Strange Are the Ways

by Strange Are the Ways (retail) (epub)

  In that strange quiet time after they had gone, when the country watched and waited, Anna received two letters. One was from Katya; a strange letter, guarded and somehow, Anna felt, oddly unforthcoming when compared with her cousin’s usual warm and impulsive outpourings. Katya and Jussi it seemed had returned to Finland. There had been some trouble with the authorities, who had not appreciated the fact that Jussi was not burning to become an officer in the Russian ranks. It would blow over. Meanwhile Katya offered no address, but promised to write when she could.

  The second arrived a day later and was from her brother Dmitri. Like Katya’s it had taken more than a month to reach her. The contents stunned her.

  Her father and her Uncle Andrei, on their way to the shop on the Nevsky, had been caught up in a violent demonstration. The soldiers had come. The killing had been cold-blooded and indiscriminate. Victor and Andrei had been caught first in the crossfire and then in the charge that had cleared the street. Victor had died at once, shot through the head. Andrei had died a short while later, with a Cossack bullet in his lung.

  Book Three

  1914-1917

  Chapter Sixteen

  The shock of the deaths of Andrei and Victor on that sultry July day in 1914 was a blow that so numbed the Shalakov family that, for a time at least, they were shut both from the seething intrigues of the city and from the increasingly dangerous concerns of the world at large. The tragedy was hardly to be comprehended. During that tense and scorching summer such violence had become alarmingly commonplace in St Petersburg; but how could it happen that two quiet, law-abiding men could be ridden down in cold blood, slaughtered where they stood, with no compunction and for no reason? As the city lay in an all but exhausted, heat-induced torpor beneath copper-coloured skies and the drift of smoke from vast fires that blazed like omens of evil to the north in the forests of Finland; as rumours flew; as one report followed fast upon the heels of another concerning the assassinations in Sarajevo, the righteous anger of Austria, the threat to Russia’s ally Serbia, the Shalakovs mourned, confused and isolated by shock and by grief, their personal tragedy overshadowing for them all the significance and hazard of outside events. But not for long could this hold true; for as they grieved Europe moved, slowly and steadily, towards bitter conflict. On the day that the crowds gathered on the streets of the city to cheer their country’s official entry into the communal mania of a war that was to encompass the world, Varya was lying, as she had for days past, in a darkened room in her sister’s home overlooking the Fontanka, deep in the drugged sleep that was her only refuge from terror and an unventable fury that those around her understandably mistook for inconsolable grief. The touching and spontaneous demonstration of the following day outside the Winter Palace, when ten thousand people fell to their knees, the national anthem lifting from ten thousand throats, at the sight of their Tsar and his family upon the palace balcony, was reported to her by an excited Margarita – the first of the family to realize that momentous happenings were afoot and to recover her equilibrium enough to want to partake in them – but made no impression. Even when, some days later, her son Dmitri received his papers as part of the country’s mobilization for war the fact barely registered with Varya. Victor had dared to leave her, alone and defenceless. The foundations of her world had been swept away; the structure that was left was fragile indeed, and Varya had little or no time for the troubles of others, large or small.

  A wave of patriotic fervour swept the city; the name that had been proudly borne for two centuries was abandoned, judged to be too Germanic. Whilst Varya slept and her family woke to realize the enormity of the events which had overtaken them, St Petersburg overnight became Petrograd. The clamour of protest that during that sweltering summer had come so very close to the articulate roar of revolution for the moment died, smothered, as a flame might be smothered, by the blanket of need to unite in common cause and against a common enemy. Almost the entire Opposition in the Duma, with the exception of the Social Democrats – Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike, sworn enemies though they were – declared its support for the Government and the war. Mother Russia was threatened; as always, her sons and daughters would defend her to the death. The streets filled with endless columns of soldiers, khaki-clad, stoic-faced, marching to the stations where waited the long requisitioned trains that would carry them to the front to face the enemy. Beside them often walked the wives, the families, the mothers and the sisters, tear-stained and valiant, wishing their menfolk ‘Godspeed and a safe return’, and blessing their Little Father, the Tsar.

