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The Dark Forest

by Hugh Walpole · English · Gutenberg #19614 · 545,823 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Dark Forest

Author: Hugh Walpole


        
Release date: October 24, 2006 [eBook #19614]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19614

Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
        Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DARK FOREST ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









                                 The

                             DARK FOREST



                                  by

                             HUGH WALPOLE




              GROSSET & DUNLAP _Publishers_, _New York_
            _by arrangement with_ GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY



                           COPYRIGHT, 1916
                      BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

       *       *       *       *       *

TO

KONSTANTINE SAMOFF

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

BY HIS FRIEND THE AUTHOR

       *       *       *       *       *




CONTENTS


PART ONE

CHAPTER

I.   SPRING IN THE TRAIN

II.  THE SCHOOL-HOUSE

III. THE INVISIBLE BATTLE

IV.  NIKITIN

V.   FIRST MOVE TO THE ENEMY

VI.  THE RETREAT

VII. ONE NIGHT


PART TWO

I.   THE LOVERS

II.  MARIE IVANOVNA

III. THE FOREST

IV.  FOUR?

V.   THE DOOR CLOSES BEHIND THEM

       *       *       *       *       *




PART ONE

CHAPTER I

SPRING IN THE TRAIN


His was the first figure to catch my eye that evening in Petrograd; he
stood under the dusky lamp in the vast gloomy Warsaw station, with
exactly the expression that I was afterwards to know so well,
impressed not only upon his face but also upon the awkwardness of his
arms that hung stiffly at his side, upon the baggy looseness of his
trousers at the knees, the unfastened straps of his long black
military boots. His face, with its mild blue eyes, straggly fair
moustache, expressed anxiety and pride, timidity and happiness,
apprehension and confidence. He was in that first moment of my sight
of him as helpless, as unpractical, and as anxious to please as any
lost dog in the world--and he was also as proud as Lucifer. I knew him
at once for an Englishman; his Russian uniform only accented the
cathedral-town, small public-school atmosphere of his appearance. He
was exactly what I had expected. He was not, however, alone, and that
surprised me. By his side stood a girl, obviously Russian, wearing her
Sister's uniform with excitement and eager anticipation, her eyes
turning restlessly from one part of the platform to another, listening
with an impatient smile to the remarks of her companion.

From where I stood I could hear his clumsy, hesitating Russian and
her swift, preoccupied replies. I came up to them.

"Mr. Trenchard?" I asked.

He blushed, stammered, held out his hand, missed mine, blushed the
more, laughed nervously.

"I'm glad ... I knew ... I hope...."

I could feel that the girl's eyes were upon me with all the excited
interest of one who is expecting that every moment of her new
wonderful experience will be of a stupendous, even immortal quality.

"I am Sister Marie Ivanovna, and you are, of course, Mr. Durward," she
said. "They are all waiting for you--expecting you--you're late, you
know!" She laughed and moved forward as though she would accompany me
to the group by the train. We went to the train together.

"I should tell you," she said quickly and suddenly with nervousness,
"that we are engaged, Mr. Trenchard and I--only last night. We have
been working at the same hospital.... I don't know any one," she
continued in the same intimate, confiding whisper. "I would be
frightened terribly if I were not so excited. Ah! there's Anna
Mihailovna.... I know _her_, of course. It was through, her aunt--the
one who's on Princess Soboleff's train--that I had the chance of going
with you. Oh! I'm so happy that I had the chance--if I hadn't had
it...."

We were soon engulfed now. I drew a deep breath and surrendered
myself. The tall, energetic figure of Anna Mihailovna, the lady to
whose practical business gifts and unlimited capacity for compelling
her friends to surrender their last bow and button in her service we
owed the existence of our Red Cross unit, was to be seen like a
splendid flag waving its followers on to glory and devotion. We _were_
devoted, all of us. Even I, whose second departure to the war this
was, had after the feeblest resistance surrendered myself to the drama
of the occasion. I should have been no gentleman had I done otherwise.

After the waters had closed above my head for, perhaps, five minutes
of strangled, half-protesting, half-willing surrender I was suddenly
compelled, by what agency I know not, to struggle to the surface, to
look around me, and then quite instantly to forget my immersion. The
figure of Trenchard, standing exactly as I had left him, his hands
uneasily at his sides, a half-anxious, half-confident smile on his
lips, his eyes staring straight in front of him, absolutely compelled
my attention. I had forgotten him, we had all forgotten him, his own
lady had forgotten him. I withdrew from the struggling, noisy group
and stepped back to his side. It was then that, as I now most clearly
remember, I was conscious of something else, was aware that there was
a strange faint blue light in the dark clumsy station, a faint
throbbing glow, that, like the reflection of blue water on a sunlit
ceiling, hovered and hung above the ugly shabbiness of the engines and
trucks, the rails with scattered pieces of paper here and there, the
iron arms that supported the vast glass roof, the hideous funnel that
hung with its gaping mouth above the water-tank. The faint blue light
was the spring evening--the spring evening that, encouraged by God
knows what brave illusion, had penetrated even these desperate
fastnesses. A little breeze accompanied it and the dirty pieces of
paper blew to and fro; then suddenly a shaft of light quivered upon
the blackness, quivered and spread like a golden fan, then flooded the
huge cave with trembling ripples of light. There was even, I dare
swear, at this safe distance, a smell of flowers in the air.

"It's a most lovely ..." Trenchard said, smiling at me, "spring here ... I
find...."

I was compelled by some unexpected sense of fatherly duty to be
practical.

"You've got your things?" I said. "You've found your seat?"

"Well, I didn't know ..." he stammered.

"Where are they?" I asked him.

He was not quite sure where they were. He stood, waving his hands,
whilst the golden sunlight rippled over his face. I was suddenly
irritated.

"But please," I said, "there isn't much time. Four of us men have a
compartment together. Just show me where your things are and then I'll
introduce you." He seemed reluctant to move, as though the spot that
he had chosen was the only safe one in the whole station; but I forced
him forward, found his bags, had them placed in their carriage, then
turned to introduce him to his companions.

Anna Mihailovna had said to me: "This detachment will be older than
the last. Doctor Nikitin--he'll take that other doctor's place, the
one who had typhus--and Andrey Vassilievitch--you've known him for
years. He talks a great deal but he's sympathetic and such a good
business man. He'll be useful. Then there's an Englishman; I don't
know much about him, except that he's been working for three months at
the English Hospital. He's not a correspondent, never written a line
in his life. I only saw him for a moment, but he seemed
sympathetic...."

Anna Mihailovna, as is well known to all of us, finds every one
sympathetic simply because she has so much to do and so many people to
see that she has no time to go deeply into things. If you have no time
for judging character you must have some good common rule to go by. I
had known little Andrey Vassilievitch for some years and had found him
tiresome. Finally, I did not care about the possibility of an
Englishman. Perhaps I had wished (through pride) to remain the only
Englishman in our "Otriad." I had made friends with them all, I was at
home with them. Another Englishman might transplant me in their
affections. Russians transfer, with the greatest ease, their emotions
from one place to another; or he might be a failure and so damage my
country's reputation. Some such vain and stupid prejudice I had. I
know that I looked upon our new additions with disfavour.

There, at any rate, Dr. Nikitin and little Andrey Vassilievitch were,
and a strange contrast they made. Nikitin's size would have compelled
attention anywhere, even in Russia, which is, of course, a country of
big men. It was not only that he was tall and broad; the carriage of
his head, the deep blackness of his beard, his eyebrows, his eyes, the
sure independence with which he held himself, as though he were
indifferent to the whole world (and that I know that he was), must
anywhere have made him remarked and remembered. He looked now
immensely fine in his uniform, which admirably suited him. He stood,
without his greatcoat, his hand on his sword, his eyes half-closed as
though he were almost asleep, and a faint half-smile on his face as
though he were amused at his thoughts. I remember that my first
impression of him was that he was so completely beneath the domination
of some idea or remembrance that, at that moment, no human being could
touch him. When I took Trenchard up to him I was so conscious of his
remoteness that I was embarrassed and apologetic.

And if I was aware of Nikitin's remoteness I was equally conscious of
Andrey Vassilievitch's proximity. He was a little man of a round plump
figure; he wore a little imperial and sharp, inquisitive moustaches;
his hair was light brown and he was immensely proud of it. In
Petrograd he was always very smartly dressed. He bought his clothes in
London and his plump hands had a movement familiar to all his friends,
a flicker of his hands to his coat, his waistcoat, his trousers, to
brush off some imaginary speck of dust. It was obvious now that he had
given very much thought to his uniform. It fitted him perfectly, his
epaulettes glittered, his boots shone, his sword was magnificent, but
he looked, in spite of all his efforts, exactly what he was, a rich
successful merchant; never was there any one less military. He had
dressed up, one might suppose, for some fancy-dress ball.

I could see at once that he was ill at ease, anxious as ever to please
every one, to like every one, to be liked in return, but unable,
because of some thought that troubled him, to give his whole attention
to this business of pleasing.

He greeted me with a warmth that was really genuine although he
bestowed it upon his merest acquaintances. His great dream in life was
a universal popularity--that every one should love him. At any rate at
that time I thought that to be his dream--I know now that there was
something else.

"But Ivan Petrovitch!... This is delightful! Here we all are! What
pleasure! Thank God, we're all here, no delays, nothing unfortunate.
An Englishman?... Indeed, I am very glad! Your friend speaks Russian?
Not very much, but enough?... You know Vladimir Stepanovitch? Dr.
Nikitin ... my friend Meester Durward. Also Meester?... ah, I beg your
pardon, Tronsart. Two Englishmen in our Otriad ... the alliance, yes,
delightful!"

Nikitin slowly opened his eyes, shook hands with me and with
Trenchard, said that he was glad to see us and was silent again.
Trenchard stammered and blushed, said something in very bad Russian,
then glanced anxiously, with an eager light in his mild blue eyes, in
the direction of the excited crowd that chattered and stirred about
the train. There was something, in that look of his, that both touched
and irritated me. "What does he come for?" I thought to myself. "With
his bad Russian and his English prejudices. Of course he'll be lonely
and then he'll be in every one's way."

I could remember, readily enough, some of the loneliness of those
first months of my own, when both war and the Russians had differed so
from my expectations. This fellow looked just the figure for high
romantic pictures. He had, doubtless, seen Russia in the colours of
the pleasant superficial books of travel that have of late, in
England, been so popular, books that see in the Russian a blessed sort
of Idiot unable to read or write but vitally conscious of God, and in
Russia a land of snow, ikons, mushrooms and pilgrims. Yes, he would be
disappointed, unhappy, and tiresome. Upon myself would fall the chief
burden of his trouble--I should have enough upon my shoulders without
him.

The golden fan had vanished from the station walls. A dim pale glow,
with sparkles as of gold dust shining here and there upon that grimy
world, faltered and trembled before the rattle and roar that
threatened it. Nevertheless, Spring was with us at our departure. As
the bells rang, as the ladies of our Committee screamed and laughed,
as Anna Mihailovna showered directions and advice upon us, as we
crowded backwards into our compartment before the first jolt of the
departing train, Spring was with us ... but of course we were all of
us too busy to be aware of it.

Nikitin, I remember, reduced us very quickly, for all practical
purposes, to a company of three. He lowered one of the upper beds,
climbed into it, stretched himself out and lay in silence staring at
the carriage-roof. His body was a shadow in the half-light, touched
once and again by the gesture of the swinging lamp, that swept him out
of darkness and back into it again. The remaining three of us did not
during either that evening or the next day make much progress. At
times there would of course be tea, and then the two Sisters who were
in a compartment close at hand joined us.

Marie Ivanovna, Trenchard's lady, was quieter than she had been
before. Her face, which now seemed younger than ever, wore a look of
important seriousness as though she were conscious of the indecency of
her earlier excitement. She spoke very little, but no one could be in
her presence without feeling the force of her vitality like some
hammer, silent but of immense power, beating relentlessly upon the
atmosphere. Its effect was the stronger in that one realised how
utterly at present she was unable to deal with it. Her very
helplessness was half of her power--half of her danger too. She was
most certainly not beautiful; her nose was too short, her mouth too
large, her forehead, from which her black hair was brushed straight
back, too high. Her complexion was pale and when she was confused,
excited, or pleased, the colour came into her face in a faint flush
that ebbed and flowed but never reached its full glow. Her hands were
thin and pale. It was her eyes that made her so young; they were so
large and round and credulous, scornful sometimes with the scorn of
the very young for all the things in the world that they have not
experienced--but young especially in all their urgent capacity for
life, in their confidence of carrying through all the demands that
the High Gods might make upon them. I knew as I looked at her that at
present her eagerness for experience was stronger, by far, than her
eagerness for any single human being. I wondered whether Trenchard
knew that. He was, beyond discussion, most desperately in love; the
love of a shy man who has for so many years wondered and dreamed and
finds, when the reality comes to him, that it is more, far more, than
he had expected. When she came in to us he sat very quietly by her
side and talked, if he talked at all, to the other Sister, a stout
comfortable woman with no illusions, no expectations, immense capacity
and an intensely serious attitude to food and drink.

Trenchard let his eyes rest upon his lady's face whenever she was
unaware, but I could see that he was desperately anxious not to offend
her. His attitude to all women, even to Anna Petrovna, the motherly
Sister, was that of a man who has always blundered in their company,
who has been mocked, perhaps, for his mistakes. I could see, however,
that his pride in his new possession, his pride and his happiness,
carried with it an absolute assurance of his security. He had no
doubts at all. He seemed, in this, even younger than she.

Through all that long Spring day we wandered on--wandering it seemed
as the train picked its way through the fields under a sky of blue
thin and fine like glass; through a world so quiet and still that
birds and children sang and called as though to reassure themselves
that they were not alone. Nothing of the war in all this. At the
stations there were officers eating "Ztchee" soup and veal and
drinking glasses of weak tea, there were endless mountains of hot meat
pies; the ikons in the restaurants looked down with benignancy and
indifference upon the food and the soldiers and beyond the station the
light green trees blowing in the little wind; the choruses of the
soldiers came from their trains as though it were the very voice of
Spring itself. It sounded in the distance like--

      _Barinisha Barinisha--Pop.
      Barinisha--Pop.
    So--la, la--la ...
      Bar ... inisha la._

The bell rang, officers with meat pies in their hands came running
across the platform. We swung on again through the green golden day.

Andrey Vassilievitch of course chattered to us all. It was his way,
and after a very brief experience of it one trained oneself to regard
it as an inevitable background, like the jerking and smoke of the
train, the dust, the shrill Russian voices in the next compartment,
the blowing of paper to and fro in the corridor. I very quickly
discovered that he was intensely conscious of Nikitin, who scarcely
throughout the day moved from his upper bunk. Andrey Vassilievitch
handed him his tea, brought his meat pies and sandwiches from the
station, and offered him newspapers. He did not, however, speak to him
and I was aware that throughout that long day he was never once
unconscious of him. His chatter, which was always the most
irrepressible thing in the world, had, perhaps, to-day some direction
behind it. For the first time in my long acquaintance with Andrey
Vassilievitch he interested me. The little man was distressed by the
heat and dirt; his fingers were always flickering about his clothes.
He was intensely polite to every one, especially to Trenchard, paying
him many compliments about England and the English. The English were
the only "sportsmen" in the world. He had been once in London for a
week; it had rained very much, but one afternoon it had been fine,
and then what clothes he had seen! But the City! He had been down into
the City and was lost in admiration; he had also been lost in
practical earnest and had appealed to one of the splendid policemen as
to the way to Holborn Viaduct, a name that he was quite unable to
pronounce. This incident he told us several times. Meanwhile ... he
hoped he might ask without offence ... what was our Navy doing? Why
weren't our submarines as active as the German submarines? And in
France ... how many soldiers had we now? He did hope that he was not
offending.... He spoke rapidly and indistinctly and much of his
conversation Trenchard did not understand; he made some rather stupid
replies and Marie Ivanovna laughed.

She spoke English very well, with an accent that was charming. She had
had, she said, an English nurse, and then an English governess.

Of course they asked me many questions about the future. Would we be
close to the Front? How many versts? Would there be plenty of work,
and would we _really_ see things? We wanted to be useful, no use going
if we were not to be useful. How many Sisters were there then already?
Were they "sympathetic"? Was Molozov, the head of the Otriad, an
agreeable man? Was he kind, or would he be angry about simply nothing?
Who would bandage and who would feed the villagers and who would bathe
the soldiers? Were the officers of the Ninth Army pleasant to us?
Where? Who? When? The day slipped away, the colours were drawn from
the sky, the fields, the hills, the stars came out in their myriads,
thickly clustered in ropes, and lakes and coils of light; the air was
scented with flowers. The second night passed.

The greater part of the next day was spent in H----, a snug town with
a little park like a clean handkerchief, streets with coloured shops,
neat and fresh-painted like toys from a toy-shop, little blue trains,
statues of bewigged eighteenth-century kings and dukes, and a
restaurant, painted Watteau-fashion with bright green groves, ladies
in hoops and powder, and long-legged sheep. Here we wandered, five of
us. Nikitin told us that he would meet us at the station that evening.
He had his own business in the place. The little town was delivered
over to the Russian army but seemed happy enough in its deliverance. I
have never realised in any place more completely the spirit of bright
cheerfulness, and the soldiers who thronged the little streets were as
far from alarm and thunder as the painted sheep in the restaurant.
Marie Ivanovna was as excited as though she had never been in a town
before. She bought a number of things in the little expensive
shops--eau-de-Cologne, sweets, an electric lamp, a wrist-watch, and
some preserved fruit. Trenchard made her presents; she thanked him
with a gratitude that made him so happy that he stumbled over his
sword more than ever, blushing and pushing his cap back from his head.
There are some who might have laughed at him, carrying her parcels,
his face flushed, his legs knocking against one another, but it was
here, at H----, that, for the first time, I positively began to like
him. By the evening when we were assembled in the station again as I
looked at him standing, waiting for directions, smiling, hot, untidy
and awkward, I knew that I liked him very much indeed....

Our new train overflowed: with the greatest difficulty we secured a
small wooden compartment with seats sharp and narrow and a smell of
cabbage, bad tobacco, and dirty clothes. The floor was littered with
sunflower seeds and the paper wrappings of cheap sweets. The air came
in hot stale gusts down the corridor, met the yet closer air of our
carriage, battled with it and retired defeated. We flung open the
windows and a cloud of dust rose gaily to meet us. The whole of the
Russian army seemed to be surging upon the platform; orderlies were
searching for their masters, officers shouting for their orderlies,
soldiers staggering along under bundles of clothes and rugs and
pillows; here a group standing patiently, each man with his
blue-painted kettle and on his face that expression of happy,
half-amused, half-inquisitive, wholly amiable tolerance which reveals
the Russian soldier's favourite attitude to the world. Two priests
with wide dirty black hats, long hair, and soiled grey gowns slowly
found their way through the crowd. A bunch of Austrian prisoners in
their blue-grey uniform made a strange splash of colour in a corner of
the platform, where, very contentedly, they were drinking their tea;
some one in the invisible distance was playing the balalaïka and every
now and then some church bell in the town rang clearly and sharply
above the tumult. The thin films of dust, yellow in the evening sun,
hovered like golden smoke under the station roof. At last with a
reluctant jerk and shiver the train was slowly persuaded to totter
into the evening air; the evening scents were again around us, the
balalaïka, now upon the train, hummed behind us, as we pushed out upon
her last night's journey.

The two Sisters had the seats by the windows; Nikitin curled up his
great length in another corner and Andrey Vassilievitch settled
himself with much grunting and many exclamations beside him. I and
Trenchard sat stiffly on the other side.

I had, long ago, accustomed myself to sleep in any position on any
occasion, however sudden it might be, and I fancied that I should now,
in a moment, be asleep, although I had never, in my long travelling
experience, known greater discomfort. I looked at the dim lamp, at the
square patch beyond the windows, at Nikitin's long body, which seemed
nevertheless so perfectly comfortable, and at Andrey Vassilievitch's
short fat one, which was so obviously miserably uncomfortable; I smelt
the cabbage, the dust, the sunflower seeds; first one bone then
another ached, in the centre of my back there was an intolerable
irritation; above all, there was in my brain some strange insistent
compulsion, as though some one were forcing me to remember something
that I had forgotten, or as though again some one were fore-warning me
of some peril or complication. I had, very distinctly, that
impression, so familiar to all of us, of passing through some
experience already known: I had seen already the dim lamp, the square
patch of evening sky, Nikitin, Andrey Vassilievitch.... I knew that in
a moment Trenchard.... He did.... He touched my arm.

"Can you sleep?" he whispered.

"No," I answered.

"It's terribly hot, close--smell.... Are you going to sleep?"

