Part 9

Slav name for Croats.

LETTERS OF TRAVEL

VI. FROM BELGRADE (II)

Up on the cliff one evening a party of Serbs were listening to a Russian soldier, one of Wrangel's army invalided to a hospital camp near Belgrade. "Which of these rivers is the Danube?" said he.

The Serbs pointed out where the Save joined the main stream, like a thread of silver joining a silver ribbon.

"Ah," said the Russian. "And my grandfather was killed on that river, fighting to free the Slavs. Defenceless little brothers, the Slavs! When the war began the enemy was right into your capital of Belgrade at once, but we Russians plunged into East Prussia. Yes, I was there, brothers, and was wounded and marched back to the Niemen with my wound open----"

He recounted where he had been in the war, and was so circumstantial that one by one the Serbs said good-bye and wished him luck and went away. And he was left standing there alone, looking over the gloomy Austrian plain below where night was descending fast.

"Would you like to have tea?" I asked. "My lodging is quite close." He readily agreed, and so we went across to the "Patriarchate" and up to Bishop Nikolai's white room.

Budomir, Nikolai's servant, a shell-shocked soldier, struck a posture of pleasure and stoked up the fire to boil some water. Budomir had been a student and now could multiply numbers of four figures in his head though he could do little else. He was devoted to Nikolai, and insisted on serving me because I was Nikolai's friend. The Russian soldier marvelled to find himself in a room so strongly Orthodox in its appearance, and he did not fail to cross himself elaborately.

Then he showed us the various crosses which he wore round his neck. One of these touched him very much: it had been given him by his mother in August, 1914, when he set out for the war. It had protected him ever since. He had gone through untold dangers and hardships, and had actually never seen his home and his wife and his child since that August morning when he marched away.

He belonged to a Guards regiment, and so I was interested to know what part he had taken in the revolution, and what he thought of it all. It should be remembered he was not a newspaper-reading Russian. He called himself a Gosudarstvenny or State peasant, apparently indicating that his family had not been serfs but had been free men. He was normally a peaceful tiller of the soil, stopped at the plough and put into battle-harness by the politicians of Europe.

Though now one of Wrangel's army he attributed all Russia's misfortunes to the "burgui." What a bourgeois really was he had not the remotest idea, but the word served. It was the burgui who brought about the March '17 revolution in Russia. "If we had been at Petrograd then it could not have happened," said he.

"How?"

"Well, before the revolution took place, the burgui arranged that the stanchest regiments should be sent to France. Yes, our regiment of Guards was actually in the lines below Verdun when the Tsar was dethroned.

"They did not tell us what had happened. We learned it first from the Germans. They began calling out to us, 'The Tsar has abdicated.' We did not pay any attention, as they were always shouting lies. Then they erected long banners outside their trenches with the words 'There is revolution in Russia. The Tsar has abdicated. Why do you go on fighting?'

"We were so infuriated by this that we planned a night attack on our own, and without the knowledge of our officers we entered the German trenches that night, just to show them what it meant to insult the Tsar. There was a great noise. The German artillery awoke. Ours replied. Our neighbours on the right and left wondered what was happening, and in the morning our N.C.O.'s were called to explain what it was all about. They told the story and were strongly reprimanded. Then officers addressed us and told us the bitter truth that there was actually revolution in Russia. And we wept, and the officers wept with us. . . ."

He was a sentimental warrior, and the tears glistened in his eyes now. He professed to be unendingly devoted to the Tsar. His regiment would have made a mountain of its dead rather than let them take the Tsar. If the Tsar had even been in the Crimea when Wrangel was there they would never have given him up.

"Whom have you hope in now?" I asked. "General Wrangel cannot do any more."

"There's only one man."

"Who is that?"

"That man is Burtsef."

What an extraordinary conjunction of sentiments!--devotion to the Tsar and belief in Burtsef! But here it was. The bourgeois were to blame for all Russia's troubles, and yet he was a soldier in the army that wanted to restore the bourgeois. Such paradoxical attitudes are no doubt responsible for the current official opinion in Serbia that all Russians tend to become Bolshevik, and that they may be a dangerous element in the State.

The soldier had three glasses of tea and then inverted his glass and got up and was most profuse in thanks, and for the present of a few dinars actually got down on his knees in thankfulness.

"You are going back to your hospital camp--how will you go?" I asked. "On foot?"

"No, by train. They give us a free pass on the railway. Some say they'll soon give us a free pass back to Russia!"

He looked very woebegone. He showed me his Georgian cross given for bravery in the field, and then once more the ikon his mother had given him. "Seven years, and I haven't once been home," said he.

"Seven years," he repeated mechanically, and began stumbling out of the room.

He was a strange and touching witness of the power of the human eruption in Russia. As it were, a clod of earth had been lifted from the province of Tambof and flung as far as the Balkans. Another witness of another kind was the old Archbishop of Minsk whom I found in the monastery of Ravanitsa.