Читать книгу Slavs of the War Zone - William Frederick Bailey - Страница 7

It is an imperial highway, the road which leads from Kamenets in Podolia to Husiatyn in Galicia where half-way across a little river the empire of Nicholas the Slav meets the dominions of Franz Joseph the Teuton.

Travellers will find on nearing Husiatyn that over eastwards lie the vast, melancholy, but none the less fertile steppes of Western Russia, across the silent immensity of which stretches this, the last great highway of the Czar. Even in this land of spaciousness such a road is remarkable for its breadth, for it measures in places quite three hundred and thirty feet from side to side.

Kamenets, or Kamieniec, the ancient government town of Podolia, is only twenty-seven miles distant once the Russian-Austrian frontier is reached. Wearisome as may be the eight or nine hours’ drive over the saddest, strangest, loneliest, vastest tract of country imaginable, it still cannot dim the glowing memory of old Kamenets, where, once upon a time, Jan Stefanowicz Mazeppa, page to the King of Poland, lived and loved, and where, in the seventeenth century, Pan Michael Wolodyjowski, Sobieski’s gallant captain, made his last desperate stand against Sultan Mahommed IV.

Kamenets once seen can never fade from the memory. It is so fascinating, so old, so grey, yet so brilliant with colour, so full of the brave spirit of the past.

The tide of many wars has ebbed and flowed against its massive, five-century old walls, and from its sturdy foundations on the high peninsula which juts out into the small river Smotritch it gazes down, as of old, on the warring hosts of the east and of the west. And still in its streets and by-ways the Orient combats the Occident for supremacy.

Picture the town as it was just before the war, one day in the spring of 1914. Many and very strange folk thronged its big, ill-paved market-place, and passed to and fro along its one really beautiful boulevard, where the trees were yet bare to the ice-cold north-east wind.

The wintry sunshine gleamed fitfully down on the old fourteenth-century château, and on the cliffs and white houses which rise one above the other upon the hillside, round which the gloomy walls and towers of the ancient fortifications entwine encircling arms. These dark bulwarks, and especially the Kuska gate, seem somehow to overshadow the present and to compel one’s thoughts back along the track of time, back to that terrible day when the vanguard of Mahommed’s great army, 300,000 strong, rode up to this same Kuska gate to demand the surrender of the exhausted garrison. To quote from Sienkiewicz’s “Pan Michael”:—

“They”—the Turks—“came on like a measureless sea—infantry, janissaries, spahis. Each pasha led the troops of his own pashalik. From dawn till night these leaders marched without stopping, moved from one place to another, stationed troops, circled about the fields, pitched tents, which occupied such a space that from the towers and highest points of Kamenyets it was possible in no wise to see the fields free from canvas. It seemed that snow had fallen. Towards evening Kamenyets was enclosed in such a fashion that nothing save pigeons could leave it.

“‘ My Army may be compared to the sands of the sea. I am a sovereign, and a grandson of the God of Justice. I hate stubborn men. Surrender your town. If you resist you will all perish under the sword, and no voice of man will rise against me!’

“So ran the Sultan’s letter, which was fastened to a dart and presented to the Christian dragoons of Kamieniec.

“‘ But what of Kamenyets?’ queried Pan Michael.

“‘ It shall go to the Sultan for long ages.’

“Whereupon Michael, ‘ the little knight,’ sent a message to his girl-wife who was sheltered in the convent close to the château. The message was:—‘ This world is nothing!’

“And then he took his helmet from his head. He looked awhile on that field of glory, on the corpses, the fragments of walls, on the breastworks, on the guns, and raising his eyes he prayed.

“At that moment the bastions quivered, an awful roar rent the air; bastions, towers, walls, horses, guns, living men, corpses, masses of earth, all torn upwards in a flame, and mixed, pounded together, as it were, into one dreadful carnage, flew towards the sky.

“Thus died Pan Michael Volodyovski, the Hector of Kamenyets.”

In the Church of St. Stanislaus he is buried, where his great Captain laid him to rest, and the echo of the final word of his burial service rings ever clearer and more triumphant:—

“Salvator! Salvatio.”