"No," I whispered back again.

"Let us move into the corridor. It will be cooler there."

There seemed to me quite a new sound of determination and resolve in
his voice. His nervousness had left him with the daylight. He led the
way out of the carriage, turned down the little seats in the corridor,
provided cigarettes.

"It isn't much better here, but we'll have the window open. It'll get
better. This is really war, isn't it, being so uncomfortable as this?
I feel as though things were really beginning."

"Well, we shall be there to-morrow night," I answered him. "I hope
you're not going to be disappointed."

"Disappointed in what?" His voice was quite sharp as he spoke to me,
"You don't know what I want."

"I suppose you're like the rest of us. You want to see what war really
is. You want to do some good if you can. You want to be seriously
occupied in it to prevent your thinking too much about it. Then,
because you're English, you want to see what the Russians are really
like. You're curious and sympathetic, inquisitive and, perhaps, a
little sentimental about it.... Am I right?"

"No, not quite--there are other things. I'd like to tell you. Do you
mind," he said suddenly looking up straight into my face with a
confiding smile that was especially his own, "if I talk, if I tell you
why I've come? I've no right, I don't know you--but I'm so happy
to-night that I _must_ talk--I'm so happy that I feel as though I
shall never get through the night alive."

Of our conversation after this, or rather of _his_ talk, excited,
eager, intimate and shy, old and wise and very, very young, I remember
now, I think, every word with especial vividness. After events were to
fix it all in my brain with peculiar accuracy, but his narration had
that night of itself its own individual quality. His was no ordinary
personality, or, at any rate, the especial circumstances of the time
drove it into no ordinary shape, and I believe that never before in
all his days had he spoken freely and eagerly to any one. It was
simply to-night his exultation and happiness that impelled him,
perhaps also some sense of high adventure that his romantic character
would, most inevitably, extract from our expedition and its purposes.

At any rate, I listened, saying a word now and then, whilst the hour
grew dark, lit only by the stars, then trembled into a pale dawn
overladen with grey dense clouds, which again broke, rolled away,
before another shining, glittering morning. I remember that it was
broad daylight when we, at last, left the corridor.

"I'm thirty-three," he said. "I don't feel it, of course; I seem to be
now only just beginning life. I'm a very unpractical person and in
that way, perhaps, I'm younger than my age."

I remember that I said something to him about his, most certainly,
appearing younger.

"Most certainly I do. I'm just the same as when I went up to Cambridge
and I was then as when I first went to Rugby. Nothing seems to have
had any effect upon me--except, perhaps, these last two days. Do you
know Glebeshire?" he asked me abruptly.

I said that I had spent one summer there with a reading party.

"Ah," he answered, smiling, "I can tell, by the way you say that, that
you don't really know it at all. To us Glebeshire people it's
impossible to speak of it so easily. There are Trenchards all over
Glebeshire, you know, lots of them. In Polchester, our cathedral town,
where I was born, there are at least four Trenchard families. Then in
Truxe, at Garth, at Rasselas, at Clinton--but why should I bother you
with all this? It's only to tell you that the Trenchards are simply
Glebeshire for ever and ever. To a Trenchard, anywhere in the world,
Glebeshire is hearth and home."

"I believe I've met," I said, "your Trenchards of Garth. George
Trenchard.... She was a Faunder. They have a house in Westminster.
There's a charming Miss Trenchard with whom I danced."

"Yes, those are the George Trenchards," he answered with eagerness and
delight, as though I had formed a new link with him. "Fancy your
knowing them! How small the world is! My father was a cousin, a first
cousin, of George Trenchard's. The girl--you must mean Millie--is
delightful. Katherine, the elder sister, is married now. She too is
charming, but in a different, graver way."

He spoke of them all with a serious lingering pleasure, as though he
were summoning them all into the dusty, stuffy corridor, carrying them
with him into these strange countries and perilous adventures.

"They always laughed at me--Millie especially; I've stayed sometimes
with them at Garth. But I didn't mean really to talk about _them_--I
only wanted to show you how deeply Glebeshire matters to the
Trenchards, and whatever happens, wherever a Trenchard goes, he always
really takes Glebeshire with him. I was born in Polchester, as I said.
My father had a little property there, but we always lived in a little
round bow-windowed house in the Cathedral Close. I was simply brought
up on the Cathedral. From my bedroom windows I looked on the whole of
it. In our drawing-room you could hear the booming of the organ. I was
always watching the canons crossing the cathedral green, counting the
strokes of the cathedral bell, listening to the cawing of the
cathedral rooks, smelling the cathedral smell of cold stone, wet
umbrellas and dusty hassocks, looking up at the high tower and
wondering whether anywhere in the world there was anything so grand
and fine. My moral world, too, was built on the cathedral--on the
cathedral 'don'ts' and 'musts,' on the cathedral hours and the
cathedral prayers, and the cathedral ambitions and disappointments. My
father's great passion was golf. He was not a religious man. But my
mother believed in the cathedral with a passion that was almost a
disease. She died looking at it. Her spirit is somewhere round it now,
I do believe."

He paused, then went on:

"It was the cathedral that made me so unpractical, I suppose. I who am
an only child--I believed implicitly in what I was told and it always
was my mother who told me everything."

He was, I thought, the very simplest person to whom I had ever
listened. The irritation that I had already felt on several occasions
in his company again returned. "My father's great passion was golf"
would surely in the mouth of another have had some tinge of irony.

In Trenchard's mild blue eyes irony was an incredible element. I could
fancy what he would have to say to the very gentlest of cynics; some
of the sympathy I had felt for him during the afternoon had left me.

"He's very little short of an idiot," I thought. "He's going to be
dreadfully in the way."

"I was the only child, you see," he continued. "Of course I was a
great deal to my mother and she to me. We were always together. I
don't think that even when I was very young I believed all that she
told me. She seemed to me always to take everything for granted.
Heaven to me was so mysterious and she had such definite knowledge. I
always liked things to be indefinite ... I do still." He laughed,
paused for a moment, but was plainly now off on his fine white horse,
charging the air, to be stopped by no mortal challenge. I had for a
moment the thought that I would slip from my seat and leave him; I
didn't believe that he would have noticed my absence; but the thought
of that small stuffy carriage held me.

But he _was_ conscious of me; like the Ancient Mariner he fixed upon
my arm his hand and stared into my eyes:

"There were other things that puzzled me. There was, for instance, the
chief doctor in our town. He was a large, fat, jolly red-faced man,
clean-shaven, with white hair. He was considered the best doctor in
the place--all the old maids went to him. He was immensely jolly, you
could hear his laugh from one end of the street to the other. He was
married, had a delightful little house, where his wife gave charming
dinners. He was stupid and self-satisfied. Even at his own work he was
stupid, reading nothing, careless and forgetful, thinking about golf
and food only all his days. He was a snob too and would give up any
one for the people at the Castle. Even when I was a small boy I
somehow knew all this about him. My father thought the world of him
and loved to play golf with him.... He was completely happy and
successful and popular. Then there was another man, an old canon who
taught me Latin before I went to Rugby, an old, untidy, dirty man,
whose sermons were dull and his manners bad. He was a failure in
life--and he was a failure to himself; dissatisfied with what he used
to call his 'bundle of rotten twigs,' his life and habits and
thoughts. But he thought that somewhere there was something he would
find that would save him--somewhere, sometime ... not God
merely--'like a key that will open all the doors in the house.' To me
he was fascinating. He knew so much, he was so humble, so kind, so
amusing. Nobody liked him, of course. They tried to turn him out of
the place, gave him a little living at last, and he married his cook.
Was she his key? She may have been ... I never saw him again. But I
used to wonder. Why was the doctor so happy and the little canon so
unhappy, the doctor so successful, the canon so unsuccessful? I
decided that the great thing was to be satisfied with oneself. I
determined that I would be satisfied with myself. Well, of course I
never was--never have been. Something wouldn't let me alone. The key
to the door, perhaps ... everything was shut up inside me, and at
last I began to wonder whether there was anything there at all. When
at nineteen I went to Cambridge I was very unhappy. Whilst I was there
my mother died. I came back to the little bow-windowed house and lived
with my father. I was quite alone in the world."

In spite of myself I had a little movement of impatience.

"How self-centred the man is! As though his case were at all peculiar!
Wants shaking up and knocking about."

He seemed to know my thought.

"You must think me self-centred! I was. For thirteen whole years I
thought of nothing but myself, my miserable self, all shut up in that
little town. I talked to no one. I did not even read--I used to sit in
the dark of the cathedral nave and listen to the organ. I'd walk in
the orchards and the woods. I would wonder, wonder, wonder about
people and I grew more and more frightened of talking, of meeting
people, of little local dinner-parties. It was as though I were on one
side of the river and they were all on the other. I would think
sometimes how splendid it would be if I could cross--but I couldn't
cross. Every year it became more impossible!"

"You wanted some one to take you out of yourself," I said, and then
shuddered at my own banality. But he took me very seriously.

"I did. Of course," he answered. "But who would bother? They all
thought me impossible. The girls all laughed at me--my own cousins.
Sometimes people tried to help me. They never went far enough. They
gave me up too soon."

"He evidently thinks he was worth a lot of trouble," I thought
irritably. But suddenly he laughed.

"That same doctor one day spoke of me, not knowing that I was near
him; or perhaps he knew and thought it would be good for me. 'Oh,
Trenchard,' he said. 'He ought to be in a nunnery ... and he'd be
quite safe, too. _He'd_ never cause a scandal!' They thought of me as
something not quite human. My father was very old now. Just before he
died, he said: 'I'd like to have had a son!' He never noticed me at
his bedside when he died. I was a great disappointment to him."

"Well," I said at last to break a long pause that followed his last
words, "what did you think about all that time you were alone?"

"I used to think always about two things," he said very solemnly. "One
was love. I used to think how splendid it would be if only there would
be some one to whom I could dedicate my devotion. I didn't care if I
got much in return or no, but they must be willing to have it ready
for me to devote myself altogether. I used to watch the ladies in our
town and select them, one after another. Of course they never knew and
they would only have laughed had they known. But I felt quite
desperate sometimes. I had so much in me to give to some one and the
years were all slipping by and it became, every day, more difficult.
There _was_ a girl ... something seemed to begin between us. She was
the daughter of one of the canons, dark-haired, and she used to wear a
lilac-coloured dress. She was very kind; once when we were walking
through the town I began to talk to her. I believe she understood,
because she was very, very young--only about eighteen--and hadn't
begun to laugh at me yet. She had a dimple in one cheek, very
charming--but some man from London came to stay at the Castle and she
was engaged to him. Then there were Katherine and Millie Trenchard, of
whom we were talking. Katherine never laughed at me; she was serious
and helped her mother about all the household things and the village
where they lived. Afterwards she ran away with a young man and was
married in London--very strange because she was so serious. There was
a great deal of talk about it at the time. Millie too was charming.
She laughed at me, of course, but she laughed at every one. At any
rate she was only cousinly to me; she would not have cared for my
devotion."

As he spoke I had a picture in my mind of poor Trenchard searching the
countryside for some one to whom he might be devoted, tongue-tied,
clumsy, stumbling and stuttering, a village Don Quixote with a stammer
and without a Dulcinea.

"They must have been difficult years," I said, and again cursed myself
for my banality.

"They were," he answered very gravely, "Very difficult."

"And your other thoughts?" I asked him.

"They were about death," he replied. "I had, from my very earliest
years, a great terror of death. You might think that my life was not
so pleasant that I should mind, very greatly, leaving it. But I was
always thinking--hoping that I should live to be very old, even though
I lost all my limbs and faculties. I believed that there was life of
some sort after death, but just as I would hesitate outside a house a
quarter of an hour from terror of meeting new faces so I felt about
another life--I couldn't bear all the introductions and the clumsy
mistakes that I should be sure to make. But it was more personal than
that. I had a horrible old uncle who died when I was a boy. He was a
very ugly old man, bent and whitened and gnarled, a face and hands
twisted with rheumatism. I used to call him Quilp to myself. He always
wore, I remember, an old-fashioned dress. Velvet knee-breeches, a
white stock, black shoes with buckles. I remember that his hands were
damp and hair grew in bushes out of his ears. Well, I saw him once or
twice and he filled me with terror like a figure out of the tapestry
up at the Castle. Then he died.

"Our house was small and badly shaped, full of dark corners, and after
his death he seemed to me to haunt the place. He figured Death to me
and until I was quite old, until I went to Rugby, I fancied that he
was sitting in a dark corner, on a chair, waiting, with his hands on
his lap, until the time came for him to take me. Sometimes I would
fancy that I heard him moving from one room to another, bringing his
chair with him. Then I began to have a dream, a dream that frequently
recurred all the time that I was growing up. It was a dream about a
huge dark house in a huge dark forest. It was early morning, the light
just glimmering between the thick damp trees. A large party of people
gathered together in a high empty room prepared for an expedition. I
was one of them and I was filled with sharp agonising terror.
Sometimes in my dream I drank to give myself courage and the glass
clattered against my lips. Sometimes I talked with one of the company;
the room was very dark and I could see no faces. Then we would start
trooping out into the bitterly cold morning air. There would be many
horses and dogs. We would lead off into the forest and soon (it always
happened) I would find myself alone--alone with the dripping trees
high around me and the light that seemed to grow no lighter and the
intense cold. Then suddenly it would be that I was the hunted, not the
hunter. It was Death whom we were hunting--Death, for me my uncle--and
I would fancy him waiting in the darkness, watching me, smiling,
hearing his hunters draw off the scent, knowing that they would not
find him, but that _he_ had found _me_. Then my knees would fail me, I
would sink down in a sweat of terror, and--wake!... Brrr!... I can see
it now!"

He shook himself, turning round to me as though he were suddenly
ashamed of himself, with a laugh half-shy, half-retrospective.

"We all have our dreams," he continued. "But this came too
often--again and again. The question of death became my constant
preoccupation as I grew to think I would never see it, nor hear men
speak of it, nor--"

"And you have come," I could not but interrupt him, "here, to the very
fortress--Why, man!--"

"I know," he answered, smiling at me. "It must seem to you ridiculous.
But I am a different person now--very different. Now I am ready, eager
for anything. Death can be nothing to me now, or if that is too bold,
at least I may say that I am prepared to meet him--anywhere--at any
time. I want to meet him--I want to show--"

"We have all," I said, "in our hearts, perhaps, come like that--come
to prove that our secret picture of ourselves, that picture so
different from our friends' opinion of us, is really the true one. We
can fancy them saying afterwards: 'Well, I never knew that so-and-so
had so much in him!' _We_ always knew."

"No, you see," Trenchard said eagerly, "there can be only one person
now about whose opinion I care. If _she_ thinks well of me--"

"You are very much in love," I said, and loosed, as I had expected,
the torrents of his happiness upon me.

"I was in Polchester when the war broke out. The town received it
rather as though a first-class company had come from London to act in
the Assembly Rooms for a fortnight. It was dramatic and picturesque
and pleasantly patriotic. They see it otherwise now, I fancy. I seemed
at once to think of Russia. For one thing I wanted desperately to
help, and I thought that in England they would only laugh at me as
they had always done. I am short-sighted. I knew that I should never
be a soldier. I fancied that in Russia they would not say: 'Oh, John
Trenchard of Polchester.... _He's_ no good!' before they'd seen
whether I could do anything. Then of course I had read about the
country--Tolstoi and Turgeniev, and a little Dostoevsky and even Gorki
and Tchekov. I went quite suddenly, making up my mind one evening. I
seemed to begin to be a new man out of England. The journey delighted
me.... I was in Moscow before I knew. I was there three months trying
to learn Russian. Then I came to Petrograd and through the English
Embassy found a place in one of the hospitals, where I worked as a
sanitar for three months. I did not leave England until November, so
that I have been in Russia now just six months. It was in this
hospital that I met Miss Krassovsky--Marie Ivanovna. From the first
moment I loved her, of course. And she liked me. She was the first
woman, since my mother, who had really liked me. She quickly saw my
devotion and she laughed a little, but she was always kind. I could
talk to her and she liked to listen. She had--she has, great ideals,
great hopes and ambitions. We worked together there and then,
afterwards, in those beautiful spring evenings in Petrograd when the
canals shone all night and the houses were purple, we walked.... The
night before last night I begged her to marry me ... and she accepted.
She said that we would go together to the war, that I should be her
knight and she my lady and that we would care for the wounds of the
whole world. Ah! what a night that was--shall I ever forget it? After
she had left me, I walked all night and sang.... I was mad.... I am
mad now. That she should love _me_! She, so beautiful, so pure, so
wonderful. I at whom women have always laughed. Ah! God forgive me, my
heart will break--"

As he spoke the heavy grey clouds of the first dawn were parting and a
faint very liquid blue, almost white and very cold, hovered above dim
shapeless trees and fields. I flung open the corridor window and a
sound of running water and the first notes of some sleepy bird met me.

"And her family?" I said. "Who are they, and will they not mind her
marrying an Englishman?"

"She has only a mother," he answered. "I fancy that Marie has always
had her own way."

"Yes," I thought to myself. "I also fancy that that is so." A sense of
almost fatherly protection had developed in myself towards him. How
could he, who knew nothing at all of women, hope to manage that
self-willed, eager, independent girl? Why, why, why had she engaged
herself to him? I fancied that very possibly there were qualities in
him--his very childishness and helplessness--which, if they only
irritated an Englishman, would attract a Russian. Lame dogs find a
warm home in Russia. But did she know anything about him? Would she
not, in a week, be irritated by his incapacity? And he--he--bless his
innocence!--was so confident as though he had been married to her for
years!

"Look here!" I said, moved by a sudden impulse. "Will you mind if,
sometimes, I tell you things? I've been to the war before. It's a
strange life, unlike anything you've ever known--and Russians too are
strange--especially at first. You won't take it badly, if--"

He touched my arm with his hand while his whole face was lighted with
his smile. "Why, my dear fellow, I shall be proud. No one has ever
thought me worth the bother. I want to be--to be--at my best here.
Practical, you know--like others. I don't want her to think me--"

"No, exactly," I said hurriedly, "I understand." Gold was creeping
into the sky. A lark rose, triumphant. A pool amongst the reeds blazed
like a brazen shield. The Spring day had flung back her doors. I saw
that suddenly fatigue had leapt upon my friend. He tottered on his
little seat, then his face, grey in the light, fell forward. I caught
him in my arms, half carried, half led him into our little carriage,
arranged him in the empty corner, and left him, fast, utterly fast,
asleep.




CHAPTER II

THE SCHOOL-HOUSE


The greater part of the next day was spent by us in the little town of
S----, a comfortable place very slightly disturbed by the fact that it
had been already the scene of four battles; there was just this
effect, as it seemed to me, that the affairs of the day were carried
on with a kind of somnolent indifference.... "You may order your
veal," the waiter seemed to say, "but whether you will get it or no is
entirely in the hands of God. It is, therefore, of no avail that I
should hurry or that you should show temper should the veal not
appear. At any moment your desire for veal and my ability to bring it
you may have ceased for ever."

For the rest the town billowed with trees of the youngest green; also
birds of the tenderest age, if one may judge by their happiness at the
spring weather. There were many old men in white smocks and white
trousers and women in brightly-coloured kerchiefs. But, except for the
young birds, it was a silent place.

I had much business to carry through and saw the rest of our company
only at luncheon time; it was after luncheon that I had a little
conversation with Marie Ivanovna. She chose me quite deliberately from
the others, moved our chairs to the quieter end of the little balcony
where we were, planted her elbows on the table and stared into my face
with her large round credulous eyes. (I find on looking back, that I
have already used exactly those adjectives. That may stand: I mean
that, emphatically, and beyond every other impression she made, her
gaze declared that she was ready to believe anything that she were
told, and the more in the telling the better.)

She spoke, as always, with that sense of restrained, sharply
disciplined excitement, as though her eager vitality were some
splendid if ferocious animal struggling at its chain.

"You talked to John--Mr. Trenchard--last night," she said.

"Yes," I said, smiling into her eyes.

"I know--all night--he told me. He's splendid, isn't he? Splendid!"

"I like him very much," I answered.

"Ah! you must! you must! You must all like him! You don't know--his
thoughts, his ideals--they are wonderful. He's like some knight of the
Middle Ages.... Ah, but you'll think that silly, Mr. Durward. You're a
practical Englishman. I hate practical Englishmen."

"Thank you," I said, laughing.

"No, but I do. You sneer at everything beautiful. Here in Russia we're
more simple. And John's very like a Russian in many ways. Don't you
think he is?"

"I haven't known him long enough--" I began.

"Ah, you don't like him! I see you don't.... No, it's no use your
saying anything. He isn't English enough for you, that's what it is.
You think him unpractical, unworldly. Well, so he is. Do you think I'd
ever be engaged to an ordinary Englishman? I'd die of ennui in a week.
Oh! yes, I would. But you like John, really, don't you?"

