Russian Treasures

34. THE GREAT RETREAT

Sablin had spent six months in the White Army. He had seen marching columns deployed from horizon to horizon. He had seen brutal cavalry attacks in which avalanches of horsemen would crash into each other at full gallop in an orgy of slaughter.

So much had passed before his eyes: cannons hopelessly stuck in the snow, half-deaf gunners who could talk only in shouts, and Kalmyk troops going into battle accompanied by the crash of tambourines and singing of their shamans. They came back with their enemies’ heads on spears.

Don Cossacks in faded tunics and trousers with red stripes, Kuban and Terek Cossacks in astrakhan hats and long, flared chokha coats, and volunteers dressed in the Russian Imperial and British uniforms had only one thing in common: their battered boots, a symbol of the great retreat.

Now, if they came across a dead body lying on the road, the first thing they did was remove the boots, which were far too precious to be allowed to go to waste.

Everyone had long since stopped expecting anything from the commissary. They had only been issued new footwear once in the last two months when they had been sent a consignment of odd army boots, left feet only.

“Don’t anger the gods,” Kirill Savich, the paramedic, had said to Sablin. “Be thankful for small mercies. Imagine if the Reds shot your right leg off. A left boot would come in handy.”

“If only I could be sure they’d shoot off the right leg,” Sablin had muttered.

The army fled but slowly. The icy steppe had thawed and was now deep with mud that clogged the wheels so that they could only move the ambulance carts forward by dragging them. Sablin remembered something similar in Manchuria during the Russian-Japanese war of 1904–1905.

The horses collapsed with exhaustion and didn’t even try to get back up again. Spattered with mud to his shoulders, Sablin approached a group of medics crowded around a horse, its sides heaving with effort and its ears twitching.

“You need to unharness it,” Sablin commanded. “Grab its mane and pull it over onto its side.”

Then they freed its bent front legs and pulled at its mane and tail. Finally, the horse was back on its feet, and the medics harnessed it again.

“I just can’t bear to watch it,” said one of the nurses named Fay, a grotesque-looking girl with a face like an imp. “The poor thing needs rest.”

Sablin sniffed. “If we let it rest, it wouldn’t move and would be dead before we knew it. A horse needs to be led. Do you remember how my mare Swallow got her hoof stuck in the crack between the planks on that bridge? If I’d left her alone, she would have broken her leg. When a horse panics, it goes crazy.”

“It’s the same with people,” sighed Fay.

Soon, the hospital was left alone, as all of the rest of the army units had overtaken it. Only occasionally a rearguard unit made its way past the ambulance carts. At first, Sablin kept looking behind to see if the Red Army was approaching, but soon, he just forgot about it.

They spent nights camped out on the floor of huts, often abandoned. Sablin always was the last to go to bed. First, he had to make sure that all of the horses were unharnessed and had enough hay. Then two hours later, he got up to check that the horses had been given their water. He couldn’t trust anyone else to do it because everyone was dazed by fatigue. They would reply automatically, “Yes, sir,” and do nothing. Only Fay helped him, fetching water when necessary or haggling with Cossack women for fodder.

“I need food and hay for the field hospital,” she insisted.

“We have nothing,” they said.

“Listen, I’ll pay you in cash. If you refuse, I’ll find what I need and pay you nothing. The Reds will take the hay anyway.”

Every now and then, Fay scolded Sablin, “You’re always taking care of the horses, but what about taking care of yourself? If one of the horses collapses, I can find another even if I have to steal it. But where would I find another doctor? Go to sleep now!”

Even in the morning when everyone had already gotten up, she sent the medics away to stop them bothering Sablin. “See to it yourselves,” Sablin heard through his sleep. “Let the doctor have a few minutes’ rest.”

After the Whites had surrendered Ekaterinodar, it seemed for a time that they would have a respite. The Bolsheviks were stuck some way behind. The Kuban River had overflowed its banks, and all of the bridges had been blown up by the Whites. It was much easier to walk now. The Kalmyks’ herds had passed the hospital unit, and the sheep trampled the mud until it was a solid, springy mass less sticky and easier to walk on than before. The hospital unit was reduced to eight carts: all of the walking wounded had gone on ahead, and half the seriously injured patients had died on the way.

