Russka (146 page)

He had never forgotten his surprise the day they were issued with arms. For when twenty of his men had received rifles, the officer in charge stopped, with an abrupt: ‘That’s it.’

‘But what about the rest?’ he had asked, surprised.

‘They’ll have to get them at the front.’

‘You mean, there are stores up there?’

The officer had looked at him pityingly. ‘They’ll get them from their fellow soldiers,’ he said. ‘The ones that have fallen.’ And it was not long before Alexander discovered that, in some regiments in this section of the front, twenty-five per cent of the men had been sent forward with no arms, expected to scavenge them, so to speak, from the hands of the dead. Somehow he had managed to beg and steal rifles for all his men; but he knew of one unit where
half the men were armed with pitchforks, and there was a rumour that to the south, one company were preparing to fight the enemy with their bare hands.

The artillery supporting them, he knew, had only two rounds per field gun; but he had not told his men this.

Then there had been the incident of the wireless.

He had been at the company command post two days before, where they had a wireless set up. The captain was busily engaged with this, giving the colonel a detailed briefing on their position and dispositions and looking rather pleased with himself. But only one thing puzzled Bobrov.

‘Are we transmitting everything like that, sir?’ he asked the captain when he was finished.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, there’s no code. You were transmitting everything in clear.’

The captain stared at him with a frown. ‘Why ever not, for God’s sake?’

‘I just thought – what if the enemy was picking up our signals? He’d know all our dispositions.’

And now the captain’s face cleared. ‘Don’t be silly, Bobrov.’ He smiled. ‘We’re transmitting in Russian, man. The Germans can’t understand a word we say.’

His attitude was not unusual. The transmissions for the entire Russian army were transmitted in clear, which, as the German High Command was later to remark: ‘Made things simpler on the eastern front.’

Why were things so badly organized? Partly, he knew, it was because the high command was dominated by men like the captain: old-fashioned, parade ground soldiers who despised modern weaponry and modern methods. The commander-in-chief, Sukhomlinov, was just such a man. There was, he also knew, a cadre of forward-looking younger officers who chafed under this regime; but these men were not in control.

But it was not just the generals. As the captain himself, in a moment of honesty, suddenly admitted to him: ‘The trouble is, we had enough ammunition for a short war but not a longer one. Our factories just don’t produce enough.’

And what, Alexander wondered, did his men make of it all? They were mostly in their early twenties. None of them wanted to
be in the army, but they seemed to understand well enough that Russia must be defended. Except, perhaps, for one. He was a pleasant young fellow with a broad face, not quick of mind, from a small village in the province of Riazan. Alexander liked him and often chatted to him in the evenings. But there was one thing he could never seem to make the fellow understand.

‘I mean, sir, they haven’t attacked Riazan, have they?’ he had said one day, with genuine puzzlement in his voice. ‘So what does the army want with me?’

‘But if we don’t fight them here in Poland, they might get to Riazan later,’ Alexander had suggested.

It had not worked, however. For the fellow had only looked at him earnestly, and then, with a childlike smile, replied: ‘Yes sir. But, then again, they might not.’ And Alexander had wondered how many others, like this simple fellow from Riazan, there might be in the Russian army.

It began quite suddenly, and it was unlike anything he had expected.

There were no German helmets; no squadrons of artillery and flashing swords; no lines of men with rifles. Nothing but a distant, sullen roar.

And then the crashes. At first the German shells fell into the woods behind. Then some more smacked into the field in front of them, sending up little typhoons of mud. The enemy knew their positions all right. And then while his men, frightened and mystified, cowered in their inadequate trench, the roaring went on, and on.

For the spring and summer of 1915, the Russian army experienced the full weight of an orchestrated German bombardment.

It was two hours later that the captain came by. His whiskered face was covered in mud as he peered down into the trench. They had taken only one direct hit. It was strangely clean. The young fellow from Riazan had simply disappeared.

‘Come on, Bobrov. Get out,’ the captain cried. ‘We’re moving back.’