"I tell you that I do," I answered, "but really, after only two
days--"

"Ah! that's so English! So cautious! How I hate your caution! Why
can't you say at once that you haven't made up your mind about
him--because that's the truth, isn't it? I wish he would not sit
there, looking at me, and not talking to the others. He ought to talk
to them, but he's afraid that they'll laugh at his Russian. It's not
very good, his Russian, is it? I can't help laughing myself
sometimes!"

_Her_ English was extremely good. Sometimes she used a word in its
wrong sense; she had one or two charming little phrases of her own:
"What a purpose to?" instead of: "Why?" and sometimes a double
negative. She rolled her r's more than is our habit.

I said, looking straight into her eyes:

"It's a tremendous thing to him, his having you. I can see that
although I've known him so short a time. He's a very lucky man
and--and--if his luck were to go, I think that he'd simply die. There!
That isn't a very English thing to have said, is it?"

"Why did you say it?" she cried sharply. "You don't trust me. You
think--"

"I think nothing," I answered. "Only he's not like ordinary men. He's
so much younger than his age."

She gave me then the strangest look. The light seemed suddenly to die
out of her face; her eyes sought mine as though for help. There were
tears in them.

"Oh! I do want to be good to him!" she whispered. Then got up abruptly
and joined the others.

Late in the afternoon an automobile arrived and carried off most of
our party. I was compelled to remain for several hours, and intended
to drive, looking forward indeed to the long quiet silence of the
spring evening. Moved by some sudden impulse I suggested to Trenchard
that he should wait and drive with me: "The car will be very
crowded," I said, "and I think too that you'd like to see some of the
country properly. It's a lovely evening--only thirty versts.... Will
you wait and come with me?"

He agreed at once; he had been, all day, very quiet, watching, with
that rather clumsy expression of his, the expression of a dog who had
been taught by his master some tricks which he had half-forgotten and
would presently be expected to remember.

When I made my suggestion he flung one look at Marie Ivanovna. She was
busied over some piece of luggage, and half-turned her head, smiling
at him:

"Ah, do go, John--yes? We will be so cr-rowded.... It will be very
nice for you driving."

I fancied that I heard him sigh. He tried to help the ladies with
their luggage, handed them the wrong parcels, dropped delicate
packages, apologised, blushed, was very hot, collected dust from I
know not where.... Once I heard a sharp, angry voice: "John! Oh!..." I
could not believe that it was Marie Ivanovna. Of course she was hot
and tired and had slept, last night, but little. The car, watched by
an inquisitive but strangely apathetic crowd of peasants, snorted its
way down the little streets, the green trees blowing and the starlings
chattering. In a moment the starlings and our two selves seemed to
have the whole dead little town to ourselves.

I saw quite clearly that he was unhappy; he could never disguise his
feelings; as he waited for the trap to appear he had the same lost and
abandoned appearance that he had on my first vision of him at the
Petrograd station. The soldier who was to drive us smiled as he saw
me.

"Only thirty versts, your honour ... or, thank God, even less. It will
take us no time." He was a large clumsy creature, like an eager
overgrown puppy; he was one of the four or five Nikolais in our
Otriad, and he is to be noticed in this history because he attached
himself from the very beginning to Trenchard with that faithful and
utterly unquestioning devotion of which the Russian soldier is so
frequently capable. He must, I think, have seen something helpless and
unhappy in Trenchard's appearance on this evening. Sancho to our Don
Quixote he was from that first moment.

"Yes, he's an English gentleman," I said when he had listened for a
moment to Trenchard's Russian.

"Like yourself," said Nikolai.

"Yes, Nikolai. You must look after him. He'll be strange here at
first."

"_Slushaiu_ (I hear)."

That was all he said. He got up on to his seat, his broad back was
bent over his horses.

"Well, and how have things been, Nikolai, busy?"

"_Nikak nyet_--not at all. Very quiet."

"No wounded?"

"Nothing at all, _Barin_, for two weeks now."

"Have you liked that?"

"_Tak totchno._ Certainly yes."

"No, but have you?"

"_Tak totchno, Barin._"

Then he turned and gave, for one swift instant, a glance at Trenchard,
who was, very clumsily, climbing into the carriage. Nikolai looked at
him gravely. His round, red face was quite expressionless as he turned
back and began to abjure his horses in that half-affectionate,
half-abusive and wholly human whispering exclamation that Russians use
to their animals. We started.

I have mentioned in these pages that I had already spent three months
with our Otriad at the Front. I cannot now define exactly what it was
that made this drive on this first evening something utterly distinct
and apart from all that I had experienced during that earlier period.
It is true that, before, I had been for almost two months in one place
and had seen nothing at all of actual warfare, except the feeding and
bandaging of the wounded. But I had imagined then, nevertheless, that
I was truly "in the thick of things," as indeed, in comparison with my
Moscow or Petrograd life, I was. We had not now driven through the
quiet evening air for ten minutes before I knew, with assured
certainty, that a new phase of life was, on this day, opening before
me; the dark hedges, the thin fine dust on the roads, the deep purple
colour of the air, beat at my heart, as though they themselves were
helping with quiet insistency to draw me into the drama. And yet
nothing could have been more peaceful than was that lovely evening.
The dark plum-colour in the evening sky soaked like wine into the
hills, the fields, the thatched cottages, the streams and the little
woods.

The faint saffron that lingered below the crests and peaks of rosy
cloud showed between the stems of the silver birches like the friendly
smile of a happy day. The only human beings to be seen were the
peasants driving home their cows; far on the horizon the Carpathian
mountains were purple in the dusk, the snow on their highest ridges
faintly silver. There was not a sound in the world except the ring of
our horses' hoofs upon the road. And yet this sinister excitement
hammered, from somewhere, at me as I had never felt it before. It was
as though the lovely evening were a painted scene lowered to hide some
atrocity.

"This is scarcely what you expected a conquered country to look like,
is it?" I said to Trenchard.

He looked about him, then said, hesitating: "No ... that is ... I
don't know what I expected."

A curved moon, dull gold like buried treasure, rose slowly above the
hill; one white star flickered and the scents of the little gardens
that lined the road grew thicker in the air as the day faded.

I was conscious of some restraint with Trenchard: "He's probably
wishing," I thought, "that he'd not been so expansive last night. He
doesn't trust me."

Once he said abruptly:

"They'll give me ... won't they ... work to do? It would be terrible
if there wasn't work. I'm not so ... so stupid at bandaging. I learnt
a lot in the hospital and although I'm clumsy with my hands generally
I'm not so clumsy about that--"

"Why of course," I answered. "When there's work they'll be only too
delighted. But there won't always be work. You must be prepared for
that. Sometimes our Division is in reserve and then we're in reserve
too. Sometimes for so much as a fortnight. When I was out here before
I was in one place for more than two months. You must just take
everything as it comes."

"I want to work," he said. "I _must_."

Once again only he spoke:

"That little fat man who travelled with us...."

"Andrey Vassilievitch," I said.

"Yes.... He interests me. You knew him before?"

"Yes. I've known him slightly for some years."

"What has he come for? He's frightened out of his life."

"Frightened?"

"Yes, he himself told me. He says that he's very nervous but that he
must do everything that every one else does--for a certain reason. He
got very excited when he talked to me and asked me whether I thought
it would all be very terrible."

"He is a nervous fussy little man. Russians are not cowards, but
Andrey Vassilievitch lost his wife last year. He was very devoted to
her--very. He is miserable without her, they say. Perhaps he has come
to the war to forget her."

I was surprised at Trenchard's interest; I had thought him so wrapt in
his own especial affair that nothing outside it could occupy him. But
he continued:

"He knew the tall doctor--Nikitin--before, didn't he?"

"Yes.... Nikitin knew his wife."

"Oh, I see.... Nikitin seems to despise him--I think he despises all
of us."

"Oh no. That's only his manner. Many Russians look as though they were
despising their neighbours when, as a matter of fact, they're really
despising themselves. They're very fond of despising themselves: their
contempt allows them to do what they want to."

"I don't think Nikitin despises himself. He looks too happy--at least,
happy is not the word. Perhaps triumphant is what I mean."

"Ah, if you begin speculating about Russian expression you're lost.
They express so much in their faces that you think you know all their
deepest feelings. But they're not their deep feelings that you see.
Only their quick transient emotions that change every moment." I
fancied, just at that time, that I had studied the Russian character
very intently and it was perhaps agreeable to me to air my knowledge
before an Englishman who had come to Russia for the first time so
recently.

But Trenchard did not seem to be greatly impressed by my cleverness.
He spoke no more. We drove then in silence whilst the moon, rising
high, caught colour into its dim outline, like a scimitar unsheathed;
the trees and hedges grew, with every moment, darker. We left the
valley through which we had been driving, slowly climbing the hill,
and here, on the top of the rising ground, we had our first glimpse of
the outposts of the war. A cottage had been posted on the highest
point of the hill; now all that remained of it was a sheet of iron,
crumpled like paper, propped in the centre by a black and solitary
post, trailing thence on the ground amongst tumbled bricks and refuse.
This sheet of iron was silver in the moonlight and stood out with its
solitary black support against the night sky, which was now breaking
into a million stars. Behind it stretched a flat plain that reached to
the horizon.

"There," I said to Trenchard, "there's your first glimpse of actual
warfare. What do you say to every house in your village at home like
that? It's ghastly enough if you see it as I have done, still smoking,
with the looking-glasses and flower-pots and pictures lying about."

But Trenchard said nothing.

We started across the plain and at once, as with "Childe Roland":

    _For mark! no sooner was I fairly found
        Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
        Than, pausing to throw backward a last view
    O'er the safe road, 'twas gone! grey plain all round:
    Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound.
        I might go on; nought else remained to do._

Our "safe road" was a rough and stony track; far in front of us on the
rising hill that bounded the horizon a red light watched us like an
angry eye. There were cornfields that stirred and whispered, but no
hedges, no trees, and not a house to be seen.

Nikolai turned and said: "A very strong battle here, Your Honour, only
three weeks back."

By the side of the road stood a little cluster of wooden crosses and
behind them were two large holes filled now with water upon which the
moon was shining. In these holes the frogs were making a tremendous
noise.

"That was shell," I said to Trenchard, pointing. The frogs drowned my
voice; there was something of a melancholy triumph in their cry and
their voices seemed to be caught up and echoed by thousands upon
thousands of other frogs inhabiting the plain.

We came then upon a trench; the ridge of it stretched like a black
cord straight across the cornfield and here for a moment the road
seemed lost.

I got out. "Here, Trenchard. You must come and look at this. Your
first Austrian trench. You may find treasure."

We walked along in single file for some time and then suddenly I lost
him: the trench, just where we were, divided into two. I waited
thinking that in a moment he would appear. There was nothing very
thrilling about my trench; it was an old one and all that remained now
of any life was the blackened ground where there had been cooking, the
brown soiled cartridge-cases, and many empty tin cans. And then as I
waited, leaning forward with my elbows on the earthwork, the frogs the
only sound in the world, I was conscious that some one was watching
me. In front of me I could see the red light flickering and turning a
little as it seemed--behind me nothing but the starlight. I turned,
looked back, and for my very life could not hold myself from calling
out:

"Who's there?"

I waited, then called more loudly: "Trenchard! Trenchard!" I laughed
at myself, leant again on the trench and puffed at my cigarette. Then
once more I was absolutely assured that some one watched me.

I called again: "Who's there?"

Then quite suddenly and to my own absurd relief Trenchard appeared,
stumbling forward over some roughness in the ground almost into my
arms:

"I say, it's beastly here," he cried. "Let's go on--the frogs...."

He had caught my hand.

"Well," I said, "what did you find?"

"Nothing--only ... I don't know.... It's as though some one were
watching me. It's getting late, isn't it? The frogs...." he said
again--"I hate them. They seem to be triumphing."

We climbed into the trap and drove on in silence.

I was half asleep when at last we left the plain and dropped down into
the valley beyond. I was surprised to discover on looking at my watch
that it was only eleven o'clock; we had been, it seemed to me, hours
crossing that plain. "It's a silly thing," I said to Trenchard, "but
it would take quite a lot to get me to drive back over that again." He
nodded his head. We drove over a bridge, up a little hill and were in
the rough moonlit square of O----, our destination. Almost immediately
we were climbing the dark rickety stairs of our dwelling. There were
lights, shouts of welcome, Molozov our chief, sisters, doctors,
students, the room almost filled with a table covered with food--cold
meat, boiled eggs, sausage, jam, sweets, and of course a huge samovar.
I can only say that never once, during my earlier experience with the
Otriad, had I been so rejoiced to see lights and friendly faces. I
looked round for Trenchard. He had already discovered Marie Ivanovna
and was standing with her at the window.

I learned at breakfast the next morning that we were at once to move
to a house outside the village. The fantastic illusions that my drive
of the evening before had bred in me now in the clear light of morning
entirely deserted me. Moreover fantasy had slender opportunity of
encouragement in the presence of Molozov.

Molozov, I would wish to say once and for all, was the heart and soul
of our enterprise. Without him the whole organisation so admirably
supported by the energetic ladies and gentlemen in Petrograd, would
have tumbled instantly into a thousand pieces. In Molozov they had
discovered exactly the man for their purpose; a large land-owner, a
member of one of the best Russian families, he had, since the
beginning of the war, given himself up to the adventure with the whole
of his energy, with the whole of that great capacity for organisation
that the management of his estates had already taught him. He was in
appearance, short, squarely built, inclined, although he was only
thirty-two or three, to be stout; he wore a dark black moustache and
his hair was already grey. He was a Russian of the purest blood and
yet possessed all the qualities that the absolute Russian is supposed
to lack. He was punctual to the moment, sharply accurate in all his
affairs, a shrewd psychologist but never a great talker and, above
all, a consummate diplomatist. As I watched him dealing with the
widely opposed temperaments and dispositions of all our company,
soothing one, scolding another, listening attentively, cutting
complaints short, comforting, commanding, soliciting, I marvelled at
the good fortune of that Petrograd committee. In spite of his kind
heart--and he was one of the kindest-hearted men I have ever met--he
could be quite ruthless in dismissal or rebuke when occasion arrived.
He had a great gift of the Russian irony and he could be also, like
all Russians, a child at an instant's call, if something pleased him
or if he simply felt that the times were good and the sun was shining.
I only once, in a moment that I shall have, later on, to describe, saw
him depressed and out of heart. He was always a most courteous
gentleman.

I drove now with him in a trap at the head of the _Oboz_, as our long
train, with our tents, provisions, boxes and beds, was called. We were
a fine company now and my heart was proud as I looked back up the
shining road and saw the long winding procession of carts and
"sanitars" and remembered how tiny an affair we had been in the
beginning.

"Well," said Molozov, "and what of your Englishman?"

"Oh, I like him," I said rather hurriedly. "He'll do."

"I'm glad you think so--very glad. I was not sure last night.... He
doesn't speak Russian very well, does he? He was tired last night. I'm
very glad that he should come, of course, but it's unpleasant ... this
engagement ... the Sister told me. It's a little difficult for all of
us."

"They were engaged the evening before they left."

"I know ... nothing to do about it, but it would have been better
otherwise. And Andrey Vassilievitch! Whatever put it into Anna
Mihailovna's head to send him! He's a tiresome little man--I've known
him earlier in Petrograd! He's on my nerves already with his chatter.
No, it's too bad. What can he do with us?"

"He has a very good business head," I said. "And he's not really a bad
little man. And he's very anxious to do everything."

"Ah, I know those people who are 'anxious to do everything.'... Don't
I know? Don't you remember Sister Anna Maria? anxious to do
everything, anything--and then, when it came to it, not even the
simplest bandage.... Nikitin's a good man," he added, "one of the best
doctors in Petrograd. We've no doctors of our own now, you
know--except of course Alexei Petrovitch. The others are all from the
Division--"

"Ah, Semyonov!" I said. "How is he?"

At that moment he rode up to us. Seen on horseback Alexei Petrovitch
Semyonov appeared a large man; he was, in reality, of middle height
but his back was broad, his whole figure thickly-set and muscular. He
wore a thick square-cut beard of so fair a shade that it was almost
white! His whole colour was pale and yet, in some way, expressive of
immense health and vitality. His lips showed through his beard and
moustache red and very thick. His every movement showed great
self-possession and confidence. He had, indeed, far more personality
than any other member of our Otriad.

Although he was an extremely capable doctor his main business in life
seemed to be self-indulgence. He apparently did not know the meaning
of the word "restraint." The serious questions in life to him were
food, drink, women.

He believed in no woman's virtue and no man's sincerity. He hailed any
one as a friend but if he considered some one a fool he said so
immediately. He concealed his opinions from no one.

When he was at work his indulgence seemed for the moment to leave him.
He was a surgeon of the first order and loved his profession. He was a
man now of fifty, but had never married, preferring a long succession
of mistresses--women who had loved him, at whom he had always laughed,
to whom he had been kind in a careless fashion.... He always declared
that no woman had ever touched his heart.

He had come to the war voluntarily, forsaking a very lucrative
practice. This was always a puzzle to me. He had no romantic notions
about the war, no altruistic compulsions, no high conceptions of his
duty ... no one had worked more magnificently in the war than he. He
could not be said to be popular amongst us; we were all of us perhaps
a little afraid of him. He cared, so obviously, for none of us. But we
admired his vitality, his courage, his independence. I myself was
assured that he allowed us to see him only with the most casual
superficiality.

As he rode up to me I wondered how he and Nikitin would fare. These
were two personalities worthy of attention. Also, what would he think
of Trenchard? His opinion of any one had great weight amongst us.

I had not seen him last night and he leant over his horse now and
shook hands with me with a warm friendliness that surprised me. He
laughed, joked, was evidently in excellent spirits. He rode on a
little, then came back to us.

"I like your new Sister," he said. "She's charming."

"She's engaged," I answered, "to the new Englishman."

"Ah! the new Englishman!" He laughed. "Apologies, Ivan Andreievitch
(myself), to your country ... but really ... what's he going to do
with us?"

"He'll work," I said, surprised at the heat that I felt in Trenchard's
defence. "He's a splendid fellow."

"I have no doubt"--again Semyonov laughed. "We all know your
enthusiasms, Ivan Andreievitch, ... but an Englishman! _Ye Bogu_!..."

"Engaged to that girl!" I heard him repeat to himself as again he rode
forward. Trenchard, little Andrey Vassilievitch, Semyonov, Nikitin ... yes,
there was promise of much development here.

We had dropped down into the valley and, at a sudden turn, saw the
school-house in front of us. It is before me now as I write with its
long low whitewashed two-storied front, its dormer-windows, its roof
faintly pink with a dark red bell-tower perched on the top. Behind it
is a long green field stretching to where hills, faintly blue in the
morning light, rose, with very gradual slopes against the sky. To the
right I could see there was a garden hidden now by trees, on the left
a fine old barn, its thatched roof deep brown, the props supporting it
black with age. In front of the pillared porch there was a little
square of white cobble-stones and in the middle of these an old grey
sundial. The whole place was bathed in the absolute peace of the
spring morning.

As we drove up a little old lady with two tiny children clinging to
her skirts came to the porch. I could see, as we came up to her, that
she was trembling with terror; she put up her hand to her white hair,
clutched again desperately the two children, found at last her voice
and hoped that we would be "indulgent."

Molozov assured her that she would suffer in no kind of way, that we
must use her school for a week or so and that any loss or damage that
she incurred would of course be made up to her. She was then, of a
sudden, immensely fluent, explaining that her husband--"a most
excellent husband to me in every way one might say"--had been dead
fifteen years now, that her two sons were both fighting for the
Austrians, that she looked after the school assisted by her daughter.
These were her grandchildren.... Such a terrible year she, in all her
long life, had never remembered. She....

The arrival of the rest of the Oboz silenced her. She remained, with
wide-open staring eyes, her hand at her breast, watching, saying
absent-mindedly to the children: "Now Katya.... Now Anna.... See what
you're about!"

The school was spotlessly clean. In the schoolroom the rough benches
were marked with names and crosses. On the whitewashed walls were
coloured maps of Galicia and tables of the Austrian kings and queens;
on the blackboard still an unfinished arithmetical sum and on the
master's desk a pile of exercise books.

In a moment everything was changed; the sanitars had turned the
schoolroom into a dormitory, another room was to be our dining-room,
another a bedroom for the Sisters. In the high raftered kitchen our
midday meal was already cooking; the little cobbled court was piled
high with luggage. In the field beyond the house the sanitars had
pitched their tents.

