THE COOLEST MAN IN RUSSIA.
I've seen many a brave man in my time, sure enough," said old Ivan Starikoff, removing his short pipe to puff out a volume of smoke from beneath his long white moustache.
"Many and many a one have I seen; for, thank heaven, the children of holy Russia are never wanting in that way, but all of them put together wouldn't make one such man as our old colonel, Count Pavel Petrovitch Severin. It was not only that he faced danger like a man—all the others did that—but he never seemed to know that there was any danger at all. It was as good as a reinforcement of ten battalions to have him among us in the thick of a fight, and to see his grand, tall figure drawn up to its full height, and his firm face and keen gray eyes turned straight upon the smoke of the enemy's line, as if defying them to hurt him. And when the very earth was shaking with the cannonade, and balls were flying thick as hail, and the hot, stifling smoke closed us in like the shadow of death, with a flash and a roar breaking through it every now and then, and the whole air filled with the rush of the shot, like the wind sweeping through a forest in autumn,—then Petrovitch would light a cigarette and hum a snatch of a song, as coolly as if he were at a dinner party in Moscow. And it really seemed as if the bullets ran away from him, instead of his running away from them; for he never got shot. But if he saw any of us beginning to waver he would call out cheerily:
"Never fear, lads, remember what the old song says!" for in those days we had an old camp-song that we were fond of singing, and the chorus of it was this:—
"Then fear not swords that brightly shine,
Nor towers that grimly frown;
For God shall march before our line,
And hew our foemen down."
"He said this so often, that at last he got the nickname among us of "Don't Fear," and he deserved it, if ever man did. Why, Father Nickolai Pavlovitch himself (the Emperor Nicholas) gave him the cross of St. George[[1]] with his own hand at the siege of Varna, in the year '28. You see, our battery had been terribly cut up by the Turkish fire, so at last there was only about half a dozen of us left on our feet. It was as hot work as I was ever in,—shot pelting, earthworks crumbling, gabions crashing, guns and gun-carriages tumbling over one another, men falling on every side like leaves, till all at once a shot went slap through our flag-staff, and down came the colours!
[[1]] The highest Russian decoration.
"Quick as lightning Pavel Petrovitch was upon the parapet, caught the flag as it fell, and held it right in the face of all the Turkish guns, while I and another man spliced the pole with our belts. You may think how the unbelievers let fly at him when they saw him standing there on the top of the breast-work, just as if he'd been set up for a mark; and all at once I saw one fellow (an Albanian by his dress, and you know what deadly shots they are) creep along to the very angle of the wall and take steady aim at him!
"I made a spring to drag the colonel down (I was his servant, you know, and whoever hurt him hurt me); but before I could reach him I saw the flash of the Albanian's piece, and Pavel Petrovitch's cap went spinning into the air with a hole right through it just above the forehead. And what do you think the colonel did? Why, he just snapped his fingers at the fellow, and called out to him, in some jibber-jabber tongue only fit to talk to a Turk in:
"'Can't you aim better than that, you fool? If I were your officer I'd give you thirty lashes for wasting the government ammunition!'
"Well, as I said before, he got the St. George, and of course everybody congratulated him, and there was a great shaking of hands, and giving of good wishes, and drinking his health in mavro tchai—that's a horrid mess of eggs, and scraped cheese, and sour milk, and Moldavian wine, which these Danube fellows have the impudence to call 'black tea,' as if it was anything like the good old tea we Russians drink at home! (I've always thought, for my part, that tea ought to grow in Russia; for it's a shame that these Chinese idolators should have such grand stuff all to themselves.)
"Well, just in the height of the talk Pavel Petrovitch takes the cross off his neck, and holds it out in his hand—just so—and says:
"'Well, gentlemen, you say I'm the coolest man in the regiment, but perhaps everybody wouldn't agree with you. Now, just to show that I want nothing but fair play, if I ever meet my match in that way I'll give him this cross of mine!'
"Now among the officers who stood near him was a young fellow who had lately joined—a quiet, modest lad, quite a boy to look at, with light curly hair and a face as smooth as any lady's. But when he heard what the colonel said he looked up suddenly, and there came a flash from his clear blue eyes like the sun striking a bayonet. And then I thought to myself:
"'It won't be an easy thing to match Pavel Petrovitch; but if it can be done, here is the man to do it!'
