Albov made his way to the mess-room. The officers were gathering for dinner. What had become of the former animation, friendly talk, healthy laughter and torrents of reminiscences of a stormy, hard, but glorious life of war? The reminiscences had faded, the dreams had flown away, and stern reality crushed them all down with its weight.
They spoke in low voices, sometimes breaking off or expressing themselves figuratively: the mess servants might denounce them, and also new faces had appeared among themselves. Not so long ago the Regimental Committee, on the report of a servant, had tried an officer of the regiment, who wore the Cross of St. George and to whom the regiment owed one of its most famous victories. This Lieutenant-Colonel had said something about “mutinous slaves.” And though it was proved that those were not his own words and that he had only quoted a speech made by Comrade Kerensky, the Committee “expressed its indignation at him”; he had to leave the regiment.
The personnel of the officers, too, was much changed. Of the original staff, some two or three remained. Some had perished, others had been crippled, others again, having earned “distrust,” were wandering about the Front, importuning Staffs, joining shock battalions, entering institutions in the rear, while some of the weaker brethren had simply gone home. The Army had ceased to need the bearers of the traditions of its units, of its former glory—of those old Bourgeois prejudices, which had been swept into the dust by the Revolutionary creative power.
Everyone in the regiment knows already of that morning’s event in Albov’s Company. He is questioned about details. A Lieutenant-Colonel sitting next him wagged his head.
“Well done, our old man. There was something in the Fifth Company, too. But I am afraid it will end badly. Have you heard what was done to the Commander of the Doubov Regiment, because he refused to confirm an elected Company Commander and put three agitators under arrest? He was crucified. Yes, my boy! They nailed him to a tree and began, in turn, to stick their bayonets into him, to cut off his ears, his nose, his fingers.”
He seized his head in his hands.
“My God! Where do these men get so much brutality, so much baseness?”
At the other end of the table the ensigns are carrying on a conversation on that ever harassing theme—where to get away to.
“Have you applied for admission to the Revolutionary Battalion?”
“No, it is not worth while. It seems that it is being formed under the superintendence of the Executive Committee, with Committees, elections and “Revolutionary” discipline. It does not suit me.”