I walked out into the little garden--a charming place with yew hedges,
a lichen-covered well and old thick apple-trees, and here I found an
old man in a broad-brimmed straw hat tending the bees. The hives were
open and he was working with a knife whilst the bees hung in a
trembling hovering cloud about him. I spoke to him but he paid no
attention to me at all. I watched him then spoke again; he
straightened himself then looked at me for a moment with eyes full of
scorn. Words of fury, of abuse perhaps, seemed to tremble on his lips,
then shaking his head he turned his back upon me and continued his
work. Behind us I could hear the soldiers breaking the garden-fence to
make stakes for their tents.

Here we were for a fortnight and it was strange to me, in the days of
stress and excitement that followed, to look back to that fortnight
and remember that we had, so many of us, been restless and
discontented at the quiet of it. Oddly enough, of all the many
backgrounds that were, during the next months, to follow in procession
behind me, there only remain to me with enduring vitality: this
school-house at O----, the banks of the River Nestor which I had
indeed good reason to remember, and finally the forest of S----. How
strange a contrast, that school-house with its little garden and white
cobbles and that forest which will, to the end of my life, ever haunt
my dreams.

And yet, by its very contrast, how fitting a background to our
Prologue this school-house made! I wonder whether Nikitin sees it
still in his visions? Trenchard and Semyonov ... does it mean anything
to them, where they now are? First of them all, Marie Ivanovna.... I
see her still, bending over the well looking down, then suddenly
flinging her head back, laughing as we stood behind her, the sunlight
through the apple-trees flashing in her eyes.... That fortnight must
be to many of us of how ironic, of how tragic a tranquillity!

So we settled down and did our best to become happily accustomed to
one another. Our own immediate company numbered twenty or so--Molozov,
two doctors, myself, Trenchard and Andrey Vassilievitch, the two new
Sisters and the three former ones, five or six young Russians,
gentlemen of ease and leisure who had had some "bandaging" practice at
the Petrograd hospitals, and three very young medical students,
directly attached to our two doctors. In addition to these there were
the doctors, Sisters and students belonging to the army itself--the
Sixty-Fifth Division of the Ninth Army. These sometimes lived with us
and sometimes by themselves; they had at their head Colonel Oblonsky,
a military doctor of much experience and wide knowledge. There were
also the regular sanitars, some thirty or forty, men who were often by
profession schoolmasters or small merchants, of a better class for the
most part than the ordinary soldier.

It is not, of course, my intention to describe with any detail the
individuals of this company. I have chosen already those of us who are
especially concerned with my present history, but these others made a
continually fluctuating and variable background, at first confusing
and, to a stranger, almost terrifying. When the army doctors and
Sisters dined with us we numbered from thirty to forty persons:
sometimes also the officers of the Staff of the Sixty-Fifth came to
our table. There were other occasions when every one was engaged on
one business or another and only three or four of us were left at the
central station or "Punkt," as it was called.

And, of all these persons, who now stands out? I can remember a
Sister, short, plain, with red hair, who felt that she was treated
with insufficient dignity, whose voice rising in complaint is with me
now; I can see her small red-rimmed eyes watching for some insult and
then the curl of her lip as she snatched her opportunity.... Or there
was the jolly, fat Sister who had travelled with us, an admirable
worker, but a woman, apparently, with no personal life at all, no
excitements, dreads, angers, dejections. Upon her the war made no
impression at all. She spoke sometimes to us of her husband and her
children. She was not greedy, nor patriotic, neither vain nor humble,
neither egoistic nor unselfish. She was simply reliable.

Or there was the tall gaunt Sister, intensely religious and serious.
She was regarded by all of us as an excellent woman, but of course we
did not like her.

One would say to another: "Sister K----, what an excellent worker!"

"Yes. How she works!"

"Splendid! Splendid!"

When owing to the illness of her old mother she was compelled to
return to Petrograd what relief we all felt! How gay was our supper
the night of her departure! There was something very childish at the
heart of all of us.

Of the young gentlemen from Petrograd I remember only three. The
family name of one was Ivanoff, but he was always known to the Otriad
as Goga, a pet diminutive of George. He was perhaps the youngest
person whom I have ever known. He must have been eighteen years of
age; he looked about eleven, with a round red face and wide-open eyes
that expressed eternal astonishment. Like Mr. Toots', his mind was
continually occupied with his tailor and he told me on several
occasions that he hoped I should visit him in Petrograd because there
in the house of his mother he had many splendid suits, shirts, ties,
that it would give him pleasure to show me. In spite of this little
weakness, he showed a most energetic character, willing to do anything
for anybody, eager to please the whole world. I can hear his voice
now:

"_Yeh Bogu_! Ivan Andreievitch!... Imagine my position! There was
General Polinoff and the whole Staff.... What to do? Only three versts
from the position too and already six o'clock...."

Or there was another serious gentleman, whose mind was continually
occupied with Russia: "It may be difficult for you, Ivan Andreievitch,
to see with our eyes, but for those of us who have Russia in our
hearts ... what rest or peace can there be? I can assure you...."

He wore pince-nez and with his long pear-shaped head, shaven to the
skin, his white cheeks, protruding chin and long heavy white hands he
resembled nothing so much as a large fish hanging on a nail at a
fishmonger's. He worked always in a kind of cold desperate despair,
his pince-nez slipping off his shiny nose, his mouth set grimly. "What
is the use?" he seemed to say, "of helping these poor wounded soldiers
when Russia is in such a desperate condition? Tell me that!"

Or there was a wild rough fellow from some town in Little Russia, a
boy of the most primitive character, no manners at all and a heart of
shining gold. Of life he had the very wildest notions. He loved women
and would sing Southern Russian songs about them. He had a strain of
fantasy that continually surprised one. He liked fairy tales. He would
say to me: "There's a tale? Ivan Andreievitch, about a princess who
lived on a lake of glass. There was a forest, you know, round the lake
and all the trees were of gold. The pond was guarded by three dwarfs.
I myself, Ivan Andreievitch, have seen a dwarf in Kiev no higher than
your leg, and in our town they say there was once a whole family of
dwarfs who lived in a house in the chief street in our town and sold
potatoes.... I don't know.... People tell one such things. But for the
rest of that tale, do you remember how it goes?"

He could ride any horse, carry any man, was never tired nor out of
heart. He had the vaguest ideas about the war. "I knew a German once
in our town," he told me. "I always hated him.... He was going to
Petrograd to make his fortune. I hope he's dead." This fellow was
called Petrov.

My chief interest during this fortnight was to watch the fortunes of
Marie Ivanovna and Trenchard with their new companions. It was
instantly apparent that Marie Ivanovna was a success. On the second
day after our arrival at the school-house there were continual
exclamations: "But how charming the new Sister! How sympathetic!...
Have you talked to the new Sister?"

Even Sister K----, so serious and religious, approved. It was evident
at once that Marie Ivanovna was, on her side, delighted with every
one. I could see that at present she was assured that what she wanted
from life would be granted to her. She gave herself, with complete
confidence, to any one and every one, and, with that triumphing
vitality that one felt in her from the first moment of meeting her,
she carried all before her. In the hospital at Petrograd they had
been, I gathered, "all serious and old," had treated her I fancy with
some sternness. Here, at any rate, "serious and old" she would not
find us. We welcomed, with joy, her youth, her enthusiasm, her
happiness.

Semyonov, who never disguised nor restrained his feelings, was, from
the first instant, strangely attracted to her. She, I could see, liked
him very much, felt in him his strength and capacity and scorn of
others. Molozov also yielded her his instant admiration. He always
avoided any close personal relationship with any of us but I could see
that he was delighted with her vitality and energy. She pleased the
older Sisters by her frank and quite honest desire to be told things
and the younger Sisters by her equally honest admiration of their
gifts and qualities. She was honest and sincere, I do believe, in
every word and thought and action. She had, in many ways, the naive
purity, the unconsidered faith and confidence of a child still in the
nursery. She amazed me sometimes by her ignorance; she delighted me
frequently by her refreshing truth and straightforwardness. She felt a
little, I think, that I did not yield her quite the extravagant
admiration of the others. I was Trenchard's friend....

Yes, I was now Trenchard's friend. What had occurred since that night
in the train, when I had felt, during the greater part of the time,
nothing but irritation? Frankly, I do not know. It may be, partly,
that he was given to me by the rest of the Otriad. He was spoken of
now as "my" Englishman. And then, poor Trenchard!... How, during this
fortnight, he was unhappy! It had begun with him as I had foreseen. In
the first place he had been dismayed and silenced by the garrulity of
his new companions. It had seemed to him that he had understood
nothing of their conversation, that he was in the way, that finally he
was more lonely than he had ever been in his life before. Then,
however strongly he might to himself deny it, he had arrived in Russia
with what Nikitin called "his romantic notions." He had read his
Dostoevski and Turgenev; he had looked at those books of Russian
impressions that deal in nothing but snow, ikons, and the sublime
simplicity of the Russian peasant. He was a man whose circumstances
had led him to believe profoundly in his own incapacity, unpopularity,
ignorance. For a moment his love had given him a new confidence but
now how was that same love deserting him? He had foreseen a glorious
campaign, his lady and himself side by side, death and terror flying
before him. He found himself leading a country life of perfect quiet
and comfort, even as he might have led it in England, with a crowd of
people, strangely unfamiliar to him, driving him, as he had been
driven in the old days, into a host of awkwardnesses, confusions and
foolishnesses. I could not forgive Marie Ivanovna for her
disappointment in him, and yet I could understand how different he
must have appeared to her during those last days in Petrograd, when
alone with her and on fire with love, he had shown his true and
bravest self to her. She was impatient, she had hoped that the others
would see him as she had seen him. She watched them as they expressed
their surprise that he was not the practical, fearless and
unimaginative Englishman who was their typical figure. Whilst he found
them far from the Karamazovs, the Raskolnikoffs, of his imagination,
they in their turn could not create the "sportsman" and "man of
affairs" whom they had expected.

To all of this Semyonov added, beyond question, his personal weight.
He had from the first declared Trenchard "a ridiculous figure." Whilst
the others were unfailingly kind, hospitable and even indulgent to
Trenchard, Semyonov was openly satirical, making no attempt to hide
his sarcastic irony. I do not know how much Trenchard's engagement to
Marie Ivanovna had to do with this, but I know that "my Englishman"
could not to his misfortune have had a more practical, more efficient
figure against whom to be contrasted than Semyonov.

During these weeks I think that I hated Semyonov. There was, however,
one silent observer of all this business upon whose personal
interference I had not reckoned. This was Nikitin, who, at the end of
our first week at the school-house, broke his silence in a
conversation with me.

Nikitin, although he spoke as little as possible to any one, had
already had his effect upon the Otriad. They felt behind his silence a
personality that might indeed be equal to Semyonov's own. By little
Andrey Vassilievitch they were always being assured: "Nikitin! A most
remarkable man! You may believe me. I have known him for many years. A
great friend of my poor wife's and mine...."

They did not appear to be great friends. Nikitin quite obviously
avoided the little man whenever it was possible. But then he avoided
us all.

Upon a lovely afternoon Nikitin and I were alone in the wild little
garden, he lying full length on the grass, I reading a very ancient
English newspaper, with my back against a tree.

He looked up at me with a swift penetrating glance, as though he were
seeing me for the first time and would wish at once to weigh my
character and abilities.

"Your Englishman," he said. "He's not happy, I'm afraid."

"No," I said, feeling the surprise of his question--it had become
almost a tradition with me that he never spoke unless he were first
spoken to. "He feels strange and a little lonely, perhaps ... it's
natural enough!"

"Yes," repeated Nikitin, "it's natural enough. What did he come for?"

"Oh, he'll be all right," I said hastily, "in a day or two."

Nikitin lay on his back looking at the green, layer upon layer, light
and dark, with golden fragments of broken light leaping in the breeze
from branch to branch. "Why did he come? What did he expect to see? I
know what he expected to see--romantic Russia, romantic war. He
expected to find us, our hearts exploding with love, God's smile on
our simple faces, God's simple faith in our souls.... He has been told
by his cleverest writers that Russia is the last stronghold of God.
And war? He thought that he would be plunged into a scene of smoke and
flame, shrapnel, horror upon horror, danger upon danger. He finds
instead a country house, meals long and large, no sounds of cannon,
not even an aeroplane. Are we kind to him? Not at all.... We are not
unkind but we simply have other things to think about, and because we
are primitive people we do what we want to do, feel what we want to
feel, and show quite frankly our feelings. He is not what we expected,
so that we prefer to fill our minds with things that do not give us
trouble. Later, like all Englishmen, he will dismiss us as savages,
or, if he is of the intellectual kind, he will talk about our
confusing subtleties and contradictions. But we are neither savages
nor confusing. We have simply a skin less than you.... We are a very
young people, a real and genuine Democracy, and we care for quite
simple things, women, food, sleep, money, quite simply and without
restraint. We show our eagerness, our disgust, our disappointment, our
amusement simply as the mood moves us. In Moscow they eat all day and
are not ashamed. Why should they be? In Kiev they think always about
women and do not pretend otherwise ... and so on. We have, of course,
no sense of time, nor method, nor system. If we were to think of these
things we would be compelled to use restraint and that would bother
us. We may lose the most important treasure in the world by not
keeping an appointment ... on the other hand we have kept our freedom.
We care for ideas for which you care nothing in England but we have a
sure suspicion of all conclusions. We are pessimists, one and all.
Life cannot be good. We ironically survey those who think that it
can.... We give way always to life but when things are at their worst
then we are relieved and even happy. Here at any rate we are on safe
ground. We have much sentiment, but it may, at any moment, give way to
some other emotion. We are therefore never to be relied upon, as
friends, as enemies, as anything you please. Except this--that in the
heart of every Russian there is a passionate love of goodness. We are
tolerant to all evil, to all weakness because we ourselves are weak.
We confess our weakness to any one because that permits us to indulge
in it--but when we see in another goodness, strength, virtue, we
worship it. You may bind us to you with bands of iron by your
virtues--never, as all foreigners think, by your vices. In this, too,
we are sentimentalists. We may not believe in God but we have an
intense curiosity about Him--a curiosity that with many of us never
leaves us alone, compels us to fill our lives, to fill our lives....
We love Russia.... But that is another thing.... Never forget too that
behind every Russian's simplicity there is always his Ideal--his
secret Ideal, perhaps, that he keeps like an ikon sacred in his heart.
Yes, of every Russian, even of the worst of us, that is true. And it
complicates our lives, delivers us to our enemies, defeats all our
worldly aims, renders us helpless at the moment when we should be most
strong. But it is good, before God, that it should be so...."

He suddenly sprang up and stood before me. "To-morrow I shall think
otherwise--and yet this is part of the truth that I have told you....
And your Englishman? I like him ... I like him. That girl will treat
him badly, of course. How can she do otherwise? He sees her like
Turgenev's Liza. Well, she is not that. No girl in Russia to-day is
like Turgenev's Liza. And it's a good thing." He smiled--that strange,
happy, confident mysterious smile that I had seen first on the
Petrograd platform. Then he turned and walked slowly towards the
house.

What Nikitin had said about Trenchard's expectation of "romantic war"
was perhaps true, in different degrees, of all of us. Even I, in spite
of my earlier experience, felt some irritation at this delay, and to
those of us who had arrived flaming with energy, bravery, resolution
to make their name before Europe, this feasting in a country garden
seemed a deliberate insult. Was this "romantic war?" These long meals
under the trees, deep sleeps in the afternoon when the pigeons cooed
round the little red bell-tower and the pump creaked in the cobbled
courtyard and the bees hummed in the garden? Bees, cold water shining
deep in the well, and the samovar chuckling behind the flower-beds,
and fifteen versts away the Austrians challenging the Russian
nation!... "You know," Andrey Vassilievitch said to me, "it's very
disheartening."

Marie Ivanovna at the end of the first week spoke her mind. I found
her one evening before supper leaning over the fence, gazing across
the long flat field, pale gold in the dusk with the hills like grey
clouds beyond it.

"They tell me," she said, turning to me, "that we may be another
fortnight like this."

"Yes," I said, "it's quite possible, or even longer. We can't provide
wounded and battles for you if there aren't any."

"But there are!" she cried. "Isn't the whole of Europe fighting and
isn't it simply disgusting of us to be sitting down here, eating and
sleeping, just as though we were in a _dacha_ in the country? At least
in the hospital in Petrograd I was working ... here...."

"We've got to stick to our Division," I answered. "They can't have it
in reserve very long. When it goes, we'll go. The whole secret of
leading this life out here is taking exactly what comes as completely
as you can take it. If it's a time for sleeping and eating, sleep and
eat--there'll be days enough when you'll get nothing of either."

She laughed then, swinging round to me, with the dusk round her white
nurse's cap and her eyes dark with her desires and hopes and
disappointments.

"Oh, I've no right to be discontented.... Every one is so good to me.
I love them all--even you, Mr. Durward. But I want to begin, to
begin, to begin! I want to see what it's like, to find what there is
there that frightens them, or makes them happy. We had a young officer
in our hospital who died. He was too ill ... he could tell us nothing,
but he was so excited by something ... something he was in the middle
of.... Who was it? What was it? I _must_ be there, hunt it out, find
that I'm strong enough not to be afraid of _anything_." She suddenly
dropped her voice, changing with sharp abruptness. "And John? He's not
happy here, is he?"

"You should know," I answered, "better than any of us."

"Why should I know?" she replied, flaming out at me. "You always blame
me about him, but you are unfair. I want him to be happy--I would make
him so if I could. But he's so strange, so different from his time at
the hospital. He will scarcely speak to me or to any one. Why can't he
be agreeable to every one? I want them to like him but how can they
when he won't talk to them and runs away if they come near him? He's
disappointed perhaps at its being so quiet here. It isn't what he
expected to find it, but then isn't that the same for all of us? And
_we_ don't sulk all day. He's disappointed with _me_ perhaps but he
won't tell me what he wants. If I ask him he only says 'Oh, it's all
r-right--it's all r-right'--I hate that 'all r-right' of your
language--so stupid! What a purpose not to say if he wants something?"

I said nothing. My silence urged her to a warmer defence.

"And then he makes such mistakes--always everything wrong that he's
asked to do. Doctor Semyonov laughs at him--but of course! He's like a
little boy, a man as old as he is. And Englishmen are always so
practical, capable. Oh! speak to him, Mr. Durward; you can, please. If
_I_ say anything he's at once so miserable.... I don't understand, I
don't understand!" she cried, raising her hands with a little
despairing gesture. "How can he have been like that in Petrograd, and
now like this!"

"Give him time, Marie Ivanovna," I answered her. "This is all new to
him, confusing, alarming. He's led a very quiet life. He's very
sensitive. He cares for you so deeply that the slightest thing wounds
him. He would hide that if he could--it's his tragedy that he can't."

She would have answered had not supper arrived and with it our whole
company. Shall I ever know a more beautiful night? As we sat there the
moon came up, red-gold and full; the stars were clustered so thickly
between the trees that their light lay heavy like smoke upon the air.
The little garden seemed to be never still as our candlelight blew in
the breeze; so it hovered and trembled about us, the trees bending
beneath their precious load of stars, shuddering in their happiness at
so good an evening.

We sat there as though we had known that it was to be our last night
of peace.... Many times the glasses of tea were filled, many times the
little blue tin boxes of sweets were pushed up and down the table,
many times the china teapot on the top of the samovar was fed with
fresh tea, many times spoons were dipped into the strawberry jam and
then plunged into the glasses of tea, such being the Russian pleasure.

There occurred then an unfortunate incident. Some one had said
something about England: there had been a joke then about "sportsmen,"
some allusion was made to some old story connected with myself, and I
had laughingly taken up the challenge. Suddenly Semyonov leaned across
the table and spoke to Trenchard. Trenchard, who had been silent
throughout the meal, misunderstood the Russian, thought that Semyonov
was trying to insult him, and sat there colouring, flaming at last,
silent. We all of us felt the awkwardness of it. There was a general
pause--Semyonov himself drew back with a little laugh.

Suddenly Marie Ivanovna, across the table, in English said softly but
with a strange eager hostility:

"How absurd!... To let them all see ... to let them know...." Perhaps
I, who was sitting next to her, alone heard her words.

The colour left Trenchard's face; he looked at her once, then got up
and left the table. I could see then that she was distressed, but she
talked, laughed more eagerly, more enthusiastically than before.
Sometimes I saw her look towards the school-house.

When there came an opportunity I rose and went to find him. He was
standing near his bed, his back to the door, his hands clenched.

"I say, come out again--just as though nothing had happened. No one
noticed anything, only I...."

He turned to me, his face working and with a passionate gesture, in a
voice that choked over the words, he cried: "She should not have said
it. She should not ... every one there.... She knew how it would wound
me.... Semyonov...."