A busy place is Kamenets on a fair day, and a gay place. The East colours everything. These peoples and tribes who live on the borderland of two civilizations are still as primitive as they were in times gone by. Their ideas and customs date back long centuries. They are still more or less barbarians, but barbarians straining unconsciously towards higher civilization. They are barbarians filled, though they themselves are unaware of it, with the spirit of revolt and agitation.

On that day the Jewish element predominated. Long lines of lugubriously apparelled sons of the chosen race sat hunkered together on the trottoirs or in the gutters, looking like so many roosting crows in their greasy black kaftans and high black caps, low, square-toed shoes, and grey stockings. The absence of corkscrew curls proclaimed them subjects of the Czar, whose law forbids them to wear long hair, a Jewish predilection not interfered with by the Austrian Government. These gentlemen of the gutter act as interpreters and guides, and they alone, amongst all the peoples and tribes which make up the population of this district, are able to speak several languages. Strangely enough, though the Austrian frontier lies so near, Russian is the only tongue spoken in Kamenets, and, consequently, these Jews are necessary should hotel accommodation, food, etc., be required by people unable to converse in that language. Employment did not evidently present itself to them on that occasion, and their attitude was distinctly hopeless. Near by, their ugly, half-clad wives and children had set up several score of dirty booths and stalls, which were heaped up with every conceivable kind of merchandise. On one stall were dozens of black loaves, onions, garlic, apples, grey-looking pastry cakes, honey cakes, and jars of gherkins. On another were pots and pans, brown and brightly-coloured crockery, broad leather boots (sapogi), sandals (lapti), and enormous felt foot-gear (válenki). Slavonic feet are, by the way, as spacious as most things in Russia, and size seventeen is not unusual in masculine boots. In proximity to such goods were webs of linen, exquisite embroideries, rolls of cloth, cheap jewellery, ribbons, ikons, crucifixes, fine laces, and piles of horribly odoriferous cast-off clothing.

The weather had been atrocious for weeks, so the cobbles of the streets and market-place were covered with frozen slush, and those peasants who had tramped into the town from a distance were spattered and crusted with mud from head to heels. The entrance to the Gostinny Dvor[5] bazaar, or town storehouse, was crowded with would-be purchasers, and black-coated, long-booted, long-haired, long-bearded merchants (Kuptsi) stood at their office and shop doors encouraging trade. Lounging about, tired, probably, by their trudge over execrable roads, were savage-visaged, long-locked, black-eyed country folk of Podolia and the adjoining provinces. These Southern Russians are strangely dissimilar in dialect, in habits and in appearance to their big, heavy-limbed and heavy-featured, blue-eyed, patient, plodding, docile fellow-patriots of Great Russia. Lithe, swift-moving, and swift-thinking, dark and passionate, the Southern or Little Russians bear more resemblance to the Poles, and, like the Poles, they possess the artistic temperament, and the majority of Russian dancers, writers, artists, actors, etc., are recruited from amongst them. From Little Russia, too, come most of the exceedingly beautiful women of the demi-monde of Petrograd and Moscow, even of Vienna and Paris. In spite of the bleakness of the morning and a wind which cuts like a razor, the complexions of these peasant girls retained an ivory-like tint, and their dark, almond-shaped eves sparkled with health and not a little of the coquetry that gained, for many of their sisters, the admiration of princes.

Such a babble of tongues! It was as though the confusion of Babel had fallen upon the jostling crowds. All shouted at the top of their voices at the same time, chaffering, haggling, gesticulating. A hand-to-hand conflict in which all would be engaged seemed imminent. Every one pushed and hustled, every one carried mountainous bundles and parcels, for the Russians never buy things until in dire need of them, and then they must perforce carry their purchases home themselves.

Barefooted women from Bessarabia, their coarse black hair bound with gay ribbons, their ears weighed down by heavy silver or brass ear-rings, rubbed shoulders with brilliant-eyed fierce-moustached Roumanians and Wallachians, attired in braided jackets, loose trousers, moccasins, and high fur headgear, who shuffled along in front of their linen-clad, sheepskin-coated wives. How these females managed to preserve their white chemises from the mud, how they found time in the few free moments of their hard life to embroider so beautifully their aprons and jackets, to weave the lovely horsehair and silver fringes with which their garments are adorned, is a subject for wonder. Then, too, there were huge-framed Kurds, Greek priests, fezzed and turbaned Turks, Moldavians in cream coats reaching almost to their ankles, covered with numberless red worsted tags, their heads surmounted by conical black chimney-pot hats bound round with coloured braid. And there were stolid Bulgarians and Poles in their national red, blue, and white costumes, also denizens of Great Russia in clumsy, much-patched Kaftans and “stove-pipe” hats, under which a mat of unkempt, tow-coloured hair stood out round their broad, dirty countenances shading their watery, kindly, grey-blue eyes.

