The Summer Day is Done (41 page)

‘Not a bit. We found we were very good friends.’ He wanted to push back her white headdress, to uncover her hair. He wanted to turn her face to his, to kiss the wide shapely mouth. ‘I think I had better be off,’ he said, ‘I’ve taken up too much of your valuable time. But I’m going to your army headquarters tomorrow and I wanted to see you before I left.’

She flashed him a look of utter disbelief.

‘Tomorrow? You’re going to Baranovichi tomorrow?’

‘Yes, that’s why I’m in Russia, to join—’

‘Colonel Kirby, that is ridiculous,’ she said. ‘It means you have come just to say goodbye again. You’re always saying goodbye. Why, all you’ve done is give us thirty minutes of your time after nearly two years. That is a most ungenerous way of keeping a promise.’

‘Olga, I only arrived yesterday afternoon.’

‘All the same,’ said Olga. But she could not let her disappointment spoil the brief reunion. She smiled and said, ‘Never mind, at least you’re in Russia again and not terribly far away. Am I to remember you to Mama? And shall I tell her,’ she added with the demureness that cloaked her humorous asides, ‘that perhaps in another two years you’ll call on us again?’

‘Give the Empress my felicitations and tell her that if I may I hope to call as often as I can,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes, quite as often as you can,’ she whispered. ‘It has seemed so long, you cannot imagine.’

She rose. He stood up. He picked up his cap and greatcoat. He looked at her. Her lashes fell.

‘Dear Olga,’ he said. It was the closest to an endearment he had ever permitted himself. It brought the pinkness to her face. ‘Olga, you are the Emperor’s eldest daughter and Russia’s brightest hope. Whatever happens, remember that you and all your family are very much loved by very many people.’

‘Colonel Kirby,’ she said faintly and was in desperate search for words again.

‘You’ll be late,’ he said gently, ‘I had better go.’

She found some words.

‘Please don’t try to be a hero, wherever they send you,’ she said, ‘there are so many heroes and all of them dead.’

‘At army headquarters,’ he said, ‘it’s not possible to be a hero.’

When he had gone Olga stared blankly at the white door. She was late but she had to take another minute to compose herself before returning to her ward. She was at her most compassionate for the rest of the day and the wounded men thought her blue eyes amazingly beautiful. The Emperor’s eldest daughter had no idea of her capacity for making people love her.

Later that day Kirby managed to offend Karita. She was to be sent home to her parents in the Crimea? Much as she loved them, she was not! How dare he try to get rid of her!

‘I won’t go,’ she said fiercely.

‘I’ll explain again,’ said Kirby. They were in his hotel room. Karita had a room on an upper floor. ‘Tomorrow I’m off to headquarters to join other British officers there. I can’t take you, my sweet. And you can’t stay in Petrograd alone. Therefore, little one, you shall have a train ticket home—’

‘Therefore, I will not,’ she said.

‘—and I’ll come and put you on the train before I leave myself. When the war is over—’

‘The war has nothing to do with it,’ said Karita.

‘Ah,’ he murmured, ‘have we another Grand Duchess here?’

‘Monsieur,’ she said primly to command his serious attention. As she hadn’t called him that for years he knew a fine old argument was in the offing. ‘Monsieur, it’s not at all proper for you to go to any headquarters in Russia without a servant. It might be proper in England, which I don’t think it is, but it isn’t in Russia.’

‘You minx,’ he said, ‘you got that from Aunt Charlotte.’

Karita put her nose in the air.

‘In Russia,’ she said, ‘officers always take servants with them. How would they manage otherwise? How will you manage? Who will see that you have clean shirts and socks? It would be humiliating if you had no servant. They would think you were nobody. What would Aunt Charlotte say to that?’

‘I think you know.’

‘She would be most upset. She would not try to put me on some old train, she would insist that I came with you. You need only telephone the War Minister and he would tell you it would be disgraceful not to have a servant with you. He would have to find one for you and it would probably be some fat old thing nobody else wanted.’

‘Fat old things can be very comforting,’ said Kirby. ‘Fat old things don’t argue.’

‘Who is arguing?’ Suddenly Karita was very offended. ‘I have done something wrong? You wish to have another servant in my place?’

‘Where would I get one like you?’ he said.
‘You’re not my servant, you’re my responsibility. I just thought you might like to see your parents, that’s all.’

