A Moment of History A Russian Soldier in World War I

By Nahum Sabsay

A Moment of History, first published in 1960, is Nahum Sabsay's dramatic account of his years as a front-line Russian soldier fighting the Germans and Austrians. Especially memorable is his description of the an informal truce where the Russian and Austrian troops, separated by a No-man's land, sang and danced together, followed the next day by intense artillery barrages on each side. The book also depicts the fall of Czarist Russia and the fight against the Communist Red Army. Choosing to flee this chaos, author Sabsay would travel eastward across Siberia, arriving in the U.S. In 1918, he would go on to study mining engineering at Harvard and moved to California where he worked as a tool and die maker while perfecting his English and writing. Sabsay died in 1965.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burtyrki Books
• Release date: Feb 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839742859

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A MOMENT OF HISTORY

A Russian Soldier in the First World War

By

NAHUM SABSAY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

A TRAIN RUSHED WEST — Spring, 1915 6

A JOLLY BOY WAS SASHA — Spring, 1915 18

AND BEHIND THE SWAMP THERE WAS A VILLAGE — Early Fall, 1915 29

IT HAPPENED AT DAYBREAK — Fall and Winter, 1915-16 87

AVDOTIA, WIFE OF AN AUSTRIAN SOLDIER — Spring, 1916 97

IN A RAINSTORM — Summer, 1916 105

NO-MAN’S LAND — Fall, 1916 116

SIPKA, WHY SHOULD WE DIE? — Winter, 1916-17 121

THE END AND THE BEGINNING — Spring, 1917 127

FOR A LOST CAUSE — Spring, 1918 133

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 173

DEDICATION

* * *

TO KITTY WHO HAD HER PAW IN IT

Note: The first five stories of this collection are rewritten versions of stories which were originally published under the same titles:

It Happened at Daybreak. Atlantic Monthly, 1927.

And Behind the Swamp there was a Village. Scribner’s Magazine, 1931.

A Jolly Boy was Sasha. Argonaut, San Francisco, California, 1934.

Avdotia, Wife of an Austrian Soldier. American Stuff Anthology, Viking Press, 1937.

A Train Rushed West. Privately printed, 1938.

A TRAIN RUSHED WEST — Spring, 1915

1

Tearing through the midnight air, flooding it with sparks and clatter, a train rushed west. It carried reinforcements to the battlefields of Galicia where our armies, only recently strong and advancing steadily, were now being driven back and demolished in the retreat.

Behind the train’s two locomotives, half a hundred old-style boxcars raced on, with a single coach among them. The coach, whose soft seats were nightly turned into bunks, was nearly filled with officers; and the boxcars were packed with soldiers, half of them sleeping on the straw-covered floors, the other half on loft-like wooden shelves erected halfway up at both ends of each car.

Some of the soldiers were recruits, barely twenty; some were reservists, bearded men in their late thirties or early forties; and there were some who had seen war already, had been wounded, patched up, and were now being taken back.

The officers were mostly young men in their twenties, second lieutenants just out of the four-months wartime military schools. There were only two older men, both of the regular army, Lieutenant-Colonel Serugin and Second Captain Mladov.

2

Lieutenant-Colonel Serugin, the commanding officer of the detachment, a heavy-set man in his early fifties, had been left behind to command a reserve regiment for training fresh troops when his own regiment had entrained for the front at the start of the war. That was over nine months ago; and it was only a few days ago that he had been ordered to rejoin his old regiment, taking with him forty-five officers and twenty-one hundred men.

Though jolted by having to go himself, he started giving orders without any special fear of what he would soon be facing. It was the same during his first twenty-four hours on the train. Then something came upon him. It was as if all at once, after thirty years of military service, he realized for the first time what war was.

For thirty years he had commanded men—platoons, half-companies, companies, a battalion, and lately a whole regiment—had led them against imaginary enemies, directed or supervised their fire upon imaginary targets, and their bayoneting of straw dummies. When still young, he had done it with zeal, dreaming dreams. As he grew older and heavier, and his zeal played out and his dreams left him, he went on, no longer giving much thought to what had become routine, largely contented with it, knowing better than to aspire to, or hope for, anything more stirring.