  Meanwhile, those that had kindled the flame of revolution that had come so close to causing an inferno now bided their time, tended the spark that still glowed, and waited.

  Whilst poor bemused Dmitri, torn so unexpectedly from his little family, remained, for the present, in Petrograd for training, Sasha was one of the first to go to the front. A combination of ill luck and bad management saw him on a train south just three weeks after the declaration of war. Margarita, dressed in a becoming new outfit for the occasion, was at the station to see him off. Quite overcome by excitement she cried prettily, noted with pleasure that her husband was beyond doubt the most handsome of the young officers waiting to board the train, and assured him and herself that the newspaper just that morning had prophesied that the war would last no longer than six weeks. She then visited her mother and Aunt Zhenia, enjoying, in the absence of much interest from her mother, the sympathy of her aunt, before going home to her toy theatre with its new cast of dashingly uniformed men and their brave and valiant women.

  Sasha, wrapped in unusual silence in a corner seat of a carriage that had turned immediately into a vodka-drinking card school, sped south-west, towards East Prussia, and a place called Tannenberg.

  * * *

  He had not known that such terror existed; had he known, would certainly never have believed it to be endurable. The anticipation was bad enough – the night before his first action he lay awake, exhausted with fear, his stomach like foul water, his head throbbing from the vodka with which he had vainly attempted to drown the abject and degrading terror that he found himself, to his disgust if not to his surprise, entirely incapable of controlling. And then, harrowingly, he found that the reality of battle was worse than the worst of his imaginings. After the first brief experience of coming under fire he knew with certainty that he would never be able to face it with the courage or fortitude – or the sheer bravado – that so many others showed. Before, during and after action, in his flinching imagination he died a thousand times, and horribly. He simply did not have it in him to endure the nightmare in which he found himself. He hated it all, from the bottom of his soul; the barbaric, earsplitting noise of the bombardment, the wicked, slicing chatter of the machine guns, the snipers’ bullets that sang like vicious insects about his head, searching, he always felt, for bone and for blood; the truly awful effort entailed in leading his men out of the comparative safety of their bunkers and trenches into the field of fire, the field of death, that awaited them, and him. And – almost the worst thing of all – he knew beyond doubt that they knew it, these men whose lives were entrusted to him; they recognized his cowardice – for that, undoubtedly, was the only name he knew to put to it – and despised him for it, some of them openly. Yet not even that humiliation could stiffen his backbone; he could not face the carnage, the dreadful threat of death; could not harden himself against the madness and the suffering around him. During the first deceptively successful push into East Prussia – successful only because German arms and efforts were at that moment concentrated upon Belgium and France on the Western Front – Sasha found himself in the field, leading men for the first time. On the second day the non-commissioned officer walking beside him was obliterated by a shell, nothing left of the living man, whom in fact Sasha had detested, but ragged and bloody flesh and bone and one boot, ridiculously all but undamaged, the foot still in it. Sasha leaned from the saddle, gagged and was sick. Again and again
he was sick. A young officer with whom he had been drinking the night before caught at his horse’s reins, hauling him along beside him; ‘Ride, Sasha, ride on! Don’t think of it.’ But how could he not? Then, and later in nightmares, until other, far worse images took its place? He found himself incapable of courage, even of the spurious kind that showed itself in the recklessness, often vodka-inspired, of many of his young fellow-officers. Friends died about him, and his fear, his terror of death, grew like a cancer within him. It was worse still after the initial advance – characterized from the start by a military ineptitude that on occasion amounted to crass stupidity – ground to its inevitable halt; for then, slowly and relentlessly, the reinforced German army led by Marshal Hindenburg outwitted and divided the Russians and began to push them back – back across those rivers, through those same fields and forests for which so many men had needlessly died, and in which the bones and the ruined flesh of man and horse still lay, stinking, half-buried in the churned and defiled earth like so much discarded offal. Sasha was haunted by the thought of pain, hag-ridden above all by the fear of dismemberment, of becoming one of those screaming wrecks who shrieked their lives away in the blood-spattered hospital tents or in the night-dark horror of no-man’s-land, too far from friend, too near to foe, to be helped with a kindly bullet or blade.

