The Story of a Life

58

Treason

In Kobrin an order arrived to move north, and so we immediately set out for the small village of Pruzhany near the Belovezha Forest. Along the way we passed endless fields, now untilled and overgrown with wild mustard. The ruins of Brest still smouldered to the south-west. In a field near Pruzhany we saw a gun with a burst barrel and stopped. A group of soldiers in crusty field coats sat around the gun. Some were smoking, others winding their puttees, and a few were sitting about doing nothing and looked at us with blank stares. I rode over to them.

‘What’s this?’ I asked a bearded soldier as I pointed to the gun. The soldier was lying back against the wheel of the gun-carriage and smoking. He gave me a brief look and said nothing.

‘What is this?’ I asked again.

‘Since when do I report to the likes of you?’ the soldier snapped back. ‘You’re no officer. Blind, are you? It’s a gun!’

‘Why’s the barrel broken?’

The man shrugged and turned away. A young soldier missing his hat answered for him. ‘What are you pestering us for?’ he said in a whiny voice. His blond hair had been cropped so close that his head shone like a glass ball. ‘You lot don’t give us a minute’s rest. It’s enough to make you want to go and drown yourself.’

‘What’s he asking about?’ yelled a soldier with a greenish face. He was squatting on his heels and scraping dirt off a biscuit with a twig. ‘What’s wrong with him? Can’t he see for himself what’s happened to the gun? It’s treason – that’s what it is!’

‘Treason!’ the bearded soldier repeated hoarsely, sitting up and flinging away his cigarette. He clenched his black fist and shook it at the east where the wind was bending the thin willows. ‘Treason! Cursed be their god, their mothers and their souls! The artillery runs ahead of supplies, and so there are no shells. The ones there are explode in the barrels. Cartridges too, nothing. So, what are we fools supposed to fight the Germans with?’

‘Treason!’ several voices muttered. ‘Can’t be anything else.’

Our wagons set in motion. I rode off.

It was there, on the front, that I first heard that awful word – ‘treason’. Soon it could be heard throughout the entire army and then the whole country. Some whispered it, others roared it at the top of their lungs. Everyone said it, from infantrymen to generals. Even the wounded, when asked what had happened to them, angrily replied: ‘Treason!’

There was more and more talk about War Minister Sukhomlinov. It was said he had been accepting enormous bribes from the arms manufacturers who supplied the army with dud shells. It wasn’t long before the rumours reached the top, and Empress ‘Alix of Hesse’ was openly charged with heading a German spy network in Russia. The indignation grew. And still there were no shells. The army pulled back to the east, unable to stop the enemy.

We were travelling across the southern part of the province of Grodno, feeding the refugees, sending them to the rear, picking up the sick and taking them to hospitals. It began to rain hard. Large puddles of frothy yellow water formed along the roads. The rain itself seemed as yellow as horses’ piss. We couldn’t dry out and before long we began to smell like wet dogs in our greatcoats. The wind howled incessantly in the bushes along the roadsides and snapped the twigs like whips.

Like a hungry man with a bone, the retreating army had picked the small towns on the way – Pruzhany, Ruzhany, Slonim – bare. Nothing was left in the shops, except for some ink and carpenter’s glue. ‘They’ve cleaned us out,’ the frightened Jewish shopkeepers complained.

Romanin and I hardly spoke anymore. His face, now shrouded under his forage cap, which he kept permanently strapped down low against the wind, looked harsh and angular. Pan Gronsky was always off somewhere in his dilapidated Ford in search of food for us. He returned seldom, unkempt, rumpled and exhausted, large bags under his eyes. He’d let his moustache grow and it now covered his mouth. It made him look like an old man. Every time he came back, he took me aside by the arm and told me in a confidential whisper: ‘It’s nothing! Don’t worry, dear boy! When this hell of a war’s over, we’ll head straight to Petrograd and toss that halfwit off the throne and feed him and all his Hessians to the damned pigs. And Poland will rise again. As God is my witness! A nation that produced the likes of Mickiewicz, Chopin and Słowackifn1 can never die! The best people of Poland will gather around their memory, like soldiers around a campfire, and they’ll swear to die or make her free.’

Each time he told me the same thing, in the exact same words, as if he were obsessed. I didn’t know whether he was exhausted or insane. His eyes burned feverishly, and he gripped my arm so tightly that I nearly screamed from the pain. I had heard somewhere that the insane often possessed enormous strength.

I confided my fears to Romanin. He gave me a sharp look and said with spite: ‘Can you really tell who’s sane and who’s insane? Well, can you? No? Well, then keep your damned notions to yourself! I couldn’t care less. Maybe I’m mad myself.’

I had never before seen Romanin so angry.

‘Why don’t you lock up that beast of yours,’ I said, trying my best to keep calm.

He gave me an odd grin, grabbed me tightly by the shoulder, but then pushed me away and walked off. That was in Slonim, in a small shop that had until just recently sold paraffin. There were still puddles of it on the scattered sheets of metal covering the floor. There was nowhere to sit. I leaned against the wall, smoked a cigarette and then followed Romanin outside.

Our unit was already on the move. Rain poured off the men’s oilskin cloaks. Bedraggled crows descended out of the sky, landed on the rotten rooftops, and then opened their beaks as if to caw. But no sound came out, almost as if they had realised it was pointless. You can’t stop the rain by cawing.