The Way of the Cross (Doroshevich)/VI
VI
IN THE FORESTS OF MOGILEF
ON the road from Roslavl to Bobruisk there passes before us the great movement of the people in all its grandeur.
—Where are you going now?—they asked me in Roslavl.
—To the province of Mogilef.
—And, to Poland.
So in ordinary parlance, do they call the province of Mogilef, the extremest, foremost point of Great Russia.
Day by day the mornings become frostier.
There is thin ice on the marsh.
The province of Mogilef is this:
—Sand, on which the forest has grown.
In the wind there are drifts of Mogilef sand upon the road.
From ahead there comes forward on the road whole clouds, whole white clouds.
Dust.
The grey carts go no longer in single file.
They have occupied the highway in its whole width.
They come on like a wall.
The aching eyes of the horses, the aching eyes of the people, equally full of physical suffering and full of affliction, rend the heart.
Over the branches of the trees, whither a glance of the eyes will not take you, rise the many smokes.
Now it is continuous.
The whole forest is inhabited.
Through the dust the whole atmosphere is yet penetrated with a sweet odour of hot pine branches.
And that scent we shall breathe the whole way without ceasing.
Two hundred and fifty versts of smoke.
And no limit and no respite.
What a grey nightmare it is that comes on, and comes on without end.
And empty carts, with horses tied on behind, come gaily along the side of the road to meet the people, avoiding the mass of traffic in the centre.
These are the carts of the buyers from Roslavl.
—For a bargain.
In the cart stands a muzhik, so as to see the road better than he would sitting down.
And lashes his horse.
Beside this horse and running at the sides of the cart, and behind it are a multiplicity of legs.
As if a spider were running quickly, quickly along the road.
The fugitives get out of the way, give up the road,—and no one even pays attention to the running spiders.
The road becomes more and more clear of forest.
All the land which has been cultivated, and the crops, are ruined.
Along the roadway, for the whole length of the road, stretches a line of planted trees.
As a protection from sand and from snow.
Against the drifts.
Half of these trees have now been rooted up.
Truly:
—As if the Tartar had gone by.
Look, at the twenty-verst post of the road gleams a white cross.
Three more crosses.
More still.
Still new ones, more new ones, yesterday's cemetery.
They are white, like little Georgian crosses, crosses pinned to the much-suffering road.
Just like Georgian orders:
—For self-sacrifice.
And there was expressed, together with affliction, much warmth and much beauty.
"They" do the burying at nights.
Do not bury, but:
—Dig holes for the dead,
as the peasants say.
—Because it is without the requiem hymn. Surely such an act is not a burial.
In the daytime, at the stopping-places, at the relief and medical points, they:
—conceal their corpses,
fearing that they may be delayed by formalities:
—and remain behind!
They carry out the corpses from the forest where they have spent the night and bring them to the road.
They must bury them in a place where the people pass by.
—Where man coming past, will cross himself and pray for the soul of the departed. For you see, the dead have not had their due singing and prayers as at a proper funeral service.
The feeling for beauty dwelling in the souls of these people who, at home, dress themselves so wonderfully, expresses itself involuntarily, sub-consciously:
—In the choice of the burial-place.
Just as the feeling for beauty in the soul of the Russian people instinctively expressed itself in the past, in the choice of beautiful places for the erection of their monasteries.
All the cemeteries:
—are in beautiful places.
Some of them, earlier in the day, have looked out a beautiful little hill.
Some, a picturesque ravine,
Some, a spot under a canopy of foliage.
But certainly:
—A beautiful spot:
All these orphan cemeteries are painfully beautiful.
The graves are fashioned with love.
Everywhere carefully heaped and evenly moulded mounds.
Often a little fencing around them.
Or the grave has been covered with pine branches.
Or the wind trembles upon a lonely branch that has been planted in the earth.
On the crosses have been tied embroidered belts, or clean white towels with deeply embroidered ends have been swathed around them.
There are inscriptions on the graves:
—This province, that town district, this survey, that village.
They bury them:
—The best they can,
and go on farther, leaving behind them the sort of graves one only sees in dreams.
On some graves "God's blessing."
Ikons of the Mother of God.
In boxes or frames.
Other ikons than that of the Mother of God I did not see.
None.
They are ikons:
—Of "She who intercedes."
And pitifully She looks out, the Woman of Suffering. From the graves, upon the river of human affliction streaming past.
On other graves are Roman Catholic ikons, paper pictures pasted on to wood.
Also only the Mother of God.
Wearing the crown, with the cleft heart, which the swords have pierced.
There are Orthodox and Catholic graves side by side and together.
Hundreds of thousands of beggared people go past, and of course no one touches an ikon or its setting, or an ikon box or the embroidered towel waving in the wind.
I stop at one collection of graves, at a second, at a third.
There are some which breathe horror.
Three, five, crosses, and on all:
—The 17th of September.[1]
—The 17th of September.
—The 17th of September.
In one day, all. In one night a cemetery grew up.
The majority are indicated by an inscription on one cross:
—Such and such a day of August.
On another:
—Such and such a day of September.
Somebody has been buried.
Others see:
—That it is a nice place.
And lay their own dead with the others, side by side.
And yet more come, and yet more. And the cemetery grows, stretching itself out along the margin of the road.
And one reads the heart-breaking inscriptions on the crosses:
—Infant.
—Infant.
—Infant.
