By Mikhail Sholokhov,
How human beings have sullied, have poisoned the world! How much human misery has been poured out! She turned passionately towards Bunchuk and sought for his hand. ‘Tell me, wouldn’t it be sweet to die for that? Tell me! Yes? What is there to believe in, if not in that? What is one to live for? It seems to me that if I die in the struggle…’ She pressed his hand to her chest so that he felt the muffled beating of her heart, and gazing up at him with a deep, darkened glance, she whispered: ‘… and if death is not instantaneous, then the last thing I shall feel will be that triumphant, disturbingly beautiful music of the future.’
The rejoicing was emphasized more sharply and ruthlessly by the deep misery of
those who had lost their relatives and dear ones for ever. There were many
cossacks missing, scattered over the fields of Galicia, the Bukovina, Eastern
Prussia, the Carpathians, Roumania — their bodies lying and rotting under the
gunfire dirge. And now the hillocks of the brotherly graves were overgrown with
vegetation, rain pressed down on them, and drifting snow enwrapped them. No
matter how often they cried on the anniversaries and remembrance days, the
eastern wind would not carry their cries to Galicia and Eastern Prussia, to the
grass-grown hillocks of the brotherly graves.
The grass grows over the graves, time overgrows the pain. The wind blew away
the traces of those who had departed; time blows away the bloody pain and the
memory of those who did not live to see their dear ones again — and will not
live, for brief is human life, and not for long is any of us granted to tread
the grass.
The wife of Prokhor Shamil beat her head against the hard ground and chewed the
earthen floor of her hut with her teeth, as she saw her brother-in-law, Martin
Shamil, caressing his pregnant wife or giving his children presents and
dandling them. She writhed and crawled on hands and knees over the floor,
whilst around her her little children clung like a drove of sheep, howling as
they watched watched their mother, their eyes dilated with fear.
Tear the collar of your last shirt at your throat, dear heart! Tear the hair of
your head, thin with joyless, heavy life; bite your lips till the blood comes;
wring your work-scarred hands and beat yourself against the floor on the
threshold of your empty hut! The master is missing from your hut, your husband
is missing, your children are fatherless; and remember that no-one will caress
you or your orphans, no-one will press your head to his breast at night, when
you drop worn out with weariness; and no-one will say to you as once he said:
‘Don’t worry, Aniska, we’ll manage somehow!’
Afterwards this incident was transformed into an heroic exploit. Kruchkov, a
favourite of the company commander, told his story and recieved the Cross of St.
George. His comrades remained in shadow. The hero was sent to the divisional
staff headquarters, where he lived in clover until the end of the war,
receiving three more crosses because influential women and officers came from
Petersburg and Moscow to look at him. The ladies ‘ahed’ and ‘ohed’, the ladies
regaled the Don cossack with expensive cigarettes and chocolates. At first he
cursed them by all the devils, but afterwards, under the benevolent influence
of the staff toadies in officers’ uniforms, he made a remunerative business of
it. He told the story of his ’exploit’, laying the colors on thickly and lying
without a twinge of conscience, while the ladies went into raptures, and
stared admiringly at the pocked-marked, brigand face of the cossack hero.
The Tsar visited headquarters, and Kruchkov was taken to be shown to him. The
sleepy Emperor looked Kruchkov over as if he were a horse, blinked his heavy
eyelids, and slapped the cossack on the back. ‘Good cossack lad!’ he marked, and turning to his suite, he asked for some Seltzer water.
Kruchkov’s shaggy head was continually pictured in the
newspapers and journals. There were Kruchkov brands of cigarettes. The
merchants of Nizhni-Novgorod presented him with a gold-mounted firearm.
And what really happened? Men has clashed on the field of death, and, embraced
by mortal terror, had fought, struck, inflicted blind blows on one another,
wounded one another’s horses; then they had turned and fled, frightened by a
shot which had killed one of their number. They had ridden away mortally
mutilated.
And it was called an heroic exploit.