Ivan Ivanovitch lived on the outskirts of a small village about one hundred miles north-east of Moscow. Like his father and grandfather and many generations before, he was a moujik, a peasant, with this difference: they had been serfs; Ivan was freeborn. His father now owned the hut in which he lived with his family of wife and three children—two girls, besides Ivan; he also owned a small patch of land, and an acre or two of tillable soil had been allotted to him when the serfs were emancipated, with a condition of slow payment to the Government, a few roubles at a time.
Up to the autumn of 1903 Ivan worked in the fields, bare-headed and blue-bloused, beside his father. The girls worked, too, for the father was lame and needed all the help he could get. He had leaned upon Ivan more and more as the years went by and his son grew from boyhood to sturdy young manhood. Every evening the family knelt before the crucifix on the wall of the living-room, and prayed for themselves, their country, and their "Little Father," the Czar, who spent all his time in far-off St. Petersburg, they were sure, in thinking of his "children," the people of the great Empire, and loving them and planning for their good. In return they almost worshipped him, as they did the figure on the crucifix.
"Soon you will have to serve as a soldier, Ivan," said his father one day. The older man had a great tawny beard and mane of hair like a lion's; Ivan resembled him more and more.
"That is true, my father."
"You are nearly of age."
"True, my father."
"But," put in his mother anxiously, "surely our boy will not have to fight?"
"Nay, Matouschka," said Ivan tenderly but manfully, "if the Czar commands, my life is his!"
Two months later he reported at the barracks at Moscow, and was duly enrolled in the 11th Regiment of Infantry, Third Division, First Reserves, of the Imperial Army.
At first the novelty was amusing, and Ivan enjoyed the companionship of his comrades in the ranks, the smart uniform and big fur cap, the music of the band, when they paraded in the great square and the crowds gathered to see. But the drill, drill, drill became tedious, and it was with rather a sense of relief that in the latter part of the following January he heard that the regiment was to leave Moscow for the Far East.