The Summer Day is Done (42 page)

Outside the mess the corridor was suddenly alive with booted feet hurrying. The Grand Duke and his staff, after half an hour at headquarters, were on their brisk way out. Rooms began to spill men and papers.

‘Orlovsky!’ Major Kolchak, sighting a divisional staff officer, shouted at him down the corridor. ‘Orlovsky, my orders!’

‘Damn your orders,’ the officer shouted back, ‘we’re overrun. You’ll have to pull back.’

Major Kolchak swore.

‘I think I’d better go,’ said Kirby.

‘Russia,’ said the major, ‘breeds more incompetents and lunatics than a bear breeds fleas. We’d all better go.’

What had been a place of activity, overlaid with a hint of civilized anxiety – ‘Nothing to worry about, Your Highness, nothing at all,’ – became metamorphosed into a bedlam of rushing panic. When they reached the top of the steps outside, with headquarters disgorging men in all directions, the Grand Duke, ramrod in his grimness, was already being driven away, his motor car belching through the gates and on to the road. His staff were following in other cars. The foreign liaison officers, two French and one British, were in the last car, waiting for Kirby. They beckoned him impatiently.

‘D’you want to come with us?’ Kirby felt he had to ask the hospitable and likeable major.

‘In that?’ Major Kolchak raised a contemptuous grin at the car. ‘I’ve still got a horse somewhere. He’s a brute but a reliable one.’

The guns began again, opening up in a frightening roar of sound.

‘God, they’ve burst through us!’ Major Kolchak was in anger and despair.

A shell dropped a hundred yards away, and exploded crumpingly in soft ground.

‘Come on!’ roared the British officer to Kirby. Kirby hesitated, but Major Kolchak had gone to the open doors of the house and was bawling for a Captain Brusilov.

Kirby went down the steps two at a time to the drive. The guns seemed on top of headquarters, the cannonading roar an outrage to the ear. Another shell struck, hitting the roof of the mansion with a tremendous crack, and slate and stone rained down. Kirby, about to take his place in the car, already moving slowly forward, turned at the thunderclap and saw Major Kolchak at the moment when a slate struck his right shoulder. His knees buckled and he dropped. Kirby sprinted back up the steps, reaching the major as he made to rise.

‘That damned Brusilov,’ he said. He put a hand to his shoulder. He winced as Kirby helped him to his feet, his rugged face a little white. A cavalry captain appeared, spilling from the doorway in company with shoving men carrying divisional records of every kind. ‘You dallying idiot,’ roared the major, ‘get my horse!’

‘Hold it!’ shouted Kirby. He came down the steps, forcibly pulling Major Kolchak with
him. The car was forty yards away. Before they reached the last step a shell smashed like the glowing iron fist of Mars into the bonnet of the moving car. The whole thing blew up, erupting into a blazing inferno of mutilated men and jagged metal. Kirby was hurled sideways over the steps, the major with him. He found himself spreadeagled partly over the drive, his head and shoulders buried in the stiff wet grass of the verge. His breath whistled from squeezed lungs. He lifted his head and saw the fiery wreckage of the car.

‘Oh, my God,’ he gasped.

Men were running in all directions. Horses were shrill with alarm, jerking at their tethers. He heard a groan. The major came slowly to his knees, his injured arm dangling, his face whiter. Horses clattered. Captain Brusilov had returned. He rode one horse, led another. The major grunted painfully and said painfully, ‘You’d better find one for yourself, Colonel.’ Kirby got to his feet, helped the major into his saddle with the assistance of Captain Brusilov, and then ran to take the major’s advice.

The road was alive with retreating Russians, cavalry going pell-mell and cursing the advent of artillerymen riding sweating horses pulling salvaged guns. There was a thumping in Kirby’s head that was familiar and made worse by the scream and crump of shells. His horse was a pounding, bony beast that carried him through the turmoil of retreat with the enthusiasm of an animal only at its best in a riot. Major Kolchak, riding with one arm useless, kept bawling
questions at cavalrymen and the grey-faced men bawled hopeless answers back at him.

The road was becoming clogged, the gun carriages a lumbering impedimenta. The German guns were ranging, with the road and its immediate environs under fire. They appeared to have divisional headquarters pinpointed now. Kirby heard explosions rocking chimneys, buttresses and roofs.

‘Ride over the fields,’ said Kirby, ‘you’re in no condition to charge through this little hell.’

‘Damnation,’ said the major, but turned his horse.