Long, springless carts, full up of occupants, rumbled by, making a tremendous clatter on the cobbles, and wealthy young farmers—gay dogs these—sitting high in their Eastern saddles above their flowing-maned, flowing-tailed steppe horses, dashed ventre à terre through the pedestrians, bidding fair to upset every man, woman, and child that crossed their path, not to mention the many miniature Orthodox street altars, prettily tricked out with gold and silver tinsel, that came in their way. Their rivals in horsemanship were some Cossacks, “the wolves of the forest.” Magnificent and relentless, they are as stern and hard of face as they are gentle and almost childlike of heart. The animals they ride are small, swift, and surefooted, more ready to reply to coercion than to persuasion. People who have only seen the Cossacks of the Imperial Guard in the Russian capital wearing their handsome, crimson uniforms with white facings would, perhaps, be disappointed in their appearance when not on Imperial guard duty. These Cossacks wore a sombre dress, all-enveloping black cloaks, black astrakhan caps with crowns of scarlet cloth, short sabres, and heavy double cartridge belts across their shoulders.

As the winter had broken and the snow was melting, sleighs had given place to wheeled vehicles, and curious indeed are the carriages in this part of the world. There are the mail carts (tegela), four-wheeled instruments of torture drawn by three or four horses driven with six or eight reins, over which the “isvoschik” bends forward, uttering piercing yells, and maintaining a furious gallop, indifferent to the fact that—as frequently happens—he may return home minus one of his team, and equally indifferent to the sufferings of his human freight, who are obliged, in the absence of seats, to squat on the hard planks of the cart’s bottom, or on some self-provided trunk or bundle of straw. Then there are the hackney cabs—the “droshkies”—scarcely less painful to those they carry than the mail carts. These are of two kinds, the slow and the fast. The first crawls at a snail’s pace from cobble to cobble, meandering along unfrequented avenues and deserted roads. The fast droshkies are used when a swift journey has to be made over crowded thoroughfares. Anything in human form more amiable, soft-tongued, and fatalistic than the average Russian cabby—or “isvoschik”—it would be impossible to conceive. For such characteristics we could almost forgive all their filth and callousness towards human and animal life.

Kamenets being not only a government but also a garrison town, soldiers are to be seen everywhere, and very alert they looked in their thick, blanket-like, yet well-cut, overcoats, which have since stood them in such good stead on the Polish battlefields. There is nothing showy about these soldiers of the Czar, they are not dressed—the rank and file—for beauty, but for service. From their flat caps, from their sabres, carried edge upwards, to the last button on their sleeves and down to their gigantic high boots, they are practical. Only the Russian officers on the staff, or those commanding crack regiments, indulge in gorgeousness. And as some of these latter drove swiftly past in their open carriages, their hands rising and falling in salute, the white, crimson, and gold of their uniforms served to remind us—had it been possible to forget—that Kamenets was the last western outpost of Russia the magnificent.

And, of course, the gipsies were there—the musicians, cattle-dealers, horse-breeders, horse-doctors, horse-thieves, and fortune-tellers of this and most other countries. Despised wanderers, nicknamed “the vermin,” they are, however, like the Jews, recognized as dirty necessities, though, unlike the latter, they can lay claim to public popularity, because, if they do not observe the slightest morality, they at any rate contribute generously to the joy of life. How the Russian gipsies earned their reputation for physical beauty it is difficult to imagine, for, when met with out of books, they are, as a rule, ugly, though, perhaps, finer of feature and more graceful than their kinsfolk of the Hungarian plains. Their welcome is secure in every restaurant and in every dingy little “trakir,” where the peasants indulge in three-farthing glasses of fragrant golden tea. Their dress, consisting of short skirts—or breeches—and jackets of gaudy colours, knee-boots of red, yellow, green, or bronze, and gay handkerchiefs, or caps, is as barbaric as their extraordinary wild dancing, characterized by its ever-increasing speed and noise, their fantastic music and singing terminating in a series of deafening chords. Gipsy girl-dancers occupy a position in Russia similar to that of the Nautch girls of India; and in aristocratic circles it is customary to engage their services for social entertainments. There was an especially lively gipsy troupe dancing that day in one of the principal cafés of the town. In the centre of a whirling, glittering ring stood the chief singer of the band beside the accompanist, who played on a weird species of guitar (balalika). And wonderful singing and dancing it was, as heady, as exciting, as satisfying to the senses as the vodka which was imbibed all around.

