The Accidental Anarchist (6 page)

Officers came through the cars now to deliver inspirational talks. About how our Little Father, the Czar, was counting on every one of us. But mainly about the enemy’s cruelty to Russian prisoners. This was to inflame our thirst for blood. In actuality, it had the opposite effect. Most of us were left subdued and depressed. Who wanted to get involved with such uncivilized savages? We all knew what we were in for, but there was no way back except in some condition we’d rather not think about.

The next day, our train lumbered to a halt near a village used as a transfer point for the wounded. I heard no sound of guns yet, but our commandant said we were very close to the battlefield.

Our hearts beat more quickly as we were marched through the village. Its principal building served as a field dressing station, and the streets were full of haggard men in Red Cross armbands wearing smeared butchers’ aprons. The huts, wherever you looked, were filled with men groaning, gasping, or horribly still. Some of them also lay on the ground outside, listlessly waiting to die.

I asked why the wounded weren’t taken to hospitals. Answer: because there were none, at least in this sector. Our high command had expected to engage the enemy much farther to the east, near the Yalu River. The Japanese, however, had treacherously refused to cooperate. There was a hospital train on the way, but it had been due several days ago and seemed to have disappeared.

Spending a couple of idle and oppressive days among the piteous cries and foul smell of the injured and dying left most of us praying for a quick death, rather than the slow one of a serious wound.

Then it turned out that our commandant had read his map incorrectly and stopped the train in the wrong place. A dried-up, snowy-haired little man, General Zasulich consulted, by the flicker of a trembling candle, a large, tattered old map from which he seemed to extract as much enlightenment as a chicken studying the commentaries of
Rashi
.

The fighting was said to be at least another half-day’s journey away. They packed us back into the train, and all ninety-six cars continued on their blind search for the war. But we still didn’t reach our destination. This time it was because the Japanese had blown up a bridge about ten minutes before we got there. We were saved only because God is good and our train, as usual, was late.

The adjutant cabled a message to Harbin for engineers and materials to repair the bridge. He was told that we were needed urgently at the front, and he should find boats and ferry us across, then force-march us the rest of the way, some hundreds of miles, with no mention of food.

Fortunately, none of the boats we were able to commandeer was big enough to carry our field pieces, ammunition, or horses, and our commandant, bless him, refused to send us into combat empty-handed.

We soldiers were quite content to remain where we were, and wouldn’t have cared if they never fixed the tracks. Except that another troop train now arrived, and suddenly there were thousands of us stranded with barely enough food for a day or two.

Being on a single-track line with no nearby spurs for detours, we couldn’t even send the second train back to get us food. Meanwhile, more trains would be arriving daily, all filled with hungry men.

We were given ammunition for our rifles and told to live off the land. While the Russian soldier, with his peasant background, was a natural-born forager, nothing edible had been growing in this rocky, frozen soil for the last hundred miles. In fact, the only cultivated fields we’d seen all day were of poppies, grown for the Chinese opium trade.

Some men formed hunting parties. They were warned not to go too far afield. The area was notorious for bands of “Chunchus” (“Red Beards”), Chinese brigands who were so powerful, and so well organized, that they didn’t hesitate to attack and rob even armed Russian patrols.

A day or two later there was more bad news. Thirty miles behind us, the Japanese had blown up the train carrying food. None of us had known it was coming, but they did.

Meanwhile, an engineer had arrived and told the adjutant that the bridge couldn’t be repaired. A bypass would have to be built on pontoons, farther downstream. Although no building materials had arrived yet and the tracks behind us now were torn up as well, we were assured that the job would be done in two weeks. A silent cheer rose from the company when we heard the news. Not a man believed that we would be out of there in less than two or three months. By now, even the most patriotic Russian blockhead knew that in
Vanya
’s army nothing ever went in a straight line.

