchange of shots with a Red Guard detachment availed; the regiment was partly disarmed, and the machine-guns, more than a hundred cases of cartridges, the field telephone apparatus and several reels of wire were confiscated. To the proposal that they should arrest their officers the cossacks replied with a refusal. Throughout the journey they lost only one officer, the regimental adjutant, and he was sentenced to death by the cossacks themselves.
Close to Chaplin the regiment was accidentally drawn into the struggle which had broken out between the anarchists and the Ukrainians. It lost three men and broke through by sheer force, with great difficulty clearing the lines occupied by the troop trains of some Sharpshooters’ division.
Within three days the first section of the regiment was detraining at Millerovo station. Half of them broke away and rode straight home from the station, whilst the remainder rode in good order to Kargin village. There next day they traded their trophies and the horses captured from the Austrians, and shared out the regimental funds and equipment. r />
Koshevoi and the other cossacks from Tatarsk village set off home in the evening. They rode up a hill. Below on the icy white, winding banks of the Chir, lay the village of Kargin, the most beautiful of all the villages of the upper Don. Smoke was rising in scattered clumps from the chimney of the steam mill, a black crowd of people was gathered on the square, the bell was ringing for vespers. Beyond the slopes of Kargin the crowns of the willows by Klimovsky village could just be seen. Beyond them, on the wormwood blue of the snowclad horizon, the spreading sunset sparkled and smoked in cloudy glooms.
The eighteen riders passed by a mound nurturing three wild apple-trees, and at a swift trot, their saddles creaking, rode off to the north-east. The frosty night lurked thievishly behind the range of hills. Wrapping their faces in their cowls, from time to time the cossacks urged their horses into a sharp gallop. The horseshoes rang out almost painfully on the hard road. Southward the road flowed from under the horses’ hoofs. On each side stretched an icy ribbon of snow, smoothed by a recent thaw, and gleaming and flowing with a chalky, fluid reflection of the moonlight.
The cossacks silently urged on their horses. The road fled to the south. A forest girdled the east. The tiny marks of hares’ feet showed on the snow at the side of the road. Over the steppe, the Milky Way girdled the sky like an ornamented, chased cossack belt.
Chapter Eight
The cossacks began to come home from the front in the late autumn of 1917. Ageing Christonia and three others who had served with him in the 52nd regiment returned. Smooth-cheeked Anikushka returned, the artillery-man Ivan Tomilin, and Yakob Podkova. After them came Martin Shamil, Ivan Alexievitch, Zakhar Koroliov, and the ungainly long Borschev. In December Mitka Korshunov unexpectedly turned up, and a week later a whole party of cossacks who had served in the twelfth regiment: Misha Koshevoi, Prokhor Zikov, Yepifan Maksaev, Andrei Koshulin, and Yegor Senilin. Fiodot Bodovskov got separated from his regiment, and rode direct from Voronezh on a handsome dun horse taken from an Austrian officer. Afterwards he was always telling the story of how he had made his way through the revolutionarily seething villages of Voronezh province, and had got away from right under the noses of Red Guard detachments, trusting to the mettle of his mount. Then came Merkulov, Piotra Melekov and Nikolai Koshevoi, who had run off from the Bolshevized 27th regiment. It was they who brought the news that Gregor Melekhov, who had recently been serving in the second reserve regiment, had gone over to the Bolsheviks and remained in Kamenka. They had also left behind them the incorrigible horse-stealer Maksim Griaznov, who had been attracted to the Bolsheviks by the novelty of the troublous days and the possibility of living in clover. They told of Maksim that he had acquired a horse of extraordinary ugliness and as extraordinary mettle, that a band of silver hair stretched right along its back, that it was not particularly high standing, but long and as red as a cow. They did not refer much to Gregor. Evidently they were reluctant to, knowing that his roads ran counter to those of the village, and whether they would run together again was uncertain.