“Heavens! It’s Botchkareva!”
Candles were lit and for fifteen minutes prayers of praise to the Lord were read, glorifying His name.
I returned to the Vasilievs by tram. On the car there were many soldiers, and again their conversation cheered me up.
“A fine end we have come to! The Germans are moving nearer and nearer, and here they are shooting and arresting the people!” the men said to one another. “Why don’t they send the Red Guard to resist the enemy? We are being sold to the Germans.”
This was my second encounter with sober-minded soldiers in one day. I arrived at Daria Maximovna’s in high spirits. The awakening of the Russian soldier had begun!
I had left my medals and crosses in Petrograd before starting out on the fateful errand. Borrowing some money from Madame Vasilieva, I went to Petrograd to fetch them. The railway carriage in which I travelled was packed with about a hundred and fifty soldiers. But they were no longer the cut-throats, the incensed and revengeful ruffians of two months ago. They did not threaten. They did not brag. The kindness of their true natures had again asserted itself. They even made a place for me, inviting me to sit down.
“Please, Madame Botchkareva,” they said, “take this seat.”
“Thank you, comrades,” I answered.
“No, don’t call us comrades any more. It’s a disgrace now. The comrades are at present fleeing from the front, while the Germans are threatening Moscow,” some of them remarked.
I felt among friends. This comradeship was what endeared the Russian soldier to my heart. Not the comradeship of the agitators, not the comradeship so loudly proclaimed in the Bolshevik manifestoes and proclamations, but the true comradeship that had made the three years in the trenches the happiest of my life. That old spirit again filled the air. It was almost too good to be true. After the nightmare of revolutions and terror, it seemed like a dream. The soldiers were actually cursing Bolshevism, denouncing Lenin and Trotzky!