The sentinels needed to be relieved every hour. People simply had no strength for more.
The foreign envoys awaited the general in Dzhankoy. The general felt nothing but contempt for the envoys. He placed no great hopes in his meeting with them but decided to go anyway. The thought of evacuating the army had made his decision. He headed for Dzhankoy after leaving General Shatalov in his place.
The general rode his armored train car along the tracks he had laid. The warmth in the car and the clacking of the wheels made his head spin. The general felt something he had felt only in childhood. This was a feeling of joy and immortality.
‘Joy and immortality,’ he uttered.
This feeling had come to him several times recently, so the general thought he would most likely die soon. That was the last thing he had time to think before falling asleep.
A locomotive’s drawn-out whistle awakened the general. It came from a passing train. They had stopped at a station.
‘Dzhankoy?’ the general asked the valet.
‘Dzhankoy,’ replied the valet.
He was holding a soap dish in one hand, a towel in the other.
The general went over to the washstand. For some reason, the water was cold even in the warm train car, and the general remembered how he had doused himself with water every morning in the cadet corps. How his body and his comrades’ bodies had been covered in goosebumps. He had a different body then. He took the towel from the valet and used it to rub his face until it was red. It was completely different.
The foreign diplomatic mission employees had gathered in a small chamber at the city council. They were sitting on bentwood chairs along both sides of a threadbare runner rug. The rug began at the doorway and led to a long oak table. Everyone rose when the general appeared, accompanied by an escort. The escort remained by the doorway and the general walked through the chamber, without glancing at anyone. He unbuttoned his military overcoat and half-sat on a chair.
‘We are leaving Crimea,’ the general said, in a silent whisper. ‘We will hold Perekop as long as required to evacuate everyone.’
The diplomatic mission employees looked at the general, expressionless.
‘I need to save my army,’ the general went on. ‘I need your help.’
‘How splendid that you take your decisions without consulting your allies,’ said the British envoy.
The general took a cigarette case from his pocket and opened it with a melodic sound.
‘I appealed to your king, asking how many people he would accept in the event of our evacuation.’
Seeing the general had taken out the cigarette, an orderly brought him a match.
‘He did not even respond to me,’ the general’s words blended with the cigarette smoke, sounding indistinct.
The British envoy wanted to object but the general raised his hand as if to save him the trouble.
‘I’m appealing to all of you: accept my soldiers. The comrades will not spare anyone’s life,’ the general crushed the cigarette in a massive marble ashtray. ‘Not anyone’s. I shall take my leave.’
He walked slowly along the runner rug but stopped just short of the door.
‘Half a year ago, England prevented me from planting minefields in Odessa’s water zone. Why?’
He was standing, with his head lowered. He did not turn.
‘I do not know,’ said the British envoy.
‘Well, I do know. British transports are now exporting grain from there, purchased for nothing from the Bolsheviks. That grain is soaked in Russian peasants’ blood.’
The general returned to Perekop late that evening. The reconnaissance chief reported to him that the enemy had managed to move significant forces toward Perekop during the day. The general nodded. He already felt the Reds’ pace and expected their offensive in the morning.
The general gave the wake-up signal an hour before dawn. He did not announce formation after they played reveille. He ordered only that the fires be stoked to blazing.
‘Jump over the fires!’ the general shouted and his voice came back to him in the regiment commanders’ shouts, like a weak echo.
‘Jump over the fires!’ he shouted again in the quiet that had set in.
Several people hinted at slight movement then immediately dissolved into the overall motionlessness. The army had fallen into lethargy in an obvious way. The general rushed to the closest fire and began shaking those who were sitting there. One after the other they stood and looked at him with vacant, weepy eyes. Never before had he seen his army like this. The general was genuinely frightened for the first time in his life.
He tore around among the campfires, attempting to bring his army back to life. Pounded soldiers on the face and in the gut. Shouted that they would be slaughtered like pigs.
Larionov distributed a half-glass of vodka to each but it had only a sedative effect. He ordered that a march be played, but the musicians’ fingers would not move in the cold. He buried his face in his hands and disappeared into the commander-in-chief’s tent.
When the other generals approached him in the tent, he said, ‘This army has died. And will never rise from the dead.’
A distant thundering sounded as he spoke. The Red artillery was beginning to shell. The Reds shelled often but poorly. Their shells fell either in front of the fortifications or far behind them. The lack of clustering in their shelling showed the Red grenadiers’ complete failure. If there was anything the general needed to watch out for, it was only a rogue shell.
The general calmed down once the battle had begun. It was as if he had forgotten his momentary outburst: he led using calculations from the artillerymen, who had determined the direction for a counterstrike. Their only reliable reference point was the Reds’ heavy weaponry. Using that reference point to the fullest, the Red artillery was suppressed twenty minutes later.
In the quiet that set in, the general again walked along the fortifications and made certain that his order to repair them had been carried out. In some spots, they had dug out broken stakes. In their places they had installed intact ones that had just been brought from Armyansk. They had not bothered to remove the cut barbed wire: they just unwound new wire alongside it.
‘Everything is ready for hosting the comrades,’ said the general.
The comrades did not make them wait. Their first wave arose in the distance as if it had coagulated out of drifting snow; it began nearing the line of defense. The Whites did not shoot. Nor did the Reds. They walked, stooped, like someone still incapable of straightening up early in the morning. On a cold, early morning by a putrid gulf. This is how they would have walked to the factory in their previous life. Their ashen sleep-deprived faces were already visible. (As before, nobody was shooting.) Some had pliers in their belts for cutting barbed wire; this gave the approaching men even more resemblance to a crowd of workmen. But they were not workmen.
Behind the first wave was a second and a third and a fourth after that… The general lost count. It seemed those waves were moving from the horizon itself. They were creeping in with the indifference of volcanic lava. With the indivisibility of a locust swarm. This was a solid, unified force. The revolutionary masses in their highest manifestation. They were being created somewhere in the depths of a large country and had been pressed forward, to this narrow isthmus. The general knew these masses were enough for ten White Armies and, in the end, would engulf both his barbed wire and his machine guns.