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Three soldiers were talking—between long silences—behind one of the baggage wagons of an army in retreat. They were Russians. Behind them and in front were men like themselves, marching out of step, and other wagons, and guns, and ambulances, and farm carts with wounded men lying in the straw. There was the shuffle of tired feet, a jingle of harness, a creaking of wheels, the shrill squeak of unoiled axles. In the soft air of the Crimea was the sharp sour smell of thousands of unwashed bodies and sweaty horses. It was the stench of a broken army.

Said one of the men who were talking, between long silences:

“I would give a thousand roubles—if I had them—for one cigarette—if there were any cigarettes.”

Fifty yards further on the man next to him behind the wagon opened his lips and licked the dust off them.

“There’s a nail breaking through the sole of my right boot. It hurts like the devil.”

The third soldier behind this wagon was a very young soldier. His name was Count Michael Pavlovitch Markov, as he was known later—last year indeed—in an English village to which he came after many wanderings as one of the exiles in a world crowded with them. He was a boy of eighteen at that time, which was in the month of October of 1921. He did not talk much on that march. His lips had a line of pain. His face, under a mask of dust, was thin and haggard. He limped badly with his left leg.

“My family has a villa near here,” he said presently. “I must go and look for them. My mother and sisters ...”

Nobody answered him. Every man in this beaten army was busy with his own thoughts in the desperate egotism of self-preservation and self-pity. It was a verst further along the road when the man who had wanted a cigarette spoke again.

“Life,” he said, “is a very disgusting affair, especially in Russia. It’s better not to be born, especially in Russia.”

He stumbled over a sharp stone and lurched heavily against the shoulder of young Markov, and said, “Pardon, comrade.”

From the ranks a yard or two ahead a soldier staggered away to the side of the road, and dropped his rifle, and fell face downwards. His comrades passed on.

“I dislike the idea of being hanged by those Reds,” said the man with a nail in his boot. “A machine-gun bullet is really the best way out. But it’s astonishing how one clings to life. For what reason? What has life to offer us now? Supposing, with a bit of luck, we get on to a ship at Sebastopol. What then? A life of exile and poverty, and starvation and degradation. And yet I hope to get on to a ship at Sebastopol.”

Sebastopol was six miles away. These men were among the remnants of the army of General Wrangel, that giant in a long black coat with red facings who was riding now in this retreat to the sea, where ships were waiting for them, they hoped. It was the last retreat after those nightmare years of revolution and counter-revolution, crowded with massacres and hangings, and all cruelties, and all horrors, because civil war is like that, especially in Russia. In a few hours—a day at longest—Russia from the White Sea to the Black Sea would be in the hands of the Reds, who were now very close behind this routed army. Lenin, that little slant-eyed man of destiny, would be the master of its millions. The revolutionary tribunals and their executioners would be busy for some time with any people of the old régime who had not yet fled, and with the bourgeois class whose minds were incapable of conversion to the gospel of Communism, and, later, with peasants who believed they had the right to reap their own harvests.

These thousands of men who trudged slowly along this road in the Crimea, overtaking, and followed by, a multitude of panic-stricken fugitives fleeing from the Red Terror so close behind, were on their last walk in Russia. They were to be wanderers henceforth in an army of exiles scattered among other peoples. Among them were poets, and painters, and musicians, and princes and cadets of Imperial Russia who had once washed themselves, and slept between clean sheets, and known life’s beauty and its small comforts, and even—some of them—its splendour and luxuries. Now they were dirty and verminous and beggared—the rabble of the last defeat.

That had happened at a place called Youchoun, behind them now. The Reds had had two hundred guns on a narrow front. Wrangel’s artillery was feeble and short of shells. A general attack had been made by the Bolshevik battalions, among whom were Letts and Chinese and Tartars. They had advanced in waves with a murderous machine-gun fire. The Kornilov regiment of the White Army—mostly ex-officers of the Imperial troops—had made repeated counter attacks and suffered frightful losses. The cavalry squadrons commanded by Kalinin had charged many times and were slaughtered by the heavy fire of the Red batteries. Then Wrangel had given orders for this retreat. There was nothing now between them and the Red army but a thin screen of exhausted cavalry. There was nothing ahead but the sea.

The man next to Michael Pavlovitch Markov—his best comrade, whose name was Sacha Dolin—spoke as though thinking aloud.

“It’s the end of all dreams. We shall never see Russia again. If we get away we shall be exiles in unknown lands. If we don’t get away we shall be dead. We are treading on Russian soil for the last time.”

