“I forbid you to strike him now and always.” Romashov rushed up and pulled the sergeant’s arm.
Shapovalenko instantaneously became stiff and erect, and raised his hand to his cap.
In his eyes, which at once resumed their ordinary lifeless expression, and on his lips there gleamed a faint mocking smile.
“I will obey, your Honour, but permit me to report that that fellow is utterly impossible.”
Khliabnikov took his place once more in the ranks. He looked lazily out of the corner of his eyes at the young officer, and stroked his nose with the back of his hand.
Romashov turned his back on him and went off, meditating painfully over this fruitless pity, to inspect the 3rd platoon.
After the gymnastics the soldiers had ten minutes’ rest. The officers forgathered at the bars, almost in the middle of the exercise-ground.
Their conversation turned on the great May parade, which was approaching.
“Well, it now remains for us to guess where the shoe pinches,” began Sliva, as he swung his arms, and opened wide his watery blue eyes, “for I’ll tell you one thing, every General has his special little hobby.
I remember we once had a Lieutenant-General Lvovich for the commander of our corps.
He came to us direct from the Engineers.
The natural consequence was we never did anything except dig and root up earth.
Drill, marching, and keeping time—all such were thrown on the dust-heap.
From morning to night we built cottages and quarters—in summer, of earth; in winter, of snow.
The whole regiment looked like a collection of clodhoppers, dirty beyond recognition.
Captain Aleinikov, the commander of the 10th Company—God rest his soul!—became a Knight of St. Anne, because he had somehow constructed a little redoubt in two hours.”
“That was clever of him,” observed Lbov.
“Wait, I have more to remind you of. You remember, Pavel Pavlich, General Aragonski and his everlasting gunnery instructions?”
“And the story of Pontius Pilate,” laughed Viatkin.
“What was that?” asked Romashov.
Captain Sliva made a contemptuous gesture with his hand.
“At that time we did nothing but read Aragonski’s ‘Instructions in Shooting.’
One day it so happened that one of the men had to pass an examination in the Creed. When the soldier got to the clause ‘suffered under Pontius Pilatus,’ there was a full stop. But the fellow did not lose his head, but went boldly on with a lot of appropriate excerpts from Aragonski’s ‘Instructions in Shooting,’ and came out with flying colours.
Ah, you may well believe, those were grand times for idiocy.
Things went so far that the first finger was not allowed to retain its good old name, but was called the ‘trigger finger,’ etc., etc.”
“Do you remember, Athanasi Kirillich, what cramming and theorizing—‘range,’ elevation, etc.—went on from morning to night?
If you gave the soldier a rifle and said to him: ‘Look down the barrel.
What do you see there?’ you got for an answer:
‘I see a tense line which is the gun’s axis,’ etc.
And what practice in shooting there was in those days, you remember, Athanasi Kirillich!”
“Do I remember!
The shooting in our division was the talk of the whole country, ah, even the foreign newspapers had stories about it.
At the shooting competitions regiments borrowed ‘crack’ shots from each other. Down at the butts stood young officers hidden behind a screen, who helped the scoring by their revolvers.
On another occasion it so happened that a certain company made more hits in the target than could be accounted for by the shots fired, whereupon the ensign who was marking got severely ‘called over the coals.’”
“Do you recollect the Schreiberovsky gymnastics in Slesarev’s time?”
“Rather!
It was like a ballet.
Ah, may the devil take all those old Generals with their hobbies and eccentricities.
And yet, gentlemen, all that sort of thing—all the old-time absurdities, were as nothing compared with what is done in our days.
It might be well said that discipline has received its quietus.
The soldier, if you please, is now to be treated ‘humanely.’
He is our ‘fellow-creature,’ our ‘brother’; his ‘mind is to be developed,’ he is to be taught ‘to think,’ etc., etc. What absolute madness!
No, he shall have a thrashing, the scoundrel.
And oh, my saintly Suvorov, tell me if a single individual nowadays knows how a soldier ought to be treated, and what one should teach him.
Nothing but new-fangled arts and rubbish.
That invention in regard to cavalry charges, for instance.”
“Yes, one might have something more amusing,” Viatkin chimed in.
“There you stand,” continued Sliva, “in the middle of the field, like a decoy-bird, and the Cossacks rush at you in full pelt.
Naturally, like a sensible man, you make room for them in good time.
Directly after comes: