A Masterful Tale of the Eastern Front
Told by M. C. della Grazie of Vienna
No result of the war has been more pitiable than the suffering inflicted on the subject races caught in its grip. These submerged peoples have had to submit helplessly to the brutalities of both sets of combatants. The Poles, the Ruthenians, the Ukranians, the Slavs of Bohemia and Moravia, have fought with little heart for Russia, Austria or Prussia, as the case might be. But the Jews of the Polish Pale and of Galicia have had an even harder fate; for while the men of military age have followed the flags of their masters, the women, the children and the old men have been obliged to face at home all the evils which travel in the wake of war—disorder, violence, disease, spoliation and semi-starvation. The following story is by M. C. della Grazie, a well known Viennese writer. It makes a masterly use of a single, simple incident to bring home the meaning of one of the war’s most hopeless and poignant tragedies. It was written at the time when the Russians still occupied the greater part of the Austrian province of Galicia. This translation, with editorial comment, is by William L. McPherson in the New York Tribune.
I—STORY OF GABRIEL GABRILOVITCH
The colonel sat on the edge of his rumpled-up peasant’s bed and with an impatient movement knocked the ashes from his cigar. On the dirty table before him lay the last number of a Russian weekly, which had just arrived by field post in Galicia—a little crumpled, but otherwise fresh looking, and with pictures which made one’s mouth water.
The devil! Was it still going so comfortably back in Petersburg (he stopped suddenly and substituted Petrograd) with those rascals of civilians and war cripples? Did such attractive girls still come in and sing and dance as those whose pictures stared at him out of the pages of the last number of the Nida? They must be damnably well off, those dogs, able to frequent the Varieties, where people sit in cozy warmth about the tables and worry about nothing more serious than the genuineness of the labels on the wine bottles.
And he, Gabriel Gabrilovitch! He had lain with his regiment for nearly two weeks in this miserable Galician hole and was forced to congratulate himself that a single windproof hut remained in which to stop for breath after all those futile attacks—that he was able at night to throw himself on a bundle of straw under this foul roof and drink punch brewed from whiskey stolen from the Jews.
For this time no headway was to be made against the devils opposite. Not even once as far as their barbed wire defences! So well was their artillery posted. To such a raking fire was every moving object exposed which came in sight within an area several hundred meters wide!
A tiresome game that—an accursedly tiresome game—and if Gabriel Gabrilovitch himself should be one of the victims! He sprang up and began to pace with heavy steps the uneven clay floor. He knew of better things than that!
Those Petrogradians—look, look!
The slender, willowy, singing girl there in the Nida, with that smile which was in itself a seduction! She evoked another image in his excited fancy. It was his last evening of pleasure in golden Petrograd. In a variety cabaret, too.
The stage is already empty, the programme finished. But in a room off the stage reserved for the performers and their guests he sees just such a piquant little creature take form in the thin smoke clouds of his cigarette. Exactly the same smile—acquired in Paris, and then carried triumphantly from stage to stage, from banquet to banquet.
The imitation diamonds glitter in the deep corsage of her dress. The coquettish curls hang like golden orchids over her ears. The atrophied stare of the wide pupils has the fascination of a serpent’s eye. Before her stands a tall, narrow glass vase, out of which nod the blood-red, long-stemmed pinks which he had brought her. He, Gabriel Gabrilovitch!
It is a picture imprinted so vividly on his senses by the warm rush of recollection that he thinks he really sees it—not least of all the purplish red of the vase of flowers.
They take it easy, those Nevsky Prospekt loungers—they take it easy!
He reaches for the glass—already cold, curse it! Not very long now and it will be day again and a new assault, as vain as the others, will bring them face to face with death.
A cold draft strikes his neck. He turns around, half angry, to see who has entered.
II—THE COSSACK LIEUTENANT’S HATRED
“Ah, so!”
It is the sotnik (lieutenant) of a Cossack detachment which has received the order to drive the last Jews out of the surrounding villages, so that the army can have a free field. The snow, which has frozen finger thick on his green overcoat, begins to melt in the close, hot air of the room. The small, hard Asiatic eyes shine. The red, frosted fists are still clenched, as if they had just beaten somebody.
“One can’t be really angry with these fellows,” says the colonel to himself, with a feeling of soldierly satisfaction.