Instead, he had found the way to an easy and pleasant living, letting no gloomy thoughts interfere with it. Even when the war came—a war he had trained many thousands of men to fight in—and the regiment he had been with for over half his life had marched out of the barracks to meet the enemy, leaving him to train other thousands, he still carried on as he had done in peacetime, aided by his advanced status, higher salary, increased allowances, and the devil-may-care spirit war brings with it. Even when it presently became clear that this war was unlike any other war man had ever fought, that it would last much longer than had seemed likely at the start, and that already the number of killed, wounded, and missing in action was mounting into millions, considering all the fronts the war was fought on—his own regiment losing all but a handful of those who only a few weeks earlier had started out in such high spirits—he still saw it as something that was happening to others and would somehow bypass him. That was why the order to get there, too, jolted him at first. But he carried on in a spirit of unconcern that deceived even himself.

It was only at the railroad station as, at his command, the bugle sounded Departure and he, turning to kiss his wife, saw sudden fear in her face, that he began to wonder whether he would return and see her again.

Shame on you, Mother! he whispered. Brace up! We’ll see yet many happy days together.

When the train started, with the regimental band on the platform playing, and people shouting Good-by and Godspeed, he, already in his compartment and seated by the window, took off his cap and crossed himself as, he knew, nearly all the men in the boxcars were doing at the moment and, as he saw, some of the young officers in the coach with him were doing, too. Then he looked out of the window for another glimpse of his wife. He had seen her hurry forward to wave to him again as the coach passed her.

The fear he had caught in her face, and the thought that had come with it, stayed with him for the rest of the day, but he let neither spoil the not unpleasant life of a commanding officer of troops in transit.

The next day he had his second jolt. At dinnertime the train halted at a station where a Red Cross train loaded with wounded had stopped, too, on its way from the front. As he walked toward the restaurant, accompanied by his adjutant, he recognized in one of the soldiers saluting them the orderly of another lieutenant colonel in his old regiment, now a full colonel and in command of the regiment. Questioning the man, he learned that the colonel had been wounded a few days earlier, quite badly, and was now among those on the Red Cross train.

Assured that the train would be there for at least another hour, he had his dinner, then went to see if he could visit the colonel. He could, if he wanted to, the doctor told him, but it would be better if he didn’t. It wouldn’t do any good either to him or to the wounded man. The colonel had got it in the face, the doctor said. They ended by sending one of the Red Cross sisters to ask the colonel if he would like to see Lieutenant-Colonel Serugin, and the colonel said no, he didn’t want to see anyone.

Back in his coach and his compartment, and for hour after hour afterwards, Lieutenant-Colonel Serugin kept his face turned to the window, fearing that the other officers might see in it what he didn’t want them to see.

It was the same the next day and the next. And now, late in the night, their fifth en route, he lay on his berth wide awake, while the train raced on, through fields and forests, rattling over shaking bridges, whirring by dark villages and through sleeping towns, taking him closer and closer to where there was no make-believe.

3

Second Captain Mladov, the other regular army officer in the detachment, rode in the adjoining compartment, sharing it with three other officers. He had been deeply asleep until well after midnight, then, his sleep suddenly gone, he lay with his eyes open, looking into the darkness around him and listening to the unbroken clatter of the wheels against the joints in the track, and to the intermittent outburst of snoring in the berth above him.

It was an accident that he had kept him behind when his regiment had left for the front at the start of the war. Two days before it got its order to entrain, a horse he was riding had thrown him and he had broken a leg.

While in the garrison hospital, his leg in a cast, his thoughts were mostly with his regiment which was one of the first to cross the frontier and, fighting one battle after another, advanced with other regiments toward the Carpathian Mountains and then across them.

Yet one day, while visiting him, his wife told him, making no effort to control her anger, that some of the other officers’ wives believed he had let the horse throw him to avoid going to war.

Were he not so helpless in his cast, he might have shown his anger more violently than he did. At the same time he was not surprised at what the others were saying. He knew they would say that, though in their hearts they knew it wasn’t so. He and his wife weren’t popular among the other officers of the regiment and their wives. His single-minded determination to pass the entrance examination to the Academy of the General Staff amused some and peeved others. And his and his wife’s staying away from most of the social activities, because they had to if he were to achieve what he had set out to do, didn’t help them any with the rest.

The truth was, his falling off the horse was as untimely, as far as he was concerned, as anything could be. Nothing could help him more in his military ambitions than being in action in a war like this, and there couldn’t have been a more disheartened man than he, when from his bed in the hospital he heard the marches of the band and the fanfares of the trumpets at the head of his regiment on the way to the railroad station. All the officers with the regiment whom he had expected to outstrip by his determination and hard work would be outstripping him now. A war of this kind wouldn’t last long. It would all be over before he was back on his feet.

