Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [510]
But it was not just the generals. As the captain himself, in a moment of honesty, suddenly admitted to him: ‘The trouble is, we had enough ammunition for a short war but not a longer one. Our factories just don’t produce enough.’
And what, Alexander wondered, did his men make of it all? They were mostly in their early twenties. None of them wanted to be in the army, but they seemed to understand well enough that Russia must be defended. Except, perhaps, for one. He was a pleasant young fellow with a broad face, not quick of mind, from a small village in the province of Riazan. Alexander liked him and often chatted to him in the evenings. But there was one thing he could never seem to make the fellow understand.
‘I mean, sir, they haven’t attacked Riazan, have they?’ he had said one day, with genuine puzzlement in his voice. ‘So what does the army want with me?’
‘But if we don’t fight them here in Poland, they might get to Riazan later,’ Alexander had suggested.
It had not worked, however. For the fellow had only looked at him earnestly, and then, with a childlike smile, replied: ‘Yes sir. But, then again, they might not.’ And Alexander had wondered how many others, like this simple fellow from Riazan, there might be in the Russian army.
It began quite suddenly, and it was unlike anything he had expected.
There were no German helmets; no squadrons of artillery and flashing swords; no lines of men with rifles. Nothing but a distant, sullen roar.
And then the crashes. At first the German shells fell into the woods behind. Then some more smacked into the field in front of them, sending up little typhoons of mud. The enemy knew their positions all right. And then while his men, frightened and mystified, cowered in their inadequate trench, the roaring went on, and on.
For the spring and summer of 1915, the Russian army experienced the full weight of an orchestrated German bombardment.
It was two hours later that the captain came by. His whiskered face was covered in mud as he peered down into the trench. They had taken only one direct hit. It was strangely clean. The young fellow from Riazan had simply disappeared.
‘Come on, Bobrov. Get out,’ the captain cried. ‘We’re moving back.’
They clambered out of the trench and followed him, keeping just inside the wood where the shells were not falling. After a time they came to the command post. It had been obliterated.
‘Damn Germans! They know how to shoot, I must admit,’ the captain said to him with a wry grin.
He’s not such a bad fellow, Alexander thought. Just a bit old-fashioned. And he glanced back to make sure all his men were together.
A shell screamed over. Then another.
And then there was a very loud bang. It was, really, quite extraordinarily loud. And everything went white.
1915, July
He awoke very slowly, through a haze, and to the sound of a piano.
How strange, he thought. I must have died. For how else should he be here, in his own bedroom, in his childhood home at Russka? Curiously he gazed around him. It seemed that the angels had decided to change the furniture somewhat, but there could be no doubt about where he was: he could see a familiar tree out of the window. That sound from the piano was certainly heavenly. He closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, stranger yet, it was to see Nadezhda staring down at him and smiling. He gazed at her in wonder, then frowned. Had she died also? He was sorry for that.
And then her voice, excitedly.
‘Dimitri – Dimitri! He’s come round.’ And the heavenly music stopped.
It had been Vladimir’s idea. When Alexander had been brought back to Moscow, still barely conscious, and his father had wondered what to do for him, it was the rich industrialist who had organized everything. Alexander had been lying there, delirious and tended by a doctor and a nurse, for three