  The German advance picked up momentum. Two entire Russian army corps surrendered. Their General, helpfully, committed suicide. The Tsar and his Administration pontificated, from well behind the lines. In Sasha’s section – and not only there – the ordered retreat became a rout. Sasha abandoned his men who had been ordered to defend a heap of stinking rubble on a totally indefensible mountain track, and fled openly at last, urging his tired horse away from the merciless guns and bayonets, the marching feet and the grim, battle-hardened faces, away from the threat of death, of mutilation. He was fortunate that he was not alone. One man’s panic-stricken collapse hardly showed in an army in full retreat. He joined a party of Guards officers who, cut off from their units, were making for the railway. Nothing was left of the early Russian successes; weeks of carnage had gone for nothing. The Tsarist army had lost three hundred thousand men.

  The Russian forces were regrouping, overrunning a small town the name of which Sasha never bothered to discover. The title of this nameless, faceless shambles of a place in which he found himself did not concern him; he had one obsession, and one only. And within hours of arriving in the chaos of a fragmented and for the moment defeated army, dirty, hungry, and determined, he had located the salvation for which he looked.

  General Alexis Nicholaev Sevronsky had known Sasha from childhood; indeed it had been in the drunken company of the General’s son that Sasha’s brother Grigor had met his end. It had been Alexis Sevronsky who had secured for Sasha his inappropriate captaincy in the Preobrajensky, one of the Tsar’s own crack regiments of Guards.

  And the General was here, in the chaos of the retreat, making concise and efficient arrangements to evacuate himself and his staff to his distant cousin the Grand Duke Nicholas’s general field headquarters, known as Stavka, in Baranovici, in the safety of the middle of the Byelorussian countryside, well away from any further uncomfortable prospect of action. Sasha went to him ready to beg; in the event such a self-betrayal proved unnecessary. In an army in which who you were and who you knew had always counted for more than military valour, knowledge or experience, the General was more than happy to add the son of his old friend to his personal staff. The boy was a handsome lad, a good hand at the card table and a splendid rider; what else could one ask? Brusque messages were sent to Sasha’s commanding officer, another old friend of the General’s, and the deed was done. Within twenty-four hours Sasha Kolashki was on a train heading north to safety, carrying within him a quite ferocious determination never to approach a field of battle again. Despite the defeat in East Prussia the news from the south and from Poland was good. The Allies were holding in the west. Confidence was still strong; Britain, France and Russia between them would defeat the Hun in weeks, then they could all go home and get on with their lives. Until then, Sasha had contrived to ensure his own safety.

  * * *

  Margarita heard the news of her husband’s new appointment in a letter that arrived some few weeks later, and was far from displeased about it. To be attached to the personal staff of a General related to the Grand Duke Nicholas himself sounded very grand indeed; she wasted no time in spreading the news. The first hard frosts of the winter had arrived; the snow would not be far behind. The river slowed, muddily, and froze, the icebreakers crashed upstream to keep the waters open for as long as possible. By the time Sasha’s letter came the optimism that had invested the city had dissipated; no-one thought any longer that the war would be over before Christmas. But then, reasoned Margarita, with all those poor young men being killed at the front, and with Sasha having access to the ear of a real live General, who knew what might happen? There was nothing like a war to advance a young soldier’s fortunes, even she knew that. She studied newspaper pictures with care and designed several bright new uniforms for her favourite tiny cardboard character.