He positively was silent over that name. The mild expression of his
eyes, the clumsy kindness of his mouth gave a ludicrous expression to
his rage.

"Wait! Wait!" I cried. "Be patient!"

As I spoke I could hear him in the railway carriage:

"I am mad with happiness.... God forgive me, my heart will break."

Breaking from me, despair in his voice, he whispered to the empty
room, the desolate row of white beds watching him: "I always knew
that I was hopeless ... hopeless ... hopeless."

"Look here," I said. "You mustn't take things so hard. You go up and
down.... Your emotions...."

But he only shook his head:

"She shouldn't have said it--like that--before every one," he
repeated.

I left him. Afterwards as I stood in the passage, white and ghostly in
the moonlight, something suddenly told me that this night the prologue
of our drama was concluded.

I waited on the steps of the house, heard the laughing voices in the
distance, while over the rest of the world there was absolute silence;
then abruptly, quite sharply, across the long low fields there came
the rumble of cannon. Three times it sounded. Then hearing no more I
returned into the house.




CHAPTER III

THE INVISIBLE BATTLE


On the evening of the following day Trenchard, Andrey Vassilievitch
and I were sent with sanitars and wagons to the little hamlet of
M----, five versts only from the Position. It was night when we
arrived there; no sound of cannon, only on the high hills (the first
lines of the Carpathians) that faced us the scattered watchfires of
our own Sixty-Fifth Division, and in the little village street a line
of cavalry moving silently, without a spoken word, on to the high-road
beyond. After much difficulty (the village was filled with the
officers of the Sixty-Fifth) we found a kitchen in which we might
sleep. Upon the rough earth floor our mattresses were spread, my feet
under the huge black oven, my head beneath a gilt picture of the
Virgin and Child that in the candlelight bowed and smiled, in company
with eight other pictures of Virgins and Children, to give us
confidence and encouragement.

It was a terrible night. On a high pillared bed set into the farther
wall, an old Galician woman, her head bound up in a red handkerchief,
knelt all night and prayed aloud. Her daughter crouched against the
wall, sleeping, perhaps, but nevertheless rocking ceaselessly a wooden
cradle that hung from a black bar in the ceiling. In this cradle lay
her son, aged one or two, and once and again he cried for half an hour
or so, protesting, I suppose, against our invasion. There was a smell
in the kitchen of sour bread, mice, and bad water. The heat was
terrible but the old lady told us that the grandchild was ill and
would certainly die were the window opened. The candle we blew out but
there remained a little burning lamp under the picture of the Virgin
immediately over the old lady's bed. I slept, but for how long I do
not know. I was only aware that suddenly I was awake, staring through
the tiny diamond-paned window, at the faint white light now breaking
in the sky. I could see from my mattress only a thin strip of this
light above the heavy mass of dark forest on the mountain-side.

I must have been still only half-awake because I could not clearly
divide, before my eyes, the true from the false. I could see quite
plainly in the dim white shadow the face of Trenchard; he was not
asleep, but was leaning on his elbow staring in front of him. I could
see the old woman with her red handkerchief kneeling in front of her
lamp and her prayer came like the turning of a wheel, harsh and
incessant. The cradle creaked, in the air was the heavy smell, and
suddenly, beyond the window, a cock crowed. These things were real.
But also I seemed to be in some place much vaster than the stuffy
kitchen of the night before. Under the light that was with every
minute growing stronger, I could fancy that many figures were moving
in the shadows; it seemed to me as though I were in some place where
great preparations were being made. I fancied then that I could
discern Marie Ivanovna's figure, then Nikitin, then Semyonov, then
Molozov.... There was a great silence but I felt that every one was
busily occupied in making ready for some affair. This was with half my
consciousness--with the other half I was perfectly aware of the actual
room, of Trenchard, the creaking cradle and the rest.

Then the forest that had been on the hills seemed to draw closer to
the house. I felt that it had invaded the garden and that its very
branches were rubbing against the windows. With all of this I was
aware that I was imagining some occurrence that I had already seen,
that was not, in any way, new to me, I was assured of the next event.
When we, all of us, Marie Ivanovna, Semyonov, Nikitin and the rest,
were ready we should move out into the forest, would stand, a vast
company, with our dogs and horses....

Why, it was Trenchard's dream that I was seeing! I was merely
repeating to myself his own imaginations--and with that I had
suddenly, as though some one had hypnotised me, fallen back into a
heavy dreamless sleep. It was already midday when I was wakened by
little Andrey Vassilievitch, who, sitting on my bed and evidently in a
state of the very greatest excitement, informed me that Dr. Semyonov
and the Sisters Marie Ivanovna and Anna Petrovna had arrived from ----,
and that we might be off at any moment. I was aware, as he
spoke, of a great stir beyond the window and saw, passing up through
the valley, a flood of soldiers, infantry, cavalry, kitchens with
clumsy black funnels bobbing on their unsteady wheels, cannon,
hundreds of carts; the soldiers came up through our own garden
treading down the cabbages, stopping at the well near our door and
filling their tin kettles, tramping up the road, spreading, like
smoke, in the far distance, up the high road that led into the
furthest forest.

"They say--to-night--for certain," said Andrey Vassilievitch, his fat
hand trembling on my bed. He began to talk, his voice shaking with
excitement. "Do you know, Ivan Andreievitch, I am continually
surprised at myself: 'Here you are, Andrey Vassilievitch, here, at the
war. What do you make of it?? I say to myself. Just consider.... No,
but seriously, Ivan Andreievitch, of course I must seem to all of you
something of a comic figure. When my wife was alive--how I wish that
you could have known her! Such a remarkable woman; every one who met
her was struck by her fine character--when my wife was alive I had my
position to support. That I should have been a comic figure would have
distressed her. But now, who cares? Nobody, you may very truly say....
Well, well. But the point is that this evening we shall really be in
the thick of it. And--may I tell you something, Ivan Andreievitch?
Only for yourself, because you are an Englishman and can be trusted:
to speak quite truthfully I'm frightened. I say to myself that one is
at the war and that one must be frightened at nothing, and still I
remain frightened.... Frightened of what?... I really cannot tell you.
Death, perhaps? But no, I should not be sorry to die--there are
reasons....

"And yet although I should not be sorry to die, I remain
frightened--all night I was awake--I do my utmost to control it, but
there is something stronger than I--something. I feel as though if I
once discovered what that something was I should not be frightened any
longer. Something definite that you could meet and say to yourself:
'There, Andrey Vassilievitch, you're not frightened of _that_, are
you? What is there to be frightened of?... Why then, you know, I don't
believe I should be frightened any more!'"

I remember that he then explained to me that he wished Nikitin had
been sent instead of Semyonov. Nikitin was much more sympathetic.

"You seem very fond of Nikitin," I said.

"We are friends ... we have been friends for many years. My wife was
very fond of him. I am a lonely man, Ivan Andreievitch, since the
death of my wife, and to be with any one who knew her is a great
happiness ... yes, a great happiness."

"And Semyonov?" I asked.

"I have nothing to say against Alexei Petrovitch," he answered
stiffly.

When later I joined the others at the cottage higher up the road taken
by the doctors of the Division, I discovered Trenchard in an ecstasy
of happiness. He did not speak to me but his shining eyes, the
eagerness with which standing back from the group he watched us all,
told me everything. Marie Ivanovna had been kind to him, and when I
found her in the centre of them, her whole body alert with excitement,
I forgot my anger at her earlier unkindness or, if I remembered it,
laid it to the charge of my own imagination or Trenchard's
sensitiveness.

Indeed we were all excited. How could we fail to be! There was some
big business toward, and in it we were to have our share. We were,
perhaps this very day, to penetrate into the reality of the thing that
for nine months now we had been watching. All of us, with our little
private histories like bundles on our backs, are venturing out to try
our fortune.... What are we going to find?

I remember indeed that early on that afternoon I felt the drama of the
whole affair so heavily that I saw in every soldier who passed me a
messenger of fate. They called me to a meal. Eat! Now! How absurd it
seemed! Semyonov watched me cynically:

"Eat and then sleep," he said, "or you'll be no use to any one."

Afterwards I went back to the kitchen and slept. That sleep was the
end of my melodrama. I was awakened by a rough hand on my shoulder to
find it dark beyond the windows and Semyonov watching me impatiently:

"Come, get up! It's time for us to start," and then moved out. I was
conscious that I was cold and irritable. I looked back with surprised
contempt to my earlier dramatic emotions. I was hungry; I put on my
overcoat, shivered, came out into the evening, saw the line of wagons
silhouetted against the sky, listened to the perfect quiet on every
side of me, yawned and was vexed to find Trenchard at my side.

"Why this is actually dull!" I thought to myself. "It is as though I
were going to some dinner that I know beforehand will be exceedingly
tiresome--only then I should get some food."

I was disappointed at the lack of drama in the affair. I looked at my
watch--it was ten o'clock. Semyonov was arranging everything with a
masterly disregard of personal feelings. He swore fine Russian oaths,
abused the sanitars, always in his cold rather satirical voice, his
heavy figure moving up and down the road with a practical vivid
alertness that stirred my envy and also my annoyance. I felt utterly
useless. He ordered me on to my wagon in a manner that, in my present
half-sleepy, half-surly mood seemed to me abominably abrupt. Trenchard
climbed up, very clumsily, after me.

I leaned back on the straw, let my arms fall and lay there, flat on my
back, staring straight into the sky.... With that my mood suddenly
changed. I was at peace with the whole world. To-night was again thick
with a heavy burden of stars that seemed to weigh like the silver lid
of some mighty box heavily down, down upon us, until trees and hills
and the dim Carpathians were bent flat beneath the pressure. I lying
upon my back, seeing only that sheet of stars, in my nostrils the
smell of the straw, rocked by the slow dreamy motion of the wagon, was
filled with an exquisite ease and lethargy. I was going into battle,
was I? I was to have to-night the supreme experience of my life? It
might be that to-night I should die--only last week two members of the
Red Cross--a nurse and a doctor--had been killed. It might be that
these stars, this straw, this quiet night were round me for the last
time. It did not matter to me--nothing could touch me. My soul was
somewhere far away, upon some business of its own, and how happy was
my body without the soul, how contented, how undisturbed! I could
fancy that I should go, thus rocking, into battle and there die before
my soul had time to return to me. What would my soul do then? Find
some other body, or go wandering, searching for me? A star, a flash of
light like a cry of happiness or of glad surprise, fell through heaven
and the other stars trembled at the sight.

My wagon stopped with a jerk. Some voice asked: what the devil were we
doing filling the road with our carts at the exact moment that
such-and-such a Division wished to move.

I heard Semyonov's voice, very cold, official and polite. Then again:
"Well, in God's name, hurry then! ... taking up the road! ... hurry, I
tell you!"

On we jogged again. Trenchard's voice came to me: he had been, it
might be, talking for some time.

"And so I'm not surprised, Durward, that you thought me a terrible
fool to show my feelings as I've done this last fortnight. But you
don't know what it is to me--to have something at last in your hands
that you've dreamed of all your life and never dared to hope for: to
have it and feel that at any moment it may slip away and leave you in
a worse state than you were before. I'd been wishing, these last
weeks, that I'd never met her, that I'd simply come to the war by
myself. But now--to-day--when she spoke to me as she did, asked me to
forgive her for what happened last night, my God, Durward! _I_ to
forgive _her_!... But I'll show her this very night what I can
do--this very night! They'll give me a chance, won't they? It would be
terrible if they didn't. Semyonov won't give me a chance if he can
help it. What have I done to Semyonov that he should hate me? What
have...."

But I didn't answer Trenchard. That part of me that had any concern
with him and his affairs was far away. But his voice had stirred some
more active life in me. I thought to myself now: Will there be some
concrete definite moment in this affair when I shall say to myself:
"Ah, there it is! There's the heart of this whole business! There's
the enemy! Slay him and you have settled the matter!" or, perhaps,
"Ah, now I've seen the secret. Now I've hunted the animal to his lair.
This is war, this thing here. Now all my days I remain quiet. There is
nothing more to fear"--or would it be perhaps that I should face
something and be filled, then, with ungovernable terror so that I
should run for my life, run, hide me in the hills, cover up my days so
that no one shall ever find me again?...

I raised myself on my elbow and looked at the country. We jolted over
a little brook, brushed through a thicket of trees, came on to a path
running at the forest's foot, and saw on our left a little wooden
house, a high wood fire burning in front of it. I looked at my watch.
It was one o'clock. Already a very faint glow throbbed in the sky. Out
of the forest, at long intervals, came a dull booming sound like the
shutting of a heavy iron door.

The wagons drew up. We had arrived at our destination.

"We shall be here," I heard Semyonov say, "some five hours or so.
You'd better sleep if you can."

A group of soldiers round the wood fire were motionless, their faces
glowing, their bodies dark. Our wagons, drawn up together, resembled
in the twilight strange beasts; the two Sisters lay down on one wagon,
Semyonov, Andrey Vassilievitch, Trenchard and I on another. My
irritated mood had returned. I had been the last to climb on to the
straw and the others had so settled themselves that I had no room to
lie flat. Semyonov's big body occupied half the wagon, Andrey
Vassilievitch's boots touched my head and at intervals his whole body
gave nervous jerks. It was also quite bitterly cold, which was curious
enough after the warmth of the earlier nights. And always, at what
seemed to be regular intervals, there came, from the forest, the
banging of the iron door.

I felt a passionate irritation against Andrey Vassilievitch. Why could
he not keep quiet? What, after all, was he doing here? I could hear
that he was dreaming. He muttered some woman's name:

"Sasha ... Sasha ... Sasha...."

"Can't you keep still?" I whispered to him, but in the cold I myself
was trembling. The dawn came at last with reluctance, flushing the air
with colour, then withdrawing into cold grey clouds, then stealing out
once more behind the forest in scattered strips of pale green gold,
then suddenly sending up into the heaven a flock of pink clouds like a
flight of birds, that spread in extending lines to the horizon,
covering at last a sky now faintly blue, with rosy bars. The flame of
the soldiers' fire grew faint, white mists rose in the fields, the
cannon in the forest ceased and the birds began.

I sat up on the cart, looked at my sleeping companions, and thought
how unpleasant they looked. Semyonov like a dead man, Andrey
Vassilievitch like a happy pig, Trenchard like a child who slept
after a scolding. I felt intense loneliness. I wanted some one to
comfort me, to reassure me against life which seemed to me suddenly
now perilous and remorseless; moreover some one seemed to be reviewing
my life for me and displaying it to me, laying bare all its
uselessness and insignificance.

"But I'm in no way a fine fellow," I could fancy myself crying. "I'm
sleepy and cold and hungry. If you'll remove Andrey Vassilievitch's
boots for me I'll lie flat on this wagon and you can let loose every
shrapnel in the world over my head and I'll never stir. I thought I
was interested in your war, and I'm not.... I thought no discomfort
mattered to me, but I find that I dislike so much being cold and
hungry that it outweighs all heroism, all sense of danger ... let me
alone!"

Then something occurred. Looking down over the side of the cart I saw,
to my great surprise, Marie Ivanovna.

"You!" I whispered.

"Hush!" she answered. "Come down."

I let myself down and at once she put her hand into mine.

"Walk with me just a little way," she whispered, "to those trees and
back." I had noticed at once that her voice trembled; now I perceived
that her whole body was shaking; her hand gave little startled quivers
under mine.

"You're cold," I said.

"No, I'm not cold," she answered still in a whisper, although we were
now some way from the wagons. "I'm frightened, Mr. Durward, that's
what's the matter--desperately frightened."

"Nonsense," I answered her. "You! Frightened! Never!"

"But I am. I've been terribly fr-frightened all night; and that
Sister Anna Petrovna, he (she sometimes confused her pronouns) sleeps
like a log. How can he? I've never slept, not for a moment, and I've
been so cold and every time the cannon sounded I wanted to run
away.... Oh, Mr. Durward, I'm so ashamed!"

Then, suddenly, desperately clutching my hand:

"Mr. Durward, you'll never tell any one, any one never.... Promise!"

"Never a soul," I answered. "It's only because you're cold and hungry
and sleepy that you think you're frightened. You're not frightened
really. But wouldn't you like me to wake Trenchard and get him to come
to you.... He'd be so happy?..."

She started fiercely from me. "Never! Never! Why, what _can_ you
think! You must never tell, most of all you must never tell him.... He
must _never_ know--nothing--"

The cannon began again. She caught my arm and stood with her body
trembling, pressed against mine. I could feel her draw a deep breath.
As I looked at her, her face white in the dawn, her large eyes staring
like a child's, her body so young and slender, she seemed another
creature, utterly, absolutely apart from the woman of this last
fortnight.

"Look here!" I said to her sternly. "You mustn't go on like this.
You've got work to do to-day. You've simply got to hold yourself in,
to tell yourself that nothing can touch you. Why to-night you'll laugh
at me if I remind you of this. You'll...."

But there was better tonic than my words, Semyonov's voice came to
us--"Hullo, you there! It's five o'clock--we're moving."

She drew herself sharply away from me. She raised her head, smiled at
me, then said:

"Thank you, Mr. Durward. It's all well now. There's Dr. Semyonov--let
us go back."

She greeted him with a voice that had in it not the slightest tremor.

There comes now a difficult matter. During the later months when I was
to reflect on the whole affair I saw quite clearly that that hour
between our leaving the wooden house and arriving in the trenches
bridged quite clearly for me the division in this business between
imagination and reality: that is, I was never after this to speak of
war as I would have spoken of it an hour before. I was never again to
regard the paraphernalia of it with the curiosity of a stranger--I had
become part of it. This hour then may be regarded as in some ways the
most important of all my experiences. It is certainly the occasion to
which if I were using my invention I should make the most. Here then
is my difficulty.

I have nothing to say about it. There's nothing at all to be made of
it....

I may say at once that there was no atom of drama in it. At one moment
I was standing with Marie Ivanovna under the sunrise, at another I was
standing behind a trench in the heart of the forest with a battery to
my left and a battery to my right, a cuckoo somewhere not very far
away, and a dead man with his feet sticking out from under the cloth
that covered him peacefully beneath a tree at my side. There had, of
course, been that drive in the wagons, bumping over the uneven road
whilst the sun rose gallantly in the heavens and the clanging of the
iron door grew, with every roll of our wheels, louder and louder. But
it was rather as though I had been lifted in a sheet from one life--a
life of speculation, of viewing war from a superior and safe
distance, of viewing indeed all catastrophe and reality from that same
distance--into the other. I had been caught up, had hung for a moment
in midair, had been "planted" in this new experience. For us all there
must have been at this moment something of this passing from an old
life into a new one, and yet I dare swear that not for any one of us
was there any drama, any thrill, any excitement. We stood, a rather
lonely little group, in the forest clearing whilst the soldiers in the
trench flung us a careless glance, then turned back to their business
of the day with an indifference that showed how ordinary and drab a
thing custom had made it.

Yes, we made a desolate little group. Semyonov had gone to a house on
the farther side of the road up which we had come, a house that flew
the Red Cross flag. We had only the right to care for the wounded of
certain Divisions and our presence had to be reported. We were left
then, Marie Ivanovna, Anna Petrovna, Andrey Vassilievitch, Trenchard
and I, all rather close together, uncomfortable, desolate and shy, as
boys feel on their first day at school. The battery on our left was
very near to us and we could see the sharp flash of its flame behind
the trees. The noise that it made was terrific, a sharp, angry, clumsy
noise, as though some huge giant clad in mail armour was flinging his
body, in a violent rage, against an iron door that echoed through an
empty house--my same iron door that I had heard all night. The rage of
the giant spread beyond his immediate little circle of trees and one
wondered at the men in the trenches because they were indifferent to
his temper.

The noise of the more distant batteries was still, as it had been
before, like the clanging of many iron doors very mild and gentle
against the clamour of our own enraged fury. The Austrian reply seemed
like the sleepy echo of this confusion, so sleepy and pleasant that
one felt almost friendly to the enemy.

Our own battery was inconsistent in his raging. Had he only chosen to
fling himself at his door every three minutes, say, or even every
minute, we could have prepared ourselves, but he was moved by nothing,
apparently, but his own irrational impulse. There would be a pause of
two minutes, then three furious explosions, then a pause of five
minutes, then another explosion.... I mastered quickly my impulse to
leap into the air at every report, by a kind of prolonged extension in
my mind of one report into another. Little Andrey Vassilievitch was
not so successful. At each explosion his body jerked as though it had
been worked by wires; then he glanced round to see whether any one had
noticed his agitation, then drew himself up, brushed off imaginary
dust from his uniform, coughed and frowned. Trenchard stood close to
Marie Ivanovna and looked at her anxiously once or twice as though he
would like to speak to her, but she, holding herself very stiffly,
watched with sternness the whole world as though she personally had
arranged the spectacle and was responsible for its success.

