VII
Every summer we went out camping at Peterhóf, with the other military schools of the St. Petersburg district. All things considered, our life there was very pleasant, and certainly was excellent for our health: we slept in spacious tents, we bathed in the sea, and spent all the six weeks in open-air exercise.
In military schools the main purpose of camp life was evidently military drill, which we all disliked very much, but the dulness of which was occasionally relieved by making us take part in manœuvres. One night, as we were already going to bed, Alexander II. aroused the camp by having the alert sounded. In a few minutes all the camp was alive—several thousand boys gathering round their colours, and the guns of the artillery school booming in the stillness of the night. All military Peterhóf was galloping to our camp, but, owing to some misunderstanding, the emperor remained on foot. Orderlies were sent in all directions to get a horse for him, but there was none, and he, not being a good rider, would not ride any horse but one of his own. Alexander II. was very angry, and freely ventilated his anger. ‘Imbecile (durák), have I only one horse?’ I heard him shout to an orderly who reported that his horse was in another camp.
What with the increasing darkness, the booming of the guns, and the rattling of the cavalry, we boys grew very much excited, and when Alexander ordered charging, our column charged straight upon him. Tightly packed in the ranks, with lowered bayonets, we must have had a menacing aspect, for I saw Alexander II. who was still on foot, clearing the way for the column in three formidable jumps. I understood then the meaning of a column which is marching in serried ranks under the excitement of the music and the march itself. There stood before us the emperor—our commander, whom we all venerated very much; but I felt that in this moving mass not one page or cadet would have moved an inch aside, or stopped awhile, to make room for him. We were the marching column—he was but an obstacle—and the column would have marched over him. ‘Why should he be in our way?’ the pages said afterwards. Boys, rifle in hand, are even more terrible in such cases than old soldiers.
Next year, when we took part in the great manœuvres of the St. Petersburg garrison, I got an insight into the sidelights of warfare. For two days in succession we did nothing but march up and down on a space of some twenty miles, without having the slightest idea of what was going on round us or for what purpose we were marched. Cannon boomed now in our neighbourhood and now far away: sharp musketry fire was heard somewhere in the hills and the woods; orderlies galloped up and down bringing the order to advance and next the order to retreat—and we marched, marched, and marched, seeing no sense in all these movements and counter-movements. Masses of cavalry had passed along the same road, making out of it a deep mass of movable sand; and we had to advance and retreat several times along the same road, till at last our column broke all discipline and represented an incoherent mass of pilgrims rather than a military unit. The colours alone remained in the road; the remainder slowly paced along the sides of the road, in the wood. The orders and supplications of the officers were of no avail.
Suddenly a shout came from behind: ‘The emperor is coming! The emperor!’ The officers ran about supplicating us to gather in the ranks: no one listened to them.
The emperor came and ordered to retreat once more—‘Turn round!’ the words of command resounded. ‘The emperor is behind us, please turn round,’ the officers whispered; but the battalion hardly took any notice of the command, and none whatever of the presence of the emperor. Happily, Alexander II. was no fanatic of militarism, and, after having said a few words to cheer us with a promise of rest, he galloped off.
I understood then how much depends in warfare upon the state of mind of the troops, and how little can be done by mere discipline when more than an average effort is required from the soldiers. What can discipline do when tired troops have to make a supreme effort to reach the field of battle at a given hour? It is absolutely powerless. Only enthusiasm and confidence can at such moments induce the soldiers to do ‘the impossible’—and it is the impossible that continually must be accomplished to secure success. How often, later on in Siberia, I recalled to memory that object lesson when we also had to do the impossible during our scientific expeditions!
Comparatively little of our time was, however, given during our stay in the camp to military drill and manœuvres. A good deal of it was given to practical exercises in surveys and fortification. After a few preliminary exercises we were given a reflecting compass and told: ‘Go and make a plan of, say, this lake or those roads, or that park, measuring the angles with the compass and the distances with your pace.’ And early in the morning, after a hurriedly swallowed breakfast, the boy would fill his spacious military pockets with slices of rye bread, and would go out for four or five hours every day in the parks, miles away, mapping with his compass and paces the beautiful shady roads, the rivulets, and the lakes. His work was later on compared with accurate maps, and prizes in optical and drawing instruments at the boy’s choice were awarded. For me these surveys were a deep source of enjoyment. That independent work, that isolation under the centuries-old trees, that life of the forest which I could enjoy undisturbed, while there was at the same time the interest in the work—all these left deep traces in my mind; and if I later on became an explorer of Siberia and several of my comrades became explorers in Central Asia, the ground for it was prepared in these surveys.
And finally, in the last form, parties of four boys were taken every second day to some villages at a considerable distance from the camp, and there they had to make a detailed survey of several square miles with the aid of the surveyor’s table and a telescopic ruler. Officers of the General Staff came from time to time to verify their work and to advise them. This life amidst the peasants in the villages had the best effect upon the intellectual and moral development of many boys.
At the same time, exercises were made in the construction of natural-sized cross-sections of fortifications. We were taken out by an officer in the open field, and there we had to make the cross-sections of a bastion, or of a bridge head, nailing poles and battens together in exactly the same way as railway engineers do in tracing a railway. When it came to embrasures and barbettes, we had to calculate a great deal to obtain the inclinations of the different planes, and after that geometry in the space ceased to be difficult to understand.
We delighted in such work, and once, in town, finding in our garden a heap of clay and gravel, we at once began to build a real fortification on a reduced scale, with well-calculated straight and oblique embrasures and barbettes. All was done very neatly, and our ambition now was to obtain some planks for making the platforms for the guns, and to place upon them the model guns which we had in our class-rooms.
But, alas, our trousers wore an alarming aspect. ‘What are you doing there?’ our captain exclaimed. ‘Look at yourselves! You look like navvies’ (that was exactly what we were proud of). ‘What if the Grand Duke comes and finds you in such a state!’
‘We will show him our fortifications and ask him to get us tools and boards for the platforms.’
All protests were vain. A dozen workers were sent next day to cart away our beautiful work, as if it were a mere heap of mud!
I mention this to show how children and youths long for real applications of what they learn at school in abstract, and how stupid are the educators who are unable to see what a powerful aid they could find in concrete applications for helping their pupils to grasp the real sense of the things they learn.
In our school all was directed towards training us for warfare. But we should have worked with the same enthusiasm at tracing a railway, at building a log-house, or at cultivating a garden or a field. But all this longing of the children and youths for real work is wasted simply because our idea of the school is still the mediæval scholasticism, the mediæval monastery!