The air was pure and soft, and in the distance, the blue-gray mountains rose up still with patches of snow here and there. Sablin rode along, falling asleep every now and again—or rather, drifting in and out of consciousness. His horse, Swallow, carried him along behind the carts, and he dreamed of Nizhny Novgorod, his house, and his wife. It seemed to him as though none of it had ever actually belonged to him, that he was watching a film of somebody else’s life, an unheard-of color film with sound.

“Doctor, look!” called Fay.

The road ahead ran through a crevice in the mountains, and countless convoys and military units were streaming down into it as though into the mouth of a funnel. The sight was majestic and eerie: the White Army disappearing into another world.

They traveled on through rocky mountains, gorges, and tunnels flooded with people, horses, camels, and carts. Partisans could be hiding behind any rock. Sablin struck up a conversation with a lieutenant who had been several times to Novorossiysk. The lieutenant told him that the entire Caucasus region was riddled with Greens like a Cossack hat crawling with lice. They called themselves “The Sochi Raiders,” “The Detachment of Thunder and Lightning,” the “Team of Avengers,” and so on.

“Who’d they want to avenge?” the doctor asked wearily.

“Everyone and everything.”

The partisans were impossible to resist: they killed whomever they wanted and snatched whatever they could carry away.

“Sometimes I think, was it really worth fighting?” Kirill Savich, the paramedic, sighed, scanning the endless columns of the retreating people. “If we’d known in advance what would happen, I don’t think we’d have formed the White Army and started the war. Russia is done for anyway, and we’ve done nothing but suffer in vain and get people killed for nothing.”

Sablin gave a wry smile. Maybe it hadn’t been worth it, but if he had to choose again, he would still have joined the volunteers and made his way from Oryol to the Caucasus Mountains.

Once, Klim Rogov had told Sablin that he didn’t want to get involved in the war; he didn’t want to waste his time on such a bad business. But war gave you no choice. It sucked in everybody, willing or unwilling.

To fight the Bolsheviks meant to shoot ordinary Russians who had been forcibly conscripted. Not to fight them meant to stand and watch your home being destroyed without even trying to defend it. It was a trap, and once you were in it, there was no good solution. You could either bite your leg off and escape crippled or wait for the hunters to come along, shoot you, stuff you, and mount you in a glass case.

Everyone had to make the choice that suited them best. Sablin had chosen to keep going to the bitter end as long as he was able. That was how Sablin saw himself—a man who never surrendered. As for what it all meant, he had no idea. In general, he often struggled to find meaning in life.

Sablin had naively believed that when they got to Novorossiysk, the worst would be over. He had thought the evacuation would be carried out in an orderly manner with the wounded transferred to ships and sent off by the commanders to wherever they saw fit. But as soon as the ambulance carts crossed the mountain pass, his hopes were dashed.

It was a quiet spring evening with the hill slopes lost in a lilac haze, and in the distance, the Black Sea was as calm as a millpond. Below as far as they could see were sprawling camps of army units. Huge pillars of swirling dark gray smoke rose from the foot of the mountains.

“Where are the Allied ships?” Fay asked anxiously.

Kirill Savich handed her his binoculars. “Over there on the horizon. I suppose none of the transports are in the port. Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen—all that remains for us to do now is throw ourselves into the sea.”

Sablin ordered them to pitch camp. Then after questioning several people about who was responsible for what, he rode Swallow down the hill to the headquarters of General Kutepov, who was in charge of the evacuation.

The general had his headquarters in a boxcar that stood uncoupled not far from the marina. Beside it were several freight cars in flames.

Sablin had to argue with the guards for some time before they let him squeeze into the hot boxcar filled with cigarette smoke. Cossacks and volunteer army officers shouted at each other, clutching their guns. General Kutepov called them to order, but quarrels kept flaring up again.