Soon Semyonov came back and said that he must go on to some further
trenches to discover the best position for us. To my intense surprise
Andrey Vassilievitch asked whether he might accompany him. I fancy
that he felt that he would venture anything to escape our adjacency to
the battery.

So they departed, leaving us more forlorn than before We sat down on
the stretchers: Anna Petrovna, fat, heavy, phlegmatic, silent; Marie
Ivanovna silent too but with a look now of expectation in her eyes as
though she knew that something was coming for her very shortly;
Trenchard near her, trying to be cheerful, but conscious of the dead
soldier under the tree from whom he seemed unable to remove his eyes.
There was, in the open space near us, a _kipiatilnik_, that is, a
large boiler on wheels in which tea is made. To this the soldiers were
crowding with their tin cans; the cuckoo, far away now, continued his
cry....

At long intervals, out of the forest, a wounded soldier would appear.
He seemed to be always the same figure, sometimes wounded in the head,
sometimes in the leg, sometimes in the stomach, sometimes in the
hand--but always the same, with a look in his eyes of mild protest
because this had happened to him, also a look of dumb confidence that
some one somewhere would make things right for him. He came either to
us or to the Red Cross building across the road, according to his
company. One soldier with a torn thumb cried bitterly, looking at his
thumb and shaking his head at it, but he alone showed any emotion. The
others suffered the sting of the iodine without a word, walking off
when they were bandaged, or carried by our sanitars on the stretchers,
still with that look of wonder and trust in their eyes.

And how glad we were when there was any work to do! The sun rose high
in the sky, the morning advanced, Semyonov and Andrey Vassilievitch
did not return. For the greater part of the time we did not speak, nor
move. I was conscious of an increasing rage against the battery. I
felt that if it was to cease I might observe, be interested, feel
excitement--as it was, it kept everything from me. It kept everything
from me because it insistently demanded my attention, like a vulgar
garrulous neighbour who persists in his tiresome story. Its perpetual
hammering had soon its physical effect. A sick headache crept upon me,
seized me, held me. I might look at the soldiers, sleeping now like
dead men in the trench, I might look at the Red Cross flag lazily
flapping in the breeze across the road, I might look at the corpse
with the soiled marble feet under the tree, I might look at Trenchard
and Marie Ivanovna silent and unhappy on the stretchers, on Anna
Petrovna comfortably slumbering with an open mouth, I might listen to
the distant batteries, to the sudden quick impatient chatter of the
machine guns, to the rattling give-and-take of the musketry somewhere
far away where the river was, I might watch the cool green hollows of
the forest glades, the dark sleepy shadows, the bright patches of
burning sky between the branches, I might say to myself that all these
things together made the impression of my first battle ... and then
would know, in my heart, that there was no impression at all, no
thrill, no drama, no personality--only a sick throb in my head and a
cold hand upon my chest and a desire to fling myself into any horror,
any danger, if I could but escape this indigestible monotony....

Once Trenchard, treading very softly as though every one around him
were asleep, came across and talked to me.

"You know," he said in a whisper, "this isn't at all what I expected."

"You needn't whisper," I answered irritably, "that battery's making
such a noise that I can't hear anything you say."

"Yes, isn't it!" he said with a little sigh. "It's very unpleasant
indeed. Do you think Semyonov's forgotten us? We've been here a good
many hours and we aren't doing very much."

"No," I answered. "We're doing nothing except get sick headaches."

There was a pause, then he said:

"Where is everything?"

"Everything?--What?"

"Well, the battle, for instance!"

"Oh, that's down the hill, I suppose. We're trying to cross the river
and they're trying to prevent us."

"Yes," he answered. "But that isn't exactly what I mean.... It's hard
to explain, but even if we were to see our soldiers trying to cross
the river and the Austrians trying to prevent them that wouldn't
be--well, wouldn't be exactly the real thing, would it? It would only
be a kind of side-show, rather unimportant like that dead man there!"

But my headache prevented my interest in his speculations. I said
nothing.

He added as though to himself:

"Perhaps each individual soldier sees the real thing for himself but
can't express what he sees...."

As I still made no answer, with another little sigh he got up and
walked back, on tip-toe, to the side of Marie Ivanovna.

Then suddenly, in the early hours of the afternoon, to our intense
relief, Semyonov and Andrey Vassilievitch appeared. Semyonov was, as
ever, short, practical, and unemotional.

"Been a long time, I'm afraid. We found it difficult to see exactly
where would be the best place. And, after all, we've got to
separate.... One Sister's wanted at the Red Cross over there. They've
asked for our help. The other will come with me on to the Position
until this evening. You three gentlemen, if you'll be so good, will
wait here until a wagon comes. Then it will take you down to the
trenches at the bottom of the hill. Then, if you don't mind, I would
like you to wait until dusk when we shall go out to fetch the
wounded.... Is that clear?"

We answered yes.

"Now which Sister will come with me? Marie Ivanovna, I think it would
interest you. No danger, except a stray shrapnel or two. Will you
come?"

There leapt upon us then, with an agitation that seemed to silence the
very battery itself, Trenchard's voice:

"No.... No ... Marie. No, it's dangerous. Semyonov says so. Your first
day...."

He spoke in English, his voice trembling. I turned to see his face
white, his eyes wide open and at the same time blind; he passionately
addressed himself to Marie Ivanovna and to her alone.

But she turned impatiently.

"Why, of course, Doctor. I'm ready at once."

Trenchard put his hand on her arm.

"You are not to go--Marie, do you hear? I have a right ... I tell you,
you are not to go!"

"Don't be so stupid, John," she shook off his arm. "Please, Doctor,
I'm ready."

Semyonov turned to Trenchard with a smile: "Mr. (they all called him
Mr. now), it will be quite well ... I will look after her."

"You ... you" (Trenchard could not control his voice), "you can't
prevent shrapnel--bullets. You don't care, you...."

Semyonov's voice was sharp: "I think it better that Sister Marie
Ivanovna should come with me. You understand, the rest of you.... We
shall meet at dusk."

Trenchard only said "Marie ..." then turned away from us. Anna
Petrovna, who had said nothing during this scene and had, indeed,
seemed to be oblivious of it, plunged with her heavy clumsy walk
across the road to the Red Cross house. The Doctor and Marie Ivanovna
disappeared behind the trench. I was, as was always my case with
Trenchard, both sympathetic and irritated. It was difficult for him,
of course, but what did he expect the girl to do? Could he have
supposed for a single moment that she would remain? Could it be
possible that he knew her so little as that? And why make a scene now
before Semyonov when he obviously could do nothing? I knew, moreover,
with a certainty that was almost ironic in its clarity, that Marie
Ivanovna did not love, did not, perhaps, even care for him. By what
moment in Petrograd, a moment flaming with their high purposes and the
purple shadows of a Russian "white night," had she been entranced into
some glorious vision of him? On the very day that followed, she had
known, I was convinced, her mistake. At the station she had known it,
and instead of the fine Sir Galahad "without reproach" of the previous
night she saw some figure that, had she been English born, would have
appeared to her as Alice's White Knight perchance, or at best the
warm-hearted Uncle Toby, or that most Christian of English
heroes--Parson Adams. I could imagine that life had been so impulsive,
so straightforward, so simple a thing to her that this sudden
implication in an affair complicated and even dishonest caused her
bitter disquiet. Looking back now I could trace again and again the
sudden flashes, through her happiness, of this distress.

He perhaps should have perceived it, but I could understand that he
could not believe that his treasure had at last after all these years
been given to him for so brief a moment. He could not, he would not,
believe it. Well, I knew that his eyes must very soon be opened to the
truth....

As I turned to see him sitting on the stretcher with his back to me,
his head hanging a little as though it were too heavy for his neck,
his back bent, his long arms fallen loose at his sides, I thought that
Alice's White Knight he, in solemn truth, presented.

He had a talent for doing things to his uniform. His cap, instead of
being raised in front, was flat, his jacket bulged out above his belt,
and the straps on his boot had broken from their holdings. He filled
the pockets of his trousers, in moments of absent-minded absorption,
with articles that he fancied that he would need--sometimes food,
black bread and sausage, sometimes a large pocket-knife, a folding
drinking glass, a ball of string, a notebook. These things protruded,
or gave his clothes a strange bulky look, fat in some places, thin in
others. As I saw him his shoulder-blades seemed to pierce his coat: I
could fancy with what agitation his hands were clenched.

We sat down, the three of us together, and again the battery leapt
upon us. Now the sun was hot above the trees and the effect of the
noise behind us was that we ourselves, every two or three minutes,
were caught up, flung to the ground, recovered, breathless, exhausted,
only to be hurled again!

How miserable we were, how lost, how desolate, Trenchard hearing in
every sound the death of his lady, Andrey Vassilievitch dreaming, I
fancy, that he had been caught in some cage out of which he would
never again escape. I, sick, almost blind with headache, and yet
exasperated, irritated by the emptiness of it all. If only we might
run down that hill! There surely we should find....

At the very moment when the battery had finished as it seemed to me
its work of smashing my head into pulp the wagon arrived.

"Now," I thought to myself as I climbed on to the straw, "I shall
begin to be excited!" We, all three of us, kneeling on the cart,
peered forward into the dim blue afternoon. We were very silent--only
once Trenchard said to me, "Perhaps we shall find her down here:
where we're going. What do you think, Durward?"

"I'm afraid not!" I answered. "But still she'll be all right. Semyonov
will look after her!"

"Oh! Semyonov!" he answered.

How joyful we were to leave our battery behind us. As the trees closed
around it we could fancy its baffled rage. Other batteries now seemed
to draw nearer to us and the whole forest was filled with childish
quarrelling giants; but as we began to bump down the hill out of the
forest stranger sounds attacked us. On either side of us were
cornfields and out of the heart of those from under our very feet as
it seemed there were explosions of a strange stinging metallic
kind--not angry and human as the battery had been, but rather like
some huge bottle cracking in the sun. These huge bottles--one could
fancy them green and shining somewhere in the corn--cracked one after
another; positively the sound intensified the heat of the sun upon
one's head. There were too now, for the first time in our experience,
shrapnel. They were not over us, but ran somewhere on our right across
the valley. Their sound was "fireworks" and nothing more--so that
alarm at their gentle holiday temper was impossible. Brock's Fireworks
on a Thursday evening at the Crystal Palace, oneself a small boy
sitting with both hands between one's knees, one's mouth open, a damp
box of chocolates on one's lap, the murmured "Ah ..." of the happy
crowd as the little gentle "Pop!" showed green and red against the
blue night sky. Ah! there was the little "Pop!" and after it a tiny
curling cloud of smoke in the air, the whole affair so gentle, so kind
even. There! sighing overhead they go! Five, six little curls of
smoke, and then beneath our very horses' feet again a huge green
bottle cracking in the sun!

And with all this noise not a living soul to be seen! We had before us
as we slowly bumped down the hill a fair view. The river was hidden
from us, but there was a little hamlet guarded happily by a green
wood; there was a line of fair hills, fields of corn, and the long
dusty white road. Not a soul to be seen, only our bumping cart and,
now and then, against the burning sky those little curling circles of
smoke. The world slumbered....

Suddenly from the ditch at the side of the road a soldier appeared,
spoke to our driver and disappeared again.

"What did he say?" I asked.

"He says, your Honour, that we must hasten. We may be hit."

"Hit here--on this road?"

"_Tak totchno._"

"Well, hurry then."

I caught a little frightened sigh behind me from Andrey Vassilievitch,
whom the events of the day had frozen into horror-stricken silence. We
hurried, bumping along; at the bottom of the hill there was a
farmhouse. From behind it an officer appeared.

"What are you doing there? You're under fire.... Red Cross? Ah yes, we
had a message about you. Dr. Semyonov?... Yes. Please come this way.
Hurry, please!"

We were led across the farmyard and almost tumbled into a trench at
the farther end of it.

It wasn't until I felt some one touch my shoulder that I realised my
position. We were sitting, the three of us, in a slanting fashion with
our backs to the earthworks of the trench. To our right, under an
improvised round roof, a little dried-up man like a bee, with his
tunic open at the neck and a beard of some days on his chin, was
calling down a telephone.

Next to me on the left a smart young officer, of a perfect neatness
and even dandiness, was eating his supper, which his servant,
crouching in front of him, ladled with a spoon out of a tin can.
Beyond him again the soldiers in a long line under the farm wall were
sewing their clothes, eating, talking in whispers, and one of them
reading a newspaper aloud to himself.

A barn opposite us in ruins showed between its bare posts the green
fields beyond. Now and then a soldier would move across the yard to
the door of the farm, and he seemed to slide with something between
walking and running, his shoulders bent, his head down. The sun, low
now, showed just above the end of the farm roof and the lines of light
were orange between the shadows of the barn. All the batteries seemed
now very far away; the only sound in the world was the occasional sigh
of the shrapnel. The farmyard was bathed in the peace of the summer
evening.

The Colonel, when he had finished his conversation with some humorous
sally that gave him great pleasure, greeted us.

"Very glad to see you, gentlemen.... Two Englishmen! Well, that's the
Alliance in very truth ... yes.... How's London, gentlemen? Yes,
_golubchik_, that small tin--the grey one. No, _durak_, the _small_
one. Dr. Semyonov sent a message. Pray make yourselves comfortable,
but don't raise your heads. They may turn their minds in this
direction at any moment again. We've had them once already this
afternoon. Eh, Piotr Ivanovitch (this to the smart young officer),
that would have made your Ekaterina Petrovna jump in her sleep--ha,
ha, ha--oh, yes, but I can see her jumping.... Hullo, telephone--Give
it here! That you, Ivan Leontievitch? No ... very well for the
moment.... Two Englishmen here sitting in my trench--truth itself!
Well, what about the Second 'Rota'? Are they coming down?... _Yeh
Bogu_, I don't know! What do you say?..."

The young officer, in a very gentle and melodious voice, offered
Trenchard, who was sitting next to him, some supper.

"One of these cutlets?"

Trenchard, blushing and stammering, refused.

"A cigarette, then?"

Trenchard again refused and Piotr Ivanovitch, having done his duty,
relapsed into his muffled elegance. We sat very quietly there;
Trenchard staring with distressed eyes in front of him. Andrey
Vassilievitch, very uncomfortable, his fat body sliding forward on the
slant, pulling itself up, then sliding again--always he maintained his
air of importance, giving his cough, twisting the ends of his
moustache, staring, fiercely, at some one suddenly that he might
disconcert him, patting, with his plump little hands, his clothes.

The shadows lengthened and a great green oak that hung over the barn
seemed, as the evening advanced, to grow larger and larger and to
absorb into its heart all the flaming colours of the day, to press
them into its dark shadow and to hide them, safe and contented, until
another morning.

I sat there and gradually, caught, as it seemed to me, into a world of
whispers and half-lights, I slipped forward a little down into the
dark walls of the trench and half-slumbered, half clung still to the
buzzing voice of the Colonel, the languid replies of the young
officer. I felt then that some one was whispering to me that my real
adventure was about to begin. I could see quite plainly, like a road
up which I had gone, the events of the day behind me. I saw the ride
under the stars, the cold red dawn. Marie Ivanovna standing beneath
my cart, the sudden battery and the desolate hours of waiting, the
wounded men stumbling out of the forest, the ride down the hill and
the green bottles bursting in the sun, the sudden silences and the
sudden sounds, my own weariness and discomfort and loneliness and now
Something--was it the dark green oak that bent down and hid the world
for me?--whispered, "You're drawing near--you're close--you're almost
there.... In a moment you will see ... you will see ... you will
see...."

Somewhere the soldiers were singing, and then all sounds ceased. We
were standing, many of us, in the dark, the great oak and many other
giant trees were about us and the utter silence was like a sudden
plunge into deep water on a hot day. We were waiting, ready for the
Creature, breathless with suspense.

"Now!" some one cried, and instantly there was such a roar that I
seemed to be lifted by it far into the sky, held, rocked, then dropped
gently. I woke to find myself standing up in the trench, my hands to
my ears. I was aware first that the sky had changed from blue into a
muddy grey, then that dust and an ugly smell were in my eyes, my
mouth, my nose. I remembered that I repeated stupidly, again and
again: "What? what? what?" Then the grey sky slowly fell away as
though it were pushed by some hand and I saw the faint evening blue,
with (so strange and unreal they seemed) silver-pointed stars. I
caught my breath and realised that now the whole right corner of the
barn was gone. The field stretched, a dark shadow, to the edge of the
yard. In the ground where the stakes of the barn had been there was a
deep pit; scattered helter-skelter were bricks, pieces of wood, and
over it all a cloud of thin fine dust that hovered and swung a little
like grey silk. The line of soldiers was crouched back into the trench
as though it had been driven by some force. From, as it appeared, a
great distance, I heard the Colonel's voice: "_Slava Bogu_, another
step to the right and we'd not have had time to say 'good-bye.'... Get
in there, you ... with your head out like that, do you want another?"
I was conscious then of Andrey Vassilievitch sitting huddled on the
ground of the trench, his head tucked into his chest.

"You're not hurt, are you?" I said, bending down to him,

He got up and to my surprise seemed quite composed. He was rubbing his
eyes as though he had waked from sleep.

"Not at all," he answered in his shrill little voice. "No.... What a
noise! Did you hear it, Ivan Andreievitch?"

Did I hear it? A ridiculous question!

"But I assure you I was not alarmed," he said eagerly, turning round
to the young officer, who was rather red in the face but otherwise
unruffled. "The first time that one has been so close to me. What a
noise!"

Trenchard searched in his pockets for something.

"What is it?" I asked.

"My handkerchief!" he answered. "So dusty after that. It's in my
eyes!"

He tumbled on to the ground a large clasp pocket-knife, a hunk of
black bread, a cigarette-case and some old letters. "I had one," he
muttered anxiously. "Somewhere, I know...."

I heard the Colonel's voice again. "No one touched! There's some more
of their precious ammunition wasted.... What about your Ekaterina,
Piotr Ivanovitch--Ho, ho, ho!... Here, _golubchik_, the telephone!...
Hullo! Hullo!"

For myself I had the irritation that one might feel had a boy thrown a
stone over the wall, broken a window and run away. Moreover, I felt
that again I had missed--IT. Always round the corner, always just out
of sight, always mocking one's clumsy pursuit. And still, even now, I
felt no excitement, no curiosity. My feet had not yet touched the
enchanted ground....

The trench had at once slipped back into its earlier composure. The
dusk was now creeping down the hill; with every stir of the breeze
more stars were blown into the sky; the oak was all black now like a
friendly shadow protecting me.

"There'll be no more for a while," said the Colonel. He was right.
There was stillness; no battery, however distant, no pitter-patter of
rifle fire, no chattering report of the machine guns.

Men began to cross the yard, slowly, without caution. The dusk caught
us so that I could not see the Colonel's face; a stream that cut the
field, hidden in the day, was now suddenly revealed by a grinning
careless moon.

Then a soldier crossed the yard to us, told us that Dr. Semyonov
wished us to start and had sent us a guide; the wagons were ready.

At that instant, whence I know not, for the first time that day,
excitement leapt upon me.

Events had hitherto passed before me like the shadowed film of a
cinematograph; it had been as though some one had given me glimpses of
a life, an adventure, a country with which I should later have some
concern but whose boundaries I was not yet to cross. Now, suddenly,
whether it was because of the dark and the silence I cannot say, I had
become, myself, an actor in the affair. It was not simply that we were
given something definite to do--we had had wounded during the
morning--it was rather that, as in the children's game we were "hot,"
we had drawn in a moment close to some one or something of whose
presence we were quite distinctly aware. As we walked across the yard
into the long low field, speaking in whispers, watching a shaft of
light, perhaps some distant projector that trembled in pale white
shadows on the horizon, we seemed to me to be, in actual truth, the
hunters of Trenchard's dream.

Never, surely, before, had I known the world so silent. Under the
hedges that lined the field there were soldiers like ghosts; our own
wagons, with the sanitars walking beside them, moved across the ground
without even the creak of a wheel. Semyonov was to meet us in an
hour's time at a certain crossroad. I was given the command of the
party. I was now, in literal truth, breathlessly excited. My heart was
beating in my breast like some creature who makes running leaps at
escape. My tongue was dry and my brain hot. But I was happy ... happy
with a strange exaltation that was unlike any emotion that I had known
before. It was in part the happiness that I had known sometimes in
Rugby football or in tennis when the players were evenly matched and
the game hard, but it was more than that. It had in it something of
the happiness that I have known, after many days at sea, on the first
view of land--but it was more than that. Something of the happiness of
possessing, at last, some object which one has many days desired and
never hoped to attain--but more, too, than that. Something of the
happiness of danger or pain that one has dreaded and finds, in actual
truth, give way before one's resolution--but more, again, than that.
This happiness, this exultation that I felt now but dimly, and was to
know more fully afterwards (but never, alas, as my companions were to
know it) is the subject of this book. The scent of it, the full
revelation of it, has not, until now, been my reward; I can only, as a
spectator, watch that revelation as it came afterwards to others more
fortunate than I. But what I write is the truth as far as I, from the
outside, have seen it. If it is not true, this book has no value
whatever.