‘I will go to the Crimea when you go there,’ she said.

He remembered Prolofski and Karita’s unconditional participation.

‘Well, I only hope it won’t be too martial for you at headquarters,’ he said.

‘I am to go with you, then?’ she said happily.

‘Either you or some fat old thing.’

She laughed up at him. He kissed her. It surprised and confused her.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I thought it was not supposed to be proper in Petrograd.’

‘It isn’t,’ he said, ‘that was a kiss from your mother and father.’

She tingled a little, but not because of her mother and father.

‘I hope that when we get to Baranovichi you won’t have too many generals telling you what to do,’ she said.

Kirby laughed. But Karita did not consider it funny. It never seemed right to her that there were men who could give him orders. She had remarked to Aunt Charlotte how disconcerting it was that Colonel Kirby was not a lord, after all.

‘Good heavens, child,’ said Aunt Charlotte, ‘he would look hideous in ermine.’

What that meant Karita had no idea.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what to proffer to people.’

‘Proffer them the information that he’s a
mystery to himself,’ said Aunt Charlotte. ‘All this wandering about, I really can’t understand him. I wish to goodness you’d marry him. That would settle him down very handsomely and heaven knows, he could not do better.’

‘Aunt Charlotte!’ Karita was in rosy shock. ‘Oh, hush! Such an improper consideration. If he heard you he would pack me off undressed.’

‘Undressed?’ Aunt Charlotte was in booming shock herself then.

‘Yes, he would pack me off immediately, as I am.’

Aunt Charlotte’s bosom heaved with laughter. The girl was a treasure and so charmingly quaint.

Karita was quite right, as Kirby had known she was. Russian officers had servants where British officers had batmen. Karita was accepted at Baranovichi by the Russians and viewed with raised eyebrows by the British. Kirby shared a railway coach with three British officers and Karita was housed with other servants in a mansion half a mile away. Headquarters itself was contained in a cluster of railway coaches screened by a wood, and Karita came every day to see to things. Within a very short time she had the coach compartments looking impeccable and the other servants thoroughly organized. She was always the most personable and irresistible of young women. As soon as she was introduced to the other British officers, all majors, she realized Colonel Kirby was their superior. She felt very satisfied about that.

Kirby’s natural gift for liaison work was immediately obvious. He not only got on well with the Russians but seemed to understand them. British and French officers had a cordial enough relationship with their Russian counterparts, but found it almost impossible to understand the Russian character. The conviviality of the ebullient officer class was always in advance of their aptitude for being frank, so that one could get no real idea of how well or how critically a new battle was going, how a situation was developing.

A French officer whimsically observed to Kirby that he understood nothing at all about the Russians except that, frustrating as they were, it was impossible to dislike them.

‘Is that what you really think?’ asked Kirby.

‘What I really think,
mon ami
, is that they turn their backs on all the bad news and that the worse the news is the more they smile.’

‘Then why despair? You’re halfway to understanding them. When there’s a crisis they clap you on the shoulder and tell you not to worry. That’s to let you know the sun sets and the moon rises, and you can no more change that than they can.’

‘But that is God’s will. A battle is conceived, fought and governed by men.’

‘That’s what you believe, my friend,’ said Kirby.

The one person who did not indulge in smiling ambiguity was the Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich. Nor did he permit this in members of his immediate staff. He was not in a position,
however, to forbid the Tsar to smile.

The Tsar did not let his concern over the progress of the war spoil his satisfaction in being at
Stavka
, as the field headquarters were called. The location was not far from the railway line connecting Moscow with Warsaw. Nicholas was happy to be at the centre of things. Nicholas did not interfere with the Grand Duke’s authority in any way and was always in unaffected pleasure whenever the commander-in-chief consulted with him or engaged him in discussion.

Discovering that Kirby was among British observers present, he did not ask for the Englishman to be brought to him. He sought him out. He found him outside his coach, talking to a Russian officer. They both saluted. Nicholas, his uniform plain and without decorations, returned the salutes. Then he took Kirby’s hand and shook it vigorously.

‘My dear fellow, this is extraordinarily nice,’ he said. ‘Well, who would have thought it? You will be a general yet. Are you comfortable? Have they given you suitable accommodation? I’m afraid we’re not all that grand here.’

‘Everything is excellent, Your Highness,’ said Kirby. ‘May I express my own pleasure at seeing you again?’

