He saw in the peasants the soil for the new earth and the soul of the new heaven.
Germans and Austrians were to the south of our nest in the Galbraudin Foothills, while to the east and north were the big lines of Russian troops as yet unawakened to the principles that moved our ranks. Our weakness was that the peasants thought the war was over.... The cold mountains were in the distance—winter still upon them—a late spring in the Foothills.... In this dramatic lull, our men talked of their ploughing, of their women.
Some one said, "They're enlisting the women and girls——"
It went through the lines like a taint of gas. The men were difficult then even for Varsieff to hold.
You must get the picture. We revolutionists were cut off from the world. The Germans and Austrians sent us messages—some friendly, some derisive. They thought us fools or gods, but waited to see what we would do. The old line of Russian troops all about—just as clean peasantry as our forces—but officered by the straight military class, impervious so far as a body to any shaft of the propagandist.
Varsieff whispered to me that those regular forces were honeycombed with our comrades, but that they were being put to death under the slightest suspicion—that two or three hundred were martyred each day.
The strangeness and horror of it all dawned upon me—the sense of the whole world against us, even America from whom we had drawn the spirit of our courage—a kind of holding of our army for slaughter. Listen, I have seen tens of thousands of troops go down to the pits of white and red, seen their opened veins colour the snows, seen the spots of red on the brown earth turn black. I have seen the boys lean over the trenches and the pools from each throat widen and deepen from one man to another. I have seen a man grab his mate as he fell and say some absurd whimsical thing that the soldier next didn't understand until his moment of death—a little sentence that folded them, not in extinction, but in a new life. All the horrors of death—quantity and quality—yellow and red and white—pure white passings that made a man think of the lilies—all manner of death I had seen, and still it had all been impersonal compared to now.
This was my own heart business. I shared leadership with Varsieff. These lives were in my hands. I wanted to go down among the boys—one by one and say that I was pure, that I loved them—that if they died they were at least loved and not wasted.
I always wondered what those young peasant souls thought about death. Once in a lot of pain when I was just a boy, I wanted badly to die and was deterred from taking my life, because of a counter-desire to get home and see my mother. I think it must be like that with the peasants.
Varsieff saw them in a strange mystic light. No man loved them as he did. They looked like sons of God to him. That's what he saw when they went down to death.