They clambered out of the trench and followed him, keeping just inside the wood where the shells were not falling. After a time they came to the command post. It had been obliterated.

‘Damn Germans! They know how to shoot, I must admit,’ the captain said to him with a wry grin.

He’s not such a bad fellow, Alexander thought. Just a bit old-fashioned. And he glanced back to make sure all his men were together.

A shell screamed over. Then another.

And then there was a very loud bang. It was, really, quite extraordinarily loud. And everything went white.

He awoke very slowly, through a haze, and to the sound of a piano.

How strange, he thought. I must have died. For how else should he be here, in his own bedroom, in his childhood home at Russka? Curiously he gazed around him. It seemed that the angels had decided to change the furniture somewhat, but there could be no doubt about where he was: he could see a familiar tree out of the window. That sound from the piano was certainly heavenly. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, stranger yet, it was to see Nadezhda staring down at him and smiling. He gazed at her in wonder, then frowned. Had she died also? He was sorry for that.

And then her voice, excitedly.

‘Dimitri – Dimitri! He’s come round.’ And the heavenly music stopped.

It had been Vladimir’s idea. When Alexander had been brought back to Moscow, still barely conscious, and his father had wondered what to do for him, it was the rich industrialist who had organized everything. Alexander had been lying there, delirious and tended by a doctor and a nurse, for three weeks.

Gradually he learned what had happened. The shell whose blast had so nearly killed him was a tiny part of a huge bombardment which had pushed the Russian army in the north back from Poland nearly three hundred miles.

‘It’s a catastrophe,’ Nadezhda told him, the third day he was well enough to talk. ‘Most of Lithuania’s gone. They’re advancing across Latvia. And our people are still pulling back. Old General Sukhomlinov’s been dismissed. About time too. Everyone says the
government’s incompetent. They say we can only hope for help from St Nicolas the Miracle-worker!’

But the really fascinating news came from his father.

Though the Tsar had dismissed the Duma early in the year and ruled by decree, the set-backs in the war had been so great that he had been forced to call it into session again, and so Nicolai Bobrov was in the capital. So great had the anti-German feeling been since war began that the government had changed the capital’s name from St Petersburg, with its German-sounding ending, to the more Russian Petrograd. It was from Petrograd, therefore, that Nicolai’s letters were now addressed.

They were full of information. He gave his son character sketches of the important men in the parliament: Rodzianko, the chairman of the Duma, portly but wise; Kerensky, the leader of the Socialists – ‘A good speaker, but with no real political plan except to destroy the Tsar’ – and several others. He related all the gossip from the court. ‘The Empress’s friend, the fellow Rasputin, caused so much trouble with his lechery that he’s been sent back to his family in Siberia. Let’s hope he stays there.’ And above all, to Alexander’s amazement, his father was optimistic.

The Germans can’t defeat Russia for a simple reason: we continue to retreat and we always have reserves. Napoleon found the same thing. Even if we abandon the capital, we shall still exhaust them.

But this present crisis is our last and best opportunity to reform the government. The Tsar didn’t want to call the Duma back but now he’s had to. We shall force some measure of democracy on him and save Russia by doing so.

Out of the defeat comes victory, my dear boy.

Alexander could only hope his father was right.

For a long time he was still very weak. It seemed the blast had damaged his insides in some way. His wounds, which were extensive, still caused him pain. ‘But you’re young. You’ll mend,’ the doctor told him cheerfully. They put him in a wheelchair and arranged a room for him downstairs so that he could wheel himself out on to the verandah and enjoy the company.

The house was busy. Dear Arina, as housekeeper, ran everything with wonderful efficiency, and she personally would
supervise the samovar of tea and the wonderful pastries that appeared on the verandah every afternoon. Despite the war, the little museum and the workshops were functioning and Arina’s son Ivan, now sixteen, was an apprentice to the woodcarver there and showing great signs of promise.