“They are such splendid beasts.”
But he asks aloud:
“Finished?”
The Cossack’s laugh is quick and harsh.
“All herded together, Colonel. Nothing is lacking but the Red Sea.”
“How many?”
“Several hundred.”
“And where are you going to drive them?”
The young lieutenant raises his shoulders slowly, so that the snow on them touches and cools his red cheeks.
“I’ll have to get an order from you as to that!”
“An order!” cries the colonel. “An order! Now, by all three metropolitans! The devil take me if I know!”
The sotnik raises his shoulder again.
“While they’re here they will be in our way.”
“The vermin,” growls the colonel, “always pestering us like——”
“Like others we are on intimate terms with,” laughs the Cossack.
“Look there, if you please!” And half jokingly, half disgustedly, he points to a black swarm of roaches hurrying like a wagon train from behind the stove and making for a crack in the floor near the open door.
“They are emigrating, the vermin,” exclaims the colonel; “upon my soul, they are.”
“Because they are hungry,” says the Cossack, with a grin.
“But the Jews. The Jews, those——” curses the colonel.
“Just as black and just as hungry—but good patriots.”
The colonel lifts his head, gazes thoughtfully for a while into the flickering flame of the slowly melting candle. Then he begins to laugh.
“Why didn’t I think of it before? Why didn’t I think of it before? Ah, Little Brother, what asses we have been!”
The Cossack’s eyes snap. He, too, has a plan which in all this orgy of bloodthirstiness appeals to him with an even bloodier zest.
“Do you know what we shall do with them—with all these patriots?”
“Drive them together somewhere and sabre them,” suggests the sotnik.
“So that they can fill the newspapers again with their tale of martyrdom,” laughs Gabriel Gabrilovitch, scornfully. “Beware, Little Brother, beware! We shall leave that to their countrymen this time.”
The blank eyes of the Cossack follow the colonel questioningly—like the eyes of a hunting dog.
“So,” laughs the latter, softly stroking his cheek. “We’ll drive these patriots to the Austrian wire entanglements. What do you think? Will those people over there shoot down their own subjects?”
“But they are non-combatants, Gabriel Gabrilovitch——”
The young man suppressed the thought before he had put it into words. There was something in the voice of his superior which cowered him. And, like a hunting dog, he merely listened.
“Don’t you see, Little Brother?” continues Gabriel Gabrilovitch, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction. “And just because in that case they will not fire, we shall rush in on the enemy. We shall have cover and can excuse ourselves for using it.”
“It would take the devil himself to think of that!” exclaims the sotnik, full of submissiveness and admiration.
“I am a good Christian,” declares Gabriel Gabrilovitch with bitter humor. “And now I must have an intermediary; for, naturally, I must inform the enemy so that they will not shoot down so many patriots.”
The young Cossack rocked his body as if already in the saddle.
“Won’t you permit me to go?”
“Muttonhead! Shall I send one on whose face are the imprints of all the Devil’s ten fingers? Pick out the youngest, the handsomest and the stupidist of the sotnia and send him over. The kind that believes anything anybody tells him. Then they over there will believe him. And what we are going to do nobody but you and I will know. Well, have you any such ‘steed of God?’”
The sotnik strikes his body with both hands, smiles and nods. “There is a Raskolnik here.”
“Is that so, Little Brother?”
Both burst into violent peals of laughter as if overcome by the humor of the situation.
III—THE PLOT THAT FAILED
They would send the Raskolnik—the sectarian who was prepared to die at any moment rather than sin in any particular against the teachings of Jesus, who even in war abhorred attacking the enemy and wanted only to defend himself—one of these religious enthusiasts who had to be driven into military service with a whip. What a joke for these two orthodox Slavs to load upon this “steed of God” the bloodguilt of their stratagem!
They laugh—laugh till their eyes fill with water.
Half an hour later a young cavalryman trots away into the murky dawn.
The fresh wind of the steppe whistles about his ears. Over his head flutters the little white flag, which they have fastened to the top of his lance.
“How is it that he has found so much favor in the eyes of his commander as to be sent as a parlamentaire to the enemy?”
