Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [185]
In spite of failures and the predominance of retreats, the ranks of the partisans were constantly replenished by new insurgents from the places the peasant horde passed through and by deserters from the enemy camp. During the year and a half that the doctor had spent with the partisans, their army had grown tenfold. When Liberius Mikulitsyn mentioned the numbers of his forces at the meeting in the underground headquarters in Krestovozdvizhensk, he exaggerated them about ten times. Now they had reached that size.
Yuri Andreevich had assistants, several fresh-baked medical orderlies with appropriate experience. His right-hand men in the medical unit were the captured Hungarian Communist and military doctor Kerenyi Lajos, known in camp as Comrade Layoff, and the Croat medic Angelyar, also an Austrian prisoner of war. With the former Yuri Andreevich spoke German; the latter, born in the Slavic Balkans, just managed to understand Russian.
4
According to the international convention of the Red Cross, army doctors and those serving in medical units did not have the right to armed participation in the military actions of the belligerents. But once, against his will, the doctor had to violate this rule. The skirmish that had started caught him in the field and forced him to share the fate of the combatants and shoot back.
The partisan line, in which the doctor, surprised by enemy fire, lay next to the detachment telephonist, occupied the edge of a forest. At the partisans’ back was the taiga, ahead was an open clearing, a bare, unprotected space, across which the Whites were moving to the attack.
They were approaching and were already close. The doctor saw them very well, the face of each one. They were boys and young men from the nonmilitary strata of the capitals and older men mobilized from the reserves. But the tone was set by the former, the young ones, the first-year students and high school boys recently enlisted as volunteers.
The doctor did not know any of them, but the faces of half of them seemed to him habitual, seen, familiar. They reminded him of his former schoolmates. Could it be that these were their younger brothers? Others he seemed to have met in street or theater crowds in years gone by. Their expressive, attractive physiognomies seemed close, kindred.
Doing their duty, as they understood it, inspired them with enthusiastic daring, unnecessary, defiant. They walked in a strung-out, sparse line, drawn up to full height, outdoing the regular guards in their bearing, and, braving the danger, did not resort to making rushes and then lying flat in the field, though there were unevennesses in the clearing, bumps and hummocks behind which they could have hidden. The bullets of the partisans mowed them down almost to a man.
In the middle of the wide, bare field over which the Whites were advancing stood a dead, burned tree. It had been charred by lightning or fire or split and scorched by previous battles. Each advancing volunteer rifleman cast glances at it, struggling with the temptation to get behind its trunk so as to take aim more safely and accurately, then ignored the temptation and went on.
The partisans had a limited number of cartridges. They had to use them sparingly. There was an order, upheld by mutual agreement, to shoot at close range, from the same number of rifles as there were visible targets.
The doctor lay unarmed in the grass, watching the course of the battle. All his sympathy was on the side of the heroically dying children. In his heart he wished them success. They were offspring of families probably close to him in spirit, to his upbringing, his moral cast, his notions.
The thought stirred in him to run out to them in the clearing and surrender and in that way find deliverance. But it was a risky step, fraught with danger.
While he was running to the middle of the clearing, holding his hands up, he could be brought down from both sides, shot in the chest and the back, by his own as a punishment for committing treason,