The White Guard (16 page)

   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 Podgorodnaya, 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.

   The field-telephones shrilled ceaselessly in the saloon car, its carpeted floor trodden and crumpled, until Franko and Garas, the two signalmen, began to go mad.

   Toropets' plan was a cunning one, as cunning as the tense, black-browed, clean-shaven colonel himself. He had intentionally sited his two batteries behind the forest, intentionally blown up the streetcar lines in the shabby little village of Pushcha-Voditsa. He had then purposely moved his machine-guns away from the farmlands, deploying them towards the left flank. For Toropets wanted to fool the defenders of the City into thinking that he, Toropets, intended to assault the City from his left (the northern) flank, from the suburb of Kurenyovka, in order to draw the City's forces in that direction whilst the real attack on the City would be delivered frontally, straight along the Brest-Litovsk highway from Svyatoshino, timed to coincide with a simultaneous assault from the south, on his right flank, from the direction of the village of Demiyovka.

   So, in accordance with Toropets' plan, Petlyura's regiments were

   moving across from the left to the right flank, and to the sound of cracking whips and accordion music, with a sergeant at the head of each troop marched the four squadrons of Kozyr-Leshko's regiment of horse.

   'Hurrah!' echoed the woods around Bely Hai, 'Hurrah!' Leaving Bely Hai, they crossed the railroad line by a wooden bridge and from there they caught their first glimpse of the City. It lay in the distance, still warm from sleep, wrapped in a vapor that was half mist, half smoke. Rising in his stirrups Kozyr stared through his Zeiss field-glasses at the innumerable roofs of many-storey houses and the domes of the ancient cathedral of Saint Sophia.

   Fighting was already in progress on Kozyr's right. From a mile or so away came the boom of gunfire and the stutter of machine-guns; waves of Petlyura's infantry were advancing on Post-Volynsk as the noticeably thinner and more ragged lines of the motley White Guard infantry, shattered by the heavy enemy fire, were retreating from the village.

   
*

   The City. A heavy, lowering sky. A street corner. A few suburban bungalows, a scattering of army greatcoats.

   'I've just heard - people are saying they've made an agreement with Petlyura to allow all Russian-manned units to keep their arms and to go and join Denikin on the Don. . . .'

   'Well? So what?'

   A rumbling burst of gunfire. Then a machine-gun started to bark.

   A cadet's voice, full of bewilderment and despair:

   'But then that means we must cease resistance, doesn't it?'

   Wearily, another cadet's voice:

   'God alone knows . . .'

   
*

   Colonel Shchetkin had been missing from his headquarters since early morning, for the simple reason that the headquarters no

   longer existed. Shchetkin's headquarters had already withdrawn to the vicinity of the railroad station on the night of the fourteenth and had spent the night in the Rose of Stamboul Hotel, right alongside the telegraph office. The field-telephone still squealed occasionally in Shchetkin's room, but towards dawn it grew silent. At daybreak two of Colonel Shchetkin's aides vanished without trace. An hour later, after searching furiously for something in his trunks and tearing certain papers into shreds, Shchetkin himself left the squalid little Rose of Stamboul, although no longer wearing his regulation greatcoat and shoulder straps. He was dressed in a civilian fur coat and trilby hat, which he had suddenly and mysteriously acquired.

   Taking a cab a block away from the 'Rose', Shchetkin the civilian drove to Lipki, where he arrived at a small but cosy and well furnished apartment, rang the bell, kissed the buxom golden-haired woman who opened the door and retired with her to the secluded bedroom. The blonde woman's eyes widened with terror as he whispered to her face:

   'It's all over! God, I'm exhausted . . .' With which Colonel Shchetkin sank down on to the bed and fell asleep after a cup of black coffee prepared by the loving hands of the lady with golden hair.

   
#

   The cadets of the 1st Infantry Detachment knew nothing of this. This was a pity, for if they had known, it might have roused their imagination and instead of cowering under shrapnel fire at Post-Volynsk they might have set off for that comfortable apartment in Lipki, dragged out the sleepy Colonel Shchetkin and hanged him from the lamp-post right opposite the blonde creature's apartment.

   They would have done well to do so, but they did not because they knew nothing and understood nothing. Indeed, no one in the City understood anything and it would probably be a long time before they did.

   A few rather subdued steel-helmeted Germans could still be seen around the City, and for all anyone knew the foxy Hetman

   with his carefully trimmed moustaches (that morning only very few people yet knew of the wounding of the mysterious Major von Schratt) was still there, as were his excellency Prince Belorukov and General Kartuzov, busy forming detachments for the defense of the Mother of Russian Cities (nobody yet knew that they had run away that morning). In fact the City was ominously deserted. The name 'Petlyura' still aroused fury in the City and that day's issue of the
News
was full of jokes at Petlyura's expense, made by corrupt refugee journalists from St Petersburg; uniformed cadets were still walking around the City, yet out in the suburbs people could already hear the whistling sound of Petlyura's motley cavalry troops cracking their whips as his lancers crossed from the left to the right flank at an easy gallop. If the cavalry is only three miles out of town, people asked, what hope can there be for the Hetman? And it's his blood they're out for... Perhaps the Germans will back him up? But in that case why were the tin-hatted Germans grinning and doing nothing as they stood on Fastov station and watched trainload after trainload of Petlyura's troops being brought up to the assault? Perhaps an agreement has been made with Petlyura to let his troops occupy the City peacefully? But if so, why the hell are the White officers' guns still shooting at Petlyura?