crystal preparations very well. At the beginning of winter, Yuri Andreevich used this same alcohol, infused with quinine bark, to treat cases of typhus, which set in again with the coming of cold weather.
3
In those days the doctor saw Pamphil Palykh and his family. His wife and children had spent the whole previous summer fleeing along dusty roads under the open sky. They were frightened by the horrors they had lived through and expected new ones. Their wanderings had put an indelible stamp on them. Pamphil’s wife and the three children, a son and two daughters, had light, sun-bleached, flaxen hair and white, stern eyebrows on dark, weather-beaten, tanned faces. The children were too small to bear any signs of what they had endured, but from their mother’s face the shocks and dangers she had experienced had driven all the play of life and left only the dry regularity of the features, the lips pressed into a thread, the strained immobility of suffering, ready for self- defense.
Pamphil loved them all, especially the children, to distraction, and with a deftness that amazed the doctor sculpted wooden toys for them with the corner of a sharply honed axe—hares, bears, cocks.
When they arrived, Pamphil cheered up, took heart, began to recover. But then it became known that, owing to the harmful influence the presence of the families had on the mood of the camp, the partisans would be obliged to separate from their kinfolk, the camp would be freed of unnecessary nonmilitary appendages, and the refugee train would set up camp for the winter, under sufficient guard, somewhere further away. There was more talk about this separation than actual preparation for it. The doctor did not believe in the feasibility of the measure. But Pamphil turned gloomy and his former fleetlings returned.
4
On the threshold of winter, for several reasons, the camp was gripped by a long stretch of anxiety, uncertainty, menacing and confusing situations, strange incongruities.
The Whites carried out the plan of surrounding the insurgents. At the head of the accomplished operation stood the generals Vitsyn, Quadri, and Basalygo. These generals were famous for their firmness and inflexible resolution. Their names alone instilled terror in the wives of the insurgents in the camp and in the peaceful population, who still had not left their native places and remained behind in their villages, outside the enemy line.
As has already been said, it was impossible to see how the enemy circle could be tightened. On that account they could rest easy. However, to remain indifferent to this encirclement was also not possible. Submission to circumstances would morally strengthen the enemy. It was necessary to attempt to break out of the trap, unthreatening as it was, for the sake of military display.
To that end large forces of the partisans were detached and concentrated against the western bend of the circle. After many days of hot fighting, the partisans inflicted a defeat on the enemy and, breaching their line at that point, came at them from the rear.
Through the freed space formed by the breach, access to the insurgents was opened in the taiga. New crowds of refugees came pouring in to join them. This influx of peaceful country people was not limited to direct relations of the partisans. Frightened by the punitive measures of the Whites, all the neighboring peasantry moved from their places, abandoning their hearths and naturally drawing towards the peasant forest army, in which they saw their defense.
But in the camp they were trying to get rid of their own hangers-on. The partisans could not be bothered with the newcomers and strangers. They went out to meet the fugitives, stopped them on the road, and turned them aside, towards the mill in the Chilim clearing, on the Chilimka River. This cleared space, formed from the farmsteads that had grown up around the mill, was called the Steadings. The plan was to set up a winter camp for the refugees in these Steadings and store the provisions allotted to them.
While these decisions were being made, things were taking their own course, and the camp command could not keep up with them.
The victory over the enemy had complications. Having let the partisan group that had beaten them pass into their territory, the Whites closed in and restored their breached line. For the unit that got to the rear of them and was separated from their own forces, the return to the taiga after their foray was cut off.
Something was also going wrong with the refugee women. It was easy to miss them in the dense, impassable thicket. Those sent to meet them lost track of the fleeing women and came back without them, while the women in a spontaneous flow moved deep into the taiga, performing miracles of resourcefulness on their way, felling trees on both sides, building bridges and log paths, making roads.
All this went contrary to the intentions of the forest headquarters and turned Liberius’s plans and projects upside down.
5
That was what he was raging about as he stood with Svirid not far from the high road, a small stretch of which passed through the taiga in that place. His officers were standing on the road, arguing about whether or not to cut the telegraph lines that ran along it. The last decisive word belonged to Liberius, and he was chattering away with a wandering trapper. Liberius waved his hand to let them know that he would come to them presently, that they should wait and not go away.
For a long time, Svirid had been unable to stomach the condemnation and shooting of Vdovichenko, guilty of nothing except that his influence rivaled Liberius’s authority and introduced a split in the camp. Svirid wanted to leave the partisans, to live freely by himself as before. But not a chance. He had got himself hired, had sold himself—he would meet the same fate as the executed men if he left the Forest Brotherhood now.
The weather was the most terrible that could be imagined. A sharp, gusty wind carried torn shreds of clouds, dark as flakes of flying soot, low over the earth. Suddenly snow began to pour from them with the convulsive haste of some white madness.
In a moment the distance was covered by a white shroud, the earth was spread with a white sheet. The next moment the sheet burnt up, melted away. The soil appeared, black as coal, as did the black sky drenched from above with the slanting streaks of distant downpours. The earth could not take any more water into itself. In moments of brightening, the clouds parted, as if to air out the sky, windows were opened on high, shot through with a cold, glassy whiteness. The standing water, unabsorbed by the soil, responded from the ground with the same thrust-open casements of puddles and lakes, filled with the same brilliance.
The drizzle slid like smoke over the turpentine-resinous needles of the evergreen forest without penetrating them, as water does not go through oilcloth. The telegraph wires were strung with beadlike raindrops. They hung crowded, one against another, and did not fall.
Svirid was among those who had been sent into the depths of the forest to meet the refugee women. He wanted to tell his chief about what he had witnessed. About the muddle that resulted from the clash of different, equally impracticable orders. About the atrocities committed by the weakest, most despairing part of the horde of women. Young mothers, trudging on foot, carrying bundles, sacks, and nursing babies, losing their milk, run off their feet and crazed, abandoned their children on the road, shook the flour out of the sacks, and turned back. Better a quick death than a long death from starvation. Better the enemy’s hands than the teeth of some beast in the
