The Way of the Cross

The Way of the Cross

THE WAY OF THE CROSS

THE WAY OF THE

CROSS

BY

V. DOROSHEVITCH

WITH AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE

BY

STEPHEN GRAHAM

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker Press 1916

Copyright, 1916 by G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

The Knickerbocker Dress, New York

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

THE Way of the Cross is probably the first piece of Russian War literature translated into English. It is a terribly poignant impression of the fugitives on the road after the great German invasion of Russia in August and September, 1915. It is written by Doroshevitch, a famous Russian journalist, and was contributed to the Russkoe Slovo in October, 1915. Doroshevitch went from Moscow to meet the oncoming flood of refugees, and he went through to the rear of the Russian army, and came back with this extraordinary picture.

At first he met the sparse survivors and first comers, those who were furthest ahead in the procession; afterwards they came thicker and thicker till they were a great moving wall. He tells how they camped in the forests, how they died by the way, how they put up their crosses by the side of the road, how they sold their horses and abandoned their carts, how they starved, how they suffered. The words speak for themselves.

Doroshevitch is chiefly famous for his work on Sakhalin, but he is a very popular modern writer, and very powerful, using an ironic pen. He writes constantly on the Russkoe Slovo, and is a great favourite. Russians buy this interesting paper even for him alone, and read his articles and feuilletons aloud. He has an extraordinary journalistic style, all short sentences, short paragraphs, word-paragraphs, dashes, marks of interrogation. Our own writers should find him interesting. Scores of Russian journalists imitate him and endeavour to write in his way—not always with success. I have been collecting his articles for some time with a view to publishing a volume of his in our Russian Library with Sologub and Kuprin and other living Russians. But here is this extraordinary document—The Way of the Cross. I felt directly I saw it that it must be translated and given to the British public, sent to the trenches, and read by all of us, if only that we may realize the temper of Russia and what the Russians have suffered.

Doroshevitch is a liberal and a progressive, but he is a real Russian and a Christian. This breathless, almost desperate story yet breathes a tender love toward the individual, and there is that Christian mysticism that can see in the White crosses over the fugitives’ graves "Georgian crosses on the breast of the suffering earth." The Georgian is the Russian equivalent of our Victoria Cross, given for valour and self-sacrifice.

Stephen Graham.

CONTENTS

The Way of the Cross

The Way of the Cross

IN 1812 Moscow made a funeral pyre for herself, and burned

—For Russia’s sake. A hundred years have passed.

And the red glare of Moscow’s fire has paled.

The Moscow of those days!

A wooden city.

The burning of it was appalling.

The ground burned under the feet of the Napoleonic soldiers: even the roadways of Moscow were made of wood at that time.

But now!

More than ten provinces have been laid waste by the enemy.

Millions of people have become beggars. And have fled.

From the places of their birth to the far centre of Russia stretches the Way of the Cross for these people.

And on this Way, as on that other Way-of Golgotha, are places, there are:

—Stopping places,

Where the people faint under the burden of the Cross.

Bobruisk. Dovsk. Roslavl.

These are names full of affliction.

These stopping places.

Especially:

—The memory of Roslavl is terrible.

The River

I

THE RIVER

ON the roadway, outside Podolsk, a sentry, an old man, said to me with a smile.

—All Russia is on parade.

And he raised the barrier to allow a motor-car to pass.

—One province comes after another.

After some hours on the road you begin to distinguish one province from another.

There goes the province of Holm.

You recognize it by the way the peasant women do their hair.

They cut a "fringe" and let it show on their foreheads, pulling it out from under their kerchiefs, As our ladies wore their hair twenty years ago.

These are:

—The White Mountain people.

The peasant Women of the White Mountain district, whom the women of other provinces cannot tolerate, but despise them for these same "fringes."

—The plain-haired women.

The Holm people came before any of the others, they have been longer on the road and are more upset than all the rest.

Their peasant women are quarrelsome, they look about them ill-naturedly, and for every little nothing they raise hysterical cries.

It’s evident that they’re upset in the very depths of their souls.

Their nerves are all unstrung.

See, approaching slowly, in their reddish sheepskin coats with fringes of wool hanging from the cuffs of their sleeves, come the people from the province of Grodno.

You can recognize the Grodno people by their carts. The carts have coverings made of checked and striped material stretched over a basket-work frame.

This homespun material is used for the festival dresses of the peasant women.

In the province of Grodno the peasant women make such cloth.

They offer it at sixty copecks an arshin at the relief points on the road:

Even in the extremity of their need they will not part with it for less than sixty copecks.

And with this precious material they now cover their carts!

All goes to ruin!

