By six o’clock the square next to the regimental Staff quarters was completely covered with men. At least two thousand had turned up. The crowd moved, chattered, laughed—just such a Russian crowd as on the Khodynka in Moscow or the Champs de Mars in Petrograd at a holiday entertainment. The Revolution could not transform it all at once, either mentally or spiritually. But, having stunned it with a torrent of new words and opened up before it unbounded possibilities, the Revolution had destroyed its equilibrium and made it nervously susceptible and stormily reactive to all methods of external influence. An ocean of words—both morally lofty and basely criminal—flowed through their minds as through a sieve, which passed through the trend of the new ideas and retained only those grains which had a real applied meaning in their daily life, in the surroundings of the soldier, the peasant, the workman. Hence the absolute absence of results from the torrents of eloquence which flooded the Army at the instance of the Minister of War; hence, too, the illogical warm sympathy with both speakers of clearly opposed politics.
Under such conditions, what practical meaning could the crowd find in such ideas as duty, honour, interests of the State, on the one hand; annexations, indemnities, the self-determination of peoples, conscious discipline, and other dim conceptions on the other.
The whole regiment had turned out; the soldiers were attracted by the meeting, as by any other spectacle. Delegates had been sent by the Second Battalion, which was in the trenches—about one-third of the battalion. In the middle of the square stood a platform for the speakers; it was decorated with red flags, faded with time and rain; they have been there since the platform was erected for a review by the Commander of the Army. Reviews are now held not among the ranks, but from a tribune. To-day the agenda of the meeting contain two questions: “(1) The Report of the Commissariat Committee on the anomalies in the supply of Officers’ rations; and (2) the report of Comrade Sklianka, an orator specially invited from the Moscow Soviet to speak about the formation of a Coalition Ministry.”
During the preceding week a stormy meeting, which nearly ended in a riot, had been held in connection with the complaint of one of the companies that the soldiers had to eat lentils, which they hated, and thin soup, simply because all the groats and butter were taken for the officers’ mess. This was clearly nonsense. Nevertheless, it was resolved to appoint a Committee for investigation, which would report to a general meeting of the regiment. The Report was drawn up by a member of the Committee, Lieutenant-Colonel Petrov, who had been removed the year before from the post of Chief of the Commissariat and was now settling accounts with his successor. In a petty, cavilling way, with a sort of mean irony, he enumerated slight, irrelevant, inaccuracies in the Commissariat Department of the regiment—there were no serious ones—and dragged out his Report endlessly in his creaking, monotonous voice. The crowd, which at first had kept quiet, now hummed again, having ceased to listen. From different sides voices were heard:
“Enough!”
“That will do!”
The Chairman of the Commission ceased reading and suggested that “those comrades who wished” should express their opinions. A tall, stout soldier ascended the platform, and began speaking in a loud, hysterical voice:
“Comrades, you have heard? That is where the soldiers’ property goes. We suffer, our clothes are worn out, we are covered with lice, we go hungry, while they pull the last piece of food out of our mouths.”
As he spoke a spirit of nervous excitement kept growing in the crowd, muffled murmurs ran through it, and shouts of approval burst from it here and there.
“When will there be an end to all this? We are worn out, weary to death.”