But he puzzles little about that. He is glad that the poor creatures of God who have been driven like mice out of their holes will be allowed to go to-morrow over into the camp of their friends. He must be a real man, the colonel, even if so far the soldiers have found little good in him.
In the east it is getting lighter. Already a silvery wave spreads over the plain from the edge of the horizon. By the time he arrives at the first entrenchment it will be so light that the enemy can easily see the flag on his lance.
“It is cold,” he muses. “But yet it is already spring, and where my horse steps the snow gives way. Soon the steppe will be green again, just as it will be back in Russia.”
And in the midst of the deep silence which surrounds him, in sight of all the horrible traces which war and death have left upon his pathway, there blossoms out of his innocent soul a pure, sweet memory—of home. He recalls the straw-covered hut, the calm and mighty waves of the distant Don, the peace of the steppe purling like a breath from heaven through the tall grasses.
He was only a pious peasant’s son—not a Cossack. But now they have put him as a supernumerary in a Cossack regiment, and he must go along, through all the blood, through all the horror.
With a slight shudder he puts his hand upon the crucifix beneath his soldier’s coat and crosses himself.
“God grant me His grace!”
On the other side they had caught sight of him. A sentinel advanced to meet him. Soon he stands before the Austrian officer.
The latter is a handsome, sturdy man. Everything neat about him, although he has lain so long with his men in the trenches. Close up to him the soldier stands, so that he can feel the other’s breath—but it doesn’t smell of brandy. The gray eyes hold him fast while he speaks. Not a muscle moves. But suddenly he laughs in the messenger’s face.
“Good. Now ride back. And say to your colonel that he has miscalculated if he believes that I shall not open fire if you try to sneak in behind those unfortunates. I know my duty, and should innocent blood be shed the blame will rest on you.”
He speaks and turns upon his heel. The sentinel leads the dejected messenger back to his horse and calls scornfully after him: “Are you really so stupid or did you think that we were so stupid?”
The latter makes no answer. But a few steps further on he strips the white flag from his lance and throws it in the muck. Then that was the colonel’s idea. And he will stick to it. At his command they are to hide like cowards behind the victims who are to be pushed—as a living wall—up to the enemy’s trenches!
“They are, of course, only Jews,” he says to himself. “But yet—but yet——”
Why does he feel that way about it?
Suddenly he realizes.
Like a picture it stands before him.
The sputtering fire about which the half-frozen Jews are huddled together—women, children, grizzled old men. Here and there a sentinel to guard them. He, too, one of the guards.
IV—IN HIS BREAST HIS OWN BULLET
Like shadows they crouch about the fire, rub the freezing hands of the children between their own, weep, groan, pray softly. One has prayer boxes bound on his brow and on his arms and nods and bows unceasingly, so that his shadow dances like a curious grotesque against the light of the fire. The Cossacks laugh. He, too, has laughed, carelessly, unconcerned.
Laughed until he has suddenly noticed the woman at the side of the bearded Jew—with the slumbering child at her breast. Something in that sight appealed to him strangely. But then they had summoned him before the sotnik. And he had thought of it no more.
How sharply that whole picture stands before him now—and among the other details especially these three: The man in prayer, the shivering mother bent toward the fire, her head cloth like a veil drawn deep over the unconscious, slumbering child.
“Bethlehem,” he murmurs reverently, and crosses himself.
And he is going to take part to-day in this infamy—he, a Christian!
Then it must be true what they believe back home. That the Pravoslavine is Anti-Christ. And he fights with him—for him—is part of his army. Have they then altered the text of the Holy Books? So that some day God’s word of love will no longer be found in it—the Holy Word spoken by Him who lay in the womb of a daughter of the House of David?
It must be so! It must be so! And if till to-day he has doubted it, now all is clear. Only Anti-Christ can give such orders.
Shall he return to the camp? Stain his hands, too, with the blood of these innocents?
“When the master speaks the servant must hearken,” they say back home.
He must obey.
Something flashes in front of him like the flash of a gun.
“A bullet,” he thinks.
“Would it were one!” he exclaims in the torment of his soul.
It is only a sun ray which suddenly shoots through the mist. But it has shown a poor mortal the right way.
They found the Raskolnik just outside the village—in his breast his own bullet, in his right hand the cross. On his lips the smile of peace that passeth understanding.