This is a twice-humbled people.

—First of all, good man, there came through our province fugitives from other places. They ruined us: dug up our potatoes, rooted up our cabbages, took off the hay, and carried away the unground grain in their carts. And as soon as this had happened we ourselves had to be on the move!—complain the peasants.

See, here come the peasants of Lublin and Lomzha provinces. They wear long white sheepskin coats with the wool showing at the cuffs of their sleeves, with broad shawl-like collars of black sheepskin, and with a beautiful ornamentation of coloured threads. They wear four-cornered caps with pompons on the corners.

Long moustaches, and shaven chins, overgrown and scrubby.

A quiet, courteous, gentle folk. Their women are arrayed in specially sumptuous fur coats.

The sleeves, the pockets, and the waists are all adorned with embroidery in coloured thread.

Now all these are dirty, all are covered with a thick layer of dust, they are torn and ragged, but you can see that they were once beautiful, ornamental, and in themselves signs of wealth.

And that not very long ago.

—It’s the third month!

—We’ve been journeying nine weeks!

—Seven weeks since we left!

The peasants answer weariedly in reply to the question:

—Have you been long on the road?

A whole eternity!

—I can’t make it out—said one of the fugitives to me. He was serving as a soldier, and used even such phrases as "the masses."

—I can’t make it out: either my home was all a dream, or I’ve gone out of my mind now, and God knows when I shall understand. My home burnt, cattle drowned in the river, no little wife, she died on the road; my two children also died and we buried them by the wayside and put crosses over the graves. I've got one son left and one horse. That’s all we are in the world. Is it possible that I am the same man as I was?

He had the common appearance of a fugitive—a two-horse cart with a single shaft and canvas tilt.

When you meet the first party of fugitives upon the road you think that they’re gipsies.

The populations of whole provinces have become gipsies, and in the month of October are leading a nomad life on the road and in the forests.

It is necessary to form some estimate of the greatness of their unexampled trial. To a cart that should be drawn by two horses one often sees only one.

The other has fallen, or has been sold by the way.

No harness of any kind, only a horse-collar.

And that lonely horse in the shafts has the air of an orphan, and imparts that air to the whole conveyance.

By the side of the horse walks the peasant or his wife, turn by turn.

They only go on foot in the mornings.

—To get warm.

In the mornings there are five degrees of frost in the fields.

But they all are travelling in their carts.

All of them have sore feet and many are lame.

Inside the carts, under feather beds, under old clothes and rags, sit or lie five or seven human beings.

The carts are crowded with people.

The little horses find it hard to draw the people and their luggage.

What is in the carts?

—We only brought_the bedding!

—We only managed to bring the linen! these are the answers you hear.

You meet the very strangest cartloads.

They sometimes carry—layers of iron.

—The roof!

It was the most valued possession.

—Their cottage had an iron roof!

When they were forced to flee, they took this most valued thing and carried it they knew not whither.

Why?

—It was the most valuable. At the sides of the carts the peasants have slung their kitchen utensils, as gipsies do.

It cuts one to the heart to see these remains of what was lately—only yesterday—opulence and sufficiency.

One often sees enamelled ware

Enamelled kettles, frying-pans, basins.

Suddenly comes a cart with a watering-pot fastened at the side.

Just one watering-pot remains from the whole garden and vegetable plot!

Sewing machines stick out from the sides of the carts.

It’s as if there had been a fire.

A fire in which all has been destroyed, and the people have caught up

—The most precious things!

Often, behind the carts, instead of spare wheels as in the majority of cases—is tied on a Viennese chair.

They had been proud of this chair.

—It had been the chair for guests.

—They didn’t get along anyhow in their home. They had Viennese chairs. Theirs wasn’t an izba.

And now, when they sleep in the woods and travel slowly along the road, in cold and hunger, they carry these chairs with them as:

—Their most precious possession.

Under the cart sometimes dogs are tied, and they run along there as they can.

They’re tied up so that they won’t get run over by the relief cars that come swiftly along.

How moving and how instant in its appeal is this enormous and silent procession! How it grips one’s heart! The procession moving no one knows whither.

Into the unknown.

Silently, above all.

The over-wearied horses do not shy when motor-cars pass them. They do not even prick up their ears.

And the dogs don’t bark.

The people in the carts do not talk.

—They have said all they’ve got to say.

They move like grey shadows, like the dead.

The peasant women are silent.

Even the children do not cry.

At the relief points, where thousands of people are gathered together, you are impressed by the silence.

What a silent country it is!

You can go for tens and for hundreds of versts—and still meet an almost uninterrupted stream of grey carts

Like a series of spectres.

