No Man's Land (54 page)

His method of operation was as follows. In the evening the corps commander informed him of our army's objectives for the next day. That night Tsipkevich would assign sectors of the front to the committee members and send them off; the next day they would telegraph the results. They paid special attention to our troop movements and the flow of matériel. And while Tsipkevich was using his revolutionary methods to unsnarl bottlenecks on the railroad, we went to the Glukhov Regiment.

The Glukhov Regiment stood on our left flank in the Carpathians, not far from Kirlya-Baba. Even during the reign of Nicholas, this regiment had deserted their positions two or three times – or so they boasted. They were camped in a dismal, rainy, godforsaken place with no roads. The road kept climbing higher and higher; at times we could see below us villages and hills descending gradually into the valley.

Finally we came to the burned remains of two small towns, divided by a shallow but swift river. Dangling from the railroad bridge over the river was a tiny locomotive. The retreating troops had pushed it off the bridge and it still hung there. These little towns are called Kuty and Wiznitz; they stand right at the gates of the Carpathians. Farther on, the road went along a river, as is generally the case in the Carpathians. On the opposite side, a train was rolling slowly along the narrow-gauge tracks. An agonizing road. Steep inclines, log surfaces – the only thing able to withstand the rains of the Carpathians – all this combined to make our trip terribly difficult. Beside the road were slopes covered with the dark fur of gloomy spruce trees and occasionally an almost vertical field: it seemed that a man and horse could climb and plow such a steep slope only on all fours – and then only by clinging to the rocks with their teeth. From time to time we encountered old mountaineers in their short, bright-colored sheepskin coats, with black umbrellas in their hands. Squads of girls were repairing the road; they smiled readily at the car. It was raining; every few minutes, it would not exactly clear but sort of turn gray and the rain would stop. Halfway there, the car gave out completely; the tires were torn to shreds. It was dark. We forded the river and spent the night in a mountaineer's cabin. It looked like Peer Gynt's abode. In the morning we patched the tires somehow, stuffing one of them with moss. We finally arrived at the regiment. Headquarters was deserted. Some second lieutenant met us – a suspicious-looking type. No doubt he had conducted a campaign against the officers and committees and had joined up with the Muravyovs, as I would now say; then when everything started shaking and falling apart, he got cold feet. Now he had just one ambition – to go on leave. The regiment was unbearable. Its noncommissioned officers had almost all run off to join the shock troops. It had no bottom and no top.

The committee tried to talk us out of a rally, but we decided to call one anyway. There was a rostrum in the middle of the meadow. The soldiers assembled; an orchestra showed up. When the orchestra played the ‘Marseillaise,' they all saluted. We got the impression that these men still had something – the regiment hadn't completely turned into mush. Life in the trenches over such a long period had worn the men down; many used sticks and walked with the practiced steps of blind men: they were suffering from ophthalmia. Worn out, cut off from Russia, they had formed their own republic. The machine-gun detachment was once again the exception. We conducted the rally. They listened restlessly, interrupting with shouts:

‘Beat him up; he's a bourgeois dog; he's got pockets in his field shirt,' or ‘How much are you getting from the bourgeois dogs?' I succeeded in finishing my speech, but while Filonenko was talking, a crowd under the leadership of a certain Lomakin ran up to the rostrum and grabbed us. They didn't beat us up, but shoved against us with shouts of ‘Come to stir us up, huh!' One soldier took off his boot and kept spinning around, showing his foot and shouting, ‘Our feet! The trenches have rotted our feet!'They had already decided to hang us – as simple as that – to hang us by the neck, but at this point Anardovich rescued us all. He began with a terrible string of mother curses. The soldiers were so taken aback that they calmed down. To him, a revolutionary for fifteen years, this mob seemed like a herd of swine gone berserk. He wasn't sorry for them or afraid. It's hard for me to reproduce his speech; I only know that, among other things, he said, ‘And even with a noose around my neck, I'll tell you you're scum.' It worked. They put us on their shoulders and carried us to the car. But as we drove off, they threw several rocks at us.

Ultimately Anardovich got the regiment under control. He went by himself, ordered them to hand over their rifles, divided them into companies, separated out seventy men and sent them under guard (one Cossack) to Kornilov's battalion, where they said they were ‘reinforcements' and where they fought no worse than anyone else. The rest went with him.

They turned out no worse than the other regiments. All this, of course, came to no avail: we were trying to keep the individual regiments from disintegrating, but this disintegration was a rational process, like all that exists, and was taking place all over Russia.

Viktor Shklovsky
was born in St Petersburg in 1893; like many of the writers in
No Man's Land
, he was involved in the crucial moments of 20-century history. During the war he volunteered for the Russian Army, participated in the February Revolution of 1917 and was wounded on the South-western Front. He then served in the Russian Expeditionary Corps in Persia. In 1918, he opposed Bolshevism and took part in an anti-Bolshevik plot led by the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Protected by Maxim Gorky, Shklovsky was pardoned but in 1922 the political tide once more turned and he fled to Berlin. Here in 1923 he published
A Sentimental Journey
in homage to
A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
by Laurence Sterne, one of his heroes. The same year Shklovsky was allowed to return to the Soviet Union, where he lived until his death in Moscow in 1984.
A Sentimental Journey
, his memoirs of the period 1917–22, is an impressionistic account that captures the revolutionary tide sweeping through Europe and Asia in those years. The chaos is there but also the generosity of spirit and the refusal of all forms of authority – not the best basis on which to run an army!