"I think that campaign was the hardest I ever served in. Before I was enlisted I had often heard it said that the Turks had no winter; but I had always thought that this was only a 'yarn,' though, indeed, it would be only a just judgment upon the unbelievers to lose the finest part of the whole year. But when down there I found it true, sure enough. Instead of a good, honest, cracking frost to freshen everything up, as our proverb says:
'Na zimni Kholod
Vsiaki molod'—
(in winter's cold every one is young), it was all chill, sneaking rain, wetting us through and through, and making the hill-sides so slippery that we could hardly climb them, and turning all the low grounds into a regular lake of mud, through which it was a terrible job to drag our cannon. Many a time in after days, when I've heard spruce young cadets at home, who had never smelt powder in their lives, talking big about 'glorious war,' and all that, I've said to myself, 'Aha, my fine fellows! if you had been where I have been, marching for days and nights over ankles in mud, with nothing to eat but stale black bread, so hard that you had to soak it before you could get it down; and if you'd had to drink water through which hundreds of horses had just been trampling; and to scramble up and down hills under a roasting sun, with your feet so swollen and sore that every step was like a knife going into you; and to lie all night in the rain, longing for the sun to rise that you might dry yourself a bit—perhaps then you wouldn't talk quite so loud about 'glorious war'!"
"However, we drove the Turks across the Balkans at last, and got down to Yamboli, a little town at the foot of the mountains which commands the high-road to Adrianople. And there the unbelievers made a stand, and fought right well. I will say that of them; for they knew that if Adrianople was lost all was over. But God fought for us, and we beat them; though indeed, with half our men sick, and our clothes all in rags, and our arms rusted, and our powder mixed with sand by those rogues of army-contractors, it was a wonder that we could fight at all.
"Towards afternoon, just as the enemy were beginning to give way, I saw Pavel Petrovitch (who was a general by this time) looking very hard at a mortar-battery about a hundred yards to our right; and all at once he struck his knee forcibly with his hand, and shouted:
"'What do the fellows mean by firing like that? They might as well pelt the Turks with potatoes! I'll soon settle them! Here, Ivan!' Away he went, and I after him; and he burst into the battery like a storm, and roared out:
"'Where's the blockhead who commands this battery?'
"A young officer stepped forward and saluted; and who should this be but the light-haired youth with the blue eyes whom I had noticed that night at Varna.
"'Well, you won't command it to-morrow, my fine fellow, for I'll have you turned out this very day. Do you know that not a single shell that you have thrown away since I've been watching you has exploded at all?'
"'With your excellency's leave,' said the young fellow, respectfully, but pretty firmly too, 'the fault is none of mine. These fuses are ill-made, and will not burn down to the powder.'
"'Fuses!' exclaimed the general. 'Don't talk to me of fuses; I'm too old for that rubbish! Isn't it enough for you to bungle your work, but you must tell me a falsehood into the bargain?'
"At the word 'falsehood' the young officer's face seemed to turn red-hot all in a moment, and I saw his hand clench as if he would drive his fingers through the flesh. He made one stride to the heap of bomb-shells, and taking one up in his arms struck a match on it.
"'Now,' said he quietly, 'your excellency can judge for yourself. I'm going to light this fuse; if your excellency will please to stand by and watch it burn you will see whether I have told you a falsehood or not.'
"The general started, as well he might. Not that he was afraid—you may be pretty sure of that—but to hear this quiet, bashful lad, who looked as if he had nothing in him, coolly propose to hold a lighted shell in his arms to see if it would go off, and ask him to stand by and watch it, was enough to startle anybody. However, he wasn't one to think twice about accepting a challenge; so he folded his arms and stood there like a statue. The young officer lighted the fuse, and it began to burn.
"As for me and the other men, you may fancy what we felt like. Of course we couldn't run while our officers were standing their ground; but we knew that if the shell did go off, it would blow every man of us to bits, and it was not pleasant to have to stand still and wait for it. I saw the men set their teeth hard as the flame caught the fuse; and as for me, I wished with all my heart and soul that if there were any good fuses in the heap this might turn out to be one of the bad ones. But no, it burned away merrily enough, and came down, and down, and down nearer and nearer to the powder. The young officer never moved a muscle, but stood looking steadily at the general, and the general at him. At last the red spark got close to the metal of the shell, and then I shut my eyes and prayed God to receive my soul.
"Just at that moment I heard the man next me give a quick gasp, as if he had just come up from a plunge under water; and I opened my eyes again just in time to see the fuse go out, and the young officer letting the shell drop at the general's feet without a word.
"For a moment the general stood stock-still, looking as if he didn't quite know whether to knock the young fellow down or to hug him in his arms like a son; but at last he held out his hand to him and said:
"'Well, it's a true proverb, that every one meets his match some day, and I've met mine today, there's no denying it. There's the Cross of St. George for you, my boy, and right well you deserve it, for if I'm 'the coolest man in my regiment,' you're the coolest in all Russia!'
"And so said all the rest when the story got abroad; and the commander-in-chief himself, the great Count Diebitsch, sent for the lad, and said a few kind words to him that made his face flush up like a young girl's. But in after days he became one of the best officers the Russian army ever had; and I've seen him with my own eyes complimented by the emperor himself in presence of the whole army. And from that day forth the whole lot of us, officers and men alike, never spoke of him by any other name but Khladnokrovni—'the cold-blooded one.'"