The People's Act of Love

by James Meek

  I went back to Chernetsky’s tent and left the torch and they asked if I had found him. I said I had not. Two of them said at once: He found him! I asked them why it had to be with such a young girl. They were unhappy at what I said. Lashmanov said, quite seriously, that we all might be killed the next day, and every man should take what he could, girl, woman, grandmother, boy. I said that surely if we were going to be killed we should be praying to God to forgive us our sins. They all laughed and told me I didn’t have any sins. And Lashmanov said – Anna, my dearest, you know I hate to use such words, but I promised not to hide anything from you, and now we are very close to the change – he said: A Hussar drinks, fucks and fights, and then he prays. And then he drinks, fucks and fights again.

  In the morning the officers got their orders. The regiment was to attack. The whole corps, the whole army, and other Russian armies, were to attack. We knew we were to be in the vanguard but we had a sense that we were part of a numberless host, cities of warriors on the move, and we felt strong. The fact that the senior officers had detailed maps of where we were going, even though it was not Russian territory, surprised and encouraged us. What they would not tell us was whether we were to attack Germans or Austrians. We feared the Germans, but the Austrians, we thought, might simply run away. Many of them were not Austrians at all, but Czechs, Slovakians, Slovenians, Croats, Bosnians, Ruthenians, Poles. They might even come over to our side. Our pistols were loaded and our sabres were sharp. The thing I feared most was having to strike an enemy with my sabre. I was trained to do it, of course, but the thought of coming close enough to a man to kiss him or shake his hand and bringing my sabre down to try to cut him in half was terrible. I did not think I could find enough hate in me for a stranger, even if he was trying to do the same to me. I had the same fear on the day we met, outside the factory. Thinking about this, I started thinking about you. I thought about Hijaz, the beautiful animal under me, carrying me forward, and what Chanov had said, how he had asked me if a horse could sin. I wondered if I was so different from Chernetsky with the girl: even more so, since the girl was, perhaps, not completely innocent, whereas Hijaz was. I thought about Chernetsky’s last words, too, over and over again. This is not for you. How I fretted while we rode out that morning. Yet that day we never saw the enemy, even though by the time it ended, almost all the men and all the horses in the regiment were dead.

  It was a hot day towards the end of August. I remember the smell of cowslips growing at the roadside, stronger than the smell of dung, sometimes, from the wagon trains we overtook. We passed columns of marching soldiers miles long. Many of them were singing. The feeling that this was some kind of strange mass excursion started to come back. It did not last. We started to pass people fleeing their homes, moving in the opposite direction. We were still in Russia, but it was a different kind of Russia, one where the people who lived there did not believe in it. In the Jewish villages those brave enough to come out and watch us pass looked at us as if they hoped we would never come back; in the Greek Catholic villages, the cheering was half-hearted. We passed the Greek Catholic shrines, with their Christs in agony on the cross, and their contented, placid Madonnas. I remember thinking how strange it was that all the armies about to fight each other believed that Christ was sent by God to be the last man tortured by other men, yet here they were, about to torture each other by the tens of thousands. The only people who did not believe it were the Jews, and they were not fighting.

  At noon, we approached the artillery line. They had not begun firing, but they were preparing to. The road passed close to a battery of about two dozen howitzers. Hundreds of men were moving around them with an energy and purpose I had not seen before in the tending of machinery. You know I am not good with comparisons, Anna, I am not a poet, but I remember thinking how it looked as if the men were serving the guns, as if the guns were their masters and they were running about for their sake. It put me in mind of that film we saw about Louis XIV, the Sun King, do you remember? How the big, fat actor playing the king stood absolutely still, just yawning, while all those dozens of servants fussed over him, dressing, bathing and powdering him. And the king never acknowledged they were there, or what they were doing. Such was his power. These machines, these big black ugly tubes with their wheels and pistons and levers, were the masters of the men. Next to each gun was a pyramid of brass shells, higher than a horse, to feed them with.

  When we were a few hundred metres away the artillerymen froze, like actors in a tableau vivant, and there was a bright flash from each gun, together with a puff of black smoke, and the guns jumped back and rolled forward again. For one second I was amazed at how quiet they were. Then the sound reached us, a series of terrible, cracking thuds. I suppose we were badly trained. I had never heard so many big guns so close. What you have to understand, Anna, is that this is not just a loud noise, like a shout, or a train passing, or an orchestra at full blast. It is a physical blow, it does not just deafen you but it punches your chest as well, you feel as if your heart and lungs are being shaken free of their fastenings. Most of us struggled to control our horses. A few shied; none bolted. Hijaz took it better than I did. After a few moments I realised I was bent forward in the saddle, eyes closed, breathing as if I had just come up for air after nearly drowning, and was gripping Hijaz so tightly with my knees that he was slowing down, about to stop. And the firing was finished; there was the clatter of the column on the road again, and the larks over the fields on either side. I relaxed, opened my eyes and nudged Hijaz forward before he had a chance to obstruct the squadron behind me.

