Knight Without Armour (19 page)

They skirted Saratursk on the north side, working their way through
orchards and private gardens, and passing within sight of several big houses
in which lights were visible. In one of them the blinds had not been lowered,
and they could sec that a party of some kind was in progress. White officers
were drinking and shouting, and there carne also, tinkling over the night
air, the sound of women’s laughter. A.J. wondered if his former
prisoner were there, or in some other such house, celebrating her freedom and
rescue. Oblimov said: “They will soon drink away their victory.”
It certainly looked as if many of the White officers had preferred Saratursk
to the continued pursuit of the enemy.

They reached the lower slopes of the hills just as the first tint of dawn
appeared, and by the time the sun rose they were high amongst the woods. A.J.
was by now beginning to feel very comfortable amongst the pine trees; he
liked their clean, sharp tang and the rustle of fir-cones under his feet. He
was tired, however, after the climb, and also, beyond his relief, rather
depressed. The world seemed a sadly vague and pointless kind of place, with
its continual movement of armies and refugees, and its battles and tragedies
and separations. He kept wondering how his prisoner had fared. He did not
particularly regret her escape; he had done his best, but Fate had
out-manoeuvred him. Nine-tenths of life seemed always to consist of letting
things happen.

Oblimov was an excellent and resourceful companion. He made a fire and
boiled tea, and while A.J. slept in the dappled sunshine he raided a
woodman’s cottage in the valley and came back with bread and meat. He
also brought some coarse tobacco, which he smoked joyously during the whole
of the afternoon. He was a great talker and looked on life in a mood of
pleasant fatalism. Soldiering was doubtless the worst job in the world, but
what else was there for a man of his type? He had no home; he couldn’t
settle down. And soldiers did, in a sense, see the world. They met people,
too—people they would never have met otherwise—“like
yourself, brother. We came across each other on the battlefield, surrounded
by dead men, and now we are yarning in a wood with our bellies full and the
blue sky over us. To-morrow, maybe, we shall say good-bye and never see each
other again. But is it not worth while? And will you ever forget me, or I
you?”

He went on to tell of his many experiences; he had been fighting, he said,
for years—ever since he had been a young man. He had fought for the
Serbs in the first Balkan War and against the Serbs in the second Balkan War,
and in the Great War, of course, he had fought the Germans. But that war had
not pleased him at all, and after a year of it he had allowed himself to be
taken prisoner. Fie admitted it quite frankly; his view of war was a strictly
professional and trade union one: if soldiers were not treated properly, why
should they go on performing their job? Two years in a German prison-camp had
not been pleasant, but they had been preferable, he believed, to what he
might have had to endure otherwise. The return of the prisoners to Russia
after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had brought him back again to normal
life—that of ordinary, rational soldiering. “A soldier does not
mind occasionally risking his life,” he explained, “nor does he
object to a battle now and again or a few tiring marches across country. But
to stand in a frozen trench for weeks on end is another matter—it
isn’t fair to ask such a thing of any man.” The warfare between
Reds and Whites was much more to his taste—the localness of it, its
sudden bursts of activity, its continual changes of scene, and its almost
limitless chances of loot and personal adventure—all agreed with him.
He did not much care on which side he fought; lie had already fought on both
and would doubtless do so again. “But personally,” he added,
“I am a man of the people.”

His completely detached attitude towards life and affairs prompted A.J. to
confide in him more than it was his habit to confide in acquaintances. He
told him briefly about the ‘daughter’ with whom he had been
wandering and from whom he had become separated during the excitements of the
day before. What was really on his mind was whether she was likely to have
been decently treated by the White soldiers before the proving of her
identity. To Oblimov, of course, he merely expressed his anxieties as a
father. Oblimov was sympathetic, but hardly reassuring. “What will
happen to her depends on what sort of a girl she is,” he declared
concisely. “If she is pretty and not pure she will have a very good
time. If she is pure and not pretty she will be left alone. But if she is
pretty and wishes to remain pure…” He left the sentence unfinished.
“Women,” he added, “are really not worth worrying about,
anyway, and evidently you think so too, else you would be searching Saratursk
for your daughter at this present moment instead of enjoying the
sunshine.” A.J. was a little startled by this acuteness. Oblimov
laughed and went on: “Brother, you cannot deceive an old soldier. I
believe she is not your daughter at all, but your wife or mistress, and you
are more than half glad to be rid of her! Don’t be offended—I
know you think you are very fond of her and are worried about her safety. But
I can see that deep down in your heart you do not care.”