“Did you know that General Kirey is evacuating artillery shells and military equipment while people are left stranded?” roared an elderly colonel with a saber scar on his forehead. “The scoundrel announced that anyone who loaded at least two thousand pounds of the stuff onboard would get a place on his steamer.”

“Why are they taking equipment and leaving the sick and wounded behind?” Sablin asked a captain from the Drozdov Regiment.

The captain folded his arms on his chest. “Everyone is already thinking about how they’ll survive after the war. The sick and wounded can’t be sold abroad, but military equipment can.”

The meeting lasted four hours. Each division had a steamer assigned to it, and the commanders were to send guards to the ships to keep unauthorized passengers from boarding.

“Gentlemen,” Kutepov repeated for the tenth time. “I assure you, you will get your transports. We’ve already had radio messages from the Allies to that effect.”

Try as he might, Sablin couldn’t manage to find a place on the ships for his hospital unit. The officers he approached either averted their gaze, told him to go to hell, or advised him to appeal to the Allies.

“The French have said they’ll give us forty-five places and no more,” the captain of the Drozdov Regiment told Sablin. “The British haven’t given us a clear answer yet. They are busy with the second battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, which has just arrived from Constantinople. They’re supposed to ensure the evacuation of the foreign missions and, if possible, some of the Whites.”

As Sablin left the boxcar, he noticed a faded propaganda poster on its wall. It was Gulliver in a British helmet pulling a fleet of battleships along on strings. “I am an Englishman,” read the slogan, “who has given you everything you need for victory.”

There was a Bolshevik leaflet on the ground directly under the staff boxcar.

Sablin returned to his camp dazed and numb. For a long time, he sat quietly, staring into the campfire.

“I’ve just been to the port,” Fay said, approaching him. “It’s so terrible there that it’s indescribable. An Italian ship docked, and everyone rushed to try to get on board. A woman was trampled to death.”

Sablin listened with only half an ear. What am I supposed to do? he thought. We have only three or four days of food left and only a couple of thousand rubles in worthless White Army money.

He looked at the slopes dotted with campfires. There were tens of thousands of people. It was impossible to evacuate them, and they couldn’t put up any fight against the Reds. What would happen to them when the Bolsheviks captured the town?

Smoke from the bonfires filled the sky. Sablin could hear rifle shots from the mountain slopes. Had the Reds already reached the passes? Or perhaps that was the Greens attacking and robbing a traveler. It was impossible to tell.

The night drew in quickly, but the camp was still humming and bustling with activity as people settled down for the night. A bird chirruped in the bushes.

Sablin got up—it was time to do the rounds of his patients still lying in carts. The nurses changed their bandages, and their tanned, thin faces were lit up by the gas lights like the faces of icons.

In the last cart lay a twenty-two-year-old patient, Nikita Yeremin. Three days earlier, Sablin had amputated his foot rotten with gangrene.

“How are you doing, young man?” Sablin asked.

Yeremin was lying with his hands behind his head. “I’m fine, doctor,” he said. “Look at the moon—how beautiful it is. It looks like a great, big, round cheese full of holes. My mother had a grocery shop in Kiev, and she sold that kind of cheese there.”

“Do we have any soap left?” Fay shouted. “We’re out of clean bandages too. I’ll have to wash dirty ones.”

“You should go to the British warehouses and get yourself new bandages there,” a male voice said from the darkness.

Sablin turned his head and was startled to see a Cossack right behind him with a dozen medical kits strung over his shoulders.

“Where did you get all this?” Sablin asked.

The Cossack pointed to the city below. “The British are destroying their military warehouses, so they’re giving away supplies for free.”

Sablin glanced at Fay. “Call Kirill Savich,” he said. “We need to go to the British now.”

“Doctor, please don’t leave us!” Yeremin cried out, grabbing Sablin’s sleeve.

“Don’t be silly.” Sablin pulled away his hand. “I’m not going to leave you behind.”

But Yeremin wouldn’t listen. “Doctor, promise you won’t abandon us! We’ll die here without you.”

Even when Sablin, Fay, and Kirill Savich had driven far away from the camp, they could still hear him shouting.