Occasional Prose (21 page)

Still, courage, discipline, a high sense of duty to those both above and below, are not the unique property of men in the regular army who feel honor-bound by its rules. These qualities are also found in revolutionaries. And the bias of this opening volume of Solzhenitsyn’s chronicle (the next will be
October 1916
) appears in the fact that the only so-called revolutionary we really get to know (and that one must say “so-called” tells a lot) is the despicable Ensign Lenartovich, who has not the slightest sense of duty and deserts his unit at a crucial moment with the excuse that his skin is too valuable to the workers to be left on the field. His cowardly desertion and striking out for himself (he wants to go over to the Germans and explain to them that he is a socialist) is a betrayal of the sole examples he knows of the oppressed masses he claims to be for—the men serving under him. He does not waste a thought on what will happen to them. Such a character is not basically implausible; there may have been many of him in the Tsar’s army. Yet he is rather thinly realized and uninteresting. The shallowness of Lenartovich (even granting that he is conceived as a shallow person) shows a failure of justice on the author’s part—understandable, God knows, humanly, after what he has suffered and seen others suffer because of the “ideas” of such embryo theorists, but in the author-as-novelist a shortcoming nonetheless. Tolstoy, one feels, would have gone deeper into Lenartovich, as he did with such a worldling as Vronsky, whose whole way of life he held in contempt and loathing. He would have probed, overcoming distaste, holding his broad nose if necessary, till he found a wretched fellow creature in the weak, complacent, sloganized young man. In Tolstoy’s universe, cowardice in war is not so damning, i.e., so “revealing.”

Nevertheless, when this is said, I have to remember that the scene of Lenartovich in the forest, with all its one-sided-ness, is magnificent. He has been found, sitting on a tree stump, by Vorotyntsev and his party, which at this point consists of only two—the giant peasant, Arsenii, and the young lieutenant from Rostov, Lieutenant Kharitonov, who has been released from a hospital with concussion and is trying to rejoin his unit. The opposite of Lenartovich, who does not have a scratch on him and is blubbering about having “nearly been killed” in a potato field by Germans. Lenartovich lies to Vorotyntsev about why he is not with his regiment, and Vorotyntsev sizes him up correctly as a deserter. Yet he takes him on as a responsibility. Lenartovich, sizing
him
up, decides to play along: Maybe this smart colonel can outwit the Germans and get the party through the line. Next they come upon a group of peasant soldiers from the Dorogobuzh regiment carrying two stretchers, one with the body of their dead colonel, which they are taking home for burial, and the other with a wounded lieutenant who is wrapped in the regimental colors. Carrying those heavy stretchers, these last survivors of a regiment that was cut to pieces covering the retreat of others in a heroic rear-guard action have traveled more than twenty-five miles along forest paths, up and down hill, through the German lines. The opposite of Lenartovich.

At Vorotyntsev’s invitation the two groups join up. Lenartovich is horror-struck. Is Vorotyntsev going to risk their own safety by taking on a dead body and a stretcher case? He cannot understand why “this clear-headed colonel was giving in to the ridiculous obscurantist notions of these peasant reservists from the darkest corners of Russia.” He revises his opinion of Vorotyntsev sharply downward and becomes even more impatient and resentful when Vorotyntsev obliges him to take a front pole of the dead man’s stretcher, he himself shouldering the other. Lenartovich has figured out that the wounded lieutenant, obviously a reactionary, has wrapped himself in the colors as a ruse to make those superstitious fools carry him: The whole procession is a disgusting, dangerous farce. But Vorotyntsev, when they come at last to a resting place, turns out to have a plan. He finds a sunny burial spot on a little hill and explains to the men that they are going to bury Colonel Kabanov now. They accept (the more willingly, Lenartovich perceives, because he and the colonel have been sharing the burden of the body), and the grave is dug. There follows a funeral service, with Arsenii—who, it comes out, has sung in his church choir—intoning the prayers for the dead “in his strong diaconal voice” and leading the responses.