As weeks and then months went by, and he saw what was happening at the various fronts, and to those whom he had envied, he sometimes caught himself thinking that his falling off the horse was a blessing after all. But that was an uninvited thought, and it didn’t fit in with what mattered to him very nearly more than anything else.

He started prodding the doctors to let him rejoin his regiment as soon as he thought there was a chance of their agreeing to do so. But they would most likely have kept him there yet if it hadn’t been for the urgency at the front.

And now on his way, lying awake in his berth, with the knocking of the wheels and the snoring of a fellow officer in his ears, his thoughts drifted back to a subject he had frequently brooded over during the last few months, at times even at night when unable to sleep.

What is it that makes the Germans able to beat us so easily? he asked himself as he had often done before. Is it their organization? Or the quality of their higher command? Or is it their field officers? Or their soldiers? How well things had gone for us in Austria until the Germans got there, too! But if the Germans were that good, how was it that the French, the British, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders—even the French and British colonial troops—were able to hold them back?

He thought of the forty-odd young men with him in the coach who soon would be commanding companies and battalions. How few of them had the stuff fighting army officers must have! It wasn’t only that most of them were less than half educated; that wasn’t the main thing. The trouble was that they were largely misfits. Those who weren’t had civilian jobs that kept them away from the war.

He thought of the soldiers, too, forty of them in each of the boxcars, at the moment sleeping side by side in rows of ten, two rows on the floor and two above on a wooden platform. They were mostly peasants—Great Russians, Ukrainians, White Russians—sprinkled with the natives of the many lands Russia had captured over the years, some of them still nomads and others, even if settled, still very much primitives. There wasn’t a skilled or semiskilled worker in the whole trainload. Those who were had to be kept in plants and shops and mills that couldn’t produce a tenth of what the army at the front needed.

There were not many among those in the train who could read and write well enough to make a company clerk. Those who could had been snatched up long ago while still in training. There were the Jews, of course. There were plenty of literates among them, and quite a few were well educated. But they weren’t allowed to be used in the army except as combatants, though sometimes the regulations had to be disregarded to get things done.

But that, too, wasn’t the main thing. A soldier didn’t have to be a skilled worker or be able to read and write to fight well. Many of the Austrian soldiers were skilled men, and most of them had had a fair schooling, yet our soldiers were constantly beating the Austrians even when outnumbered. In past wars our soldiers had fought at least as well as those of any other nation they met on the battlefields. Why, then, not in this war, and the war before this, the Japanese war?

He thought he knew the answer. There were plenty of others who knew it, though not many dared put it into words.

4

In the boxcars, all unlighted and all with their sliding doors shut, there were also a few whose troubled thoughts kept them awake. One was Private Sidor Karp, not yet twenty-two. His body lay squeezed in between two sleeping soldiers on a straw-covered loftlike shelf, but his mind was back home in an out-of-the-way village on the Oka River. Just before he had entrained for the front, he had had a letter from his wife, written for her by her younger brother who had had three winters of schooling, in which she hinted that his father was following her. That could end but one way. The timid girl had no chance against the strong-willed old man.

He saw in his mind his wife and his father, and he thought of a few other young wives in the village whose husbands were also in the army or navy, and whose fathers-in-law wouldn’t leave them alone. The more he thought, the sicker grew his heart.

He lay on his side with his eyes on the small window near the roof of the car; behind that window stars moved in the black sky, now forward, now backward, now slowly, now rapidly.

5

In the same boxcar, but at the opposite end on the floor, in another row of ten men, lay Private Ivan Gapov. He was thirty-nine and the father of ten children, six of whom were still alive. One of his sons was in the army, too, and already at the front. His home was a village in the Ural Mountains. That village and a small market town down below in the foothills of the mountains had been all the world he had ever seen or known before he was drafted and taken to a large city somewhere far away, to be trained to fight in the war. They had kept him there and drilled him for over four months; and now for five days and five nights already he had been riding in a train through a world—or what he could see of it from his boxcar at those short intervals when its sliding door was open—that was startlingly different from the world he had known. Yet this world, too, was inhabited by the same kind of Russian and Christian as he was himself, and ruled by the same government and the same Tsar.

He had always known, of course, that all over the land there were those who were well-fed, well-dressed, and waited on, with pocketfuls of money to buy or do anything they fancied. But he had never thought there were as many of them as he caught glimpses of at the railroad stations the train passed through. And the number of boys, girls, and young men in school uniforms he saw there, too!

Had he lived not in the wild part of the Urals but in one of the cities, his Vaska might have had a chance. He was ten years old now and as smart a boy as the village had ever seen. That was what all the old people in the village were saying. But what good was it to a boy to be smart with no school in the village, or anywhere near it, to teach him if only to read and write?

