We were hurled now into a world of dust and despair. The square market place, the houses that huddled round it were swallowed up by soldiers, horses, carts and whirling clouds. A wind blew and through the wind a hot sun blazed. Everywhere horses were neighing, cows and sheep were driven in thick herds through columns of soldiers, motor cars frantically pushed their way from place to place, and always, everywhere, covering every inch of ground flying, as it seemed, from the air, on to roofs, in and out of windows, from house to house, from corner to corner, was the humorous, pathetic, expectant, matter-of-fact, dreaming, stolid Russian soldier. He was to come to me, later on, in a very different fashion, but on this dreadful day in O⸺ he was simply part of the intolerable, depressing background.
If this day were dreadful to me what must it have been to Trenchard! We were none of us aware at this time of what had happened to him two days before, nor did we know of his adventure of yesterday. O⸺ seemed to him, he has told me, like hell.
We spent the day gathered together in a large white house that had formerly been the town-hall of O⸺. It had, I remember, high empty rooms all gilt and looking-glasses; the windows were broken and the dust came, in circles and twisting spirals, blowing over the gilt chairs and wooden floors.
We made tea and sat miserably together. Semyonov was in some other part of the town. We were to wait here until Molozov arrived from B⸺.
There can be few things so bad as the sense of insecurity that we had that afternoon. The very ground seemed to have been cut away from under our feet. We had gathered enough from the officers of our Division to know that something very disastrous “somewhere” had occurred. It was the very vagueness of the thing that terrified us. What could have happened? Only something very monstrous could have compelled so general a retirement. We might all of us be prisoners before the evening. That seemed to us, and indeed was afterwards proved in reality, to have been no slender possibility. There was no spot on earth that belonged to us. So firm and solid we had been at M⸺. Even we had hung pictures on the walls and planted flowers outside the dining-room. Now all that remained for us was this horrible place with its endless looking-glasses, its bare gleaming floors and the intolerable noise through its open windows of carts, soldiers, horses, the smell of dung and tobacco, and the hot air, like gas, that flung the dust into our faces.
Beyond the vague terrors of our uncertainty was the figure, seen quite clearly by all of us without any sentiment, of Russia. Certainly Trenchard and I could feel with less poignancy the appeal of her presence, and yet I swear that to us also on that day it was she of whom we were thinking. We had been, until then, her allies; we were now her servants.
By Russia every one of us, sitting in that huge room, meant something different. To Goga she was home, a white house on the Volga, tennis, long evenings, early mornings, holidays in a tangled wilderness of happiness. To Sister K⸺ she was “Holy Russia,” Russia of the Kremlin, of the Lavra, of a million icons in a million little streets, little rooms, little churches. To Sister Sofia she was Petrograd with cafés, novels by such writers as Verbitzkaia and our own Jack London, the cinematograph, and the Islands on a fine evening in May. To the student like a white fish she was a platform for frantic speeches, incipient revolutions, little untidy hysterical meetings in a dirty room in a back street, newspapers, the incapacities of the Duma, the robberies and villainies of the Government. To Anna Petrovna she was comfortable, unspeculative, friendly “home.” To Nikitin she was the face of one woman upon whose eyes his own were always fixed. To Marie Ivanovna she was a flaming glorious wonder, mystical, transplendent, revealed in every blade of grass, every flash of sun across the sky, every line of the road, the top of every hill.
And to Trenchard and myself? For Trenchard she had, perhaps, taken to herself some part of his beloved country. He has told me—and I will witness in myself to the truth of this—that he never in his life felt more burningly his love for England than at this first moment of his consciousness of Russia. The lanes and sea of his remembered vision were not far from that dirty, disordered town in Galicia—and for both of them he was rendering his service.
At any rate there we sat, huddled together, reflected in the countless looking-glasses as a helpless miserable lot, falling into long silences, hoping for the coming of Molozov with later news, listening to the confusion in the street below. Marie Ivanovna with her hands behind her back and her head up walked, nervously, up and down the long room. Her eyes stared beyond us and the place, striving perhaps to find some reason why life should so continually insist on being a different thing from her imaginings of it.
Lighted by the hot sun, blown upon by the dust, her figure, tall, thin, swaying a little in its many reflections, had the determined valour of some Joan of Arc. But Joan of Arc, I thought to myself, had at least someone definite against whom to wave her white banner; we were fighting dust and the sun.
Trenchard and Nikitin had left us to go into the town to search for news. We were silent. Suddenly Marie Ivanovna, turning upon us all as though she hated us, cried fiercely:
“I think you should know that Mr. Trenchard and I are no longer engaged.”
It was neither the time nor the place for such a declaration. I cannot suggest why Marie Ivanovna spoke