Lenartovich stands aside, with a twisted smile of condescension, not adding his voice to the responses, but his head is bared. Once the body is buried, there is still the problem of the wounded lieutenant they are carrying. Vorotyntsev makes no allusion to this, and they go forward with the stretcher till they are near the spot he has selected for them to try to cross the German-held main road. They wait for night. Then the reactionary lieutenant shows that he “knows his duty.” Volunteering to stay behind, he invites the men to unwind the colors from his body, which they do; a peasant is wrapped in them. But, at the last minute, colors or not, they decline to accept his sacrifice. The strongest of the reservists, as they start to cross the road under machine-gun fire, picks up the lieutenant and hoists him onto his shoulder. The stretcher is left behind in the wood.

Now if you subtract Lenartovich from these happenings, which occupy three separate chapters, you see that the narrative is not the same without him—less forceful, less strangely moving. He, the deserter, is essential to that motley group in the woods, by no means all “good” men but sharing some natural wisdom he lacks. The ensign’s very apartness from the others, his quality of onlooker, his coldness and self-satisfaction, his indifference to the colors, his irreligion, complete and sharpen the picture like the introduction of a shadow. If all this is a lesson, there must be someone present whom the lesson is aimed at—a heathen, in fact. Though perhaps not entirely irredeemable. Vorotyntsev thinks he has the makings of an officer in him—an estimate Lenartovich would angrily reject if he could see the thought running through the colonel’s head. But if the potential for good in Lenartovich had been explored for the reader, in other words, if his creator had treated him more fairly, shown him to us “in the round,” the very chiaroscuro of the effect I have just tried to describe would vanish. This novel is
not
the work of a liberal imagination, and its strong alternations of light and shade are essential to its particular vision, which is less close to the optics of
War and Peace
than to moralized myth whose beginning is the Separation of Light from Darkness.

The Masurian Lakes campaign is taken by Solzhenitsyn as the text for a sermon interspersed with cautionary tales and deriving much of its force from the natural setting of wilderness, menacing lakes, isthmuses, deep pine and oak woods. The failure of leadership to guide the men through the uneven, broken terrain, moral as well as topographical, is ascribed—and this is a surprise—more to plain stupidity than to any of the more familiar vices. The stupid generals of Army Group Headquarters, ignorantly directing the movements of Samsonov’s and Rennenkampf’s armies, issuing idiotic orders and insane counter-orders, neglecting the most elementary details of supply and transport, so that the men march five days beside a railroad track when they might have been sent by train and go into the attack hungry having received no bread rations and often not even hardtack; the stupid, lethargic corps commanders who order a retreat when their men are winning a battle, fail to send up reinforcements in a tight squeeze, do not notice a large gap in the defense perimeter, mistake two columns of advancing Germans for a Russian relief force and do not dispatch scouts to investigate, send out uncoded wireless messages, so that the amazed Germans are informed of their orders of the day and troop dispositions; and behind all these fools, the jackasses of the General Staff under the Tsar’s uncle, the Grand Duke Nikolai, himself rather intelligent and alert but too fearful of court intrigues to use seriously his power as commander-in-chief to fire his incompetent and well-connected subordinates. All this massed and beribboned stupidity is seen as a kind of opaqueness, density, darkness of mind into which no thought can penetrate, no ray of truth or reason.

The primordial night of these men’s minds is, in fact, the source of their cunning, lies, and incessant evasions, their adroitness in bureaucratic in-fighting, and avoidance of responsibility—an adroitness of maneuver and power of anticipation that they pitifully lack on the field. Stupidity is the mother of calculation; the task of covering up their incompetence stimulates their brain-power to an unremitting and feverish activity.

In contrast to the prevailing idiocy of the Russian command (an exception is General Martos, commander of XV Corps, a lively, intelligent man and brave as well), Solzhenitsyn sets the efficiency, good organization, and technical competence of the Germans. He admires German management, which he sees as progressive and enlightened, an example the Russians ought to have taken to heart. Yet, among the German generals he notes degrees and shadings of mental capacity. On the German side the outstanding brain is Hermann von François, too conceited to be respected as a man by Solzhenitsyn but, as a general, brave, brilliant, agile, resourceful. Solzhenitsyn attributes the victory of Tannenberg entirely to von François, and Churchill concurs, although, at the time Churchill wrote, Ludendorff had been assigning himself the credit. Von François was successful because (although, like Martos, he was a mere corps commander) he was not afraid to go over the heads of the cautious and pedantic Ludendorff, his wooden superior, Hindenburg and the General Staff itself to complain directly to the Kaiser when his projects were being thwarted. Nor did the Kaiser let protocol stop him from telephoning to von François in the field to hear his opinion on the correct deployment of his corps. That such a relation is possible is proof in itself of German superiority. Among the more pathetic documents cited by Solzhenitsyn are two Russian soldiers’ jingles, one mocking the Kaiser, who is represented on a postcard as a miserable tomcat—“So who leads the German army? Willy Whiskers—stupid cat!”—the other mocking von François—“O Hermann the German, you’re wicked and silly! Almost as bad as that fool Kaiser Willy!” Von François also had the sense, when he did not get the orders he liked, to disobey the orders he got; in an intelligent man Solzhenitsyn excuses and even applauds this.