He went on talking about women in general, and A.J. went on listening
until both occupations were suddenly interrupted by a sound that came to them
very clearly across the valley. It was the sharp rattle of machine-gun fire.
Oblimov, all his professional instincts aroused, scented the air like a
startled hound. “It looks as if the battle’s moving back on the
village,” he said. “Let’s go down a little and see if we
can judge what’s happening.”

They picked their way amongst the trees till they reached a small clearing
whence could be seen the whole of the valley. Machine-gun and rifle- fire was
by that time intense, and a thin chain of white smoke ringed the town on the
further side. Already a few cavalry wagons were leaving Saratursk by the
mountain road. By late afternoon the battle was over and its results were
obvious; the Reds had retaken the town and the Whites were in full retreat to
the east. “Now,” advised Oblimov, “we had better move along
ourselves. If the Whites are pursued too hard, some of them may hide in these
woods, and it would be just as well for us not to be found with them.”
So they descended the hillside and walked boldly into Saratursk. There was no
danger of their being noticed or questioned; the recaptured town was in far
too much uproar and chaos. The earlier victory of the Whites had been due
largely to the poisoning of the water that the Red soldiers had drunk; many
more men had died of that than of battle-wounds, and the survivors were
disposed to take revenge. The whole place, they said, was White in sympathy,
and it was certainly true that the more prosperous shopkeepers and private
citizens had loaded gifts upon White officers. Now they wished they had been
more discreet. As the victorious Reds lurched into the town, drunk with that
highly dangerous mixture of triumph and fatigue, the shopkeepers put up their
shutters and made themselves as inconspicuous as possible. All the omens were
for an exciting night.

Oblimov soon joined his soldier companions, but A.J. preferred to mingle
with the crowd that surged up and down the main street. It was a hot,
swaying, tempestuous, and increasingly bad-tempered multitude. The
market-place, packed with wounded Reds for whom there was no hospital
accommodation and hardly any but the most elementary medical treatment, acted
as a perpetual incitement to already inflamed passions. Amidst this acre of
misery the town doctor and a few helpers worked their way tirelessly, but
there was little that could be done, since the retreating Whites had
commandeered all medical supplies—even to bandages and surgical
instruments. This was bad enough, but even worse to many was the fact that
the Whites seemed also to have drunk the whole town dry. There was not a
bottle of beer or a dram of vodka in any of the inns, and the litter of empty
bottles in all the gutters told its own significant tale. The first
‘incident’ was caused by this. A few soldiers, refusing to
believe that there was absolutely no drink to be had at all, insisted on
inspecting the cellar of one of the inns. There they found a couple of
bottles of champagne. They drank without much enthusiasm, for they preferred
stronger stuff, and then wrecked the inn-keeper’s premises. The news of
the affair soon spread and led to a systematic search, not only of inns, but
of private houses. In many cases the terrified occupants handed over any
liquor they possessed; where they did not, or had none to hand over, the
soldiers usually went about smashing pictures and furniture amidst wild
shouts and caperings. All this time the town was becoming more crowded;
soldiers were still pouring in from the west, and these later arrivals,
having endured more prolonged hardships, were in fiercer moods. Towards eight
o’clock the rumour went round that a certain local lawyer had been
responsible for the poisoning of the water-supply the day before. The man,
who was hiding in his house, was dragged out into the middle of the street
and clubbed to death. This only whetted appetites; between eight and
midnight, perhaps a dozen citizens, mostly shopkeepers and professional men,
were killed in various ways and places. Then the even more exciting rumour
gained currency that a whole houseful of Whites, including high-born officers
and ladies, were in hiding about a mile out of the town, their retreat having
been cut off by the Reds’ rapid advance. The village schoolmaster saved
his life by giving details of this illustrious colony; it included, he said,
no less a personage than the Countess Marie Alexandra Adraxinc, well known in
pre-Revolution Petersburg society, and distantly connected with the family of
the ex-Emperor. She had been passing as a peasant, continued the informative
schoolmaster, and had caused a great sensation among the White officers by
declaring and establishing her true identity. Many of them had known her in
former times, and a great party had been held both in her honour and to
celebrate the glorious White victory of Saratursk. And it was the effects of
this and similar parties that had helped towards the equally glorious Red
victory that had so immediately followed.