Chapter 6. The Lost and Found Battlefield 

When you consider that we had come from the opposite corner of the world for no reason other than to liberate the Chinese empire from Japanese domination, it was strange that even the Manchurian coolies our army employed as laborers along the Trans-Siberian Railway appeared, with some mad sense of Asiatic solidarity, to be spying for the Japanese against us, their liberators. This bizarre loyalty explained how the enemy knew about our imminent arrival before we did. To no one’s regret, the blown-up bridge postponed our arrival at the battlefield by nearly a month, giving many of us four weeks longer to live.

Unfortunately, in time, our engineers managed to put up some sort of temporary bridge, which it was best not to examine too closely, and our train resumed its breathless progress toward the theater of war. This time, we traveled with leaden hearts, knowing we were in for a fight to the death against an enemy who had no appreciation for Europe’s civilized traditions of warfare.

Meanwhile, we heard from soldiers guarding the railroad station at Mukden that our losses on retreating – or to be accurate, escaping – from Port Arthur had run into the tens of thousands. Thus, our train was needed to evacuate an endless stream of torn and broken men for whom no hospital beds were available locally, while its current, human freight was needed to fill the gaping holes in what was left of our front lines. So we were ordered out of the damp and airless train cars and were obliged to continue on foot. We were headed for the battlefield, and this time, nothing but a miracle could delay us.

From what I saw as we reached Manchuria, the best proof of how little the Russians actually expected a Japanese attack was how totally and nakedly unprepared our army and navy were, both for the fighting and its natural consequences. (To be fair, I am not certain that, even if our generals had been diligently planning this war, day and night, for the past ten years, they would have done much better.).

To begin with, we had learned nothing about modern advances in infantry tactics, while the despised Japanese, in their shameless eagerness to be westernized, were up on all the latest tricks. Our leaders were also smugly ignorant about the Japanese mentality, their fanaticism, their patriotic fervor, their incredible endurance, their horribly unpredictable methods of attack, and willingness to squander 100,000 lives for the capture of Port Arthur.

Meanwhile, the doctrines of infantry combat had been totally overturned several decades earlier by the American invention, or perfection, of the machine gun. Not that our Maxim wasn’t at least as good as the Hotchkiss used by the Japanese. The difference was they knew how to employ it with some tactical effectiveness, while to us it was just another burden some poor donkey or foot soldier had to haul over the frozen ground.

Our repeating rifle was actually superior to those with which the Japanese were armed. Unfortunately, the invention of smokeless powder, about which no one had bothered to inform our officers, had increased the range, accuracy, and penetrating power of rifle bullets. This allowed the Japanese foot soldiers to be armed with lighter rifles while carrying twice as many bullets.

Unlike the Japanese, we had almost no mountain artillery, nothing but heavy stuff, useless for mobile warfare. It soon was obvious that most of our officers still visualized ground combat in terms of the last war they had fought – against the Turks thirty years earlier.

Add to these lapses the fact that the Russian infantryman, for all his stubbornness and bravery, was obviously not insane enough to try to outdo his Asiatic enemy. Especially in our regiment where the majority of soldiers were not Russians at all, but Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Balts, and even Germans, all of whom felt toward the Czar about as much warmth as a chicken has for a fox. Throughout the army, the only force able to stir the average czarist soldier out of his brutish apathy, aside from self-preservation, was talk of revolution.

On our first night’s excursion in search of the battlefield, there was a lot of grumbling about the cold, the lack of food, and, more perfunctorily, about the ‘Japs,’ a term that, for us, also included Siberians, Manchurians, Koreans, and Chinese. Despite all the “inspirational” talks about Japanese atrocities we’d been given en route, we didn’t really hate them. The Japanese we merely feared, although not as much as we feared the villainous incompetence of our own junior officers.

