At last Trenchard found himself with Molozov and Ivan Mihailovitch, the student like a fish, in the old black carriage. Molozov had “flung the world to the devil,” Trenchard afterwards said, “and I sat there, you know, looking at his white face and wondering what I ought to talk about.” Trenchard suddenly found himself narrowly and aggressively English—and it is certain that every Englishman in Russia on Tuesday thanks God that he is a practical man and has some common sense, and on Wednesday wonders whether anyone in England knows the true value of anything at all and is ashamed of a country so miserably without a passion for “ideas.”
Tonight Trenchard was an Englishman. He had been really useful at O⸺ and he had felt a new spirit of kindness around him. He did not know that Marie Ivanovna had made her declaration to us and that we were therefore all anxious to show him that we thought that he had been badly treated. Moreover he suspected, with a true English distrust of emotions, that the Russians before him were inclined to luxuriate in their gloom. Molozov’s despair and Ivan Mihailovitch’s passionate eyes and jerking white hands irritated him.
He smiled a practical English smile and looked about him at the swaying procession of carts and soldiers with a practical eye.
“Come,” he said to Molozov, “don’t despair. There’s nothing really to be distressed about. There must be these retreats, you know. There must be. The great thing in this war is to see the whole thing in proportion—the whole thing. France and England and the Dardanelles and Italy—everything. In another month or two—”
But Molozov, frowning, shook his head.
“This country … no method … no system. Nothing. It is terrible. … That’s a pretty girl!” he added moodily, looking at a group of peasants in a doorway. “A very pretty girl!” he added, sitting up a little and staring. Then he relapsed, “No system—nothing,” he murmured.
“But there will be,” continued Trenchard in his English voice. (He told me afterwards that he was conscious at the time of a horrible priggish superiority.) “Here in Russia you go up and down so. You’ve no restraint. Now if you had discipline—”
But he was interrupted by the melancholy figure of an officer who hung on to our slowly moving carriage, walking beside it with his hand on the door. He did not seem to have anything very much to say but looked at us with large melancholy eyes. He was small and needed dusting.
“What is it?” asked Molozov, saluting.
“I’ve had contusion,” said the little officer in a dreamy voice. “Contusion … I don’t feel very well. I don’t quite know where I ought to go.”
“Our doctors are just behind,” said Molozov. “You can come on with them.”
“Your doctors …” the little officer repeated dreamily. “Very well. …” But he continued with us. “I’ve had contusion,” he said. “At M⸺. Yes. … And now I don’t quite know where I am. I’m very depressed and unhappy. What do you advise?”
“There are our doctors,” Molozov repeated rather irritably. “You’ll find them … behind there.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” the melancholy little figure repeated and disappeared.
In some way this figure affected Trenchard very dismally and drove all his English common sense away. We were moving now slowly through clouds of dust, and peasants who watched us from their doorways with a cold indifference that was worse than exultation.
When we arrived, at two or three in the morning, at X⸺, our destination, the spirits of all of us were heavily weighted. Tired, cross, dirty, driven and pursued, and always with us that harassing fear that we had now no ground upon which we might rest our feet, that nothing in the world belonged to us, that we were fugitives and vagabonds by the will of God.
As our carriage stopped before the door of the large white building in X⸺ that seemed just like the large white building in O⸺, the little officer was again at our side.
“I’ve got contusion …” he said. “I’m very unhappy, and I don’t know where to go.”
Trenchard felt now as though in another moment he would tumble back again into his nightmare of yesterday. The house at X⸺ indeed was fantastic enough. I feel that I am in danger of giving too many descriptions of our various halting-places. For the most part they largely resembled one another, large deserted country houses with broken windows, bare walls and floors, a tangled garden and a tattered collection of books in the Polish language. But this building at X⸺ was like no other of our asylums.
It was a huge place, a strange combination of the local town-hall and the local theatre. It was the theatre that at that early hour in the morning seemed to our weary eyes so fantastic. As we peered into it it was a huge place, already filled with wounded and lighted only by candles, stuck here and there in bottles. I could see, dimly, the stage at the back of the room, and still hanging, tattered and restless in the draught, a forgotten backcloth of some old play. I could see that it was a picture of a gay scene in an impossibly highly coloured town—high marble stairs down which flower-girls with swollen legs came tripping into a marketplace filled with soldiers and their lovers—Carmen perhaps. It seemed absurd enough there in the uncertain candlelight with the wounded groaning and crying in front of it. There was already in the air that familiar smell of blood and iodine, the familiar cries of: “Oh, sestritza—Oh, sestritza!” the familiar patient faces of the soldiers, sitting up, waiting for their turn, the familiar sharp voice of the sanitar: “What Division? What regiment? bullet or shrapnel?”
I remember that some wounded man, in high fever, was singing, and that no one could stop him.
“He’s dead,” I heard