There was a whine, a sense of catastrophe and a vomiting belch of gravel and stone as a shell struck the road itself. It took the legs from horses, smashed men into eternity by blast or shrapnel, and a gun carriage danced, lifted and crashed. The blast itself reached far enough to engulf Kirby and the major with rushing heat that almost sucked them from their saddles. Kolchak groaned. A man staggered up from a kicking, dying horse. It was Brusilov. The next salvo whistled, earth on either side of the road was torn from its bed and hurled in mighty clods. Kolchak swayed in his saddle and blood dripped from the sleeve of his jacket. He began to fall sideways. Kirby flung himself from his saddle and caught the Russian as he limply fell. Men and horses were flying from the road, galloping in all directions to escape the salvoes.

This is hell right enough, thought Kirby, and one I wasn’t born for. He dragged Major Kolchak away from the road. Something thudded into
his right arm at the same time as he felt the numbing shock of white-hot shrapnel smashing into his left leg above the knee. He was flung violently downwards over the collapsing body of Major Kolchak. The thumping ceased and he lay still amid the uproar of German guns pounding retreating Russians.

Olga sat in the room she shared with Tatiana at the Alexander Palace of Tsarskoe Selo. It was bright today, even if cold. The snow had gone and the sun was doing its best to bring life to long-frozen green. It had been a bad time at the hospital for two days. The Germans had almost broken through in Poland, it was said. But Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich had stopped them, thrown them back.

Today had been frenzied, so many casualties again. She had worked without stopping until four o’clock, and then they had insisted that she take a rest. She would go back for a while this evening.

She longed for peace, for the world to be sane again. Livadia was an impossible dream away now. How remote was its sunshine, its flowers, its gardens, its happiness. How far away was the pleasure of seeing Papa playing tennis with Colonel Kirby.

He might have written. Only to Alexis, of course. But he hadn’t. Mama would not mind a bit how much he wrote to Alexis. He had said he
would come to see them when he was on leave. Oh, he had better.

‘Olga?’ It was Tatiana in her hospital uniform. She sounded a little tentative.

‘Tasha, have they sent you to take a rest too?’

‘Olga, perhaps you should come,’ said Tatiana.

‘Now?’ Olga looked up at her sister. Tatiana tried to smile. It was so unlike her to make hard work of a smile. ‘Tasha?’ Olga rose, gripped by intuitive fear. ‘What has happened?’

‘It’s Colonel Kirby. Olga, he’s rather bad, but perhaps not dreadfully bad – oh, I thought you’d want to know and to come, but don’t tell Mama I came for you, she would think it too pointed.’

Olga snatched up her headdress. She said nothing, but she was pale and her fingers made fumbling work of the simple task of fixing it.

Then, as she went with Tatiana, she said, ‘Is he going to die, Tatiana? Is he going to be a hero?’

‘Don’t be so dramatic,’ said Tatiana matter-of-factly, ‘that isn’t like you at all, that’s silly.’

They had brought him off the hospital train two days after he and Major Kolchak had been carried to the nearest base in a wagon. Nicholas himself had sent a message saying that whatever the best was, he would like Colonel Kirby to have it. Alexandra had received the message, dashed off in a hurry by Nicholas. Because the Tsar himself had interceded, the hospital staff did their initial best in respect of a bed. The Catherine Palace was overflowing, every ward crowded, so they took Kirby to an upper room that was the smallest in the vast place. It was
a room used for storing truckle beds, and the beds had been restacked and space found to accommodate the patient.

Alexandra had been appalled by his condition, his greatcoat dirty and muddy, thrown around him and buttoned to keep it on. Beneath this his uniform was just as dirty, and it was ripped and slashed where field medicos had attended to a smashed right arm and a badly wounded leg. Dried black blood caked his khaki, the field bandages solid with it. His forehead was bruised and he was unconscious, his pulse erratic. It was while Alexandra was taking his pulse rate that the shocked Tatiana slipped away.

She came back accompanied by Olga, by which time Colonel Kirby had been stripped. He lay on top of the blanketed bed, a sheet and other blankets over him. A doctor was examining his right arm. Olga, seeing the extent of the wound, the gashed flesh, the seeping blood, paled to stricken white.

‘Oh, Mama,’ she gasped.

‘What are you doing here?’ Alexandra spoke kindly enough but was a little disapproving.

‘I couldn’t rest with so much to do,’ said Olga, blue eyes frozen as she stared at the stillness of the Englishman. ‘I came back, I heard about Colonel Kirby – Mama, it’s only his arm, isn’t it? He’s not really as bad as he looks, is he?’