Though Peter Suvorin and Karpenko remained in Moscow, the rest of the family had all moved to the country and Alexander was interested to see how each person seemed to have their own appointed task. Mrs Suvorin was busy helping a new
Zemstvo
organization to house the flood of refugees from the front. ‘We’ve even got two Jewish families in the village,’ she informed them. Vladimir had converted the Russka cloth-works into a small armaments factory, making cartridges and grenades. As for Dimitri, he was playing and composing each day. A dozen suites for piano and two movements of his first symphony were already written, the scores being kept in a locked cupboard which was treated by all the family with the reverence that used to be reserved for an icon.

And then there was Nadezhda.

Her father had set up a little nursing home where wounded soldiers could convalesce in Russka, and every day she would go over there to nurse them. Sometimes those that were fit enough were brought over for tea at the house. And though Alexander sometimes observed a slight coldness in the girl towards her mother, it seemed to him that there was a new gentleness in her manner: a gentleness that, in particular, was meant for him.

And so the month of July passed peacefully, and that of August. During that month the doctor allowed him, twice, to be taken by cart to the monastery. How delightful it was, he thought, to be back amongst such familiar sights.

Except for one thing: the village.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ he remarked to Vladimir. ‘What happened? I never saw the place so prosperous.’

It was true. For while, by the summer of 1915, the great cities were suffering from the war, in the huge Russian countryside, the First World War ushered in a time of plenty. How could this be?

‘Actually,’ Vladimir explained, ‘it’s quite simple. Like most administrations in wartime, the government’s paying for things by printing money. Consequently there’s inflation. And the one thing everyone needs, which the peasants have, is grain. Grain prices
are high, we’ve just had a bumper harvest, and the villagers have all got excess income.’ He grinned. ‘Do you know, that rogue Boris Romanov’s even bought himself a phonograph. He even plays Tchaikovsky on it, I believe.’

A week later, visiting Boris Romanov’s comfortable house, Alexander saw this marvel for himself. And he wondered to himself: Could it be, after all, that this war would be the saving of Russia, and that his optimistic father was right?

The blow fell in late August. The Tsar dismissed the Duma. At the same time, he decided to take over, personally, as commander-in-chief of the Russian armies. He would go to the front himself.

In the first week of September, Alexander received a long letter from his father. It was no longer optimistic. And its ending was filled with foreboding.

Everyone pleaded with him, from Rodzianko down; but the Tsar is an obstinate fellow who believes it is his duty to be an autocrat. So democracy under tsardom is dead, I’m sure of it. As for his attempts to revive the army, they are bound to be unlucky. I can foresee only chaos.
Rasputin has reappeared here. I hear he saw the Tsar himself. God save us.

Yet even now, it was hard to believe.

The rule of the Tsar was over. Russia was free.

Nicolai Bobrov stood at the window and looked out eagerly. A head cold had kept him indoors that day. It was three hours now since his son Alexander had gone over to the Taurida Palace where the Duma met to see if the news had come. Any moment he would be back.

Surely the news must have come. Surely by now the Tsar must have signed the abdication. ‘For God knows,’ he murmured, ‘the Tsar can’t possibly go on.’ Not now that Bobrov and his friends had taken power.

For in the end, it was the Duma who had deposed the Tsar.

What a strange business it had been; yet not really so surprising. The fears he had expressed back in that fateful summer of 1915 had been justified.

The Tsar had been frequently away at the front. True the army had not done so badly. The great Brusilov offensive of 1916, mounted while the British were making their mass attack on the Somme, though it had failed to break the enemy, had made some gains on the western front. Down in the Caucasus, Russian troops had advanced into Turkey. But in the south, Germany and Austria had pushed to the western shore of the Black Sea through Rumania and the British had been forced to pull out of Gallipoli, leaving Russia still blockaded at the entrance of the Black Sea and unable to export her grain.

The war on the Russian front, as on the western front, was a grim stalemate.

But at the centre – Bobrov could only shake his head. It had been a nightmare. The Empress, that foolish and ignorant German woman, had been left holding the reigns of government. It seemed she had got it into her head that she was another Catherine the Great – so she once told a startled official. And beside the Empress – seen or unseen – had been the terrible Rasputin.