And silent, silent, silent.

Nothing but hopeless boredom and grief in their eyes.

Weary and indifferent faces, as of convicts being marched along the road

And only by the new white wooden crosses along the side of the road can you see how much suffering has silently passed there.

A river of suffering has coursed along.

At the medical stations the doctors tear their hair.

—What can we do? Confess our helplessness? Numbers come to us suffering from rheumatism. From rheumatism in its most acute form. What can we do? What help can we give these people who must spend their nights in the forests?

There are many cases of typhoid fever

And at the medical stations on the road the doctors give a sigh of relief and exclaim

—Thank God, no typhus.

Dysentery is raging.

—It is astonishing, how many are suffering from dysentery!—and that also is a matter for despair.

Nearly everybody has bronchitis.

Many cases of acute pneumonia.

Among the children, scarlatina.

Scores are suffering from bruises and blisters, and have their feet bandaged up.

So blistered, that it’s impossible to walk.

Feet scorched from the bonfires near which the people have slept at night in the forest.

The doctors work as hard as they can.

They work with superhuman energy.

But how can one cope with elemental calamity?

And it is truly elemental.

What can we do? said a doctor to me.

Yesterday I had an experience. Side by side. A man was dying, a woman gave birth to a child.

The Channel

II

THE CHANNEL

THE peasants and peasant women—in war time the village is a woman's country—come out and look at the oncoming fugitives with great curiosity.

—Not our faces. Not our caps. They're not dressed like us, they don't speak plainly.

The peasant women look at them closely.

—Where do they come from?

Everyone is rapturous concerning:

—The people from below Riga.

That is how the peasants designate the German colonists from the Baltic provinces.

They came "with the autumn," while lit was yet warm.

They did not hurry themselves. They took care of their fine horses.

They came in large, fine, spacious covered carts.

With all their household goods.

In the provinces of Moscow, Kaluga, Smolensk, Mogilef, and Minsk, all the peasants speak of them with envy:

—You see where these people come from. From below Riga.

They speak with envy of the people from Holm province.

—Especially of those who came first.

They managed to get away in the warm weather.

When there was something on the road for the cattle to eat.

They drove their herds with them.

—There was something to look at. What fine cows!

The peasants also approve of the Grodno folk.

—They have fine horses. No comparison with otirs.

The peasant women especially admire the people from Lomzha and Lublin, and cry out:

—What fine clothes! They're dressed up like butterflies! It's beautiful to look at them!

When one sees them first they create a strange impression.

Suddenly amidst the grey line of fugitives are seen—bright patches.

Peasant women come along in bright new shawls.

Ornamental, sumptuous.

With such tired and mournful faces and yet dressed in their festival clothes.

This is the most dreadful of all.

These people have come to the very last.

Everything else has been worn out, it has all gone to rags, changed to tatters.

And at the last stopping place the peasant woman has taken out of her box or from the bottom of some little tub, her best clothes which she has hidden there till then.

The very last.

A ragged fugitive has still something left.

But these well-dressed people have nothing more.

All has gone.

Soon they'll have nothing more to put on.

The farther you go, the more you meet of these

—Peasants in their best clothes.

The people of the villages say

—She's put on her last skirt. Yet you can see what sort of people they were.

And our village folk say, enviously:

—They've put the horses in by twos. How smartly they trot! It's evident they've been well fed. Not like ours.

The villagers are, above all, practical.

The peasants and their wives have bought up the fugitives' cattle.

Ask the peasant women who guard the flocks—the women do this work now:

—Have you bought any cows from the fugitives?

Every one of them will answer:

—Why not? There goes one of their cows, there's another, there's another.

They're not willing to talk about the price they paid.

—How much did we give? They were dear. Thirty roubles.

But their neighbours, who have not bought cows for themselves, will tell you:

—It's impossible for her to pay such a price! She ought to say outright that she practically got them for nothing.

The villages round about make a lot of money through the fugitives.

They do nothing but bake enormous quantities of black bread and cart it to the relief points.

At a rouble and a half, at a rouble seventy, even at two roubles the pood.

Unheard-of prices!

And there are places through which pass 12,000 fugitives a day.

There is some fear that the villagers have given themselves up too much to bread making.

Will they have enough for themselves by and by?

Has the harvest been so good as to allow them to feed not only themselves but hundreds of thousands of others?

The towns, villages, and hamlets along the road are filled with terror.

—The fugitives will eat us all up!

—They're like locusts.

Utterly worn out, the fugitives turn in from the highway and make their camp in the forest at the very edge of the road.

They stay there for days, for a week, upon occasion for two weeks.

