The White Guard

  you should remove all insignia and badges of rank, take anything from the armory you may want and which you can carry away and go home, stay there without showing yourselves and wait there until you are recalled to duty by me.'

  The colonel stopped, and his abrupt silence was emphasised even more by the absolute stillness in the hall. Even the arc-lights had ceased to hiss. Every man in the room was staring at one point - the colonel's clipped moustache.

  He went on:

  'I shall issue orders for your recall as soon as there is the slightest change in the situation. But I must tell you that the hopes of any such change are slim ... I can't predict how events will develop, but I think the best that every, . . . er . . . (the colonel suddenly yelled the next word) loyal man among you can hope for is to be sent to join General Denikin's forces on the Don. So my orders to the whole regiment - with the exception of the officers and those who were on sentry-duty last night - are to dismiss and return immediately to your homes!'

  'What? What?! . . .' The incredulous murmur ran down the ranks and the bayonets dipped and swayed. Bewildered faces gazed around them, some were plainly relieved, some even delighted . . .

  Staff Captain Studzinsky stepped forward from the group of officers. Bluish-white in the face, squinting, he took a few paces towards Colonel Malyshev, then glanced round at the officers. Myshlaevsky was not looking at Studzinsky but was still staring at Colonel Malyshev's moustache. From his expression he looked exactly as if he was about to indulge in his usual habit of breaking out in obscene abuse. Karas stupidly put his arms akimbo and blinked. In the separate group of young ensigns there suddenly came the rustling sound of the rash, dangerous word 'arrest' . . .

  'What was that?' muttered a deep voice from the ranks of the cadets.

  'Arrest!'

  'Treachery!'

  Studzinsky suddenly gave an inspired look upward at the

  electric light globe above his head, then glanced down at the butt of his holster and barked:

  'Number 1 Troop!'

  The first rank broke up, several gray figures stepped forward. A strangely confused scene ensued.

  'Colonel!' said Studzinsky in a thin, hoarse voice, 'you are under arrest!'

  'Arrest him!' one of the ensigns suddenly shrieked hysterically and moved toward the colonel.

  'Stop, gentlemen!' shouted Karas, who although his mind did not work fast had firmly grasped the import of the situation.

  Myshlaevsky leaped swiftly forward, grabbed the impetuous ensign by the sleeve of his greatcoat and pulled him back.

  'Let me go, lieutenant!' shouted the ensign, grimacing with fury.

  'Quiet!' The colonel's voice rang out with complete self-assurance. Although his mouth was twitching as much as the ensign's and his face was mottled with red, there was more calm and confidence in his expression than any of the other officers could muster at that moment. All stood still.

  'Quiet!' repeated the colonel. 'I order you all to stay where you are and listen to me!'

  Silence reigned, and Myshlaevsky became sharply attentive. It was as if a sudden thought had occurred to him and he was now expecting some news from the colonel that was considerably more important than that which he just announced.

  'I see,' said the colonel, his cheek twitching, 'that I would have made a fine fool of myself if I had tried going into battle with the motley crew which the good Lord saw fit to provide me with. Obviously it was just as well that I didn't. But what is excusable in a student volunteer or a young cadet, and possibly just excusable in an ensign is utterly inexcusable in you, Staff Captain Studzinsky!'

  With this the colonel withered Studzinsky with a look of quite exceptional virulence, his eyes flashing with sparks of genuine exasperation. Again there was silence.

  'Well, now', went on the colonel, 'I have never attended a meeting in my life, but it seems that I shall have to start now. Very well, let's hold a meeting! Now I agree that your attempt to arrest your commanding officer does credit to your patriotism, but it also shows that you are, er . . . how shall I put it, gentlemen?. . . inexperienced! Briefly - I have no time left and nor, I assure you,' the colonel said with baleful emphasis, 'have you. Let me ask you a question: whom are you proposing to defend?'

  Silence.

  'I'm asking you: whom do you mean to defend?' the colonel repeated threateningly.

  His eyes burning with interest Myshlaevsky stepped forward, saluted and said:

  'We are in duty bound to defend the Herman, sir.'

