‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, there’s no code. You were transmitting everything in clear.’
The captain stared at him with a frown. ‘Why ever not, for God’s sake?’
‘I just thought – what if the enemy was picking up our signals? He’d know all our dispositions.’
And now the captain’s face cleared. ‘Don’t be silly, Bobrov.’ He smiled. ‘We’re transmitting in Russian, man. The Germans can’t understand a word we say.’
His attitude was not unusual. The transmissions for the entire Russian army were transmitted in clear, which, as the German High Command was later to remark: ‘Made things simpler on the eastern front.’
Why were things so badly organized? Partly, he knew, it was because the high command was dominated by men like the captain: old-fashioned, parade ground soldiers who despised modern weaponry and modern methods. The commander-in-chief, Sukhomlinov, was just such a man. There was, he also knew, a cadre of forward-looking younger officers who chafed under this regime; but these men were not in control.
But it was not just the generals. As the captain himself, in a moment of honesty, suddenly admitted to him: ‘The trouble is, we had enough ammunition for a short war but not a longer one. Our factories just don’t produce enough.’
And what, Alexander wondered, did his men make of it all? They were mostly in their early twenties. None of them wanted to be in the army, but they seemed to understand well enough that Russia must be defended. Except, perhaps, for one. He was a pleasant young fellow with a broad face, not quick of mind, from a small village in the province of Riazan. Alexander liked him and often chatted to him in the evenings. But there was one thing he could never seem to make the fellow understand.
‘I mean, sir, they haven’t attacked Riazan, have they?’ he had said one day, with genuine puzzlement in his voice. ‘So what does the army want with me?’
‘But if we don’t fight them here in Poland, they might get to Riazan later,’ Alexander had suggested.
It had not worked, however. For the fellow had only looked at him earnestly, and then, with a childlike smile, replied: ‘Yes sir. But, then again, they might not.’ And Alexander had wondered how many others, like this simple fellow from Riazan, there might be in the Russian army.
It began quite suddenly, and it was unlike anything he had expected.
There were no German helmets; no squadrons of artillery and flashing swords; no lines of men with rifles. Nothing but a distant, sullen roar.
And then the crashes. At first the German shells fell into the woods behind. Then some more smacked into the field in front of them, sending up little typhoons of mud. The enemy knew their positions all right. And then while his men, frightened and mystified, cowered in their inadequate trench, the roaring went on, and on.
For the spring and summer of 1915, the Russian army experienced the full weight of an orchestrated German bombardment.
It was two hours later that the captain came by. His whiskered face was covered in mud as he peered down into the trench. They had taken only one direct hit. It was strangely clean. The young fellow from Riazan had simply disappeared.
‘Come on, Bobrov. Get out,’ the captain cried. ‘We’re moving back.’
They clambered out of the trench and followed him, keeping just inside the wood where the shells were not falling. After a time they came to the command post. It had been obliterated.
‘Damn Germans! They know how to shoot, I must admit,’ the captain said to him with a wry grin.
He’s not such a bad fellow, Alexander thought. Just a bit old-fashioned. And he glanced back to make sure all his men were together.
A shell screamed over. Then another.
And then there was a very loud bang. It was, really, quite extraordinarily loud. And everything went white.
1915, July
He awoke very slowly, through a haze, and to the sound of a piano.
How strange, he thought. I must have died. For how else should he be here, in his own bedroom, in his childhood home at Russka? Curiously he gazed around him. It seemed that the angels had decided to change the furniture somewhat, but there could be no doubt about where he was: he could see a familiar tree out of the window. That sound from the piano was certainly heavenly. He closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, stranger yet, it was to see Nadezhda staring down at him and smiling. He gazed at her in wonder, then frowned. Had she died also? He was sorry for that.
And then her voice, excitedly.
‘Dimitri – Dimitri! He’s come round.’ And the heavenly music stopped.
It had been Vladimir’s idea. When Alexander had been brought back to Moscow, still barely conscious, and his father had wondered what to do for him, it was the rich industrialist who had organized everything. Alexander had been lying there, delirious and tended by a doctor and a nurse, for three weeks.
Gradually he learned what had happened. The shell whose blast had so nearly killed him was a tiny part of a huge bombardment which had pushed the Russian army in the north back from Poland nearly three hundred miles.
‘It’s a catastrophe,’ Nadezhda told him, the third day he was well enough to talk. ‘Most of Lithuania’s gone. They’re advancing across Latvia. And our people are still pulling back. Old General Sukhomlinov’s been dismissed. About time too. Everyone says the government’s incompetent. They say we can only hope for help from St Nicolas the Miracle-worker!’
But the really fascinating news came from his father.
Though the Tsar had dismissed the Duma early in the year and ruled by decree, the set-backs in the war had been so great that he had been forced to call it into session again, and so Nicolai Bobrov was in the capital. So great had the anti-German feeling been since war began that the government had changed the capital’s name from St Petersburg, with its German-sounding ending, to the more Russian Petrograd. It was from Petrograd, therefore, that Nicolai’s letters were now addressed.
They were full of information. He gave his son character sketches of the important men in the parliament: Rodzianko, the chairman of the Duma, portly but wise; Kerensky, the leader of the Socialists – ‘A good speaker, but with no real political plan except to destroy the Tsar’ – and several others. He related all the gossip from the court. ‘The Empress’s friend, the fellow Rasputin, caused so much trouble with his lechery that he’s been sent back to his family in Siberia. Let’s hope he stays there.’ And above all, to Alexander’s amazement, his father was optimistic.
The Germans can’t defeat Russia for a simple reason: we continue to retreat and we always have reserves. Napoleon found the same thing. Even if we abandon the capital, we shall still exhaust them.
But this present crisis is our last and best opportunity to reform the government. The Tsar didn’t want to call the Duma back but now he’s had to. We shall force some measure of democracy on him and save Russia by doing so.
Out of the defeat comes victory, my dear boy.
Alexander could only hope his father was right.
For a long time he was still very weak. It seemed the blast had damaged his insides in some way. His wounds, which were extensive, still caused him pain. ‘But you’re young. You’ll mend,’ the doctor told him cheerfully. They put him in a wheelchair and arranged a room for him downstairs so that he could wheel himself out on to the verandah and enjoy the company.
The house was busy. Dear Arina, as housekeeper, ran everything with wonderful efficiency, and she personally would supervise the samovar of tea and the wonderful pastries that appeared on the verandah every afternoon. Despite the war, the little museum and the workshops were functioning and Arina’s son Ivan, now sixteen, was an apprentice to the woodcarver there and showing great signs of promise.