The gipsy song was taken up and lilted by the passers-by in the street. The sun sparkled brightly on the minaret of the fourteenth-century church of SS. Peter and Paul, from which minaret, during the Turkish dominion (1672-1699) the faithful of Islam were summoned to prayer. And beyond the church the Czar’s Standard fluttered in the wind above the hoary old castle, above the spot where, on the day before his great fight, Pan Michael and his wife Basia kissed for the last time, and the little knight made a tryst with his love to meet “at the heavenly gate,” in the strong city of God, “where there will be no tears, only endless rejoicing; no Pagans, nor cannon, nor mines under the walls, only peace and happiness.”[6]

It was ten o’ clock in the morning, and time to climb into the “tarantass”—a covered vehicle, happily possessed of springs—in which the journey from Kamenets to the Russian-Austrian frontier was to be undertaken.

Passing out of the town at a break-neck speed down the steep way which ends at the gates of the fortifications, many thoughts and speculations crowded the mind. How long will it be before Kamenets awakes to modern life; when will electric lighting take the place of petroleum street lamps; when will electric trams oust its few teeth-shattering omnibuses; when will its hotels shelter less voracious parasites, and more competent servants?

It is a drive of between eight or nine hours’ duration from Kamenets to Husiatyn, from where as lazy a train as was ever forced to convey passengers starts to make the journey, via Trembowla and Tarnopol, to Lemberg (Lwów) in Galicia.

For the first hour or so after leaving the town the broad highway was lively with traffic, with peasants on foot and peasants in waggons, with “droshkies” and eccentric phaëtons peculiar to this part of Russia and the Caucasus. But after some miles had been traversed, all signs of life vanished, swallowed up in the vast emptiness. On these great steppes silence broods. Humanity is nothing. The waste of land lies empty and still. There is only space, boundless except where the earth’s curve creates an imaginary limitation. Villages certainly exist, but are hidden amongst the mighty billows of land which, like huge Atlantic waves turned solid, roll away and away into the far distance.

A storm blew up. Heavy battalions of clouds began mustering to the north-east. Within ten minutes a hailstorm had burst, and solid lumps of ice, as big as hazel nuts, came rattling down in fury, cutting the skin, numbing the fingers, paralysing every faculty. To learn what cold can be, one has only to be caught in a spring hail shower on the steppes!

But it did not last long! In half an hour the sky had cleared, the sun had ventured timidly out, and the sodden country gleamed like a silvery sea. It was not difficult, under the influence of the biting north-easter, to picture these plains as they are in winter—an infinite sheet of blinding, dazzling snow, which piles up to a depth of four feet during a day or a night. It comes driving along in a terrible hurricane, which envelops in oblivion any unfortunate wayfarers who may be caught in it, especially when it blows horizontally.

But it was hard to imagine this vastness as it appears on a hot summer day—a golden ocean of grain under a cloudless blue sky. Just then the steppes were brown, with patches here and there of vivid green, and more patches of steely, half-melted snow reflecting a chill and steely sky.

It was heavy travelling over the slippery, sticky mire, which, a week previously, had been deep spotless snow. The carriage swayed to and fro, throwing the occupants from side to side. So violently did it lurch that it was a matter for thankfulness that the wheels and axle remained intact, and that the harness—which was made of new rope with interludes of leather—did not snap.

A very long, very narrow waggon hove in view, moving at an extremely leisurely pace, seemingly unguided, until, when within colliding distance, a bull-like roar from its depths gave evidence that the three starved-looking, hairy horses which drew it were not entirely without a master, and a thin, sallow face, with grotesquely shaggy eyebrows and Mongol-shaped greenish eyes, shadowed by a mud-clotted, furry turban, peered for a moment drunkenly over the side, and then sank again out of sight, muttering—“Padi! Padi!”—and the waggon rumbled on into nowhere with the patron saint of drunkards as protector.