‘His leg has been hit too,’ said Alexandra, ‘but Dr Bajorsky will see to him. You had better go to your ward, my love.’

‘Mama, please—’

‘Hush now,’ whispered Alexandra, concerned
at Olga’s distress in the presence of the doctor and a nurse. The nurse, at a nod from the doctor, gently pulled aside the coverings to reveal the injured leg. Olga turned to ice. She had seen many wounds, many victims of bullet and shrapnel, and she knew the consequences of some wounds. Colonel Kirby’s shattered arm was bad enough, his leg was dreadful. The flesh from the knee upwards was an angry, swollen blue, the wound itself was of torn and contused muscle and sinew, and how the bone itself was affected she dared not think. Dr Bajorsky examined the leg as he had examined a thousand others, with the knowledge of his profession and the experience of concentrated months in this hospital. Experience of this kind was often a greater decider than knowledge.

Kirby’s stillness was a help to the examination. He remained deeply unconscious. Dr Bajorsky straightened up. Young less than half a year ago, he was old-looking now. He turned to the Empress.

‘Your Highness,’ he said, ‘even giving him the very best help we can, his leg will have to come off, but with luck we can save his arm.’

Tatiana stifled a cry, Olga trembled.

‘God is with him and with you, Dr Bajorsky,’ said Alexandra quietly, crossing herself.

‘No,’ said Olga wildly.

‘Olga!’ Alexandra was inexpressibly shocked.

‘God is always with us, I know that,’ said Olga, ‘but if his leg is amputated Colonel Kirby will die. Mama, you have only to look at him.’

‘He will die if it isn’t amputated,’ said Dr
Bajorsky. ‘You will excuse me, Your Highness? I will make the theatre arrangements.’

He left the room. Olga hesitated, then followed him.

‘She’s very distressed,’ said Alexandra, ‘but we can only put our trust in God.’

‘Yes, Mama,’ said Tatiana palely, ‘but I am distressed too.’

Olga caught up with Dr Bajorsky.

‘Dr Bajorsky, I beg you,’ she implored, ‘I know why you’re going to take his leg off. It’s because there are hundreds of other cases just as bad and you and the other doctors are so desperately pressed. It’s easier to take off a man’s leg than spend hours trying to piece the bone together. Amputation is swifter, isn’t it?’

‘Nurse,’ he said, for this was what the Grand Duchesses insisted on being called in the hospital, ‘the Emperor himself has asked us to do all we can, and we will. However pressed we are, do you think I’d allow myself to be governed by expediency and not by compassion? You do me an injustice.’

‘Truly, I don’t mean to,’ said Olga desperately. ‘You’ve worked harder than anyone else here and done so much for so many, and you’re terribly tired. But Colonel Kirby deserves more than compassion even. He’s an Englishman and we can’t let Russia take his leg off when he’s given us so much of himself, he’s been the truest friend Russia could have. He’d give his life for us. He
will
give his life for us if you amputate, because if you do he’ll die, I know he will.’

He was moved by her desperation, but he shook his head tiredly.

‘He may die either way,’ he said, ‘for an operation such as you suggest will take many hours. In his condition would he survive that?’

‘Yes, he would, he would survive the longest hours but not an amputation.’ Olga did not know if she really believed this, she spoke more in faith and hope than professional conviction. She begged and pleaded, detaining him in the corridor, and finally she said, ‘Dr Bajorsky, try, oh please try. We will all be eternally grateful – oh, that must be what hundreds have said to you about other men, but give Colonel Kirby time, your time. Save his leg, God will do the rest. It will exhaust you, I know, but Dr Bajorsky, dear Dr Bajorsky, please?’

He had never realized just how lovely this Grand Duchess was, how earnest and urgent with faith she could be, how striking her intensely blue eyes were.

‘You’re asking the impossible,’ he said, ‘but when we get him into the theatre we’ll have a longer look at the impossible. I can promise nothing beyond that.’

‘You will try, I know you will,’ she said.

‘I will see, I cannot promise,’ he said. He smiled to give her some hope as he went on his way.

Olga returned to the room. It looked uncomfortable and depressing with its stacked bed frames and other stores. The nurse had applied temporary new dressings and enclosed Kirby in blankets. He lay very still, his breathing
quiet. Alexandra had gone but Tatiana was there, sitting by the bed. She looked strained. Her day had been quite full enough without this. The nurse, carrying a bucket full of stained, dirty bandages, left the room.