  'The Hetman?' the colonel questioned in return. 'Good. Regiment - atten-shun!' he suddenly roared in a voice that made the entire regiment jump to attention. 'Listen to me! This morning at approximately 4 a.m. the Hetman shamefully abandoned us all to our fate and ran away! Yes, he ran away, like the most miserable scoundrel and coward! This morning too, an hour after the Hetman, our commanding general, General Belorukov, ran away in the same way as the Hetman - in a German train. In no more than a few hours from now we shall be witnesses of a catastrophe in which the wretched people like yourselves who were tricked and involved into this absurd escapade will be slaughtered like dogs. Listen: on the outskirts of this city Petlyura has an army over a hundred thousand strong and tomorrow . . . what am I saying, tomorrow - today!' and the colonel pointed out of the window to where the sky was beginning to pale over the City, 'the isolated, disorganised units formed from officers and cadets, abandoned by those swine at headquarters and by those two unspeakable rogues Skoropadsky and Belorukov, who should both be hung, will be faced by Petlyura's troops who are well armed and who outnumber them by twenty to one . . . Listen, boys!' Colonel Malyshev suddenly exclaimed in a breaking voice, although his age made him more of an elder brother than a father

  to the rows of bayonet-toting youths in front of hirn - 'Listen! I am a regular officer. I went through the German war, as Staff Captain Studzinsky here will witness, and I know what I'm talking about! I assume full and absolute responsibility for what I'm doing! Understand? I'm warning you! And I'm sending you home! Do you understand why?' he shouted.

  'Yes, yes', answered the crowd, bayonets swaying. Then loudly and convulsively a cadet in the second rank burst into tears.

  To the utter surprise of the regiment and probably of himself, Staff Captain Studzinsky crammed his gloved fist into his eyes with a strange and most un-officer like gesture, at which the regiment's nominal roll fell to the floor, and burst into tears.

  Infected by him several more cadets began weeping, the ranks disintegrated and the disorderly uproar was only stopped when Myshlaevsky, in his Radames voice, roared an order to the bugler:

  'Cadet Pavlovsky! Sound the retreat!'

  #

  'Colonel, will you give me permission to set fire to the school building?' said Myshlaevsky, beaming at the colonel.

  'No, I will not', Malyshev replied quietly and politely.

  'But sir,' said Myshlaevsky earnestly, 'that means that Petlyura will get the armory, the weapons and worst of all -' Myshlaevsky pointed out into the hallway where the head of Tsar Alexander I could be seen over the landing.

  'Yes, he'll get all that', the colonel politely agreed.

  'You can't mean to let him, sir?'

  Malyshev turned to face Myshlaevsky, stared hard at him and said:

  'Lieutenant, in three hours' time hundreds of human lives will fall to Petlyura and my only regret is I am unable to prevent their destruction at the cost of my own life, or of yours. Please don't mention portraits, guns or rifles to me again.'

  'Sir,' said Studzinsky, standing at attention in front of the colonel, 'I wish to apologise on my own behalf and on behalf of those officers whom I incited to an act of disgraceful behavior.'

  'I accept your apology', replied the colonel politely.

  #

  By the time the morning mist over the town had begun to disperse, the blunt-muzzled mortars on the Alexander Hig
h School parade ground had lost their breech-blocks and the rifles and machine-guns, dismantled or broken up, had been hidden in the furthermost recesses of the attic. Heaps of ammunition had been thrown into snowdrifts, into pits and into secret crannies in the cellars, while the globes no longer radiated light over the assembly hall and corridors. The white insulated switchboard had been smashed by cadets' bayonets under Myshlaevsky's orders.

  #

  The reflection in the windows was blue sky. The two last men to leave the school building - Myshlaevsky and Karas - stood in the sunlight on the square.

  'Did the colonel warn Alexei that the regiment was going to be disbanded?' Myshlaevsky asked Karas anxiously.

  'Yes, I'm sure he did. After all, Alexei didn't turn up on parade this morning, so he must have been told', replied Karas.

  'Shall we go and see the Turbins?'

  'Better not by daylight, as things are. It won't be safe for officers to be seen congregating in groups ... you never know. Let's go back to our apartment.'

  Blue skies in the windows, white on the playground and the mist rose and drifted away.

