As the obvious and no more than adequate reward for his military services Tarabas asked for the command of one of the new home regiments about to be formed. This desire of the captain’s, emphatically supported by his violent and domineering manner, by the pistol and the riding-crop, to say nothing of the impression which his retinue made upon the minister, took barely two hours to fulfil. Thus out of the ruins of the old army Captain Tarabas emerged a colonel. He was charged with the formation of a new regiment in the garrison of Koropta.
9
THE little town of Koropta was in the throes of utmost bewilderment when Tarabas and his henchmen arrived. It was filled with men in the most various uniforms, swarmed hither and cast up from every section of the front and from the interior of the land; prisoners from the suddenly abandoned camps, vagrants and drunkards, many lured by the chance of exploiting the general chaos to some adventurous profit of their own, there to tempt fortune while they might, and Providence as well. They roamed about in the narrow streets, camped in the broad desolate square of the market-place, perched upon farm-wagons and army automobiles as they rolled aimlessly about, squatted on the sunlit steps of the big court-house or on the old gravestones in the cemetery on the hill. At the summit of this hill arose the small bright yellow church of the town.
It was a clear and perfect autumn day. In its matchless azure brilliance the dilapidated little houses with their crooked shingled roofs, the wooden sidewalks, the dried-out, silver-gleaming mud between, the ragged uniforms — all looked like a splendid painting in continuous movement; the figures and all its separate parts seemed to be still in search of their final place in it. In amongst the coloured uniforms flitted the quick, fearsome shadows of Jews in long caftans, and the light-yellow sheepskins of the peasant men and women. Women with variegated flowered kerchiefs on their heads sat on the low thresholds in the open doorways of the little houses, engaged in purposeless, agitated chatter. The children played in the middle of the street. And through the silvery slush ducks and geese waded towards such black puddles as had happily not yet been dried up by the sun.
Amidst this scene of peace the poor inhabitants of Koropta were at their wits’ end and terribly excited. They lived in expectation of something dreadful, worse perhaps than anything the war had brought them yet. Its immense, burning boots had trodden into the poor rows of Koropta’s houses and left their blackened, wasted track behind. The old low wall round the graveyard on the hill had many holes to show where senseless shots had missed their aim; there the war had buried its murderous fingers in the stone. With those same fingers it had lately strangled many a son of the little town. Peaceful in their lives the people of Koropta had always been, without a thought beyond their meagre days and quiet nights, intent upon the simple course of their simple destinies. Suddenly overtaken by the war, they first stood petrified before its dreadful face, then turned and fled before it, but turned back again, made up their minds to stay, spellbound in its fiery breath. They all were innocent, they knew nothing of history’s murderous laws, stolid and uncomplaining they bore the blows God dealt them as they had borne the Tsar’s blows years without end before. They hardly could believe the tidings that the Tsar no longer sat upon his golden throne in St. Petersburg, still less the second and more awful news that he had been shot like a dog too old to be of any more use. And now they were being told that they themselves were no longer part of Russia, but an independent country. Now, said the teachers, the lawyers, the educated folk, they were a free, delivered nation. What was the meaning of such talk as this? And of what dire peril was this tumult in their town the promise?
Captain Tarabas troubled his head as little about the laws of history as did the inhabitants of Koropta. The deliverance of the nation enabled him to continue his life as a soldier. What had he to do with politics? That was for the teachers, the lawyers, the educated folk! Captain Tarabas was a colonel now. It was his task to get together a first-rate regiment and to command it. No other man than Nicholas Tarabas would have been capable of gathering a whole regiment together with a handful of men. He had a definite plan. In the diminutive railway-station of Koropta, immediately in front of the wooden barracks, where an old Russian major still gave orders to one non-commissioned officer and the station sentry, Tarabas drew his men up in a double row and put them through a little drill. He had them kneel down and shoulder arms, and fire a volley or two into the air, all in the presence of a few astonished spectators, some in civilian clothes and some in uniform; the station sentry and the old major were also in the audience. Tarabas, visibly gratified at the number of spectators whom the meaningless shooting had lured to watch the remarkable proceedings, thereupon addressed his company.
“You men,” spoke Tarabas, “who have followed me into many battles and the rests between them, into the war against the enemy and against the revolution, you have no wish to lay down your arms now and go back peacefully to your homes. You, and I, too, we want to die as soldiers, and as soldiers only! With your help I am going to form a new regiment in this place, to serve the new country fate has given us. Fall out!”
The little troop shouldered arms. All of them were terrible to see, more terrible by far than the menacing and ragged figures on the station and about the town. For they possessed all the accoutred, rattling, clinking, spurred, and well-groomed frightfulness of their leader and master. Bright gleamed the diligently oiled rifle-barrels; the shoulder-straps were taut and strong across the broad chests and shoulders, and belted the close jackets without spot or wrinkle. Like Tarabas they all wore martial, neatly brushed, enormous moustaches for the adornment of their faces, sleek with good nourishment. And the eyes of all of them were cold and hard, good, vigilant steel. Tarabas himself, although Heaven knows his strength of purpose needed no heartening sight to feed and strengthen it still more, even Tarabas felt his power confirmed when he looked at those men of his. Each one of them was a faithful and devoted image of himself. Together they were as six-and-twenty Tarabases, six-and-twenty replicas of the great Nicholas Tarabas, and but for him non-existent. That is what they were, his twenty-six reflections.
He told them to wait for the time being, and strode with clanking footsteps into the station headquarters. He found nobody there. For the old major, likewise his sergeant, were still outside on the platform whence they had witnessed Tarabas’s remarkable drill-parade and the remarkable discipline of his troops. Colonel Tarabas struck the table with his riding-crop. It was a blow that must surely be heard all over the now silent station. And the major appeared at once.