9
In those days the front began to stir. Sudden changes were going on there. To the south of the place where Gordon ended up, one of our combined units, in a successful attack of its separate constituent parts, broke through the fortified positions of the enemy. Developing its strike, the attacking group kept cutting deeper into their disposition. After it followed auxiliary units, widening the breach. Gradually falling behind, they became separated from the head group. This led to its being captured. In these circumstances, Second Lieutenant Antipov was taken prisoner, forced into it by the surrender of his platoon.
False rumors went around about him. He was considered dead and buried under the earth in a shell crater. This was repeated from the words of his acquaintance Galiullin, a lieutenant serving in the same regiment, who supposedly saw him die through his binoculars from an observation post, when Antipov was leading his men in an attack.
Before Galiullin’s eyes was the habitual spectacle of a unit attacking. They were supposed to advance quickly, almost at a run, across the space that separated the two armies, an autumn field overgrown with dry wormwood swaying in the wind and prickly thistles motionlessly sticking up. By the boldness of their courage, the attackers were either to entice the Austrians lodged in the opposite trenches to come and meet their bayonets or to shower them with grenades and destroy them. To the running men the field seemed endless. The ground yielded under their feet like a shifting swamp. First ahead, then mixing with them, ran their lieutenant, brandishing his revolver over his head and shouting “Hurrah!” with his mouth ripped open from ear to ear, though neither he nor the soldiers running around him could hear it. At regular intervals the running men fell to the ground, got to their feet all at once, and with renewed shouting ran on further. Each time, together with them, but quite differently from them, individual men who had been hit fell full length, like tall trees cut down, and did not get up again.
“They’re overshooting. Phone the battery,” the alarmed Galiullin said to the artillery officer standing next to him. “No, wait. They’re right to shift the aim deeper in.”
Just then the attackers moved in close to the enemy. The artillery fire stopped. In the ensuing silence, the hearts of the men standing at the observation post pounded hard and fast, as if they were in Antipov’s place and, like him, having led men to the edge of the Austrian trench, in the next moment had to display prodigies of resourcefulness and courage. Just then two sixteen-inch German shells exploded ahead of them, one after the other. Black columns of earth and smoke concealed all that followed. “Yeh Allah! That’s it! The bazaar’s over!” Galiullin whispered with pale lips, considering the lieutenant and his soldiers lost. A third shell landed just next to the observation post. Bending low to the ground, they all hurried away from it.
Galiullin had slept in the same dugout with Antipov. When the regiment became reconciled with the thought that he had been killed and would not come back, Galiullin, who had known Antipov well, was put in charge of his belongings, with a view to handing them over in the future to his wife, of whom many photographs were found among Antipov’s things.
A former second lieutenant from the volunteers, the mechanic Galiullin, son of the yard porter Gimazetdin from Tiverzin’s courtyard and in the distant past an apprentice to a locksmith, beaten by his master Khudoleev, owed his advancement to his former tormentor.
Having been made a second lieutenant, Galiullin, no one knew how and without his own will, wound up in a warm and cushy billet in one of the garrisons far in the rear. There he had command of a detachment of semi-invalids, whom equally decrepit veterans instructed in the mornings in a drill they had long forgotten. Besides that, Galiullin checked whether sentinels had been correctly placed at the supply depots. It was a carefree life—nothing more was required of him. Then suddenly, along with reinforcements consisting of militiamen from earlier drafts and coming from Moscow to be under his command, arrived Pyotr Khudoleev, who was all too well-known to him.
“Ah, an old acquaintance!” Galiullin said, smiling darkly.
“Yes, sir,” replied Khudoleev, standing to attention and saluting.
It could not end so simply. At the very first negligence in drill, the lieutenant yelled at the lower-ranking man, and when it seemed to him that the soldier was not looking him straight in the eye, but somehow vaguely to the side, he punched him in the teeth and put him in the guardhouse for two days on bread and water.
Now Galiullin’s every move smacked of revenge for past things. To settle accounts like this, under the discipline of the rod, was too unsporting and ignoble a game. What was to be done? It was impossible for the two of them to remain in the same place any longer. But where and on what pretext could an officer transfer a soldier from his assigned unit, unless he sent him to a disciplinary one? On the other hand, what grounds could Galiullin think up for requesting his own transfer? Justifying himself by the boredom and uselessness of garrison duty, Galiullin asked to be sent to the front. This earned him a good reputation, and when, in the next action, he displayed his other qualities, it became clear that he was an excellent officer, and he was quickly promoted to first lieutenant.
Galiullin had known Antipov since the time at Tiverzin’s. In 1905, when Pasha Antipov had lived for half a year with the Tiverzins, Yusupka had gone to see him and play with him on Sundays. He had seen Lara there once or twice then. After that he had heard nothing about them. When Pavel Pavlovich left Yuriatin and landed in their regiment, Galiullin was struck by the change that had come over his old friend. The bashful, laughter-prone, prissy prankster, who looked like a girl, had turned into a nervous, all-knowing, scornful hypochondriac. He was intelligent, very brave, taciturn, and sarcastic. At times, looking at him, Galiullin was ready to swear that he could see in Antipov’s heavy gaze, as in the depths of a window, some second person, a thought firmly embedded in him, a longing for his daughter or the face of his wife. Antipov seemed bewitched, as in a fairy tale. And now he was no more, and in Galiullin’s hands there remained Antipov’s papers and photographs and the mystery of his transformation.
Sooner or later Lara’s inquiries had to reach Galiullin. He was preparing to answer her. But it was a hot time. He felt unable to give her a proper answer. He wanted to prepare her for the coming blow. And so he kept postponing a long, detailed letter to her, until he heard that she herself was somewhere at the front, as a nurse. And now he did not know where to address a letter to her.
10
“Well? Will there be horses today?” Gordon would ask Dr. Zhivago when he came home in the afternoon to the Galician cottage they were living in.
“Horses, hah! And where will you go, if there’s no way forward or back? There’s terrible confusion all around. Nobody understands anything. In the south, we’ve encircled the Germans or broken through them in several places, and they say that in the process several of our scattered units got into a pocket, and in the north, the Germans have crossed the Sventa, which was considered impassable at that point. It’s their cavalry, up to a corps in number. They’re damaging railways, destroying depots, and, in my opinion, encircling us. Do you get the picture? And you say horses. Well, look lively, Karpenko, set the table and get a move on. What are we having today? Ah, calves’ feet. Splendid.”
The medical unit with the hospital and all its dependencies was scattered through the village, which by a miracle had gone unscathed. Its houses, with gleaming western-style, narrow, many-paned windows from wall to wall, were preserved to the last one.