Disappointment faced him when he reached the outskirts of the town, where an iron bridge spanned the swollen river. White guards were holding up the crowd of fugitives who sought to cross, while other guards were hastily digging trenches on the further bank. They were all in an excitable, nerve-racked mood, aware of unwelcome possibilities, and prepared to act desperately and instantly. Not a single refugee, they ordered, must leave the town; this was to prevent spies from reporting to the Reds the preparations that were being made for the town’s defence. The ban applied to women and children as well as to men, and was being enforced at every possible exit.
There was nothing to be gained by arguing the point, apart from which, A.J. was anxious that both he and Daly should remain as inconspicuous as possible. He felt that their best chance of safety lay with the crowd of dirty, ailing, poverty-stricken wretches who, merely because nobody cared about them at all, were usually exempt from too close attention by either side. Most of them were squatting miserably in doorways along the road back to the town, nibbling precious fragments of food, or rebandaging their torn and blistered feet.
It was an anxious morning for Novarodar. Shells fell every ten minutes or so on the centre of the town, but many did not burst, and even the others were of poor construction and caused little damage. Once one realised that the likelihood of being hurt by the long-range bombardment was considerably less than that of catching typhus from the town’s water-supply, it was possible to ignore the intermittent booming and crashing. But such philosophic detachment was not possible to everyone, and towards midday there was evidence that many of the White defenders were themselves losing nerve. Already rifle- fire was being exchanged between the White trenches and advanced Red scouting- parties. During the afternoon the leaders of the local Soviet were dragged out of prison by White guards, lined up in the market-square, and ceremonially machine-gunned before a public for the most part too apprehensive of its own immediate future to be either repelled or elevated by such an entertainment.
During most of the morning A.J. and Daly sat patiently in a side-street with a crowd of other refugees. But in the afternoon, shortly after the shooting of the Soviet leaders, White guards toured the town in motor cars and rounded up all who were out of doors. Those who had no homes were lodged in some of the big rooms of The town-hall.
Thus it happened that the refugees had a sort of grand-stand view of the entry of the Bolsheviks into Novarodar, which took place about five o’clock in the afternoon, after a sharp and bloodthirsty battle at the town outskirts. At some points the Whites had resisted to the last, but at others they had run away into the town and sought refuge in houses.
Mysteriously and marvellously there appeared a dazzling array of red flags to greet the invaders. The actual march into the town was an almost suspiciously quiet affair. Not a rifle-shot, nor a cheer, nor a lilt of a song disturbed the march of those squads of hard-faced, bearded veterans and grinning, wild-eyed boys, caked with mud and blood, badly clothed, flushed with bitter triumph, helping their wounded along or carrying them in improvised stretchers made of great-coats. The Red leader, a keen-looking youth of not more than twenty, halted his troops in the market-square and read a proclamation declaring the friendliest intentions of the invaders towards all who had not given assistance to the Whites.
From the large windows, mostly broken, of that first-floor room in the town-hall, history could be seen enacting itself at a prodigious rate. The first task after the reading of the proclamation was to deal with the White prisoners actually captured in the trenches outside the town. These men, battered and mud-stained as their captors, were lined up and machine-gunned from a roof on the opposite side of the square—not very copiously, however, for there seemed to be a shortage of ammunition. Their bodies, some still twitching, were then dragged away and piled in a heap in a side- street.
The Reds were quite convinced that the shot prisoners represented only a very small fraction of the Whites who had held the town, and as night approached, the rage of the invaders grew into a very positive determination to root out all Whites who might be in hiding. Then began a house-to-house search by groups of blood-maddened soldiery. The market-square was the scene of some of the worst incidents, for in it were the larger houses and shops in which Whites might be expected to have found sympathisers. Terrified wretches were dragged out of doorways and clubbed to death; several were flung out of high windows and left broken and dying on the pavements. Firing sounded from all over the town, with now and then the sharp patter of a machine-gun. Later on vengeance became more extended and took in the entire bourgeois element among the townspeople; shops were looted and better-class citizens seized in their houses, accused vaguely of having assisted the Whites, and butchered there and then on their own thresholds.
Some of the refugees screamed hysterically at the sights that were to be seen from the town-hall windows, and many covered their faces and refused to look. A few, however, of whom A.J. was one, gazed on the scene almost impassively, and this either because they were already satiated with horrors, or because their minds had reached that calm equilibrium, born of suffering, in which they saw that market-square at Novarodar as but a tiny and, on the whole, insignificant fragment of a world of steel and blood. To A.J. the latter reason applied with especial force; and more than ever, as the moments passed, his mind clung to what was all in his life that counted—the woman there at his side. The rest of the world was but a chaos of cancelling wrongs, and to offer pity for it was as if one should pour out a single drop of water upon a desert. He felt, as he gazed down upon all the slaughter, that it could not really matter, or it would not be happening.
He was pondering and feeling thus, when a man near him, who had also been watching the scene quite calmly; began to talk to him. He was a thin, ascetic- looking man, middle-aged, with deep-set eyes and a lofty forehead. His voice and accent were educated.
“If I may read your thoughts,” he said quietly, “you are wondering just how much and how little all this can mean.”
A.J. was unwilling to betray himself by any too intelligent answer, so he merely half-nodded and let the other continue talking, which he was more than willing to do. He had been a professor of moral philosophy, he confided, and was now penniless and starving. Probably also (though he did not say so) he was a little mad. He expounded to A.J. a copious theory of the decadence of Western civilisation and the possible foundation of a new and cruder era based on elementals such as hunger, thirst, cruelty, and physical uncleanliness. “No man,” he said oracularly, “has really eaten until he has starved, or been clean until he has felt the lice nibbling at him, or has lived until he has faced death.” He also praised civil war as against war between nations, because it was necessarily smaller and more personal. “It is better, my friend,” he said, “that I should kill you for your wife, or for the contents of your pockets, than that we should stand in opposing trenches and kill each other anonymously because a few men in baroque armchairs a thousand miles away have ordered us to.”
Conversation was several times interrupted by gusts of machine-gunning; once a spray of bullets shattered the already broken windows and several refugees were cut by falling glass.