“Who’d they want to avenge?” the doctor asked wearily.
“Everyone and everything.”
The partisans were impossible to resist: they killed whomever they wanted and snatched whatever they could carry away.
“Sometimes I think, was it really worth fighting?” Kirill Savich, the paramedic, sighed, scanning the endless columns of the retreating people. “If we’d known in advance what would happen, I don’t think we’d have formed the White Army and started the war. Russia is done for anyway, and we’ve done nothing but suffer in vain and get people killed for nothing.”
Sablin gave a wry smile. Maybe it hadn’t been worth it, but if he had to choose again, he would still have joined the volunteers and made his way from Oryol to the Caucasus Mountains.
Once, Klim Rogov had told Sablin that he didn’t want to get involved in the war; he didn’t want to waste his time on such a bad business. But war gave you no choice. It sucked in everybody, willing or unwilling.
To fight the Bolsheviks meant to shoot ordinary Russians who had been forcibly conscripted. Not to fight them meant to stand and watch your home being destroyed without even trying to defend it. It was a trap, and once you were in it, there was no good solution. You could either bite your leg off and escape crippled or wait for the hunters to come along, shoot you, stuff you, and mount you in a glass case.
Everyone had to make the choice that suited them best. Sablin had chosen to keep going to the bitter end as long as he was able. That was how Sablin saw himself—a man who never surrendered. As for what it all meant, he had no idea. In general, he often struggled to find meaning in life.
Sablin had naively believed that when they got to Novorossiysk, the worst would be over. He had thought the evacuation would be carried out in an orderly manner with the wounded transferred to ships and sent off by the commanders to wherever they saw fit. But as soon as the ambulance carts crossed the mountain pass, his hopes were dashed.
It was a quiet spring evening with the hill slopes lost in a lilac haze, and in the distance, the Black Sea was as calm as a millpond. Below as far as they could see were sprawling camps of army units. Huge pillars of swirling dark gray smoke rose from the foot of the mountains.
“Where are the Allied ships?” Fay asked anxiously.
Kirill Savich handed her his binoculars. “Over there on the horizon. I suppose none of the transports are in the port. Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen—all that remains for us to do now is throw ourselves into the sea.”
Sablin ordered them to pitch camp. Then after questioning several people about who was responsible for what, he rode Swallow down the hill to the headquarters of General Kutepov, who was in charge of the evacuation.
The general had his headquarters in a boxcar that stood uncoupled not far from the marina. Beside it were several freight cars in flames.
Sablin had to argue with the guards for some time before they let him squeeze into the hot boxcar filled with cigarette smoke. Cossacks and volunteer army officers shouted at each other, clutching their guns. General Kutepov called them to order, but quarrels kept flaring up again.
“Did you know that General Kirey is evacuating artillery shells and military equipment while people are left stranded?” roared an elderly colonel with a saber scar on his forehead. “The scoundrel announced that anyone who loaded at least two thousand pounds of the stuff onboard would get a place on his steamer.”
“Why are they taking equipment and leaving the sick and wounded behind?” Sablin asked a captain from the Drozdov Regiment.
The captain folded his arms on his chest. “Everyone is already thinking about how they’ll survive after the war. The sick and wounded can’t be sold abroad, but military equipment can.”
The meeting lasted four hours. Each division had a steamer assigned to it, and the commanders were to send guards to the ships to keep unauthorized passengers from boarding.
“Gentlemen,” Kutepov repeated for the tenth time. “I assure you, you will get your transports. We’ve already had radio messages from the Allies to that effect.”
Try as he might, Sablin couldn’t manage to find a place on the ships for his hospital unit. The officers he approached either averted their gaze, told him to go to hell, or advised him to appeal to the Allies.
“The French have said they’ll give us forty-five places and no more,” the captain of the Drozdov Regiment told Sablin. “The British haven’t given us a clear answer yet. They are busy with the second battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, which has just arrived from Constantinople. They’re supposed to ensure the evacuation of the foreign missions and, if possible, some of the Whites.”
As Sablin left the boxcar, he noticed a faded propaganda poster on its wall. It was Gulliver in a British helmet pulling a fleet of battleships along on strings. “I am an Englishman,” read the slogan, “who has given you everything you need for victory.”
There was a Bolshevik leaflet on the ground directly under the staff boxcar.
Down with idle landlords, capitalists, and officers with golden epaulets!
All the soldiers of the White Army are now eligible to return home except for monarchists, landlords, kulaks, factory owners, traders, profiteers, and other parasites, all of whom are expelled from Soviet Russia.
Present this leaflet at any political department of the Red Army.
Stick your bayonet into the ground! Join the Red Army! Join history! Forward toward a new dawn of humanity!
Sablin returned to his camp dazed and numb. For a long time, he sat quietly, staring into the campfire.
“I’ve just been to the port,” Fay said, approaching him. “It’s so terrible there that it’s indescribable. An Italian ship docked, and everyone rushed to try to get on board. A woman was trampled to death.”
Sablin listened with only half an ear. What am I supposed to do? he thought. We have only three or four days of food left and only a couple of thousand rubles in worthless White Army money.
He looked at the slopes dotted with campfires. There were tens of thousands of people. It was impossible to evacuate them, and they couldn’t put up any fight against the Reds. What would happen to them when the Bolsheviks captured the town?
Smoke from the bonfires filled the sky. Sablin could hear rifle shots from the mountain slopes. Had the Reds already reached the passes? Or perhaps that was the Greens attacking and robbing a traveler. It was impossible to tell.
The night drew in quickly, but the camp was still humming and bustling with activity as people settled down for the night. A bird chirruped in the bushes.
Sablin got up—it was time to do the rounds of his patients still lying in carts. The nurses changed their bandages, and their tanned, thin faces were lit up by the gas lights like the faces of icons.
In the last cart lay a twenty-two-year-old patient, Nikita Yeremin. Three days earlier, Sablin had amputated his foot rotten with gangrene.
“How are you doing, young man?” Sablin asked.
Yeremin was lying with his hands behind his head. “I’m fine, doctor,” he said. “Look at the moon—how beautiful it is. It looks like a great, big, round cheese full of holes. My mother had a grocery shop in Kiev, and she sold that kind of cheese there.”
“Do we have any soap left?” Fay shouted. “We’re out of clean bandages too. I’ll have to wash dirty ones.”
“You should go to the British warehouses and get yourself new bandages there,” a male voice said from the darkness.