The Story of a Life

48

Paper Scraps and the Bugler

The front-line hospital train consisted mostly of heated goods wagons. There were only four passenger carriages, and in one of these an operating theatre had been set up. I was assigned to this carriage. From that moment on I was all alone. Only doctors and nurses were allowed into the operating theatre. For days on end I did nothing but rub the white walls with turpentine, scrub the floors, sterilise bandages and gauze in the autoclave and listen to the singing of our ‘chemist’, who spent his days in his little cubbyhole of a dispensary behind a partition. Romanin was in fact just a student from the Moscow Institute of Trade. He loved to sing all sorts of songs to combat his loneliness in the train dispensary.

His repertoire was extensive. When he was feeling playful, he’d sing:

How I’d love a young man,

Parading in a fine white shirt,

Such a fine white shirt,

A fancy cane in his hand.

In a melancholy mood, Romanin would sob:

Oh, my beloved, why did you kiss me so,

And set my heart ablaze with this terrible glow …

Sometimes Dr Pokrovsky would upbraid him for mixing up the medicines and then Romanin would become morose and sing an ominous anarchist anthem:

Hark to the sound of the signal,

And the mighty cannons’ roll,

Arise, O brothers, heed the call of Ravachol!

Romanin had a nasty habit of sitting in his dispensary for hour upon hour, hiding from me and refusing to acknowledge my calls from the other side of the partition. It was not surprising then, how I’d jump, startled and swearing, when the silence was suddenly broken by some ridiculous tune sung in his desperate howl:

He was a bit paunchy,

Ah, yes, paunchy, paunchy,

And something of a baldy,

But did I care?!

To the accompaniment of these songs our empty train crawled over the sodden plains from Moscow to Brest-Litovsk. At night I’d take myself off to bed in a carriage set aside for the orderlies known as the ‘staff room’. My bunkmates were Romanin, Nikolasha Rudnev, a decent oaf from the agricultural college in Petrovsk, and a quiet Pole by the name of Hugo Lyakhman. In his little free time, Lyakhman did nothing but polish his boots. The shine was unbearable.

It was quiet at the front, and so we sat for a long time in Brest, a dull town set in the middle of a sorrowful plain. That spring of 1915 was equally sorrowful. Nothing grew here but some dandelions along the paths. The sunlight barely shone through the permanently hazy sky. The war was right next door, but all we could see of it were the throngs of soldiers and low-ranking officers milling about Brest station and the long troop trains crowding the dirty sidings. The air war had as yet not begun. The Germans’ big guns could not reach Brest. The fighting was far off, near Keltse.

We were impatient to be sent to the front. We were tired of waiting. It seemed to us as if the wheels of the train had rusted to the rails and the train would never move. Young and excited, we had forgotten that staying in Brest meant that soldiers weren’t being wounded in battle, that there was a lack of injured and maimed men. Only Romanin thought of this, and he would say to us: ‘You’ve come to the front acting as if it’s a night out at the theatre. Stamping your feet in a hurry for the curtain to go up. You fools!’

It was always quiet for a few minutes in the staff room after Romanin’s outbursts, but then the arguments broke out again – typical Russian student arguments. They were loud, endless and always well meant, even if we held wildly divergent views. Mostly we argued about Germany and the monstrous stupidity and impudence of the Prussian militarists. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s spiky waxed moustache, the fantasy of all martinets and pimps, served as the symbol of Germany in those days. It seemed impossible to believe that this was the Germany of Schiller and Goethe, Richard Wagner and the young and, at the time, beautiful writer Heinrich Mann.

Finally, the day came. Our train slowly began to move. I leapt from the train and raced down the platform to the operating carriage; once we were in motion, it wasn’t possible to go from one to the other. I hopped up, opened the door and sat down on the rear platform, my legs dangling over the side. I sat like that for several hours, my eyes searching the fields and villages of Poland for traces of war as we rolled along. But there weren’t any. We rode past villages where the bindweed clung to the fences upon which the locals had placed their clay pitchers, upside down, to dry, just as it was done back home in Ukraine. Arrogant storks looked out from their enormous nests on top of the peasant huts. The air was soft and the colour of pale gold, like the hair of the young children who waved excitedly at the passing train.

