And a little line drawing of a fox in a ringmaster’s shiny boots and top hat.
That summer the Russian army broke through the Austro-Hungarian lines on the Southwestern Front, a stunning advance that took pressure off the French and the British at Verdun and knocked the Austrians out of the war. Called the Brusilov Offensive, it proved the Entente’s greatest victory. And yet the flood of the Russian wounded, the terrible numbers of the dead, undercut any mood of rejoicing. For the city was more than the imperial capital, it was the great staging area of the war—whole districts devoted to barracks, to shipbuilding and munitions factories. Soldiers drilled in the middle of boulevards, and crowded every tram. We could watch the country’s lifeblood pouring into the war like water onto sand. We had front-row seats. The stores, as Varvara had told me that first year, were stripped to bare shelves, but the hospitals were full, and new ones were opening all the time. Even the Winter Palace housed the wounded.
Mother’s friends and their daughters donned the short white veil of the volunteer nurses, a brave red cross sewn upon the apron, but Mother couldn’t bear the sight of wounded men, not with Volodya at the front. Every amputee reminded her of the danger. In lieu of nursing, she organized a sewing circle among her friends, making swabs and rolling gauze for use on the battlefield. My school friends knitted scarves and socks. I tried, but I was no Seryozha. My scarves resembled great tangles of hair.
It was Miss Haddon-Finch who suggested that she and I could help the war effort by assisting the British embassy with its program of distributing parcels—clothing and tools, boots and underwear, evaporated milk and sugar—to wounded Russian soldiers returning home to distant villages. “The British want to show their appreciation for their sacrifice,” she said. I quickly agreed. Anything was better than sitting on a summer’s day rolling gauze. A young adjutant at the embassy gave us a list of questions we should ask the men. They seemed awfully dry, more like a census—name, region, district, and so on. Profession? Married or single? Number of children? Literate? But I supposed they gave married men more than the single ones, and something for the children, books if they could read. Our job was just to take the information. The packages would arrive upon discharge.
My dread grew with each block as we took a cab up to the great military hospital on Vasilievsky Island, grim in the summer heat. Its vast foyer echoed—even there, beds had been set up. I wasn’t a squeamish girl, but I still remember my terror at seeing wounded men lying right in the open, soldiers moaning, hobbling on crutches, their heads encased in bandages. My governess had that English confidence, though, young as she was, and I followed her brisk steps as she approached the desk where a formidable nurse wrote in a ledger.
“Izvenite,” said Miss Haddon-Finch. The woman refused to acknowledge our presence. She tried again, louder. “Excuse me, please? I’m here to visit the soldiers. We were sent by the British embassy. For the discharge packages.”
“What packages?” the woman snapped. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Miss Haddon-Finch again explained our purpose in halting Russian, but it just irritated the big nurse all the more. “I don’t have time for this,” the woman fired back. “Escorting British ladies around like it’s an exposition. Do you think this is a museum? I’ve got dying men to think about. We don’t even have enough beds. Are the English going to give them to us?”
My governess couldn’t understand such rapid speech, but she certainly could guess that her request wasn’t being properly received. It brought out her military side, this plain young woman in shirtwaist and boater, daughter of a colonel in the Indian army. “I beg your pardon,” she said in English, the way the British did, which was anything but a plea for forgiveness. “I’d like to speak to your superior. I’m here on behalf of His Majesty the King. I resent being treated like a beggar.”
I translated quickly for her, proud of her starch, and the irritable nurse got up and found a soldier into whose hands she could deposit us.
I explained our purpose to him, showing him our forms and questions. He asked a heavier man, perhaps a doctor, who shrugged—What’s it to me?—and the soldier led us up the wide stairs, through some swinging double doors into a great airless ward that smelled of carbolic and human waste. The heat! And the stench. Once you have smelled the stink of decaying bodies, you never forget it. The cheap tobacco the soldiers smoked was a blessing. Both my governess and I stood a few feet inside the doorway, afraid to move another foot closer. There were so many men, a vast stockyard of the wounded—a row against each wall with an aisle down the middle, long as a soccer field. Those who were not in too much pain stared at us, calling out for help, for attention. “Barynya!” Miss! “Water, there’s no water.” “Help me!” The smell, and the shouting… I grew woozy and turned back to the door.
“Stop it,” my governess said, grabbing my arm. “Imagine your brother. My brother. Don’t be afraid of them. They’re in pain.”
She started at the first bed, by the door on the right. She tried to speak to the man, who had some sort of box keeping his yellowed sheet from his feet. “What happened?” she asked in her halting Russian. “Trench foot, barynya.” he said. Clean-shaven, but a peasant, his lined face, his short nose, his bright eyes. Puzzled by the Russian phrase, she turned to me to translate.
I was burning up, and the stink made me queasy. I could smell his decaying feet. It was dead summer. Why didn’t they open the windows? “Are you hot, soldier?”
“Better than being cold, barynya.”
“This lady has some questions for you,” I said. “The English are giving packages on discharge. To thank you for fighting.”
“They’re going to thank us for fighting,” he told the man lying next to him, whose head and left eye were swathed in soiled bandages. “Why don’t the tsar thank us?”
“Thinks he already did,” said the man beyond the one with the bandaged head. “One less arm to wash.” They all laughed their way into coughing fits.
“Sorry, miss. I shouldn’t joke around. Just been in this bed awhile,” said the first.
The man across the way groaned rhythmically. “Help me… help me…”
“What’s wrong with him?” my governess asked.
“Gangrene, miss,” said the first man.
She shuddered, touching the little locket around her neck that held a picture of her brother, fighting in France somewhere, probably Verdun. “Maybe we should just find out which ones are being discharged.” She was a great one for systems. She would have made a good soldier, despite her weakness for romantic novels. She stopped a small nurse carrying a pan covered with a cloth. “Can you tell me which men are to be sent home?”
“How should I know?” the nurse said. “If they get better they go back to the front. If they get worse…” She shrugged. “The amputees go home. Why don’t you start there?”
“But how will we know?” she called after the woman, already bustling away.
“It’s on the chart,” the nurse called back over her shoulder.
Despite the noise and the heat and our confusion, we began to go down the row, studying the charts that hung at the foot of the beds. Trench foot, shrapnel, bayonet. Amputation. Gangrene. Bullet in the head, bullet lodged in the spleen, in the spine, in the groin. Paralysis. Amputation. “We’d better split up,” she said. “It’ll go faster.”