of their human image. They were shaggy, blackened, exhausted, and frightful as ghosts.
They had been disarmed at the very beginning of the investigation. It did not occur to anyone to search them a second time before the execution. That seemed like an unnecessary meanness, a mockery of people in the face of death.
Suddenly Rzhanitsky, a friend of Vdovichenko’s, who was walking beside him and, like him, was an old ideological anarchist, fired three times at the line of the convoy, aiming at Sivobluy. Rzhanitsky was an excellent shot, but his hand shook from agitation and he missed. Again the same delicacy and pity for their former comrades kept the guards from falling upon Rzhanitsky or responding to his attempt by shooting ahead of time, before the general command. Rzhanitsky had three unspent shots left, but in his excitement, perhaps forgetting about them and vexed at having missed, he hurled his Browning against the stones. The blow fired off the Browning a fourth time, wounding the condemned Pachkolia in the foot.
The orderly Pachkolia cried out, clutched his foot, and fell, uttering quick shrieks of pain. Pafnutkin and Gorazdykh, who were nearest to him, picked him up, held him under the arms, and dragged him, so that he would not be trampled by his alarmed comrades, because they no longer knew what they were doing. Pachkolia went towards the stony edge, where the condemned men were being crowded, hopping, limping, unable to step on his wounded foot, and kept crying out. His inhuman howls were infectious. As if on signal, they all lost control of themselves. Something unimaginable began. Swearing poured out, prayers and entreaties were heard, curses resounded.
The adolescent Galuzin, throwing from his head the yellow-braided high school cap he was still wearing, sank to his knees and like that, without getting up from them, crept backwards in the crowd towards the frightful stones. He bowed quickly to the ground in front of the convoy, cried and sobbed, pleading with them half unconsciously, in singsong:
“I’m guilty, brothers, have mercy on me, I won’t do it again. Don’t destroy me. Don’t kill me. I haven’t lived yet, I’m too young to die. I want to go on living, I want to see mama, my mama, one more time. Forgive me, brothers, have mercy. I’ll kiss your feet. I’ll carry water for you on my back. Ah, terrible, terrible—mama, mama, I’m lost.”
From the midst someone wailed, no one could see who:
“Dear, good comrades! How can it be? Come to your senses. We’ve shed blood together in two wars. We stood, we fought for the same cause. Have pity, let us go. We’ll never forget your kindness, we’ll earn it, we’ll prove it in action. Are you deaf that you don’t answer? Aren’t you Christians?”
To Sivobluy they shouted:
“Ah, you Judas, you Christ-seller! What sort of traitors are we compared to you? May you be throttled yourself, you dog, you three-time traitor! You swore an oath to your tsar and you killed your lawful tsar, you swore loyalty to us and you betrayed us. Go and kiss your Forester devil, till you betray him. And you will betray him.”
Vdovichenko remained true to himself even on the verge of the grave. Holding high his head with its gray, flying hair, he loudly addressed Rzhanitsky, like communard to communard, for everyone to hear:
“Don’t humiliate yourself, Boniface! Your protests won’t reach them. These new Oprichniki,1 these executioners of the new torture chambers, won’t understand you. Don’t lose heart. History will sort it all out. Posterity will nail the Bourbons of the commissarocracy and their black cause to the pillory. We die martyrs to ideas at the dawn of the world revolution. Long live the revolution of the spirit! Long live universal anarchy!”
A volley of twenty guns, produced on some soundless command caught only by the firing squad, mowed down half of the condemned men, most of whom fell dead. The rest were finished off with a second volley. The boy, Terenty Galuzin, twitched longer than anyone else, but in the end he, too, lay still, stretched out on the ground.
2
The idea of shifting camp for the winter to another place further east was not renounced at once. Reconnoitering and scouting out the area to the other side of the high road, along the watershed of the Vytsk- Kezhem, went on for a long time. Liberius often absented himself from camp to the taiga, leaving the doctor alone.
But it was already too late to move, and there was nowhere to move to. This was the time of greatest unsuccess for the partisans. Before their final collapse, the Whites decided to have done with the irregular forest units at one blow, once and for all, and, in a general effort on all fronts, surrounded them. The partisans were hemmed in on all sides. This would have been a catastrophe for them if the radius of the circle had been smaller. They were saved by the intangible vastness of the encirclement. On the doorstep of winter, the enemy was unable to draw its flanks through the boundless, impassable taiga and surround the peasant troops more tightly.
In any case, movement anywhere at all became impossible. Of course, if there had existed a plan of relocation that promised definite military advantages, it would have been possible to break through, to fight their way out of the encirclement to a new position.
But no such plan had been worked out. People were exhausted. Junior commanders, disheartened themselves, lost influence over their subordinates. The senior ones gathered every evening in military council, offering contradictory solutions.
They had to abandon the search for another wintering site and fortify their camp for the winter deep inside the thicket they occupied. In wintertime, with the deep snow, it became impassable for the enemy, who were in short supply of skis. They had to entrench themselves and lay in a big stock of provisions.
The partisan quartermaster, Bisyurin, reported an acute shortage of flour and potatoes. There were plenty of cattle, and Bisyurin foresaw that in winter the main food would be meat and milk.
There was a lack of winter clothes. Some of the partisans went about half dressed. All the dogs in the camp were strangled. Those who knew how to work with leather made coats for the partisans out of dogskin with the fur outside.
The doctor was denied means of transportation. The carts were now in demand for more important needs. During the last march, the gravely ill had been carried by foot for thirty miles on stretchers.
Of medications, all Yuri Andreevich had left were quinine, iodine, and Glauber’s salts. The iodine necessary for operations and dressings was in crystals. It had to be dissolved in alcohol. They regretted having destroyed the production of moonshine, and the less guilty moonshiners, who had been acquitted, were approached and charged with repairing the broken still or constructing a new one. The abolished making of moonshine was set going anew for medical purposes. People in the camp only winked and shook their heads. Drunkenness reappeared, contributing to the developing degradation in the camp.
The level of distillation they achieved reached almost two hundred proof. Liquid of such strength dissolved the
