"It is the Czar's command."
Silently they plodded on, the snow whirling about them as they marched. Here and there a knot of people cheered them. This was pleasant. Ivan felt that he was really a soldier. When a lump came into his throat at the thought of the little hut in the lonely white waste far to the north, he gulped it down and broke into a hoarse laugh which brought down a reprimand from the nearest officer.
The troops were packed into a long transport train like cattle. When the cars stopped or started suddenly they fell against each other. Some swore and even struck out, but most were as mild and phlegmatic as the cows and sheep whose places they had taken. Ivan was of this sort.
"Never mind," he said to a man who trod upon his foot; "it is nothing. My foot is iron"; and when he was thrown against a neighbour: "Ah, what a blockhead I am! Will you not hit me, to pay the score?"
Most of the soldiers said nothing. As verst after verst of desolate snowy landscape was left behind they stood or squatted in the cars, silent, uncomplaining. Why should they find fault with cold and hunger and fatigue? It was the Czar's command. The Little Father in his palace was caring for them. It was theirs not to complain, but to obey.
There were many delays on the ill-constructed, overcrowded Siberian Railway, the black cord that stretched across a continent to Port Arthur and Vladivostok, seven thousand miles away. But whether it was seventy miles or seven thousand the rank and file of the army hardly knew or cared. Cold, hungry, stiff from constrained position, they bore all privations with calmness and even a sort of jovial good-humour. At night every soldier fumbled under his furs and heavy winter coat for his ikon, and his bearded lips murmured the sacred Name.
At length the rugged shores of Lake Baikal were reached, in Farther Siberia. Here there was another halt, for the railway itself came to an end, and the troops were ordered out of the train at early dawn.
"How can we go on?" asked Ivan stupidly. Before him a white plain stretched away to the horizon line. To the right were mountains; to the left, mountains. The ice-bound surface of the lake was swept by a bitter gale, which heaped up huge drifts and flung them away again, like a child at play. Behind the regiment of fur-capped soldiers, huddled on the frozen shore, was home; before them, what seemed an Arctic sea. The snow fell heavily, and drifted around their feet. "How can we go on?" asked Ivan; and a subaltern, breathing through his icy moustache, replied: "I do not know, private, but we must advance. It is the Czar's command."
When Russia, determined to establish a port on the open sea, though it were thousands of miles from her capital, built the great Trans-Siberian Railway, she progressed rapidly with her fragile, light-rail, single-track road until she came to Lake Baikal. Here Nature had placed what might well be deemed an impossible obstruction: a huge inland lake four hundred miles in length, eighteen hundred feet deep, bordered with mountains, whose sheer granite cliffs rose from the water to a height of fifteen hundred feet, and in their turn were overshadowed by snow-capped peaks. The lake at this point is forty miles wide. No bridge could span its storm-swept surface, no tunnel could be driven beneath its sombre depths. How was the obstacle to be surmounted? A weaker nation would have given up the task, as the French tired of working at the Panama Canal; Russia, ponderous, tireless, determined, almost irresistible, moved on. In the science of Physics, the momentum of a moving body is thus analysed and expressed: M = m × v. In other words, it equals the mass of the body multiplied by its velocity. If either factor be increased, the momentum becomes correspondingly greater. When Russia moves, the velocity is slight, but the mass is enormous. When the soldier, in the time-worn anecdote, tried to stop with his foot the slowly rolling spent cannon-ball, it snapped his leg like a pipe-stem. The nation that opposes Russia must itself be of iron mould, or it will snap. Lake Baikal was a trifle, a mere incident to the civil engineers who laid out the Trans-Siberian Railway.