The miles were jolted over and left in the rear, and the surroundings changed slightly. Gaunt windmills and other marks of humanity’s presence appeared. Narrow side tracks, leading from the main highway out on to the open steppe, became more numerous, littered with wisps of straw and hay—sure sign of an approach to a village—and pedestrians commenced to appear, as it were, out of nowhere. Flocks of geese and herds of swine drifted by under the guardianship of girls and boys, who were sometimes on foot, sometimes mounted on little steppe ponies, which both sexes rode straddle-wise without saddle or bridle. Their untamed eyes and savage type of countenance proclaimed them descendants of those Kalmuk intruders, who, in the words of a contemporary writer “came up to raid like a flash of lightning,” and, “having no fixed place of abode, sought to conquer all lands and colonize none, who burned the villages and the churches, and led the people away into slavery, who made the land ring with the cry of the vultures, fighting with one another over the bodies of the slain; and the ravens scream as they fly to the spoil.”

Presently a band of about thirty or forty country people floundered into sight. They represented a whole village, and were on their way en masse to seek employment as field labourers in some Russian agricultural district, where they would be put up for hire in the market-place. The men were walking, the women, most of them, were huddled together in the springless carts. All carried their belongings in huge bundles. Even the children were being taken, and the babies were tied on to their respective mothers’ backs, whence they surveyed life, whilst sucking away contentedly at the sloppy bread poultices (soska), which their mammas, like all affectionate Russian peasant mammas, had tied across their mouths with pieces of linen to ensure them constant nourishment and diversion, or—as often occurs—death by choking. It was not surprising to learn subsequently that this particular community were en route for a town two hundred miles distant, and that they were going to walk every inch of the way! They appeared cheerful, and, with true Slavonic politeness, lifted their hats in greeting, calling out salutations in their soft guttural dialect. Courteous, but never cringing, good-tempered when civilly treated, but obstinate and sullen as mules when annoyed, lazy, but wonderfully shrewd, these peasants of South-Western Russia—these “Mazeppas,” as they are christened by their compatriots—are a very likeable people.

By evening Husiatyn was reached, and there it was, alas! necessary to spend the night in an hotel kept, like every hotel in Galicia, by Jews. That dreadful night solved the mystery as to why such an easy-going, civil, indolent, religiously broad-minded race as the Slavs, dislike, scorn, hate, and persecute the Jews, more especially the Askenazim variety of the race.

These Askenazim Jews are decidedly loathsome. Their unhealthy faces, lanky figures, oily curls, and mournful Kaftans are nasty enough, but when we add the fact that in popular estimation they never invent or produce anything which would tend to the betterment of human existence and civilization, that they live by usury, cheating, and bribery, and—more unpopular still—are the proprietors of almost every hotel and inn in the Slav lands, two-thirds of which are verminous and impossible, it is easy to understand why the unbusiness-like, thriftless, but big-souled people amongst whom they live have developed a spirit of anti-Semiticism. The “fifty-verst law” of Russia, by which Jews are forbidden to reside within this distance of the frontier, has been ineffectual, probably because the Russians, in spite of the law, have been steadily pushing their Jews towards the Austrian border, to the great alarm of that country, and, however objectionable, these Israelites must, after all, live somewhere! So it comes about that the country districts on the Russian-Galician frontier are made hideous by filthy Jewish settlements, and the towns are overrun by Israelites who are believed to be all guile.

For two long and exasperating hours, the Customs officials had to be interviewed, the negotiations taking place through the medium of a greedy, evil-smelling, hooked-nosed, beady-eyed member of the Chosen Race.

Tickets were taken for Lemberg (Lwów), and it was a relief to see the last of this Hebrew interpreter, and scramble into the fusty, overheated train which, more than half-an-hour after the hour fixed for starting, was only beginning, by the emittance of doleful and complaining snorts and wheezy snuffles, to show itself possessed of the steam of life. But in Russia and Poland time is of small account, and it can be said that hereabouts few individuals can assert that they have ever lost a train or known any one to have been killed by a train—unless suicidally, and that must have been a matter of considerable difficulty.

Grape Pickers in Istria.

A Wine Press in Dalmatia.

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