  Eight

  Mist. Mist, and needle-sharp frost, claw-like frost flowers. Snow, dark and moonless, then faintly paling with the approach of dawn. In the distance beyond the City, blue onion-domes sprinkled with stars of gold leaf; and on its sheer eminence above the City

  the cross of St Vladimir, only extinguished when the dawn crept in across the Moscow bank of the Dnieper.

  When morning came the lighted cross went out, as the stars went out. But the day did not warm up; instead it showed signs of being damp, with an impenetrable veil suspended low over the whole land of the Ukraine.

  Ten miles from the City Colonel Kozyr-Leshko awoke exactly at daybreak as a thin, sour, vaporous light crept through the dim little window of a peasant shack in the village of Popelyukha. Kozyr's awakening coincided with the word: 'Advance.'

  At first he thought that he was seeing the word in a very vivid dream and even tried to brush it away with his hand as something chill and threatening. But the word swelled up and crept into the shack along with a crumpled envelope and the repulsive red pimples on the face of an orderly. Kozyr pulled a map out of a gridded mica map-case and spread it out under the window. He found the village of Borkhuny, then Bely Hai, and from these used his fingernail to trace the route along the maze of roads, their edges dotted with woods like so many flies, leading to a huge black blob

  the City. Added to the powerful smell of Kozyr's cheap tobacco, the shack reeked of homegrown shag from the owner of the red pimples, who assumed that the war would not be lost if he smoked in the colonel's presence.

  Faced with the immediate prospect of going into battle, Kozyr was thoroughly cheerful. He gave a huge yawn and jingled his complicated harness as he slung the straps over his shoulders. He had slept last night in his greatcoat without even taking off his spurs. A peasant woman sidled in with an earthenware pot of milk. Kozyr had never drunk milk before and did not wish to start now. Some children crept up. One of them, the smallest, with a completely bare bottom, crawled along the bench and reached out for Kozyr's Mauser, but could not get his hands on it before Kozyr had put the pistol into his holster.

  Before 1914 Kozyr had spent all his life as a village schoolmaster. Mobilised into a regiment of dragoons at the outbreak of war, in 1917 he had been commissioned. And now the dawn of

  December 14th 1918, found Kozyr a colonel in Petlyura's army and no one on earth (least of all Kozyr himself) could have said how it had happened. It had come about because war was Kozyr's true vocation and his years of teaching school had been nothing more than a protracted and serious mistake.

  This, of course, is something that happens more often than not in life. A man may be engaged in some occupation for twenty whole years, such as studying Roman law, and then in the twenty-first year it suddenly transpires that Roman law is a complete waste of time, that he not only doesn't understand it and dislikes it too, but that he is really a born gardener and has an unquenchable love of flowers. This is presumably the result of some imperfection in our social system, which seems to ensure that people frequently only find their proper metier towards the end of their lives. Kozyr had found his at the age of forty-five. Until then he had been a bad teacher, boring and cruel to his pupils.

  'Right, tell the boys to get out of those shacks and stand to their horses', said Kozyr in Ukrainian and tightened the creaking belt around his stomach.

  Smoke was beginning to curl up from the chimneys of Popel-yukha as Colonel Kozyr's cavalry regiment, four hundred sabres strong, rode out of the village. An aroma of shag floated above the ranks, Kozyr's fifteen-hand bay stallion prancing nervously ahead of them, whilst strung out for a quarter of a mile behind the regiment creaked the waggons of the baggage train. As soon as they had trotted clear of Popelyukha a two-color standard was unfurled at the head of the column of horsemen - one yellow strip and one blue strip of bunting tacked to a lance-shaft.

  Kozyr could not abide tea and preferred to breakfast on a swig of vodka. He loved 'Imperial' vodka, which had been unobtainable for four years, but which had reappeared all over the Ukraine under the Hetman's regime. Like a burst of flame the vodka poured out of Kozyr's gray army canteen and through his veins. In the ranks, too, a liquid breakfast was the order of the day, drunk from canteens looted from the stores at Belaya Tserkov; as soon as the vodka began to take effect an accordion struck up at

  the head of the column and a falsetto voice started a refrain which was at once taken up by a bass chorus.

  The trooper carrying the colors whistled and flicked his whip, lances and shaggy black braided fur caps bobbing in time to the song. The snow crunched under a thousand iron-shod hoofs. A drum gaily tapped out the cadence.