‘Ah, but it’s not quite the same as meeting on a tennis court,’ said Nicholas. ‘What do you think of things?’

They strolled around the cold encampment and discussed the war. Kirby found that the Tsar’s appreciation of the general situation was intelligent and keen, though his optimism was as
obstinate as ever. Yet as always he felt it impossible not to have a warm, human liking for him.

Kirby and other Allied officers sensed the ammunition problem was already critical. But to speak of it to Russian officers was to invite the inevitable response that cheerfully led nowhere.

‘Where did you hear that, old man? It’s nothing to worry about. How is the bewitching Karita? Absolutely damned splendid girl you have there, Colonel.’

Kirby was kept busy on translation work involving decoding.

It was when the early spring was softening the ground and turning frost into mud that one day the Grand Duke paid a visit to the divisional headquarters of a forward unit. Kirby, with another British officer and two French colonels, accompanied the commander-in-chief and his staff. They travelled in a galaxy of powerful staff cars, and it took them two hours to reach the division. They passed through various reserve camps on the way, the Grand Duke’s car rushing through to the sound of cheers.

Not far from the divisional headquarters the Russians were solidly entrenched on their Polish soil, where their front ran for hundreds of miles. On this particular day the division had been under a bombardment that seemed erratic, the German guns switching from one sector to another. The limited Russian reply was symptomatic of their apparently incurable shell shortage.

As the Grand Duke’s motorized cavalcade approached the divisional headquarters the
distant bombardment increased, and the German cannonade intensified to a constant, rumbling roar. The house stood back about two hundred yards from the road. Kirby felt that the war had suddenly become very close, the noise of the guns impossible to shut out. There was activity inside and outside the house, the place full of guards, full of officers and men coming and going. The Grand Duke and his staff strode quickly up the steps, sentries sprang aside and presented rifles in salute. Kirby stayed on the steps, and a Russian cavalry major, his boots grey with drying mud and his head bare, came out. He had a glass of wine in his hand. He looked at Kirby’s British uniform with interest.

‘The old man has come a bit close to things today, hasn’t he?’ he said.

‘It was his own idea,’ said Kirby, ‘it sounds uncomfortably noisy here to me.’

The major, liking this frankness and the faultless Russian, grinned. He was square and rugged of face, thickset and powerful of body.

‘Boris Gregorovich Kolchak, Fifth Ukrainian Cavalry,’ he said, introducing himself.

‘John Kirby, British liaison.’

Major Kolchak, looking not unlike a friendly bear, watched the road. More artillery appeared, riders lashing at the straining horses.

‘That will make just about two hundred guns on this sector,’ he said, ‘outnumbering the shells by two to one.’

Above the rumbling thunder Kirby said, ‘Is this normal or is there an offensive today?’

‘Yes, it’s noisy, isn’t it?’ said Major Kolchak.
‘But they’re always at it, Colonel. The trouble with the Germans is that they can’t fight a friendly war. Unless they’re creating a little bit of hell for someone somewhere they’re not enjoying themselves.’ A dispatch rider driving a motorcycle combination roared up the long drive and Major Kolchak waited for the engine to be cut before going on. ‘I don’t know why they’re raising hell today. They can’t be thinking of making a move. With this thaw the whole country is like a bog.’

‘Perhaps it’s a demonstration,’ said Kirby.

‘Demonstration?’

‘To acknowledge the visit of the Grand Duke.’

Major Kolchak grinned again. ‘Come inside,’ he said, ‘it’s just as noisy but at least you can have a drink.’

Coincidentally, the guns stopped then and amid a bleak silence they went into the stone-built mansion. In a large room full of tables, maps and men, the Grand Duke was making himself heard in an altercatory discussion with the divisional commander. It seemed that contact between headquarters and some forward sectors was dangerously tenuous and the Grand Duke was insisting on remedial action. Major Kolchak glanced at Kirby and shrugged as if to indicate confusion was a state familiar to division. He drew Kirby into another room, where a few officers were taking a cold lunch standing up. Kirby helped himself to a slice of cooked meat and some bread, leaving the more exotic food alone. Major Kolchak poured some wine. It seemed that the major was in command
of a cavalry troop bivouacked a mile away. He had been summoned to headquarters and told to wait for orders. He had been waiting two hours.