Some of the crowd were for marching on the house and storming it, but the
Red leader, a shrewd, capable fellow, was impressed by the political
importance of the prisoners and anxious to act with due circumspection. Let a
few local shopkeepers be butchered by all means, but countesses and
highly-placed White officers were too valuable to be wasted on the mob.
Besides, being a person of good memory and methodical mind, he seemed to
recollect that there had already been some bother about that particular
countess; she had been captured in Siberia, hadn’t she, and had been on
her way to Moscow in charge of some local commissar when, somehow or other,
the two had escaped from the train and had not been heard of since? The
beautiful countess and the susceptible commissar—what a theme for a
comic opera! General Polahkin, whose victory over the Whites had been due
partly to military ability but chiefly to the sudden and almost miraculous
repair of a couple of machine-guns, smiled to himself as he gave orders that
the house should be surrounded, arid that, if its occupants gave themselves
up, they should be conducted unharmed to the town jail.

This operation was carried out without a hitch, and towards three
o’clock in the morning the little procession entered the town. There
were about a dozen White officers, whose resplendent uniforms and dejected
faces contrasted piquantly with the shabby greatcoats and triumphant faces of
their guards. There were five women also—dressed in a weird assortment
of clothes, some of them walking painfully in ballroom slippers, and all
rather pale and weary-looking. All except one gave occasional terrified
glances at the jeering crowds that lined the streets to the prison entrance.
The exception was the woman whose name everyone now knew—the woman who
(according to a story that was being improved on, saga-Eke, with every
telling) had beguiled a commissar into escaping with her and had then,
somehow or other, escaped from him! The crowd were not disposed to be too
unfriendly towards such a magnificent adventuress, and if she had only played
the actress well enough, they were quite drunk enough to have cheered her.
But she did not act the right part, and her appearance, too, was
disappointingly unromantic. She gazed ahead with calm and level eyes, as if
she were not caring either for them or for anything in the world.

When the captives were safely locked in the prison, the crowd, suffering a
kind of reaction, began a systematic looting of the shops. They were, in
truth, disconcerted by the tameness of what had promised to be highly
exciting, and now worked out their spleen as best they could. Po did not
object; loot was, after all, the perquisite of the poorly-paid soldier. By
dawn the town presented a forlorn appearance; every window in the main street
had been smashed and the gutters were full of broken glass and miscellaneous
articles that had been stolen, broken, and then thrown away. Some of the
local peasants, professing violently Red feelings, had taken part in the
looting, and they, perhaps, had made most out of it, since they had homes in
which they could store whatever they took. One small cottage attracted
attention by having the end of a piano sticking out of the doorway; the
acquirer could not play, but banged heavily with his fists to indicate his
delight.

The following day was to some extent anti-climax; the revellers were tired
and spent most of the time sleeping off the effects of the carousal. In the
afternoon, however, fresh Red reinforcements arrived from the west—men
of even more violent temperament than those already in possession, and
accompanied, moreover, by several fluent and apparently professional orators
who harangued the crowd in the market-place with unceasing eloquence.
Polahkin, it soon appeared, was unpopular with these new arrivals; they
doubted his ‘redness,’ and were particularly incensed because he
had permitted the White captives to retain their lives.