Just as soft and golden was the face of a Polish girl carrying two buckets of water on her yoke. She stopped to set the buckets on the ground, shielded her eyes with her hand and watched for a long time as the carriages slowly rumbled by. Then, she brushed a strand of hair from her face and picked up her buckets. Tall black crucifixes stood at the crossroads. Old women with their knitting sat beside them, and tethered goats grazed on the grass. Candles burned in a small chapel, but I could not make out anyone inside. And still the same soft golden colour of the fields and the same streams, sluggishly flowing over pale, golden sandy bottoms.

‘Where’s the war?’ I asked myself. Our train passed by the fortress at Ivangorod. Far beyond the Vistula we could see its green earthworks and the tall stumps of ancient black poplars felled during the siege.

And then suddenly I saw it: hurriedly dug trenches filled with water stretched in rows across the swampy lowlands from the railway tracks all the way to the horizon. Our train was moving along a high dike. The engine let out a whistle, the brakes screeched and we stopped: for some reason the bridge across the Vistula was closed. In the silence which followed we could hear a bugler blowing some kind of signal from inside the fortress. Orderlies began jumping out of the train.

‘We’re gonna be here for a good hour,’ Romanin yelled to me. ‘Come on!’

We ran down the steep bank and then walked along the trenches. I began to catch sight of paper scraps and crumpled tin cans lying everywhere in the grass, which had apparently sprouted after the battle. The tins had been opened in a hurry, perhaps with a bayonet. Their jagged edges had rust on them; it looked like blood.

I didn’t understand how so much paper could end up on a battlefield. There were scraps of letters, newspapers, postcards, books, documents and faded, sweat-stained photographs. Soldiers’ caps had been trampled into the mud. An Austrian cap, its peak torn off, dangled from a burnt bush. Rags of coarse cotton soldiers’ underwear fluttered in the wind on a twisted barbed-wire entanglement, as if they had purposely been hung up there to dry. Barbed wire lay about in piles of rust.

‘It looks as if water isn’t the only thing that can rust iron,’ mumbled Romanin.

‘What else?’

‘Blood,’ he replied, reluctantly.

All around lay soldiers’ boots, buttons, cartridges, steel clips, torn packets of Ira cigarettes, grey machine-gun straps, red silk ribbons, nails, soaked tobacco pouches embossed with crosses, little icons, belts, the soles of boots, wrapping paper, dirty bandages tied up with string, Austrian dagger-bayonets, smashed wooden spoons, steel shell casings, bullet-riddled canteens, broken glass. This was the rubbish of war – everything a man leaves behind on the field of death, everything that he had cherished while alive and then tossed away, abandoned to the sun, wind and rain. I thought to myself that grown men had fought and died here, but each one of them had treated his soldier’s property, which he had carried and feared to part with, like a child. Near a shell hole lay a dead horse, its bones picked clean by carrion crows, its long yellow teeth exposed as if in a laugh. The water at the bottom of the hole was black with fat tadpoles as round as rubber balls.

It was very quiet. Nothing but the sound of field mice rustling in the rubbish. And then, from behind the fortress walls, the bugler sounded his mournful notes once again. That sound brought to mind my childhood notion of war as something magnificent. The sound of the bugle held all the glorious lies about war that I, and many others, had been brought up on since my earliest years: the flutter of the banners, the singing of trumpets, charging hoof beats, bullets whistling through the air, the glitter of swords, the steely bristling of bayonets, the exhilarating sense of danger. I still knew by heart the splendid verses first learned as a little boy of Le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.

Father had three thick volumes of Gnedich’s History of Art.fn1 I loved to look at the pictures by Matejko, Willewalde, Meissonier, Gros – all those paintings of the battles of Eylau and Fère-Champenoise, of hussars’ attacks, the uhlans’ lances, neat round puffs of cannon smoke, and of generals with brass field glasses in their hands, their maps spread out before them on a drum.fn2 Of course, I knew war was nothing like these paintings. But these images of the splendour of war nevertheless stuck in my mind and refused to let go. What I saw now was not war itself, only its aftermath, its dirt, its stench, its refuse. It was not what I had expected. But I kept quiet and said nothing to Romanin.

The engine whistled and let out two puffs of steam along the tracks. It was time to go back. We walked in silence to the train. On the platform Romanin gave me a sideways glance and said: ‘You’ve got to get used to it, little fellow. This is nothing.’

I lost my temper and swore at Romanin. It was the one and only time during our wartime friendship that I ever did.