He had heard that in cities it was sometimes possible for poor people to send a bright boy to school. He had been trying to find out, but those he asked didn’t seem to know more than he did. Perhaps now that he was near different kinds of people, he might meet someone who would be able to tell him what to do about Vaska.

6

In another boxcar farther toward the end of the train was another soldier who didn’t sleep. He was Private Yeremei Bulan, the end man of a row on the floor under the wide shelf with a similar row on it.

It was not a troubling thought or physical discomfort that kept him awake. He had been sleeping too much ever since he had climbed into the car with most of his platoon at the station where they had entrained, and now it was as if he had no more sleep left in him. So he just lay there on his back, pressed against the wall of the car, looking into the darkness, listening to the assortment of snores around him, to the sounds of the speeding train, and wondering what kind of food they would be getting at the front.

Here, on the train, and at the railroad stations where they occasionally stopped to have their meals, the food wasn’t as good as it had been at the barracks. There, as soon as they got up in the morning and had made up their cots, washed their hands and faces, and passed inspection, each man was given a four-ounce piece of boiled beef, three lumps of sugar, and three pounds of black bread—the bread and sugar to last through the day—and they had all the tea they could drink. At noon they had a thick, fat cabbage soup, or some other kind of soup, then boiled cereal of one kind or another, also with plenty of fat; and they could eat all they wanted of each. For supper they had more soup, though not as good as they had at noon; and they had more tea. It was much better food, and more of it, than he had had in all his thirty-seven years before he was put into the army.

In private life he had been a landless peasant with not even a hut of his own. None of the Bulans owned land, or ever had. For that matter, not many families in the village had land of their own, and the few who did had no more than a patch. Not that they were lazy or drank too much. They drank reasonably, and they worked about as hard as anybody. Their trouble went back to the time when the peasants had been freed from serfdom. The nobleman, who had owned the village the Bulans and their kin had been born in and had lived in for generations, found ways of not letting them have what he was supposed to give them.

A peasant couldn’t grow enough food for his family unless he had more than just a couple of acres of land. The land was poor in their district, and the droughts there were frequent, and nearly just as frequent were fires which, once started, didn’t die until the last hut and the last barn and all the other outdoor buildings had been turned to ashes. The last time it happened, three years before the war, he did what others had been doing over the years. He left what only a few hours earlier had been their village, and with his wife and four children took to the roads, heading south and begging for food on the way.

After three weeks of it, they ran into a bit of luck. His wife landed a job as kitchen helper at a railroad laborers’ camp. He left her there with their four children and continued farther south where, he had heard, there was a chance to find a job.

It took him two more weeks to reach Kharkov, the city he had heard about. But when there he learned that many another burned-out or dispossessed peasant had heard the same story and had come there, too. He also learned that it was much the same in other cities, either big or small. Somehow, however, he did find a way of making a few kopecks—and at times as much as a ruble—a day. Two other peasants asked him to join them in a wood-chopping team. The two had a little over three rubles between them, enough to buy a lumberman’s saw and possibly an ax, too, but they would need at least one more ax. He had no money to buy it but he knew of a place where he could borrow one. He borrowed it and a few pieces of lumber the same night. Next day they built a sawhorse and, like many a similar team, took to walking along the streets, packing their sawhorse, saw, and axes, entering every single yard they passed and, if finding there a pile of logs waiting to be sawed and chopped, chanted, Chop wood! Chop wood!

Some days they had to walk for an hour or two—at times longer—before they ran into a prospect. When they did and, in response to their chant, the owner of the wood or the servant came out of the house and asked how much they wanted to saw and chop it, they gave their price, making it small enough to undercut the offer of any team who had been there already. But the owner would shake his or her head and re-enter the house, forcing them to knock at the door and offer to work for less.

He knew that those people had driven just as hard a bargain with the peasants who had brought those logs to the city and who had to pay the owner of the forest for them. Yet they weren’t poor people. He saw that from the way they talked, from the way they were dressed and were cared for by cooks and maids, from the houses they lived in, and from the odors of roasts, meat pies, and pastries coming from their kitchens.

He, himself, and his two companions didn’t always have enough food even of the kind they ate. He was getting nowhere trying to save a few rubles to send to his wife so that she and their children could join him. It wasn’t only that he was making much too little to save anything. There was another trouble: his flesh was weak. There were times when he couldn’t resist a few drinks; and there were times when he took a woman.