They chop wood and make fires.

They cut it down, not asking

—Whose is it?

They cut wood indiscriminately, continuously.

When they have absolutely made a space bare, they move on farther.

They eat into the forest.

And behind them they leave the fresh-hewn stumps of trees, the bare glade, the black traces of the bonfires.

They trample down everything.

No grass remains, not a bit of hay, no leaves from the trees which they've cut down, no branches—the ground is covered only with a sort of grey dust, with a litter of light rubbish.

All around is a stench from the filth they've left behind.

Sometimes—indeed often—by the side of the road they leave a new-made grave marked by a white, roughly cut wooden cross.

As you go along the road you can see the forest smoking here, there, and in every direction.

These are the bonfires of the fugitives.

At night the fugitives wander about in the neighbourhood.

They dig up the potatoes, take all the cabbages, drag off stacks of corn waiting to be ground, and piles of hay.

At some places where the fugitives have been out and foraged, the people complain:

—Lord a' mercy! The oats which were being brought to us have fallen into the hands of the fugitives on the road. So much oats was sent, and we have the invoice for it. But only half arrives. The fugitives have stopped the wagons on the road and taken away what they wanted.

At one of the points on the road I met a substantial local farmer.

He was selling unground oats.

No dearer than five copecks above the price of hay a pood.

—It doesn't matter how cheap it is, cried he in despair. The fugitives rob the wagons all the same.

At another point I was told of a local landowner:

—He goes about with a revolver. The fugitives have dug up more than a hundred acres of potatoes belonging to him.

There's no stopping people who've come to the end of things.

Near Gomel a by-road goes over a ravine, and the fugitives puilled the bridge to bits.

For their bonfires.

In the towns and villages you hear of country squires who have fled by night with their families from the coming of the fugitives.

You hear of some who have asked for a guard of soldiers.

—If only for the night. Entirely at our expense.

Their fear is quite understandable, when at night-time a great crowd overtakes you.

But no personal assaults of any kind have been heard of.

However, regarding property, no one asks:

—Whose?

You understand that by the carts of the fugitives.

One is full of wood, of fresh wood just chopped, and on top of it is tied a great bundle of hay, whilst behind hang sheaves of rye.

What do the peasantry think about this?

Along the whole road to Bobruisk, no matter where I asked the question:

—Don't the fugitives do you a lot of damage?

—Nitchevo! Nothing, that's all right.

—Don't they dig up your potatoes, and take away your hay?

—Yes, they take it. How not dig them up?

And for hundreds of versts, just as if it were a conspiracy, you will hear these phrases:

—Let them dig them up!

—They've got to eat, haven't they?

—Perhaps we shall have to do it ourselves!

I often heard:

—They take things in extremity. They ask for more, and we make them a present of it.

Not once did I hear the word which would be used to apply to beggars:

—Podaem, We grant.

But:

—Daem, We give.

Or, more often:

—Dareem, We present.

The peasants, especially the women, are distressed by the "unsung corpses," the dead which the fugitives have to bury by the roadside as they go.

In many places the people have told me:

—We said to them,—Give us your corpses. We will put them in their shrouds, sing the service, and bury them as Christians. But they have no time to do anything. They dig the grave the night before and next morning they go on.

The channel softly receives the river into itself.

In the great misfortune that has befallen these fugitives, the peasantry, by their humanity and good-will, have taken upon themselves half the burden of the calamity.

The peasants say:

—The first fugitives really did offend us.

—At first, in a way, they were rude.

Clearly, we ought specially to increase the number of relief stations,

—To lessen all this.

Oh, these relief stations beginning to be built after the fugitives had already arrived!

The peasants were really affronted by the people of Holm province

—The Holm people, these are the ones who were rude to us.

This is the general saying

In Kaluga province, in Mogilef, in Smolensk, and in Minsk.

The Holm peasants—are the most exasperating people.

Especially exasperating

How they talk of their own province!

—And is your land good?

—Our land? There's no such land anywhere else in the world. Do you call your ground land? I shouldn't think it worth cultivating. Now ours is land. One could eat it—that's the kind of land it is. Like bread!

—Were you well-off?

—Were we well-off? You people who live here couldn't dream what our life there was like.

—Did you have fine cattle?

—Such cattle I had! And such a house I had with a grove round it and money spent on it! How our children grew up! What cattle perished on the way hither, how many we sold for a mere nothing!

The rumour often went round among the Holm peasants that they were to be driven

—To Siberia.

And they were afraid.

—Such winter there! Nothing will ripen.

They are angry to have lost

—Such riches.

And according to the peasants, it is only those from Holm province who have been rude to them.