Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [67]
At headquarters, where they were used to moving whole armies and measuring distances by hundred-mile marches, they assured him that the village was somewhere nearby, around twelve or fifteen miles away. In reality it turned out to be more than sixty.
For the whole way, along the horizon to the left of the direction they were moving in, there was an unfriendly growling and rumbling. Gordon had never in his life been witness to an earthquake. But he reasoned correctly that the sullen and peevish grumbling of enemy artillery, barely distinguishable in the distance, was most comparable to underground tremors and rumblings of a volcanic origin. Towards evening, the lower part of the sky in that direction flushed with a rosy, quivering fire, which did not go out until morning.
The driver took Gordon past ruined villages. Some of them had been abandoned by their inhabitants. In others, people huddled in cellars deep underground. The villages had become heaps of rubble and broken brick, which stretched along the same lines as the houses once had done. These burned-down settlements could be surveyed at a glance from end to end, like barren wastes. On their surface, old women rummaged about, each in her own burnt debris, digging up something from the ashes and hiding it away each time, imagining they were hidden from strangers’ eyes, as if the former walls were still around them. They met and followed Gordon with their gaze, as if asking if the world would soon come to its senses and return to a life of peace and order.
During the night the travelers came upon a patrol. They were told to turn off the main road, go back, and skirt this area by a roundabout country road. The driver did not know the new way. They spent some two hours senselessly wandering about. Before dawn the traveler and his driver arrived at a settlement that bore the required name. No one there had heard anything about a field hospital. It soon became clear that there were two villages of the same name in the area, this one and the one they were looking for. In the morning they reached their goal. As they drove along the outskirts, which gave off a smell of medicinal chamomile and iodoform, he thought he would not stay overnight with Zhivago, but, after spending the day in his company, would head back in the evening to the railway station and the comrades he had left. Circumstances kept him there for more than a week.
9
In those days the front began to stir. Sudden changes were going on there. To the south of the place where Gordon ended up, one of our combined units, in a successful attack of its separate constituent parts, broke through the fortified positions of the enemy. Developing its strike, the attacking group kept cutting deeper into their disposition. After it followed auxiliary units, widening the breach. Gradually falling behind, they became separated from the head group. This led to its being captured. In these circumstances, Second Lieutenant Antipov was taken prisoner, forced into it by the surrender of his platoon.
False rumors went around about him. He was considered dead and buried under the earth in a shell crater. This was repeated from the words of his acquaintance Galiullin, a lieutenant serving in the same regiment, who supposedly saw him die through his binoculars from an observation post, when Antipov was leading his men in an attack.
Before Galiullin’s eyes was the habitual spectacle of a unit attacking. They were supposed to advance quickly, almost at a run, across the space that separated the two armies, an autumn field overgrown with dry wormwood swaying in the wind and prickly thistles motionlessly sticking up. By the boldness of their courage, the attackers were either to entice the Austrians lodged in the opposite trenches to come and meet their bayonets or to shower them with grenades and