  As I passed the guns, they fired again. The flash, the smoke, the recoil and the blast all happened at the same time. It could not have been much louder but it seemed so. All I could think of was myself, keeping myself whole. It was so intimate. I had the feeling that a stranger had appeared in front of me and, without any reason or sign of emotion, shoved me hard in the chest. Without realising what I was doing, I dropped the reins, and my feet seemed to lift out of the stirrups of their own accord, and I hunched over with my knees drawn up against the pommel and my hands over my face. As before, the horror passed, and I became aware of what I was doing, and moved my hands slowly away from my eyes. I could not understand what was happening; I seemed to be in shade, though there were no trees; and Hijaz was walking on as if nothing had happened. I straightened up and returned my feet to the stirrups. When I had tried to hide from the noise of the guns, four of my troopers, the tallest, had ridden around me, shielding me from the view of the rest of the squadron and picking up Hijaz’s reins. They did not look at me, and did not speak. Their move was so lightly and quickly made that they must have rehearsed it. I was astonished, and grateful, although I said nothing, bracing myself for the next salvo, clenching my jaw and feeling the reins slippery with sweat. That time, the salvo did not come until we were a mile away, when it was more tolerable. I do not know what happened; perhaps the troopers had seen me flinch at the sound of artillery in exercises, and were ready, or perhaps the Colonel had spoken to them. He had asked me about this before, and I had lied that I was not troubled by it. Pride, Anna. Anyway, now, I was touched and given heart by the care my troopers showed. Yet what if I had been exposed there and then, and led back down the lines in shame, accused, I suppose, of cowardice? Perhaps I would have been shot. Perhaps I would never have met Chanov again. God knows his purpose.

  We rode on. The gunfire stopped after a time, and it became very peaceful, although I remember thinking how few civilians there were to be seen.

  We were on the Lemberg road. The regiment was marshalled and fed and watered at an abandoned village, where the staff had made headquarters in the house of the richest peasant. They were setting up field telephones, and a despatch rider on a motorcycle came and went. Again there was a sense of order and purpose and service to a remoter, more demanding power than we had served before. At about four in the afternoon the fighting squadrons were ordered to mount up and advance in
columns, cross country.

  Some word came down to the junior officers about what had been said among the staff. This was not the great attack; that would be later. We were being sent to test enemy defences. Balloons, aeroplanes, spies and scouts had looked over the Austrian lines – they were Austrians, it turned out – but there were still enemy positions the staff weren’t sure about. There was a wooded valley they were interested in. The plan was for the regiment to approach the valley from the low ridges on either side. Rumlyan-Pechersky was in trouble because this was to have been done the previous day, and so even though it was late, with only five hours of decent light left, and we were supposed to go, reconnoitre, and return, he insisted we move immediately. The squadron commanders did not like his plan, which involved taking the whole regiment through a five hundred metre gap between dense woods to reach the open country that led to the valley. Rumlyan-Pechersky insisted, pointing out that the staff had promised to send a rifle battalion to secure the woods on either side of the gap. So we set off, with the sun in our eyes, as if we had given it to the Austrians to use against us.

  After an hour, we saw the gap ahead. The squadrons were walking in columns four abreast across the stubble of harvested wheat. The idea was to move as quickly as possible through the gap and then wheel round and dash for the ridges. Rumlyan-Pechersky’s adjutant was looking through binoculars. Even without them we could see the flags waving from the edges of the woods, the signal that the infantry had secured them. The bugler sounded canter and our horses stretched their stride. We drew our sabres, although God knows, we did not expect to have to use them. It was to make us feel strong, their sharpened weight hanging from our arms. And we did feel strong, as the ground began to thunder with the sound of our hooves, and we were young, and there seemed to be so invincibly many of us, almost a thousand, a flood of horse power and khaki stretched back in the wind. You could see the teeth, horse teeth and men’s teeth as their lips stretched back. The sabres were supposed to have dull, greased flats, to slide smoothly out of the scabbard and not reflect the sun, but some men’s metal sparkled among the field of warriors. I saw it shine.