We were warned by the soldier who guarded us not to walk in a group
and we stole now, beneath a garden-wall, white under the moon, in a
long line. I could hear Trenchard behind me stumbling over the stones
and ruts, walking as he always did with little jerks, as though his
legs were beyond his control. We came then on to the high road, which
was so white and clear in the moonlight that it seemed as though the
whole Austrian army must instantly whisper to themselves: "Ah, there
they are!" and fire. The ditch to our right, as far as I could see,
was lined with soldiers, hidden by the hedge behind them, their rifles
just pointing on to the white surface of the land. Our guide asked
them their division and was answered in a whisper. The soldiers were
ghosts: there was no one, save ourselves, alive in the whole world....

Then a little incident occurred. I was walking in the rear of our
wagons that I might see that all were there. I felt a touch on my arm
and found Andrey Vassilievitch standing in the middle of the road. His
face, staring at me as though I were a stranger, expressed desperate
determination.

"Come on," I said. "We've no time to waste."

"I'm not coming," he whispered back. His voice was breathless as
though he had been running.

"Nonsense," I answered roughly, and I put my hand on his arm. His body
trembled in jerks and starts.

"It's madness ... this road ... the moon.... Of course they'll
fire.... We'll all be killed. But it isn't ... it isn't ... I can't
move...."

"You _must_ move.... Come, Andrey Vassilievitch, you've been brave
enough all day. There's no danger, I tell you. See how quiet
everything is. You _must_...."

"I can't.... It's nothing ... nothing to do with me.... It's awful all
day--and now this!"

I thought of Marie Ivanovna early in the morning. I looked down the
road and saw that the wagons were slowly moving into the distant
shadows.

"You _must_ come," I repeated. "We can't leave you here. Don't think
of yourself. And nothing can touch you--nothing, I tell you."

"I'll go back, I must. I can't go on."

"Go back? How can you? Where to? You can't go back to the trench. We
shan't know where to find you." A furious anger seized me; I caught
his arm. "I'll leave you, if you like. There are other things more
important."

I move away from him. He looked down the long road, looked back.

"Oh, I can't ... I can't," he repeated.

"What did you come for?" I whispered furiously. "What did you think
war was?... Well, good-bye, do as you please!"

As I drew away I saw a look of desperate determination in his eyes. He
looked at me like a dog who expects to be beaten. Then what must have
been one of the supreme moments of his life came to him. I saw him
struggle to command, with the effort of his whole soul, his terror.
For a moment he wavered. He made a hopeless gesture with his hand,
took two little steps as though he would run into the hedge amongst
the soldiers and hide there, then suddenly walked past me, quickly,
towards the wagons, with his own absurd little strut, with his head
up, giving his cough, looking, after that, neither to the right, nor
to the left.

In silence we caught up the wagons. Soon, at some cross-roads, they
came to a pause. The guide was waiting for me. "It would be better,
your Honour," he whispered, "for the wagons to stay here. We shall go
now simply with the stretchers...."

We left the wagons and, some fifteen of us, turned off down a lane to
the left. Sometimes there were soldiers in the hedges, sometimes they
met us, slipping from shadow to shadow. Always we asked whether they
knew of any wounded. We found a wounded soldier groaning under the
hedge. One leg was soaked in blood and he gave little shrill desperate
cries as we lifted him on to the stretcher. Another soldier, lying on
the road in the moonlight, murmured incessantly: "_Bojé moi! Bojé moi!
Bojé moi!_" But they were all ghosts. We alone, in that familiar and
yet so unreal world, were alive. When a stretcher was filled, four
sanitars turned back with it to the wagons, and we were soon a very
small party. We arrived at a church--a large fantastic white church
with a green turret that I had seen from the opposite hill in the
morning. Then it had seemed small and very remote. I had been told
that much firing had been centring round it, and it seemed now for me
very strange that we should be standing under its very shadow, its
outline so quiet and grave under the moon, with its churchyard, a
little orchard behind it, and a garden, scenting the night air, close
at hand. Here in the graveyard there was a group of wounded soldiers,
in their eyes that look of faithful expectation of certain relief. Our
stretchers were soon full.

We were about to turn back when suddenly the road behind us was filled
with shadows. As we came out of the churchyard an officer stepped
forward to meet us. We saluted and shook hands. He seemed a boy, but
stood in front of his men with an air as though he commanded the
whole of this world of ghosts.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

We explained.

"Well, if you'll excuse me, you'd better make haste. An attack very
shortly ... yes. I should advise you to be out of this. Petrogradsky
Otriad? Yes ... very glad to have the pleasure...."

We left him, his men a grey cloud behind him, and when we had taken a
few steps he seemed, with his young air of importance, his happy
serious courtesy, to have been called out of the ground, then, with
all his shadows behind him, to have been caught up into the air. These
were not figures that had anything to do with the little curling
wreaths of smoke, the bottles cracking in the sun, our furious giants
of the morning.

"Ah, _Bojé moi, Bojé moi_!" sighed the wounded.... It was impossible,
in such a world of dim shadow, that there should ever be any other
sound again.

My excitement had never left me; I had had no doubt, during this last
half-hour, that I was on the Enchanted Ground of the Enemy, so stray
and figurative had been my impressions all day. Now they were all
gathered into this half-hour and the whole affair received its climax.
"Ah," I thought to myself, "if I might only stay here now I should
draw closer and closer--I should make my discovery, hunt him down. But
just when I am on the verge I must leave it all. Ah, if I could but
stay!"

Nevertheless we hastened. The world, in spite of the ghosts, was real
enough for us to be conscious of that attack looming behind us. We
found our wagons, transferred our wounded, then hurried down the road.
We found the cross-roads and there, waiting for us, Semyonov and
Marie Ivanovna. Standing in the moonlight, commanding, as it seemed
to me, all of us, even Semyonov, she was a very different figure from
the frightened girl of the early morning. Now her life was in her
eyes, her body inflamed with the fire of the things that had come to
her. So young in experience was she, so ignorant of all earlier
adventure, that she could well be seized, utterly and completely, by
her new vision ... possessed by some vision she was.

And that vision was not Trenchard. Seeing her, he hurried towards her,
with a glad cry:

"Ah, you are safe!"

But she did not notice him.

"Quick, this way!... Yes, the stretchers here.... No, I have
everything.... At once. There is little time!"

The wounded were laid on the stretchers in the square of the
cross-roads. Semyonov and Marie Ivanovna bandaged them under the
moonlight and with the aid of electric-torches. On every side of me
there were little dialogues: "No ... not there. More this way. Yes,
that bandage will do. It's fresh. Hold up his leg. No, _durak_, under
the knee there.... Where's the lint?... Turn him a little--there--like
that. _Horosho, golubchik_. _Seitchass_! No, turn it back over the
thigh. Now, once more ... that's it. What's that--bullet or
shrapnel?... Take it back again, over the shoulder.... Yes, twice!"

Once I caught sight of Trenchard, hurrying to be useful with the
little bottle of iodine, stumbling over one of the stretchers, causing
the wounded man to cry out.

Then Semyonov's voice angrily:

"Tchort! Who's that?... Ah, Meester! of course!"

Then Marie Ivanovna's voice: "I've finished this, Alexei
Petrovitch.... That's all, isn't it?"

These voices were all whispers, floating from one side of the road to
the other. The wounded men were lifted back on to the wagons. We moved
off again; Semyonov, Trenchard, Marie Ivanovna and I were now sitting
together.

We left the flat fields where we had been so busy. Very slowly we
began to climb the hill down which I had come this afternoon. Behind
me was a great fan of country, black now under a hidden moon, dead as
though our retreat from it, depriving it of the last proofs of life,
had flung it back into non-existence. Before us was the black forest.
Not a sound save the roll of our wheels and, sometimes, a cry from one
of the wounded soldiers, not a stir of wind....

I looked back. Without an instant's warning that dead world, as a
match is set to a waiting bonfire, broke into flame. A thousand
rockets rose, soaring, in streams of light into the dark sky; the
fields that had been vapour ran now with light. A huge projector, the
eye, as it seemed to me, of that enemy for whom I had all day been
searching, slowly wheeled across the world, cutting a great path
across the plain, picking houses and trees and fields out of space,
then dropping them back again. The rockets were gold and green,
sometimes as it seemed ringed with fire, sometimes cold like dead
moons, sometimes sparkling and quivering like great stars. And with
this light the whole world crackled into sound as though the sky, a
vast china plate, had been smashed by some angry god and been flung,
in a million pieces, to earth. The rifle-fire rose from horizon to
horizon like a living thing. Now the shrapnel rose, breaking on the
dark sky in flashes of fire. Suddenly some house was burning! The
flames rose in a column, breaking into tongues that advanced and
retreated, climbed and fell again. In the farthest distance other
houses had caught and their glow trembled in faint yellow light fading
into shadow when the projector found them. With a roar at our back
our own cannon began; the world bellowed and shook and trembled at our
feet.

We reached the top of the hill. I caught one final vision, the picture
seeming to sway with all its lights, its shadows, its giant eye that
governed it, its colours and its mist, like a tapestry blown by wind.
I saw in our wagon, their faces lighted by the fire, Semyonov and
Marie Ivanovna. Semyonov knelt on the wooden barrier of the cart, his
figure outlined square and strong. She was kneeling behind him, her
hands on his shoulders. Her face was exultant, victorious. She seemed
to me the inspirer of that scene, to have created it, to hold it now
with the authority of her gaze.

Behind her Trenchard was in shadow.

We were on the hill-top, the cannon, as it seemed, on every side of
us. We hung for a moment so, the sky flaming up to our feet. Then we
had fallen down between the woods, every step muffling the sounds.
Everything was dark as though a curtain had been dropped.

Semyonov turned round to me.

"Well," he said, "there's your battle.... You've been in the thick of
it to-day!"

I saw his eyes turned to Marie Ivanovna as though already he possessed
her.

I was suddenly tired, disappointed, exhausted.

"We've not been in the thick of it," I answered. "We have missed
it--all day we have missed it!"

I tried to settle down in my wagon. "I beg your pardon," I said
irritably to Trenchard, "but your boot is in my neck!"




CHAPTER IV

NIKITIN


But this is not my story. If I have hitherto taken the chief place it
is because, in some degree, the impressions of Trenchard, Marie
Ivanovna, Andrey Vassilievitch must, during those first days, have run
with my own. We had all been brought to the same point--that last
vision from the hill of the battle of S---- and from that day we were
no longer apprentices.

I now then retire. What happened to myself during the succeeding
months is of no matter. But two warnings may be offered. The first is
that it must not be supposed that the experiences of myself, of
Trenchard, of Nikitin in this business found their parallel in any
other single human being alive. It would be quite possible to select
every individual member of our Otriad and to prove from their case
that the effect of war upon the human soul--whether Russian or
English--was thus and thus. A study, for example, might be made of
Anna Petrovna to show that the effect of war is simply nothing at all,
that any one who pretends to extract cases and contrasts from the
contact of war with the soul is simply peddling in melodrama. Anna
Petrovna herself would certainly have been of that opinion. Or one
might select Sister K---- and prove from her case that the effect of
war was to display the earthly failings and wickedness of mankind,
that it was a punishment hurled by an irate God upon an unrepentant
people and that any one who saw beauty or courage in such a business
was a sham sentimentalist. Sister K---- would take a gloomy joy in
such a denunciation. Or if one selected the boy Goga it would be
simply to state that war was an immensely jolly business, in which one
stood the chance of winning the Georgian medal and thus triumphing
over one's schoolfellows, in which people were certainly killed but
"it couldn't happen to oneself"; meals were plentiful, there were
horses to ride, one was spoken to pleasantly by captains and even
generals. Moreover one wore a uniform.

Or if Molozov, our chief, were questioned he would most certainly say
that war, as he saw it, was mainly a business of diplomacy, a business
of keeping the people around one in good temper, the soldiers in good
order, the generals and their staffs in good appetite, the other Red
Cross organisations in good self-conceit, and himself in good health.
All these things he did most admirably and he had, moreover, a heart
that felt as deeply for Russia as any heart in the world; but see the
matter psychologically or even dramatically he would not. He had his
own "nerves" and on occasion he displayed them, but war was for him,
entirely, a thing of training opposed to training, strategy opposed to
strategy, method and system opposed to method and system. For our
doctors again, war was half an affair of blood and bones, half an
affair of longing for home and children. The army doctors contemplated
our voluntary efforts with a certain irony. What could we understand
of war when we might, if we pleased, return home at any moment? Why,
it was simply a picnic to us.... No, they saw in it no drama whatever.

Nevertheless how are we to be assured that these others, Anna
Petrovna, Sister K----, Goga, the Doctors had not their own secret
view? The subject here is simply the attitude of certain private
persons with whom I was allowed some intimacy ... for the rest one has
no right to speak.

There comes then the second difficulty, namely: that of Nikitin,
Andrey Vassilievitch, Semyonov and Marie Ivanovna one can only present
a foreign point of view. Of Nikitin and Andrey Vassilievitch, at
least, I was the friend, but however deeply a Russian admits an
Englishman into friendship he can, to the very last, puzzle, confuse,
utterly surprise him. The Russian character seems, superficially, with
its lack of restraint, its idealism, its impracticality, its
mysticism, its material simplicities, to be so readily grasped that
the surprise that finally remains is the more dumbfounding. Perhaps
after all it is the very closeness of our resemblance the one to the
other that confuses us. It is, perhaps, that in the Russians' soul the
East can never be reconciled to the West. It is perhaps that the
Russian never reveals his secret ideal even to himself; far distant is
it then from his friend. It may be that towards other men the Russian
is indifferent and towards women his relation is so completely sexual
that his true character is hidden from her. Whatever it be that
surprise remains. For to those whom Russia and her people draw back
again and again, however sternly they may resist, this sure truth
stands: that here there is a mystery, a mystery that may never be
discovered. In the very soul of Russia the mystery is stirring; here
the restlessness, the eagerness, the disappointment, the vision of the
pursuit is working; and some who are outside her gates she has drawn
into that same search.

I am not sure whether I may speak of Nikitin as my friend. I believe
that no one in our Otriad save Trenchard could make, with truth, this
claim. But for his own reasons or, perhaps, for no reason at all, he
chose me on two occasions as his confidant, and of these two
occasions I can recall every detail.

We returned that night from S---- to find that the whole Otriad had
settled in the village of M----, where I myself had been the night
before. We were all living in an empty deserted farmhouse, with a
yard, a big orchard, wide barns and a wild overrun garden. We were, I
think, a little disappointed at the very languid interest that the
history of our adventures roused, but the truth was that the wounded
had begun to arrive in great numbers and there was no time for
travellers' stories.

A dream, I know, yesterday's experiences seemed to me as I settled
down to the business that had filled so much of my earlier period at
the war. Here, with the wounded, I was at home--the bare little room,
the table with the bottles and bandages and scissors, the basins and
dishes, the air ever thicker and thicker with that smell of dried
blood, unwashed bodies, and iodine that is like no other smell in the
world. The room would be crowded, the sanitars supporting legs and
arms and heads, nurses dashing to the table for bandages or iodine or
scissors, three or four stretchers occupying the floor of the room
with the soldiers who were too severely wounded to sit or stand, these
soldiers often utterly quiet, dying perhaps, or watching with eyes
that realised only dreams and shadows, the little window square, the
strip of sky, the changing colours of the day; then the sitting
soldiers, on ordinary of a marvellous and most simple patience,
watching the bandaging of their arms and hands and legs, whispering
sometimes "_Bojé moi! Bojé moi!_" dragging themselves up from their
desperate struggle for endurance to answer the sanitars who asked
their name, their regiments, the nature of their wounds. Sometimes
they would talk, telling how the thing had happened to them:

"And there, your Honour, before I could move, she had come--such a
noise--eh, eh, a terrible thing--I called out '_Zemliac_. Here it is!'
I said, and he...."

But as a rule they were very quiet, starting perhaps at the sting of
the iodine, asking for a bandage to be tighter or not so tight,
sometimes suddenly slipping in a faint to the ground, and then
apologising afterwards. And in their eyes always that look as though,
very shortly, they would hear some story so marvellous that it would
compensate for all their present pain and distress. There would be the
doctors, generally two at a time--Semyonov, unmoved, rough apparently
in his handling of the men but always accomplishing his work with
marvellous efficiency, abusing the nurses and sanitars without
hesitation if they did not do as he wished, but never raising his soft
ironic voice, his square body of a solidity and composure that nothing
could ruffle, his fair beard, his blue eyes, his spotless linen all
sharing in his self-assured superiority to us all; one of the Division
doctors, Alexei Ivanovitch, a man from Little Russia, beloved of us
all, whether in the Otriad or the army, a character possessing it
seemed none of the Russian moods and sensibilities, of the kindest
heart but no sentimentality, utterly free from self-praise,
self-interest, self-assertion, humorous, loving passionately his
country and, with all his Russian romance and even mysticism, packed
with practical common sense; another Division doctor, a young man,
carving for himself a practice out of Moscow merchants, crammed with
all the latest inventions and discoveries, caring for nothing save his
own career and frankly saying so, but a lively optimist whose belief
in his own powers was quite refreshing in its sincerity.

In such a place and under such conditions Semyonov had at the earlier
period been master of us all. The effect of his personality was such
that we had, every one of us, believed him invincible. The very
frankness of his estimate of the world and ourselves as the most
worthless and incompetent bundle of rubbish, caused us to yield
completely to him. We believed that he rated himself but little higher
than the rest of us. He _was_ superior but only because he saw so
clearly with eyes purged of sentiment and credulity. We, poor
creatures, had still our moments of faith and confidence. I had never
liked him and during these last days had positively hated him. I did
not doubt that he was making the frankest love to Marie Ivanovna and I
thought he was influencing her.... Trenchard was my friend, and what
an infant indeed he seemed against Semyonov's scornful challenge!

But now, behold, Semyonov had his rival! If Semyonov cared nothing for
any of us, Nikitin, it was plain enough, cared nothing for Semyonov.
From the very first the two men had been opponents. It seemed as
though Nikitin's great stature and fine air, as of a king travelling
in disguise from some foreign country, made him the only man in the
world to put out Semyonov's sinister blaze. Nikitin was an idealist, a
mystic, a dreamer--everything that Semyonov was not. It is true that
if we mattered nothing at all to Semyonov, we also mattered nothing at
all to Nikitin, but for Nikitin there were dreams, visions, memories
and hopes. We were contented to be banished from his attention when we
were aware that happier objects detained him. We might envy him, we
could not dislike him.

Semyonov never sneered at Nikitin. From the first he left him
absolutely alone. The two men simply avoided one another in so far as
was possible in a company so closely confined as ours. From the first
they treated one another with a high and almost extravagant
politeness. As Nikitin spoke but seldom, there was little opportunity
for the manifestation of what Semyonov must have considered "his
childishly romantic mind," and Nikitin, on his side, made on no single
occasion a reply to the challenge of Semyonov's caustic cynicism.

But if Nikitin was an idealist he was also, as was quite evident, a
doctor of absolutely first-rate ability and efficiency. I was present
at the first operation that he conducted with us--an easy amputation.
Semyonov was assisting and I know that he watched eagerly for some
slip or hesitation. It was an operation that any medical student might
have conducted with success, but the first incision of the knife
showed Nikitin a surgeon of genius. Semyonov recognised it.... I
fancied that from that moment I could detect in his attitude to
Nikitin a puzzled wonder that such an artist could be at the same time
such a fool.

I began to feel in Nikitin a very lively interest. I had from the
first been conscious of his presence, his distinction, his attitude of
patient expectation and continuously happy reminiscence; but I felt
now for the first time a closer, more personal interest. From the
first, as I have said on an earlier page, his relationship to Andrey
Vassilievitch had puzzled me. If Nikitin were not of the common race
of men, most assuredly was Andrey Vassilievitch of the most ordinary
in the world. He was a little man of a type in no way distinctively
Russian--a type very common in England, in America, in France, in
Germany. He was, one would have said, of the world worldly, a man who,
with a sharp business brain, had acquired for himself houses, lands,
food, servants, acquaintances. Upon these achievements he would pride
himself, having worked with his own hand to his own advantage, having
beaten other men who had started the race from the same mark as
himself. He would be a man of a kindly disposition, hospitable,
generous at times when needs were put plainly before him, but yet of
little imagination, conventional in all his standards, readily
influenced outside his business by any chance acquaintance, but
nevertheless having his eye on worldly advantage and progress; he
would be timid of soul, playing always for safety, taking the easiest
way with all emotion, treading always the known road, accepting day by
day the creed that was given to him; he would be, outside his brain,
of a poor intelligence, accepting the things of art on the standard of
popular applause, talking with a stupid garrulity about matters of
which he had no first-hand knowledge--proud of his position as a man
of the world, wise in the character and moods of men of which, in
reality, he knew nothing. Had he been an Englishman or a German, this
would have been all and yet, because he was a Russian, this was not
even the beginning of the matter.

