Flashman Papers 3-Book Collection 3: Flashman at the Charge, Flashman in the Great Game, Flashman and the Angel of the Lord. George Fraser MacDonald
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to be off, the fellow just lumbered away, with the others trailing after him. It was as though they had no feeling whatever.
Oh, it was a cheery place, all right, this great empire of Russia as I first saw it in the autumn of ’54 – a great ill-worked wilderness ruled by a small landed aristocracy with their feet on the necks of a huge human-animal population, with Cossack devils keeping order when required. It was a brutal, backward place, for the rulers were ever fearful of the serfs, and held back everything educational or progressive – even the railway was discouraged, in case it should prove to be revolutionary – and with discontent everywhere, especially among those serfs who had managed to better themselves a little, and murmurings of revolt, the iron hand of government was pressing ever harder. The “white terror”, as they called the secret police, were everywhere; the whole population was on their books, and everyone had to have his “billet”, his “ticket to live” – without it you were nobody, you did not exist. Even the nobility feared the police, and it was from a landlord that I heard the Russian saying about being in jail – “Only there shall we sleep sound, for only there are we safe.”21
The land we travelled through was a fit place for such people – indeed, you have to see it to understand why they are what they are. I’ve seen big countries before – the American plains on the old wagon-trails west of St Louis, with the whispering grasses waving away and away to the very edge of the world, or the Saskatchewan prairies in grasshopper time, dun and empty under the biggest sky on earth. But Russia is bigger: there is no sky, only empty space overhead, and no horizon, only a distant haze, and endless miles of sun-scorched rank grass and emptiness. The few miserable hamlets, each with its rickety church, only seemed to emphasize the loneliness of that huge plain, imprisoning by its very emptiness – there are no hills for a man to climb into or to catch his imagination, nowhere to go: no wonder it binds its people to it.
It appalled me, as we rolled along, with nothing to do but strain your eyes for the next village, soaked by the rain or sweating in the sun, or sometimes huddling against the first wintry gusts that swept the steppes – they seemed to have all weathers together, and all bad. For amusement, of course, you could try to determine which stink was more offensive – the garlic chewed by the driver or the grease of his axles – or watch the shuttlecocks of the wind-witch plant being blown to and fro. I’ve known dreary, depressing journeys, but that was the limit; I’d sooner walk through Wales.
The truth is, I was beginning to find Russia a frightening place, with its brooding, brutish people and countryside to match; one began to lose the sense of space and time. The only reliefs were provided by our halts at the way-stations – poor, flea-ridden places with atrocious accommodation and worse food. You’d been able to get decent beef in the Crimea for a penny a pound, but here it was stchee and borsch, which are cabbage soups, horse-meat porridge, and sweet flour tarts, which were the only palatable things available. That, and their tea, kept me alive; the tea is good, provided you can get “caravan tea”, which is Chinese, and the best. The wine they may put back in the moujiksa for me.
So my spirits continued to droop, but what shook them worst was an incident on the last morning of our journey when we had halted at a large village only thirty versts [twenty miles] from Starotorsk, the estate to which I was being sent. It wasn’t so different, really, from the peasant-thrashing I’d already seen, yet it, and the man involved, branded on my mind the knowledge of what a fearful, barbarous, sickeningly cruel land this Russia was.
The village lay on what seemed to be an important cross-roads; there was a river, I remember, and a military camp, and uniforms coming and going from the municipal building where my civilian took me to report my arrival – everything has to be reported to someone or other in Russia, in this case the local registrar, a surly, bull-necked brute in a grey tunic, who pawed over the papers, eyeing me nastily the while.
These Russian civil servants are a bad lot – pompous, stupid and rude at the best. They come in various grades, each with a military title – so that General or Colonel So-and-so turns out to be someone who neglects the parish sanitation or keeps inaccurate records of livestock. The brutes even wear medals, and are immensely puffed-up, and unless you bribe them lavishly they will cause you all the trouble they can.
I was waiting patiently, being eyed curiously by the officials and officers with whom the municipal hall was packed, and the registrar picked his teeth, scowling, and then launched into a great tirade in Russian – I gather it was addressed against all Englishmen in general and me in particular. He made it clear to my escort, and everyone else, that he considered it a gross waste of board and lodging that I should be housed at all – he’d have had me in the salt-mines for a stinking foreigner who had defiled the holy soil of Mother Russia – and so forth, until he got quite worked up, banging his desk and shouting and glaring, so that the noise and talk in the room died away as everyone stopped to listen.
It was just jack-in-office unpleasantness, and I had no choice but to ignore it. But someone else didn’t. One of the officers who had been standing to one side, chatting, suddenly strolled forward in front of the registrar’s table, paused to drop his cigarette and set a foot on it, and then without warning lashed the registrar full across the face with his riding crop. The fellow shrieked and fell back in his chair, flinging up his hands to ward another blow; the officer said something in a soft, icy voice, and the trembling hands came down, revealing the livid whip-mark on the coarse bearded face.
There wasn’t a sound in the room, except for the registrar’s whimpering, as the officer leisurely raised his crop again, and with the utmost deliberation slashed him across the face a second time, laying the bearded cheek open, while the creature screamed but didn’t dare move or protect himself. A third slash sent man and chair over, the officer looked at his whip as though it had been in the gutter, dropped it on the floor, and then turned to me.
“This offal,” says he, and to my amazement he spoke in English, “requires correction. With your permission, I shall reinforce the lesson.” He looked at the blubbering, bleeding registrar crawling out of the wreck of his chair, and rapped out a string of words in that level, chilly whisper; the stricken man changed course and came wriggling across to my feet, babbling and snuffling at my ankles in a most disgusting fashion, while the officer lit another cigarette and looked on.
“He will lick your boots,” says he, “and I have told him that if he bleeds on them, I shall have him knouted. You wish to kick him in the face?”
As you know, I’m something in the bullying line myself, and given a moment I dare say I’d have accepted; it isn’t every day you have the opportunity. But I was too amazed – aye, and alarmed, too, at the cold, deliberate brutality I’d seen, and the registrar seized the opportunity to scramble away, followed by a shattering kick from my protector.
“Scum – but rather wiser scum,” says he. “He will not insult a gentleman again. A cigarette, colonel?” And he held out a gold case of those paper abominations I’d tried at Sevastopol, but hadn’t liked. I let him light one for me; it tasted like dung soaked in treacle.
“Captain Count Nicholas Pavlovitch Ignatieff,”22 says he, in that cold, soft voice, “at your service.” And as our eyes met through the cigarette smoke I thought, hollo, this is another of those momentous encounters. You didn’t have to look at this chap twice to remember him forever. It was the eyes, as it so often is – I thought in that moment of Bismarck, and Charity Spring, and Akbar Khan; it had been the eyes with them, too. But this fellow’s were different from anything yet: one was blue, but the other had a divided iris, half-blue, half-brown, and the oddly fascinating effect of this was that you didn’t know where to look, but kept shifting from one to the other.
For the rest, he had gingerish, curling hair and a square, masterful face that was no way impaired by a badly-broken nose. He looked tough, and immensely self-assured; it was in his glance, in the abrupt way he moved, in the slant of the long cigarette between his fingers, in the rakish tilt of his peaked cap, in the immaculate white tunic of the Imperial Guards. He was the kind who knew exactly what was what, where everything was, and precisely who was who – especially himself. He was probably a devil with women, admired by his superiors, hated by his rivals, and