  I was in the van of the second squadron to go through. Ahead of me I could see the first squadron slow as it entered open country and begin to turn towards the head of the valley. I heard a strange little sound in the air around me, the kind of sound a fly swatter makes before it hits anything, and sure enough, Khigrin, the lieutenant next to me, slapped his neck with the kind of grunting cry you make when an insect bites you. And then he fell off his horse! I remember thinking how embarrassed he would be, one of the best horsemen in the regiment, falling off his mount because of an insect bite. It seems to me now that I thought all this before I became aware that above the jostling, thudding, jingling sound of horsemen and that curious whishing sound of air being struck there was the sound of machine gun fire. Even then I could not comprehend that it might be directed towards us. I turned round and saw our column was shedding little black heaps which lay dark against the bright stubble like dung. Trooper Bilenko was looking at me with a face like a fighting dog at bay. I saw him bend sharply in the middle, sideways, like a puppet, something a man could not do unless his spine had been violently broken, and he started to shout something at me, I heard the first word, ‘They –’ when part of his neck snapped apart, like a piece of rubber pulled tight, and his mouth was stopped with a sluice of blood. I felt some warm drops of it hit my face as Bilenko’s horse died under him and catapaulted the dead trooper over its head onto the ground. I turned round again and wiped my eyes clean of Bilenko’s blood with the back of my hand. I could see the first squadron exploding in front of me. Its neat outline of a few seconds ago was still there, only marked by dead and crippled men and horses, while the living and wounded remnant were flying in all directions, being cut down as they moved.

  I understood the squadron had to wheel into line abreast and head for the woods on one or other side. I was confused. It would have been the right thing to do if I were a good officer keeping a clear head, since the fire was coming from there and we were too close to retreat, but in the state I was in I was thinking just of how dark and sheltered the woods were, how they would make a place to hide. What is even more peculiar is that I was thinking less of myself, or the other men in the squadron, than of Hijaz. The most important thing at that moment was that Hijaz should not be harmed. I felt something vital to me depended on it.

  I could see no other officers left alive, or the bugler, so I reined Hijaz in, turned, lifted my sabre and shouted the command, looking back down the column. At first I thought the men, in desperation, were trying to take cover on the ground, or behind dead horses, there were so many lying still and so few still standing. It did not seem possible that we could have lost more than half the squadron in so short a time. Yet we had. The survivors began to wheel. Even as they did, of course, they were still dropping, in such a quick, dull way. The bullets took possession of them and in a moment they ceased to be, without a hair’s breadth of space between living and dying. A kind of incantation began to swell in my mind, to whom, I don’t know, calling for it to slow down, to wait, to let it be done with more mercy and dignity, to let us witness, at least, each execution, even if the witnesses were then themselves to be executed. And the more blood and falling around me the louder the incantation, as if part of me felt that I could really, if not halt the killing, at least make it pass more slowly, or be done again from the beginning, in such a way that we were ready. Perhaps I was thinking of football, looking for someone to blow the whistle, impose order and fairness. But I saw Chernetsky, sound asleep in the stubble with his jacket covered in fresh blood and his head resting on the rising and falling chest of his mutilated dying horse, sound asleep, even though a trooper whose legs had been shot to bits was screaming in his ear for him to get up. Then just as we were about to charge for the woods we heard a sound like a flock of banshees settling down on us from above and the sky burst into pieces. I was inside a drum being beaten by a mad boy as big as the world, the sound and the blast together, the shells exploding just above the ground. I knew I was deaf after the first fall of shells but I still heard the explosions with my whole body. Even though I had not been hit I felt my bones were going to break with the blasts. I toppled off Hijaz and fell on a corpse, rolling off and staggering back and opening my eyes in time to see a huge spinning blade of shrapnel cut my horse open from neck to hindquarters, cut him ragged and deep, to guts and joints. He stood four square for a moment, shook his head from side to side in irritation, as he would do when the flies got too many. Then his legs folded and he fell. I drew my pistol and crawled over to him but his heart had stopped beating. I put my hands around his neck and curled myself up as tightly as I could, burying my face in the warm dark shield of my chest and his mane, and cried like a baby. Anna, I truly did, I had read the expression, but I heard myself bawling, screaming through the tears, and even when the tears stopped, till my throat was raw.

  After a time, when I had stopped screaming, still in my cocoon, it occurred to me that there was no more shelling, and the nature of the shooting had changed. It seemed incomprehensible to me that men should still be capable of fighting, but as the light faded – I opened my eyes for a second now and then – I could hear them, shouting orders, shouting for help, shooting. Horses passed at speed, singly and in small groups. I heard more shelling further away, outbreaks of rifle fire and the screams of men charging, and an aeroplane overhead. Then it was dark.

  I do not know what happened, whether we mistook the flags, whether the Austrians captured our men and discovered the signal. I do not know whose shells landed on us, the Austrians or ours. It does not seem to matter. It did not matter then. I uncurled myself in the darkness and raised myself on my knees. Around me I could see the lumps of dead. There was some movement, a slithering and a twitching. They were not all dead. I heard a horse’s sick breathing, and then a man’s voice, murmuring and wheezing. I clasped my ha
nds together, laid them on Hijaz’s stiff belly, bent my head and prayed to God to forgive us all.