The issue area consisted of about twenty wagons, for the nonce without horses, lined up in two rows of ten, fairly widely spaced. From the first wagon, each man was handed a knapsack—a rather crude, khaki-colored canvas thing with no frame, uncushioned straps, and a simple tie at the top to close it—plus a smaller cloth bag of similar color.
“As you get your equipment, either put it on or stuff it in those,” a quartermaster noncom advised.
The second wagon was piled high with hundreds of furazhka, the visored, peaked caps worn almost universally by the Imperial Army, and papakhas, which were pile winter caps, plus “Adrians,” steel helmets of a French design.
Mokrenko and Panfil expected to be given any old hat, with instructions to trade it off or make it fit for himself. Instead, the clerk looked them over, went to one part of the wagon behind him, and then another, returning with two furazhka that actually fit fairly well. The pile caps he passed over were big, but that was to be expected and preferred. A French-manufactured helmet followed.
“You’ll have to remove the French insignia yourselves,” the clerk said. “No, we don’t have Imperial insignia for the helmets. Supposedly someone is soon going to be working on it.”
The third wagon was fronted by a pile of shirts and tunics. “Find two shirts that fit,” said the man on that station. “Big is all right; make sure they’re not too small. The tunics are probably going to be a little big, anyway, given how much weight you’ve lost.”
And so it went, through trousers, two each—“No belts for your trousers; no suspenders, either. Take a piece of rope and a bit of wood and make your own!”—through boots, “sapogi” in Russian, two pairs of foot wrapping, called “portyanki,” and a heavy overcoat of a better manufacture than the Imperial Army had seen since 1915 or so.
Each man got an adjustable leather belt with shoulder straps and cartridges boxes for it, plus a shovel to hang from it. A Zelinski model gas mask was hung over one shoulder and a bread bag, a kind of a loose purse for men, over the other. Into the knapsack also went a pair of decent lined leather mittens. One canteen was given to each man, as was a small pot for boiling water and a bayonet without scabbard. Tent section, rope, poles, and pegs all went into the knapsack as did a small notebook, towel, toiletry bag, tin of fat for waterproofing boots, boot brush, and a little uniform repair kit with needle, thread, buttons, plus this, that, and whatnot. Three wool blankets—none of them of the best by this stage of the war—plus a ground cloth completed the ensemble.
Interlude
Tatiana: Old Flames
Before the revolution—rather, the revolutions—the three of us, Mama, my sister Olga, and I, worked in a military hospital. Olga, as it turned out, just couldn’t deal with the suffering, the stress, or the sheer physical work involved. I think she might have been able to take on any two of those; all three, together, were just too much for her. She was put to work handling administrative and clerical matters, which suited her a good deal better than changing bandages and emptying bedpans… or holding the hands of the dying.
Me, I just wanted to help. No… no, that’s not quite right, nor quite honest; I wanted to feel, by helping, and for the first time in my life, like an active, useful human being. They still tried to shield me from it, of course, and it took a good deal to convince everyone that I was serious about taking on duties at least as onerous as anyone else had.
I flirted with most of the patients, at least a little. Why? Why because I thought morale was critical to healing, and it wouldn’t hurt their morale any for me to flirt with them.
One was more than flirting, however. There was an officer of the Guards—everyone knew who he was so I won’t mention the name—already well decorated for bravery and advanced beyond what his years would suggest. He was fairly short, not much taller than I was, a little dark, and with maybe some Tatar in his ancestry. It was his grandfather, I think, who had been the first one ennobled in his ancestry, so marriage was out of the question.
Still, a girl could dream, couldn’t she? Me, I dreamt of a happy life, somewhere in the country, with cows and chickens and a brood of children, his children and mine, and hopefully none of them bleeders like my poor, dear, utterly frustrated brother.
Maybe if we could both have run off to America…
Chapter Six
Camp Budapest, Bulgaria
They had Russian machine guns, rifles and uniforms, Amerikanski pistols and light machine guns, and French light cannon.
It wasn’t even twenty-one hundred hours and already the waxing crescent of the setting moon hung low in the west. There were no electric lights, and it was far too dark to risk the small parts of the various special weapons by detailed familiarization of the troops with them at night. There was a surplus of talent as far as the heavy machine guns went. The same could not be said for either the Lewis guns or the 37mm infantry cannon. Still time was short and what there was of it had to be used,
The only man in the battalion who knew anything about the Lewis guns was Sergeant Major Nenonen, and nobody knew anything about the 37mm jobs.
Fortunately, Corporal Panfil could read French, while the Germans had thoughtfully provided a French manual with the guns. Right now, Panfil, with a gun next to his pallet, the wheels and caisson having been left outside, pored over that manual by the light of a flickering candle, his officer, Lieutenant Federov looking from over his shoulder and trying to puzzle through the instructions, too, while Feldfebel Yahonov and Sergeant Oblonsky manipulated the gun by the instructions given.
“So what happens if you miss?” Yahonov asked.
“It gives… mmm… two methods. The simpler one says…”—Panfil scanned over the text of the pertinent section, then translated the gist of it—“to keep your hands away from the traversing and elevating mechanisms—in other words, leave the gun alone—and then move the deflection and elevation knobs to put the telescopic sight on the explosion,” Panfil patiently explained. “Then, without touching the sight’s controls, to use the elevation and traversing wheels to get your sight picture back on the target.”
“Deflection?”
“Right and left, but reversed.”
“Let me think about that for a bit,” Yahonov said, working out the process in his mind. “Ooooh, I see; what’s happening there is that it turns into an instant bore sighting or zero, while adjusting for atmosphere, wind, and weather, yes?”
“Must be,” Panfil agreed.
Daniil had just finished explaining what he suspected would be needed for a landing area. Lieutenant Turgenev, a former Guards Cavalry officer, detailed to intelligence, and currently leading a small detachment of mixed cavalry and Cossacks, furiously copied down nearly every word.
“All that comes,” Kostyshakov said, “from a couple of articles I read while at Fort IX. After I meet with the captain of the airship I might have better guidance. Also, it ought to be within one to two days’ march from wherever you find the Romanovs. Now come back tomorrow, noontime, with a tentative plan,” Daniil added.
“You’re too generous with time, sir,” the lieutenant said sardonically.