Even I, a squad leader, found it difficult to work up much enmity. I knew that for each official enemy in Japanese uniform, I had a far more dedicated enemy at my side or behind my back. Prominent among these was Pyotr, the Ukrainian sergeant to whom I’d had such a murderous introduction almost as soon as I arrived in Petersburg. Having been demoted as a result of the trial, he was now under my command, and Glasnik frequently warned me that “the sheep-faced
katzap
” remained determined to settle old scores. And since I now outranked him, he was merely biding his time until the chaos of battle would make it quite impossible to determine precisely whose bullet had killed whom.

Meanwhile, I was quite content for our blundering general not to find the battlefield.

Tired, footsore and having gone without hot food for some twenty hours, some of my men were audibly grumbling. I advised them to shut up and count their blessings: if our commander knew his business, we would have been in battle already and possibly dead.

We plodded on past devastated villages and frozen, long-unburied corpses until, at sunrise, our general, perplexed, halted the column and politely asked some blank-faced Manchurian peasants if they could tell him where to find the battlefield. They glanced, open-mouthed, at his map and professed not to know what he was talking about. Meanwhile, the treacherous Japanese remained the Devil-only-knows where. By noon, we were totally exhausted, but also relieved to know that we had been granted another day of life.

Out of the icy morning fog that smothered the ground, we saw a convoy grinding toward us. Each wagon was piled high with dead or wounded soldiers, some of the latter still capable of moans and shrieks that scarcely seemed human. This, it turned out, was the unit at whose flank we were to have fought this morning.

None of us said a word, but it was easy to guess what each man was thinking. Those were men, full of life like us, and look at what had happened to them in only a few short days, perhaps only hours. Following the convoy was a file of stretcher-bearers carrying those wounded men whom they still had some wild hope of saving. Some of the stretcher-bearers seemed to make a professional assessment of us, as though estimating how heavy we would be to carry after the next encounter. I could hear a few of the men wishing they were already wounded and on their way back; at least they would escape something worse.

It was not until I recognized one of the walking wounded that it suddenly hit me: this was my younger brother’s company! With a beating heart, I fell in beside one soldier and asked about Avrohom.

He made a negative gesture and averted his eyes.

I clawed at the front of his coat. “What happened to my brother?”

He shrugged.

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me.”

“Half the company is missing.”

“Captured?”

“I don't know!”

In the end, all I could get out of him was that he had not actually seen Avrohom’s body, but my brother’s platoon was the first to be thrown into the attack, and hardly a man among them had survived. I held out little hope for my younger brother, who had never shown any interest in physical exertion, and I suspected hadn’t taken well to soldiering.

I dropped to the ground, choked with tears, and bitterly regretted having enjoyed our reprieve. If only our imbecile of a general had found the battlefield in time, my brother’s platoon might not have been wiped out. I darkly consoled myself with the thought that it mattered little which one of us was the first to die when it was plain that, eventually, we all would end up buried forever in this strange soil.

Some of my squad tried to console me. But I was most conscious of the one man who stood aloof and grinning.

We were suddenly halted and ordered to start digging trenches. I noticed that our officers had us deployed on the back slope of a hill in such a way that, while we wouldn’t see the approaching enemy, we would, at least, be able to run away more easily. It was nice to see how much faith they had in the Russian infantry’s ability to stand fast under frontal attack.

The trenches were to be about twenty feet apart and four-and-a-half-feet deep. The digging went easily because the ground was soft and muddy. But, for the same reason, the sides of the trenches kept caving in.

Before sunset, we were summoned together at the foot of the hill, where our commanding general delivered a talk. He was unquestionably a talented orator, at least as measured by his effect on the Russian and Ukrainian boys. He recounted the greatness of Holy Mother Russia, of how we had never lost a war, and of how devoted our Little Father, the Czar, was to the welfare of his people, regardless of their nationality or religion. Therefore, each man, whatever his origins, should consider it an honor to give his life for the Czar. After the war, things would be different: peasants would receive more land, workers would get higher wages, and even the Jews would have the right to own land wherever they wished to live.