Although he was familiar with all the rooms on the main floor, Dimitri had only once been to the upper floor of the house; he knew there was a sitting room and a study up there, but he could not remember where they were. Having reached the top of the curving stairs he went slowly round the landing, opening one door after another. He found the sitting room and a bedroom, but not the study, and was about to go down again when, down a short passage on his left, he noticed a single door. That must be it. He went towards it, and turned the handle.
It was a handsome room. The walls were blue; the window depicted a strange, dreamy landscape with mountains in the distance and trees in the foreground, whose fruits were red and gold. On the far wall was a painting by Gauguin, depicting two naked women with a Tahitian sunset behind them.
It was not the study, however. Though there was a desk on the left and a chaise longue in the centre, at the far side of the room stood a large bed.
And upon it lay his Uncle Vladimir and Karpenko.
They were both naked. Vladimir’s large, hairy form was turned away from him, but there could be no mistaking it. His powerful arm was resting across Karpenko’s back. Karpenko, however, had his head turned towards the door and now his handsome face looked straight into Dimitri’s.
Dimitri stared. Then Karpenko gave him a strange, rather guilty smile, as though to say: Well, now you know, don’t you?
And not knowing what to do, Dimitri very quietly retreated, closed the door, made his way down the stairs to the silent hall and walked out of the house.
For some time, as he walked towards his home, he could not make out his own feelings, the shock and horror were so great. And it was with surprise, perhaps, as he finally turned into the courtyard with its dusty mulberry tree that he realized that, for his friend, he felt a new kind of protectiveness. As for Uncle Vladimir, he felt a kind of betrayal together with one determined thought: Nadezhda must never know.
And on that dream-like day it also came to him how much there was about people he did not understand.
It was late that afternoon, having at last summoned up the courage, that Alexander Bobrov entered the Suvorin mansion and, rather to his surprise, was told that Nadezhda was free to see him.
Still more surprising was the fact that, before he could stammer out the apology he had carefully prepared, she reached up, touched him on the lips and said: ‘Never mind.’ Then she linked her arm in his and suggested they walk through the gallery.
Looking at her face, it seemed to Alexander that earlier she might have been crying; but whether for that reason or some other, there was a quietness, a tenderness in her manner he had never seen before.
But this was nothing to his surprise and joy when, as he was about to leave, she turned to him and said, ‘Well, Alexander, you’re going off to war. Don’t forget to come back to me, will you?’ And then, turning up her face and looking at him with a little smile: ‘Perhaps you would like to kiss me.’
And she reached up her arms.
1915
There had been a shower. The ground was wet and steaming in the sun as Alexander waited with his men. In front of them lay a huge Polish field; behind, a line of trees.
Soon the action would begin.
Alexander Bobrov surveyed his men. There were thirty-three of them, all, except one, raw recruits, conscripted that winter and given four weeks basic training. The single veteran, a reservist of twenty-seven, Alexander had deputed to act as sergeant.
The trench in which they were standing was not very deep. Once they had got to six feet down, the captain inspecting the line had told them impatiently, ‘That’ll do. We’ve come here to fight, not dig.’
He was a short, fat man, the captain: an officer of the old school with fierce grey whiskers and a red face who, it sometimes seemed to Bobrov, secretly regarded the war as an exasperating diversion from his proper military business of sitting in his club. This morning, though, he had been bustling and brisk.
‘Won’t be long now,’ he had told them an hour ago. ‘Be brave, lads.’ Then he had disappeared.
Alexander gazed at the huge, muddy field before him. About half a mile away, it dipped down, and past that one could see only a lightly wooded ridge some way beyond. Would German helmets suddenly appear? Or puffs of smoke? Alexander hardly knew. For this was his first action, his first real taste of war.
War. In their primary objective the Russian command had been successful. Her immediate, lightning strikes in the summer of 1914 had taken the enemy by surprise. In the north, Russian forces had raced across Poland and smashed into the Germans in East Prussia, causing a momentary panic-stricken retreat. In the south, a Russian army had swept westward from the Ukraine into Austrian territories, and only just been prevented from cutting north, through Silesia, into Germany and towards Berlin itself.
True, the initial success was achieved at appalling cost. The offensive in the north was not properly supported. When the Germans counter-attacked, the losses were horrific. A quarter of a million men were killed in the August offensive in the north; by the end of 1914 Russian losses, including prisoners-of-war, reached an amazing 1,200,000 men.
But Germany was fighting on two fronts. Her master plan had failed. And the empire of Russia, having been humiliated in her last two wars – the Crimean and the war with Japan – had shown herself a military power to be reckoned with. By the start of 1915, Germany was concentrating its main effort against her. And by March 1915, so necessary was she to France and Britain, that those allies had reluctantly to agree that when the war was over she should receive nothing less than the ancient city of Constantinople – her dream since the time of Catherine the Great – as her prize.
In 1915, however, the Germans were beginning to strike back. And now they were advancing with thunder.
Alexander Bobrov looked at his men thoughtfully. He liked them. He thought they liked him too. But he wished they were better prepared.
For if the great offensive of 1914 had been dramatic, the second round, of 1915, had taken on a very different character.
He had never forgotten his surprise the day they were issued with arms. For when twenty of his men had received rifles, the officer in charge stopped, with an abrupt: ‘That’s it.’
‘But what about the rest?’ he had asked, surprised.
‘They’ll have to get them at the front.’
‘You mean, there are stores up there?’
The officer had looked at him pityingly. ‘They’ll get them from their fellow soldiers,’ he said. ‘The ones that have fallen.’ And it was not long before Alexander discovered that, in some regiments in this section of the front, twenty-five per cent of the men had been sent forward with no arms, expected to scavenge them, so to speak, from the hands of the dead. Somehow he had managed to beg and steal rifles for all his men; but he knew of one unit where half the men were armed with pitchforks, and there was a rumour that to the south, one company were preparing to fight the enemy with their bare hands.
The artillery supporting them, he knew, had only two rounds per field gun; but he had not told his men this.
Then there had been the incident of the wireless.
He had been at the company command post two days before, where they had a wireless set up. The captain was busily engaged with this, giving the colonel a detailed briefing on their position and dispositions and looking rather pleased with himself. But only one thing puzzled Bobrov.
‘Are we transmitting everything like that, sir?’ he asked the captain when he was finished.