Yes, truly, it is the province of Mogilef.[2]
Every three, every five versts,—and then every two versts, and every verst,—crosses, crosses, crosses.
A continuous cemetery.
And between these crosses, and amongst the lowering smoke of forest bonfires and clouds of dust come on, come on, without end come on grey carts and people, like grey visions.
With uninterrupted hooting, tinkling, and whistling, the relief cars come along, making their way through the dense crowd going in the opposite direction.
Going for fugitives, going with fugitives.
Every car in Roslavl is being used for the carting of the fugitives.
They gather on the road the sick, the tired-out, horseless ones, the people going on foot; they pick up the children, the orphaned, the lonely.
Those who are riding on worn-out, hardly moving horses.
They give a push from behind when there's a hill to be climbed.
Some Grodno people are going forward slowly and wearily on oxen.
They try not to get separated from one another, but are failing.
Grodno people. Holm people, Lublin people, Lomzha people.
How many there are on the road!
All have gone.
Here comes a cunningly contrived house on wheels.
The owner has either taken an entire wash-house, or has built one and put it on wheels,—and now a pair of horses is drawing it.
Through the open door you can see the people sitting on a wooden form, just as if at home.
Singing.
Some Polish women are carrying, on wooden stands, large pictures of the Mother of God, all in dark ribbons, hung with branches of evergreen, adorned with withered flowers.
They carry the ikons the whole road, hundreds of versts, in the hands.
They go forwards as if seeing nothing in front of them.
As if they felt no tiredness whatever.
In a sort of unbroken ecstasy.
As if they were going to heaven.
And, never ceasing, loudly they sing.
They do not complain, but give praise.
There arises a voluminous cloud of white dust, that you cannot see through.
The sort of cloud that a herd of cattle will raise, and of herds, only a herd of sheep.
The shadows of sheep, but not sheep.
Wasted, Skeletons.
—What do you make of the sheep?
—Bought by the Government.
—Where do you drive them from?
—From Lublin province itself.
—How many?
—There were fifteen hundred, but three hundred have died by the way.
In the villages the peasant women stand with armfuls of white bread, which are baked here in saiki.[3]
—One can buy something nice for the children's mouths.
But the peasant women complain:
—A bad trade. No one buys. A ruined people.
They sell the sort which is called "nourishing," the half-white.
Coming to a hamlet, I ask a Jewess, who is standing at a corner with a bread-tray:
—How much is your black bread?
—Four copecks a pound. It is not black, but it is good.
A characteristic answer in these parts.
Some of the fugitives are not accustomed to black bread, and complain that because of it:
—The stomach gets out of order.
Beyond Propoisk we come to what is probably the most sober place on earth, a melancholy beggared hamlet where, who should drink?—there live only Jews.
Beyond Propoisk I meet a band of war prisoners.
Amid the grey-blue uniforms of the Austrians are a few luckless Germans with red edging to their hats.
They sit on a bank at the side of the road and look on with curiosity at the fugitives who for their part are not interested in them or in anything that they see.
The officers seem to be all very young, and judging from their appearance, must have been students before the war; several of them wear spectacles. They are seated in carts.
We meet further bands of prisoners below Dovsk and below Kief.
Here and near Dovsk the prisoners are from the German side, near Kief they are from the southern, the Austrian.
—What differences!
I don't know if it's an accident,
But the Austrian prisoners from the German front are fine-looking men, and smartly attired.
Near Kief we meet:
—A miserable lot.
Boys, and to judge by the sound condition of their boots, only lately taken for soldiers, and they are clad in women's jackets and wrapped about with worn-out peasant kerchiefs.
—When one detachment of prisoners was stopped for some reason or other, and afterwards were ordered to catch up, on the run—they did not run like soldiers.
Out of twenty only one held his head high, raised his elbows, and ran in the proper way.
The remainder ran in a disorderly fashion, panting, and waving their arms wildly
In the way that we call:
—Coming in time from the plough.
The first impression, perhaps an accidental one, was this:
—That to the German front they send the Austrians of the first class, the picked troops of Austria.
The eyes had just rested on this new picture, and then once more they fell upon the endless stream of grey carts.
And the crosses, the crosses, along the length of the road.
See, they have brought from a village camp a newly joinered coffin, quickly put together by the village carpenter.
An open cart moves slowly along the middle of the road.
The horse with suffering pain-full eyes steps forward slowly with uncertain strides.
Just staggering.
Will fall in a minute.
Wavering also, as smoke in the wind, goes the attendant peasant beside his horse, and his eyes have that glassy look which seems to express nothing whatever.
In the open cart, with folded arms, with pinched nose, lies the corpse.
And the wax-like yellow face looks sternly toward the sky.
Beside the corpse, just by the head, is a child looking forth from its rags.
As if this was not merely a going, but:
—A procession.
And in this procession is something painfully touching and majestic.
On the left-hand side of the road lies the carcase of a horse.
Its purple half-eaten side reddens in the sun.
At our approach several dogs with blood-dripping mouths leap away from the horse, barking.
The way they go seems strange. As if they were not dogs.
They have the appearance of wolves.
How quickly in Nature every animal becomes wilder!
Let but blood be tasted.
See, once more come people from the village, one carrying a coffin lid, two others a coffin, and they run to overtake their cart.
Another dead horse and another lot of dogs.
Overhead fly black clouds of ravens, cawing and calling.
What is this?
The picture of the retreat of the "great army?"
Yes, of the great agricultural army.
And with what, and how, shall we pay for it?