As further contrast to the ponderous stupidity at the top of the Russian command, which was also top-heavy (there were too many generals in the Tsar’s army), the author lets us see the intelligence and skill of many field officers, ranking down from colonel to captain, and the quick apprehension and perceptiveness of common soldiers like Arsenii, who cannot read and takes a German grand piano for a funny kind of black billiard table. The human resources and learning skills of the Russian people never cease to delight and astonish Vorotyntsev whenever he comes upon them. And whenever he meets intelligence, it goes hand and hand with bravery. In Solzhenitsyn’s mind these qualities appear to be linked, as if in a holy marriage. No brave man can be wholly stupid, and no darkened mind venturesome. Whether this is true or not (which may depend on your definition of intelligence and of bravery), Solzhenitsyn, I think, loves intelligence because for him this faculty or its free exercise comes as much from the heart as from the brain. Lenartovich, whose judgments are almost infallibly wrong, illustrates the fact that nobody can be more stupid than a highly trained intellectual.

In any case there can be no doubt that in the present novel intelligence, whenever it shows itself, produces an effect of sheer joy comparable to the sensation of coming into a clearing in the woods. The circumstances of war, testing responses at every turn and with unexpected results in terms of rank and education, isolate this faculty and render it more valuable, more indispensable for survival than it is in ordinary life. At the same time, absence of it or momentary failures of it are much more conspicuous, taking the form of colossal blunders, for which somebody is going to be blamed.

In
August 1914
Colonel Vorotyntsev is the carrier of the precious quality. He has been sent as a sort of divine messenger by the Grand Duke, and his function is precisely to gather intelligence and report back to his commander-in-chief. Arriving on a Sunday (August 11), he finds Samsonov still in eastern Poland, comfortably installed in his headquarters and enjoying a pre-dinner rest. He has in fact been lying down, in his stocking feet, with his military tunic off, the picture of unruffled tranquillity, though his mind is uneasy because his superior, General Zhilinsky, at Army Group Headquarters, back in Bialystok, has been sending him impossible orders to keep pushing his troops ahead, though they have been nine days on the march already without the regulation day’s rest, and they need a halt anyway for supplies to catch up with them; their rations are running out. Besides, it worries him that he has had no information about the enemy’s whereabouts, nor about that of the First Army, to his right; nothing has come in from cavalry reconnaissance or from Army Group Headquarters. It is five days since his troops crossed the East Prussian frontier; the worn-out men have been advancing through an eerie, deserted countryside. For three days they did not see a German or hear a shot fired. Another irritation: Zhilinsky has taken two of his corps away from him, leaving him with three and a half, while the invisible and, as it turns out, inactive Rennenkampf somewhere to the northeast has seven. Army Group Headquarters is confident that the German forces are up there facing Rennenkampf in the north, where they can be cornered and destroyed. Samsonov’s instinct tells him that they are somewhere on his left, to the southwest of Rennenkampf: Why, after being defeated at Gumbinnen, would they just stand still in that marshy lake region waiting to be trapped? Zhilinsky will not listen and every day orders him to move his army farther right (i.e., to the northeast), while Samsonov, pursuing his instinct, is edging his forces left, where he is sure the Germans are. Sure enough, that day he has had confirmation. Contact has finally been made; yesterday a unit of General Martos’s XV Corps, on the
left
of the left center, has wheeled
left
and caught the enemy, defeated him, and forced him back. This has been the battle of Orlau, August 10.