  'Fine! Cheerful does it, lads', said Kozyr approvingly. And the whip cracked and whistled its melody over the snowbound Ukrainian fields.

  As they passed through Bely Hai the mist was clearing, the roads were black with troops and the snow crunching under the weight of marching feet. At the crossroads in Bely Hai the cavalry column halted to let pass a fifteen-hundred-strong body of infantry. The men in the leading ranks all wore identical blue long-skirted tunics of good quality German cloth; they were thin-laced, wiry, active little men who carried their weapons like trained troops: Galicians. In the rear ranks came men dressed in long heel-length hospital robes, belted in with yellow rawhide straps. On their heads, bouncing atop their fur caps, were battered German army helmets and their hob-nailed boots pounded the snow beneath them.

  The white roads leading to the City were beginning to blacken with advancing troops.

  'Hurrah!' - the passing infantry shouted in salute to the yellow and blue ensign.

  'Hurrah!' echoed the woods and fields of Bely Hai.

  The cry was taken up by the guns to the rear and on the left of the marching column. Under cover of night the commander of the support troops, Colonel Toropets, had already moved two batteries into the forest around the City. The guns were positioned in a half-circle amid the sea of snow and had started a bombardment at dawn. The six-inch guns shook the snow-capped pine trees with waves of thundering explosions. A couple of rounds fell short in the large village of Pushcha-Voditsa, shattering all the windows of four snowbound houses. Several pine trees were reduced to splinters and the explosions threw up enormous fountains of snow.

  Then all sound died in the village. The forest reverted to its dreamy silence and only the frightened squirrels were left scuttling, with a rustle of paws, between the trunks of centuries-old trees. After that the two batteries were withdrawn from Push-cha and switched to the right flank. They crossed boundless acres of arable land, through the wood-girt village of Urochishche, wheeled on to a narrow country road, drove on to a fork in the road and there they deployed in sight of the City. From early in the morning a high-bursting shrapnel bombardment began to fall on Podgo
rodnaya, Savskaya and on Kurenyovka, a suburb of the City itself. In the overcast, snow-laden sky the shrapnel bursts made a rattling noise, as though someone were playing a game of dice. The inhabitants of these villages had taken cover in their cellars since daybreak, and by the early morning half-light thin lines of cadets, frozen to the bone, could be seen conducting a skirmishing withdrawal towards the heart of the City. Before long, however, the artillery stopped and gave way to the cheerful rattle of machine-gun fire somewhere on the northern outskirts of the City. Then it too died down.

  #

  The train carrying the headquarters of Colonel Toropets, commander of the support troops, stood deep in the vast forest at the junction about five miles from the village of Svyatoshino, lifeless, snowbound and deafened by the crash and thunder of gunfire. All night the electric light had burned in the train's six cars, all night the telephone had rung in the signal-box and the field-telephones squealed in Colonel Toropets' grimy compartment. As the glimmer of a snowy morning began to light up the surroundings, the guns were already thundering ahead up the line leading from Svyatoshino to Post-Volynsk, the bird-like calls of field-telephones in their yellow wooden boxes were growing more urgent and Colonel Toropets, a thin, nervous man, said to his executive officer Khudyakovsky:

  'We've captured Svyatoshino. Find out please, whether we can move the train up to Svyatoshino.'

  Toropets' train moved slowly forward between the timber walls of the wintry forest and halted near the intersection of the railroad and a great highroad which thrust its way like an arrow to the very heart of the City. Here, in the dining-car, Colonel Toropets started to put into operation the plan which he had worked out for two sleepless nights in that same bug-ridden dining-car No.

  4173.

  The City rose up in the mist, surrounded on all sides by a ring of advancing troops. From the forests and farmland in the north, from the captured village of Svyatoshino in the west, from the ill-fated Post-Volynsk in the south-west, through the woods, the cemeteries, the open fields and the disused shooting-ranges ringed by the railroad line, the black lines of cavalry trotted and jingled inexorably forward along paths and tracks or simply cut across country, whilst the lumbering artillery creaked along behind and the ragged infantry of Petlyura's army trudged through the snow to tighten the noose that they had been drawing around the City for the past month.