“My family has a villa near here,” said Michael. “They will be waiting for me.”

The road to Sebastopol was crowded with civilians driving carts until their lean horses could go no further, pushing hand-carts piled high with luggage and household goods, upon which were perched their babies and small children, wrapped in blankets. One of these hand-carts had lost a wheel and a pile of baggage lay strewn by the wayside. Two young girls were trying to do something about it while their mother wept and while the endless procession of people in flight and an army in retreat surged slowly past them. It surged like a sluggish tide past many human derelicts who had fallen by the wayside because their bodies could not move forward though flogged by the terror of their spirit.

“For the love of God and all His holy saints,” cried an old man, “give a lift to my poor wife who is ill and can go no further.”

No one answered his cry. The retreating soldiers stared ahead blindly. Their lips were parched. They had broken boots and blistered feet. There were still five miles ahead before they reached the sea. The Red Army was only a few miles behind them.

Sacha Dolin, who had been an artist before he became a soldier, spoke to young Markov.

“My wife is in Moscow. I think I told you, comrade. I shall never see her again.”

“My mother and sisters are living in a villa a mile further on,” said Michael. “It’s six months since I left home and seems like six years.”

“All this was written in the Book of Destiny,” said Dolin. “It’s easy to blame the English and French for letting us down. But Destiny has had most to do with it. We Russians have always had God’s wrath against us. It’s because of our cruelty. We are, of course, uncivilized. We’re savages. Before this War and Revolution I had no idea that human nature could be so beastlike. I believed in beauty. I worshipped beauty. That’s a very humorous thought. It makes me laugh as I think of it!”

He laughed then, with a harsh rasping note in his throat.

He was a man ten years older than young Michael by his side, and had fought in the war against the Germans before the Revolution.

Michael was keeping his eyes upon the faces of the civilian refugees. Somewhere among these people, pushing their hand-carts or driving farm carts and wagons might be his mother and sisters. Here and there between the peasant folk from villages and farmsteads were women of good class. Two girls walked in thin high-heeled shoes, and for a moment Michael thought they might be Olga and Tania, his sisters. He stared at them, but they were unknown to him. A woman in a black dress with a silk shawl over her head walked by the side of the road with her hand on the arm of a young girl. That might be his mother and Tania. But it was somebody else’s mother and sister. He heard the woman speak as he passed.

“You must leave me, Vera. I can’t go another step. Leave me. Your safety is all I pray for.”

“I shall stay with you, mother,” answered the girl firmly.

It was a mile farther along the road that Michael spoke again to Sacha, his comrade.

“It’s here that I step aside. My people’s villa is half a mile down that side road. Good-bye, Sacha. A thousand thanks for your comradeship.”

“What’s that?” asked Sacha vaguely, like a man walking in a dream. “What do you say, my dear Markov?” He looked dazed. He was breathing heavily, and lurching as he walked like a drunken man.

“I’m leaving you,” said Michael. “My villa is quite close. My mother and sisters may still be there.”

“No, no!” said Sacha. “Don’t be a fool, my child.”

He stepped from behind the wagon to follow the boy while other wagons passed on, followed by lines of infantry in dirty uniforms and broken boots.

“It’s best not to be too foolish,” said Sacha, holding on to the strap of Michael’s belt. “I should hate to think you’d been killed by the Bolsheviks. That would matter nothing to me because I have seen quite a lot of life and too much of death. But you’re only a boy. Life is in front of you. You still have time for beauty and many good things.”

“I must go to the villa,” said Michael quietly. “Life is no good to me without my mother and sisters.”

“They have gone, little comrade,” said Sacha. “Everybody has fled, and if we don’t get to the sea before tomorrow we shall hang on the nearest trees. It’s best to keep on the move.”

“I couldn’t pass the villa,” said Michael stubbornly. “Supposing my mother and sisters were there—waiting for me?”

“Then you must go alone,” said Sacha. “I hate the idea of being hanged.”

He put an arm round the boy’s shoulder and kissed his cheek.

“You are so young!” he said. “You have the face of David. You and I have been good comrades, my little one. May we meet again in the unknown future.”

“Oh, Sacha, my friend!” cried Michael, with a breaking voice.

The boy turned and went up the side road leading to the villa. Sacha Dolin, who had been a painter in Moscow, rejoined the army in retreat. He held on to the strap of a cavalry horse. The man riding it was Prince George Matchabelli, who afterwards sold scent in New York.