I had, as I have already said, in earlier days known him only
slightly. I had once stayed for three days in his country-house and it
was here that I had met his wife. Russian houses are open to all the
world and, with such a man as Andrey Vassilievitch, through the doors
crowds of men and women are always coming and going, treating their
host like the platform of a railway station, eating his meals,
sleeping on his beds, making rendezvous with their friends, and yet
almost, on their departure, forgetting his very name.

My visit had been of a date now some five years old. I can only
remember that his wife did not make any very definite impression upon
me, a little quiet woman, of a short figure, with kind, rather sleepy
eyes, a soft voice, and the air of one who knows her housewifely
business to perfection and has joy in her knowledge. "Not
interesting," I would have judged her, but I had during my stay no
personal talk with her. It was only after my visit that I was told
that this quiet woman was the passion of Andrey Vassilievitch's life.
He had been over thirty when he had married her; she had been married
before, had been treated, I was informed, with great brutality by her
husband who had left her. She had then divorced him. Praise of her, I
discovered, was universal. She was apparently a woman who created love
in others, but this by no marked virtues or cleverness; no one said of
her that she was "brilliant," "charming," "fascinating." People spoke
of her as though here at least there was some one of whom they were
sure, some one too who made them the characters they wished to be,
some one finally who had not surrendered herself, who gave them her
love but not her whole soul, keeping always mystery enough to maintain
her independence. No scandal was connected with her name. I heard of
Nikitin and others as her friends, and that was all. Then, quite
suddenly, two months before the beginning of the war, she died. They
said that Andrey Vassilievitch was like a lost dog, wished also at
first to talk to all who had known her, wearying her friends with his
reminiscences, his laments, his complaints--then suddenly silent,
speaking to no one about her, at first burying himself in his
business, then working on some committee in connexion with one of the
hospitals, then, as it appeared on the impulse of a moment, departing
to the war.

I had expected to find him a changed man and was, perhaps,
disappointed that he should appear the same chattering feather-headed
little character whom I had known of old. Nevertheless I knew well
enough that there was more here than I could see, and that the root of
the matter was to be found in his connexion with Nikitin. In our
Otriad, friendships were continually springing up and dying down. Some
one would confide to one that so-and-so was "wonderfully sympathetic."
From the other side one would hear the same. For some days these
friends would be undivided, would search out from the Otriad the
others who were of their mind, would lose no opportunity of declaring
their "sympathy," would sit together at table, work together over the
bandaging, unite together in the public discussions that were frequent
and to a stranger's eye horribly heated. Then very soon there would
come a rift. How could that Russian passionate longing for justified
idealism be realised? Once more there were faults, spots on the sun,
selfishness, bad temper, narrowness, what you please. And at every
fresh disappointment would my companions be as surprised as though the
same thing had not happened to them only a fortnight ago.

"But only last week you liked him so much!"

"How could I know that he would hold such opinions? Never in my life
have I been more surprised."

So upon these little billows sailed the stout bark of Russian
idealism, rising, falling, never overwhelmed, always bravely
confident, never seeking for calm waters, refusing them indeed for
their very placidity.

But in the midst of these shifting fortunes there were certain
alliances and relationships that never changed. Amongst these was the
alliance of Nikitin and Andrey Vassilievitch. Friendship it could not
be called. Nikitin, although apparently he was kindly to the little
man, yielded him no intimacy. It seemed to us a very one-sided
business, depending partly upon Andrey Vassilievitch's continual
assertions that Nikitin was "his oldest friend and the closest friend
of his wife," that "Nikitin was one of the most remarkable men in the
world," that "only his intimate friends could know how remarkable he
was"; partly too upon the dog-like capacity of Andrey Vassilievitch to
fetch and carry for his friend, to put himself indeed to the greatest
inconvenience. It was pathetic to see the flaming pleasure in the
man's eyes when Nikitin permitted him to wait upon him, and how
ironically, upon such an occasion, would Semyonov watch them both!

In spite of Nikitin's passivity he did, I fancied, more than merely
suffer this unequal alliance. It seemed to me that there was behind
his silence some active wish that the affair should continue. I should
speak too strongly if I were to say that he took pleasure in the man's
company, but he did, I believe, almost in spite of himself, secretly
encourage it. And there was, in spite of the comedy that persistently
hovered about his figure and habits, some fine spirit in Andrey
Vassilievitch's championship of his hero. How he hated Semyonov! How
he lost no single opportunity of trying to bring Nikitin forward in
public, of proving to the world who was the greater of the two men!
Something very single-hearted shone through the colour of his loyalty;
nothing, I was convinced, could swerve him from his fidelity. That, at
least, was until death.

There arose then in these days of the wounded at M----a strange
relationship between myself and Nikitin. Friendship, I have said, I
may not call it. Nikitin afterwards told me it was my interest in the
study of human character that led to his frankness--as though he had
said, "Here is a man who likes to play a certain game. I also enjoy
it. We will play it together, but when the game is finished we
separate." Although discussions as to the characters of one or another
of us were continuous and, to an Englishman at any rate, most
strangely public, I do not think that the Russians in our Otriad were
really interested in human psychology. One criticised or praised in
order to justify some personal disappointment or pleasure. There was
nothing that gave our company greater pleasure than to declare in full
voice that "So-and-so was a dear, most sympathetic, a fine man."
Public praise was continuous and the most honest and spontaneous
affair; if criticism sometimes followed with surprising quickness that
was spontaneous too; all the emotions in our Otriad were spontaneous
to the very extreme of spontaneity. But we were not real students of
one another; we were content to call things by their names, to call
silence silence, obstinacy obstinacy, good temper good temper, and
leave it at that.

No one, I think, really considered Nikitin at all deeply. They admired
him for his "quiet" but would have liked him better had he shared some
of their frankness--and that was all.

It happened that for several days I worked in the bandaging room
directly under Nikitin. The work had a peculiar and really
unanalysable fascination for me. It was perhaps the directness of
contact that pleased me. I suppose one felt that here at any rate one
was doing immediate practical good, relieving distress and agony that
must, by some one, be immediately relieved; and, at any rate, in the
first days at M---- when the press of wounded was terrific (we
treated, in one day and night, nine hundred wounded soldiers) there
could be no doubt of the real demand for incessant tireless work. But
there was in my pleasure more than this. It was as though, through the
bodies of the wounded soldiers, I was helping to drive home the attack
upon our enemy. By our enemy I do not mean anything as concretely
commonplace as the German nation. One scarcely considered Germany as a
definite personality. One was resolved to cripple its power because
one believed that power to be a menace to the helpless, the innocent,
the lovers of truth and beauty; but that resolve, although it never
altered, seemed (the nearer one approached the citadel) in some way to
be farther and farther removed from the real question. Germany was of
no importance, and the ruin that Germany was wreaking was of no
importance compared with the histories of the individual souls that
were now in the making. Here were we: Nikitin, Trenchard, Sister
K----, Molozov, myself and the others--engaged upon our great
adventure. Across the surface of the world, at this same instant, out
upon the same hunt, seeking the same answer to their mystery, were
millions of our fellows. Somewhere in the heart of the deep forest the
enemy was hiding. We would defeat him? He would catch us unawares? He
had some plot, some hidden surprise? What should we find when we met
him?... We hated Germany, God knows, with a quiet, unresting,
interminable hatred, but it was not Germany that we were fighting.

And these wounded knew something that we did not. In the first moments
of their agony when we met them their souls had not recovered from the
shock of their encounter. It was, with many of them, more than the
mere physical pain. They were still held by some discovery at whose
very doors they had been. The discovery itself had not been made by
them, but they had been so near to it that many of them would never be
the same man again. "No, your Honour," one soldier said to me. "It
isn't my arm.... That is nothing, _Slava Bogu_ ... but life isn't so
real now. It is half gone." He would explain no more.

Since the battle of S----, I had been restless. I wanted to be back
there again and this work was to me like talking to travellers who
had come from some country that one knew and desired.

In the early morning, when the light was so cold and inhuman, when the
candles stuck in bottles on the window-sills shivered and quavered in
the little breeze, when the big basin on the floor seemed to swell
ever larger and larger, with its burden of bloody rags and soiled
bandages and filthy fragments of dirty clothes, when the air was
weighted down with the smell of blood and human flesh, when the sighs
and groans and cries kept up a perpetual undercurrent that one did not
notice and yet faltered before, when again and again bodies, torn
almost in half, faces mangled for life, hands battered into pulp, legs
hanging almost by a thread, rose before one, passed and rose again in
endless procession, then, in those early hours, some fantastic world
was about one. The poplar trees beyond the window, the little
beechwood on the hill, the pond across the road, a round grey sheet of
ruffled water, these things in the half-light seemed to wait for our
defeat. One instant on our part and it seemed that all the pain and
torture would rise in a flood and overwhelm one ... in those early
morning hours the enemy crept very close indeed. We could almost hear
his hot breath behind the bars of our fastened doors.

There was a peculiar little headache that I have felt nowhere else,
before or since, that attacked one on those early mornings. It was not
a headache that afflicted one with definite physical pain. It was like
a cold hand pressing upon the brow, a hand that touched the eyes, the
nose, the mouth, then remained, a chill weight upon the head; the
blood seemed to stop in its course, one's heart beat feebly, and
things were dim before one's eyes. One was stupid and chose one's
words slowly, looking at people closely to see whether one really
knew them, even unsure about oneself, one's history, one's future;
neither hungry, tired, nor thirsty, neither sad nor joyful, neither
excited nor dull, only with the cold hand upon one's brow, catching
(with troubled breath) the beating of one's heart.

In normal times the night-duty was of course taken in rotation, but
during the pressure of these four days we had to snatch our rest when
we might.

About midnight on the fifth day the procession of wounded suddenly
slackened, and by two o'clock in the morning had ceased entirely. The
two nurses went to bed leaving Nikitin, myself, and some sleepy
sanitars alone. The little room was empty of all wounded, they having
been removed to the tent on the farther side of the road. The candles
had sunk deep into the bottles and were spluttering in a sea of
grease. The room smelt abominably, the blood on the floor had trickled
in thin red lines into the cracks between the boards, and the basins
with the soiled bandages overflowed. There was absolute silence. One
sanitar, asleep, had leaned, still standing, over a chair, and his
shadow with his heavy hanging head high above the candle against the
wall.

Nikitin, seeming gigantic in the failing candlelight, stood back
against the window. He did not keep, as did Semyonov, perfect
neatness. A night of work left him with his hair on end, his black
beard rough and disordered; his shirtsleeves were turned up, his arms
stained with blood, and in his white apron he looked like some kingly
butcher. I was tired, the cold headache was upon me. I wished that I
could go, but I knew that both he and I must stay until eight o'clock.
While there was work to do nothing mattered, but now in the silence
the whole world seemed as empty and foul as a drained and stinking
tub.

Nikitin looked at me.

"You're tired," he said.

"No, I'm not tired," I answered. "I shouldn't sleep if I went to bed.
But I've got a headache that is not a headache, I smell a smell that
isn't a smell, I'm going to be sick--and yet I'm not going to be
sick."

"Come outside," he said, "and get rid of this air." We went out and
sat down on a wooden bench that bordered the yard. Before us was the
high-road that ran from the town of S---- into the very heart of the
Carpathians. As the cold grey faded we could catch the thin outline of
those mountains, faint, like pencil-lines upon the sky now washed with
pink, covered in their nearer reaches by thick forests, insubstantial,
although they were close at hand, like water or long clouds. We could
see the road, white and clear at our feet, melting into shadow beyond
us, and catching in the little misty pools the coloured reflection of
the morning sky.

The air was very fresh; a cock behind me welcomed the sun; the cold
band withdrew from my forehead.

Nikitin was silent and I, silent also, sat there, almost asleep, happy
and tranquil. It seemed to me very natural to him that he should
neither move nor speak, but after a time he began to talk. I had in
that early morning a strange impression, as though deep in my dreams I
was listening to some history. I know that I did not sleep and yet
even now as I recover his quiet voice and, I believe, many of his very
words, in reminiscence those hours are still dreaming hours. I know
that every word that he told me then was true in actual fact. And yet
it seems to me that we were all slumbering, the world at our feet, the
sun in the sky, the wounded in their tent, and that through the mist
of all that slumber Nikitin's voice, soft, measured, itself like an
echo of some other voice miles away, penetrated--but to my heart
rather than to my brain. Afterwards this was all strangely parallel in
my mind with that earlier conversation that I had had with Trenchard
in the train.... And now as I sit here, in so different a place,
amongst men so different, those other two come back to me, happy
ghosts. Yes, happy I know that one at least of them is!

Like water behind glass, like music behind a screen, Nikitin's voice
comes back to me--dim but so close, mysterious but so intimate. Ah,
the questions that I would ask him now if only I might have those
morning hours over again!

"You're a solemn man altogether, Durward. Perhaps all Englishmen seem
so to us, and it may be only your tranquillity, so unlike our moods
and nerves by which we kill ourselves dead before we're half way
through life.... I had an English tutor for a year when I was a boy.
He didn't teach me much: 'all right' and 'Tank you' is the only
English I've kept, but I think of him now as the very quietest man in
all the universe. He never seemed to breathe, so still he was. And how
I admired him for that! My father was a very excitable man, his moods
and tempers killed him when he was just over forty.... We have a
proverb, 'In the still marshes there are devils,' and we admire and
fear quiet men because they have something that we have not. And I
like the way that you watch us, Durward. Your friend Trenchard does
not watch us at all and one could be his friend. For you one has quite
another feeling. It is as though I had something to give you that you
really want. Why should I not give it you? My giving it will do me no
harm, it may even yield me pleasure. You will not throw it away. You
are an Englishman and will not for a moment's temper or passion reveal
secrets. And there are no secrets. What I tell you you may tell the
world--but I warn you that it will neither interest them nor will they
believe it.... There is, you see, no climax to my story. I have no
story, indeed; like an old feldscher in my village who hates our
village Pope. 'Why, Georg Georgevitch,' I say, 'do you hate him? He is
a worthy man.' 'Your Honour,' he says, 'there is nothing there; a fat
man, but God has the rest of him--I hate him for his emptiness.' I'm
in a humour to talk. I have, in a way, fulfilled the purpose that my
English tutor created in me. I've grown a sort of quiet skin, you
know, but under that skin the heart pounds away, the veins swell to
bursting. I'm a fool behind it all--just a fool as every Russian is a
fool with more in hand than he knows how to deal with. You don't
understand Russia, do you? No, and I don't and no one does. But we can
all talk about her--and love her too, if you like, although our
sentiment's a bad thing in us, some say. But for us not to talk--for
one of us to be silent--do you know how hard that is?... And through
it all how I despise myself for wishing to tell them! What business is
it of theirs? Then this war. Can you conceive what it is doing to
Russians? If you have loved Russia and dreamed for her and had your
dreams flung again and again to the ground and trampled on--and now,
once more, the bubbles are in the sky, glittering, gleaming ... do we
not have to speak, do you think? Must it not be hard, when before we
have not been able to be silent about women and vodka, to be silent
now about the dearest wish of our heart? We have come out here, all of
us, to see what we will find. I have come because I want to get nearer
to something--I had brought something in my heart about which I had
learnt to be silent. 'That is enough!' I thought, 'there can be
nothing else about which I can wish to talk; but now, suddenly, like
that crucifix on the hillock by the road that the sun has just
touched, there is something more. And now here we are nothing ... two
souls come together out of space for an hour ... and it doesn't matter
what I say to you, except that it's true and the truth will be
something for you. Here's what I've come to the war with ... my little
bit of possession, if you like, that I've brought with me, as we've
all brought something. Will you understand me? Perhaps not, and it
really doesn't matter. I know what I have, what I want, but not what I
am. So how should you know if I do not? And I love life, I believe in
God. I wish to meet Death. One can be serious without being absurd at
an early hour like this, when nothing is real except such things....
Andrey Vassilievitch and myself have puzzled you, have we not? I have
seen you watching us very seriously, as though we were figures in a
novel, and that has amazed me, because you must not be solemn about
us. You'll understand nothing about Russian life unless you laugh at
it during at least half the week.

"Almost five years ago I met Andrey Vassilievitch at a friend's house
in Petrograd. He was an acquaintance of mine of some years' duration,
but I had avoided him because he seemed to me the last kind of man
whom I would ever care to know. I had been at this time five years in
Petrograd and had now a good practice there as a surgeon. I was a
successful man and I knew it, but I was also a disappointed man
because my idealism, that was being for ever wounded by my own
actions, would not die. How I wished for it to die! I thought of the
day when I should be without it as the day of liberation, of freedom.
That had become my idea, I must tell you, the dominating idea of my
life: that I should kill my idealism, laugh at the belief in God, lose
faith in every one and everything, and then simply enjoy myself--my
work which I loved and my pleasure which I should love when my
idealism had died.... Sometimes during those years I thought that it
was dying. Women helped to kill it, I believed, and I knew many women,
desperately persistently laughing at them, leaving them or being left
by them; and then, in spite of myself, bitterly, deeply disappointed.
Something always saying to me: 'I am God and you cannot hide from me.'
'I am God and I will not be hidden.'

"And on this night, about five years ago, at the house of a friend, I
met Andrey Vassilievitch. We left the house together, and because it
was a fine night, walked down the Nevski. There at the corner of the
Morskaia, because he was a nervous man who wished to be well with
every one in the world and because he had nothing especial to say, he
asked me to dinner, and I, because it was a fine night and there had
been good wine, said that I would go.

"The next day I cursed my folly. I do not know to this day why I did
not break the engagement, it would have been sufficiently easy, but
break it I did not and a week later, reluctantly, I went. Do you know
how houses and streets of which you have observed nothing, afterwards,
called out by some important event, leap into detail? That night I
swear that I saw nothing of that little street behind the Mariinsky
Theatre. It was a fine 'white night' at the end of May and the theatre
was in a bustle of arrivals because it was nearly eight o'clock. Not
at all the hour of Russian dinner, as you know, but Andrey
Vassilievitch always liked to be as English as possible. I tell you
that I saw nothing of the street and yet now I know that at the door
of the little _trakteer_ there were two men and a woman laughing, that
an _isvotchik_ was drawn up in front of a high white block of flats,
asleep, his head fallen on his breast, that the wonderful light,
faintly blue and misty like gauze hung down from the sky, down over
the houses, but falling not quite on to the pavement which was hard
and ugly and grey. The little street was very silent and quiet and
had, like so many Petrograd streets, a decorous intimacy with the
eighteenth century ghosts thronging its air....

"Afterwards, how I was to know that street, every stone and corner of
it! It seems wonderful to me now that I trod its pavement that night
so carelessly. My destination was a square little house at the corner
on the right. Andrey Vassilievitch boasted a whole house to himself, a
rare pride in our city, as you know. When I was inside the doors I
knew at once that it was not Andrey Vassilievitch's house at all. Some
stronger spirit than his was there. Knowing him, I had expected to
find there many modern things, some imitation of English manners, some
bad but expensive pictures, a gramophone, a pianolo, a library of
Russian classics in our hideous modern bindings, a billiard-room--you
know the character. How quiet this little house was. In the little
square hall an old faded carpet, a grandfather's clock and two
eighteenth century prints of Petrograd. All the rooms were square, so
Russian with their placid family portraits, their old tables and
chairs, not beautiful save for their fidelity, and old thumbed
editions of Pushkin and Gogol and Lermontov in the bookshelves.
Clocks, old slow clocks, all telling different time, all over the
house. The house was very neat, but in odd corners there were all
those odd family things that Russians collect, china of the worst
period, brass trays, large candlesticks, musical boxes, anything you
please. Only in the dining-room there was some attempt at modernity.
Bad modern furniture, on the walls bad copies of such things as
Somoff's 'Blue Lady,' Vrubel's 'Pan' and one of Benoit's 'Peter the
Great' water-colours. Beyond this room the house was of eighty years
ago, muffled in its old furniture, speaking with the voice of its old
clocks, scented with the scent of its musk and lavender, watched by
the contented gaze of the old family portraits.

"Alexandra Pavlovna, Andr

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