  * * *

  Dima, home on a short leave before being sent to the front, shook his head at his wife’s question. ‘No, my love. I won’t be home for Christmas. Don’t set your heart on it. Go with the others to Aunt Zhenia’s. Or perhaps to Sofia Petrovna’s?’ This last was spoken hesitantly.

  Natalia, at the sound of her mother’s name, shook her head. ‘She doesn’t like the children, Dima, you know she doesn’t. She says they make her head ache.’ Calmly she ironed, folded and packed, as if her heart were not breaking, as if the joyous secret she had kept from her husband had not become a lead weight upon her spirit. At her feet little Natasha played, fair-haired and blue-eyed as her Aunt Margarita, whilst at the table solemn Nicholai doggedly attempted the intricacies of a simple wooden jigsaw puzzle. Dima watched his small, composed, brown-haired wife helplessly. Since childhood he had loved her; there were no words to tell her how much. And as for the children –

  He bent and picked ’Tasha up, throwing her in the air, making her squeal. Natalia stopped for the briefest of moments, watching them, then she turned her back, busying herself again. ‘I truly don’t know what you do with your socks, Dima – do you chew them to produce such holes?’

  He smiled wryly from behind his daughter’s uninhibited giggles. ‘The food we get, I might as well.’

  It did not occur to Dima to complain. Like so many of his countrymen he was a fatalist; like all of them, he was a Russian. He did not want to leave his home, his much-loved wife and family, but his country called and he must answer. It had always been so. The needs of his small family must be submerged beneath the needs of the larger family that was his country. The Tsar, father of his people, asked it. These past weeks had not been so bad, stationed as he had been close to St Petersburg – Petrograd as it now was, though he could never remember to call it so – but the time had come now for him to leave. So leave he must, and it did not occur to him to question that. He bent to stand his small daughter upon unsteady legs. Last week an agitator had appeared in the camp; leaflets had been passed from hand to hand, the man had appeared and disappeared, talking to small groups, whispering, inciting. Dima supposed he must be a brave man; for certainly he would have been shot had the authorities caught him. In the end there had been no need; the men themselves had tired of him and taken it upon themselves to throw him in the river and leave him to freeze or to sink. A separate peace with Germany, he had preached. The overthrow of the men who perpetuated this filthy war; a capitalist’s war, nothing to do with the needs and lives of the workers; a war to preserve the rich and their riches, a war fought with the blood and the guts of the underdog to keep the underdog down. Dima had understood not a half of it. Things were as they were, and that was it. He needed no upstart Bolshevik to tell him that he was closer to a German worker than he was to his own officers; how could that be? A German w
orker was a German; Dima’s officer, however young, however arrogant, was a Russian, and the argument ended there. He swung his young daughter onto his shoulders and galloped clumsily about the small room. Natalia ducked her head and ironed a shirt for the second time, rubbing with painful vigour at nonexistent creases. Nicholai scowled beneath lowered brows at both of them, then diligently applied himself to his jigsaw.

  * * *

  Christmas came, and Christmas went, the first of the war, subdued and quiet. The Tsar in his wisdom had banned all sales of alcohol for the duration of hostilities; not an edict to which many paid much heed, except in public, but one that certainly affected the more common places of entertainment. The first, fragile successes of Russian arms were celebrated privately, and with a confidence born of a lack of understanding. In the field, though it had yet to be fully demonstrated, the Tsarist armies were ill-equipped, ill-led, and ill-founded. All that the Tsar of All the Russias had to expend was men, souls counted in millions. And, for the moment obedient, those souls fought like demons, and like demons were destroyed in the fire.

  * * *

  Varya was living, more or less permanently, at her sister’s house on the Fontanka. Nanny Irisha, with the far from princely sum provided for her in Victor’s will, had been pensioned off to her somewhat reluctant family in a village near Moscow. Strange, she had bitterly informed anyone who would listen, were the ways of God. Seraphima had been given simple notice to quit.