GABRIEL CHEVALLIER

I WAS AFRAID

from
Fear

translated by Malcolm Imrie

W
E FIRST MADE REAL CONTACT
when I asked for some books. When people like to read, they can readily find common ground. Preferences lead to debate, and give a rapid measure of each other's opinions. On my bedside table I soon had Rabelais, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Jules Vallès, Stendhal naturally, some Maeterlinck, Octave Mirbeau, and Anatole France, etc., all suspect authors for the young daughters of the bourgeoisie. And I rejected, as conventional and insipid, the writers whom they'd been fed.

Once I'd won over one nurse she'd bring along another one, and so it went. The conversations began and I was surrounded and bombarded with questions. They asked me about the war: ‘What did you do at the front?'

‘Nothing worth reporting if you're hoping for feats of prowess.'

‘You fought well?'

‘I really have no idea. What do you mean by “fought”?'

‘But you were in the trenches… Did you kill any Germans?'

‘Not that I know of.'

‘But you saw them right in front of you?'

‘Never.'

‘How can that be? At the front line?'

‘Yes, at the front line I never saw a living, armed German before me. I only saw dead Germans: the job had been done. I think I preferred it that way… Anyway, I can't tell you what I'd have done faced with some big, fierce Prussian, and how it would have turned out as regards national honour… There are actions you don't plan in advance, or only plan pointlessly.'

‘So what have you actually done in the war?'

‘What I was ordered to do, no more no less. I am afraid there's nothing very glorious in it, and none of the efforts I was compelled to make were in the least prejudicial to the enemy. I am rather afraid that I may have usurped the place I have here and the care you are bestowing on me.'

‘Oh, you
do
get on my nerves! That's not an answer. I asked you what you
did
!'

‘Yes?… Well, all right, what did I do? I marched day and night without knowing where I was going. I did exercises, I had inspections, I dug trenches, I carried barbed wire, I carried sandbags, I did look-out duty. I was hungry and had nothing to eat, thirsty and had nothing to drink, was tired without being able to sleep, was cold without being able to get warm, and had lice without always being able to scratch… Will that do?'

‘That's all?'

‘Yes, that's all… Or rather, no, that's nothing. Would you like to know the chief occupation in war, the only one that matters: I WAS AFRAID.'

I must have said something really disgusting, something obscene. They gave a little indignant shriek and ran off. I saw the revulsion on their faces. From the looks they exchanged I could guess their thoughts: ‘What? A coward! How can this man be French!' Mademoiselle Bergniol (twenty-one, a colonel's daughter, with all the fervour of a Child of Mary, but with wide hips that would predispose her to maternity) asked me insolently:

‘So, you are
afraid
, Dartemont?'

A very unpleasant word to have thrown at you, in public, by a young woman, and quite an attractive one at that. Ever since the world began, thousands and thousands of men have got themselves killed because of that word on women's lips… But it isn't a matter of making these girls happy by trumpeting out a few appealing lies like a war correspondent narrating daring deeds. It's a matter of telling the truth, not just mine but ours, theirs, those who are still there, the poor bastards. I took a moment to let the word, with all its obsolete shame, sink in, and accepted it. I answered her slowly, looking her in the face:

‘Indeed, mademoiselle, I am afraid. Still, I am in good company.'

‘Are you claiming that others were also afraid?'

‘Yes.'

‘It is the first time I have ever heard such a thing and I must say I find it hard to accept. When you're afraid, you run away.'

Nègre, who wasn't asked, comes to my rescue spontaneously, with this sententious statement:

‘The man who flees has one inestimable advantage over the most heroic corpse: he can still run!'

His support is disastrous. I can feel that our situation is getting seriously out of hand and sense a collective rage rising up in these women, like the one that possessed the mobs in 1914. I quickly intervene:

‘Calm down, no one runs away in war. You can't…'

‘Ah-ha! You
can't
… but what if you could?'

They are looking at me. I scan their faces.

‘If you could?…
Everyone would take to their heels!
'

Nègre can no longer restrain himself:

‘Yes, everyone, no exceptions. French, German, Austrian, Belgian, Japanese, Turkish, African… the lot… If you could? I tell you it'd be like a great offensive in reverse, a bloody great Charleroi, every direction, every country, every language… Faster, forward! The lot, I'm telling you, the whole lot!'

Mademoiselle Bergniol, standing between our beds like a gendarme at a crossroads, tries to put a stop to this rout.

‘And the officers?' she snaps. ‘Generals were seen charging at the head of their divisions!'

‘Yes, so it's said… They marched with the troops once to show off, to play to the gallery – or simply because they didn't know what would happen, just as we didn't the first time. Once but not twice! When you've tasted machine-gun fire on open ground once, you're not going to go there again for the fun of it… You can bet that if generals had to go over the top, they wouldn't launch attacks so lightly. But then they discovered defence in depth, those aggressive old chaps! That was the finest discovery of the General Staff!'