Knight Without Armour

They argued thus until the train arrived, and A.J. stayed with them, smiling at their remarks occasionally, but saying very little. There was a great rush for seats on the train, and when at last the seven soldiers had all crowded into a coach they leaned out of the open window and kissed him—their captain, their legend, the man whom they would remember and wonder at until the end of their lives. And he, when their train had gone, strolled away still half smiling.

He lay at night, like thousands of others, in any sheltered corner he could find, with a little bundle of all his possessions for a pillow. After three more days a train came in from the east; it was grotesquely full already, but he managed to find a place in a cattle-truck.

The train was very long, and between the first coach next to the engine and the last cattle-truck at the rear the whole world lay in mad microcosm. For the first coach was a dining-car, smooth-running and luxurious; you could look through the windows and see military officers, spattered with gold braid, picking their teeth after fried chicken and champagne, while attendants in evening-dress hovered about them obsequiously. Next came the first-class coach in which these magnates lived when they were not eating and drinking; and next the second-class coaches, containing those who were not fortunate enough to be high military officers; they were not allowed to use the dining-car, but the attendants would sometimes, at an extortionate price, supply them with food and drink. After that carne the third-class coaches, crammed with soldiers of the Revolution, who bought or commandeered food at wayside stations; and last, comprising two-thirds of the whole train, were the cattle-trucks, packed from floor to roof with refugees and peasants and returning exiles—folk who had spent their last paper rouble on a railway ticket, or else had smuggled themselves on board with no ticket at all, and who had nothing to eat except the food they could bargain for, or the ghastly tit-bits they could rake out of rubbish-bins behind the station refreshment-rooms.

A.J. spent hours in his corner of the truck, watching through the slats the constant procession of miles. He was half oblivious of those about him, of babies who screamed and were sick, of women who moaned with hunger, of men who chattered or quarrelled or were noisily companionable. In a similar way he half noticed the changes that had taken place since he had last moved over the scene—the extraordinary evidences of a new Siberia that had sprung up ribbon-like along the thin line of the railway, the new factories and freight-yards, the trams in the streets of Omsk, the steel bridges that had replaced wooden ones.

The journey was tiring, but worse for others than for himself, for his body, like his mind, seemed only capable of half-sensations. For years he had been unaware of this, but now, in a world of men and women, he perceived and was puzzled by it; he found himself doing things in a curious dream-like way, as if part of him were asleep and were obeying the other part automatically. Even when he talked, he heard his own voice as if it were another person speaking; and when he felt tiredness, or hunger, or a physical ache, the sensation came to him slowly, incompletely, almost at secondhand.

A fellow-exile tried to converse with him, but received little encouragement. The man was an ex-university professor named Tribourov—fat, pompous, and tremendously eager to reach Petrograd because he knew many people in the government and felt sure of a good appointment. He was also extremely annoyed that he had not been able to find a place for himself and his wife in the second-or first-class coaches. “Really, the government ought to arrange things better,” he complained continually.

Madame Tribourov, a thin and rather delicate-looking woman, who had shared the professor’s exile for five years, was suffering acutely from illness and hunger; she could not eat any of the rough food that was the only kind obtainable at wayside stations, and every day she grew weaker and nearer to collapse. Tribourov himself, dreaming bureaucratic dreams, paid little attention to her beyond an occasional word of perfunctory encouragement; she would be all right, he kept saying, as soon as they reached the end of the journey.