And the revolution was quick to make use of them.
The sailors threw themselves into the heat of the struggle with all their unspent passion, themselves spurring to action a foe which had up to then been vacillating, procrastinating, still mustering its forces.
Semyon had no time for thoughts of home and wife now.
By October, speechifying was over and the rifles began to speak.
The enemy was to be met at every hand.
Death lurked in every terrified, furtive glance of hate.
From the Baltic to the Pacific, from the White Sea to the Black Sea, Russia was tossed in turbid confusion.
Semyon slung his rifle over his shoulder and set off to combat the "hydra of counterrevolution."
Carrying a bundle and a kettle, Roshchin and Katya threaded their way through the crowds at the station and were borne along by the tide of humanity between the threatening bayonets of the outposts. Once outside, they sauntered aimlessly up Rostov's principal street.
Only six weeks before, the flower o-f Petersburg society had been strolling from shop to shop here.
The pavements had been gay with guardsmen's caps and the jingling of spurs, snatches of French could be heard, and elegantly attired ladies snuggled into expensive furs to shield their noses from the chill damp.
With incredible frivolity they thought only of wintering here, and returning in time for the white nights to their Petrograd flats and mansions, with the respectful hall porters, pillared drawing rooms, carpets, and blazing fires.
Oh, Petersburg!
In the end everything was bound to turn out all right!
Certainly the elegantly attired ladies were in no way to blame!
And suddenly, as if some great stage manager had clapped his hands, everything disappeared, as on a revolving stage.
The scenery was entirely changed.
The streets of Rostov were deserted.
The shops were boarded up, their plate-glass windows punctured with bullet holes.
The ladies hid away their furs and bound up their heads in kerchiefs.
Some of the officers left with Kornilov, but the greater part became, with dramatic rapidity, harmless townsmen, actors, cabaret singers, dancing teachers, and the like.
And the February wind drove the rubbish in clouds over the pavements.
"We came too late," said Roshchin.
He walked with drooping head.
He felt as if the body of Russia had been broken into a thousand bits.
The dome which had protected the empire had been smashed to smithereens.- The people had become a herd.
History and the great past had vanished like a transparency in front of a stage setting.
The naked, scorched desert, now dotted all over with graves, was exposed. The end of Russia....
He felt as if something within him had been shattered, and that its sharp fragments were piercing that which he had always considered indestructible, the very axis around which his life revolved. He kept a pace behind Katya, stumbling as he walked.
"Rostov has fallen, Kornilov's army, the last wandering remnant of Russia, is on the eve of annihilation, and when this happens there will be nothing left but to put a bullet in one's brains."
They were walking at random.
Roshchin remembered the addresses of some of his former regimental comrades.
But they, too, might have run away or been shot.
Then there remained only death in the road.
He glanced at Katya.
She was stepping out serenely and modestly in her short cloth jacket and Orenburg shawl.
Her sweet face, with the great grey eyes, kept turning with naive wonder from the torn notices to the broken shop windows.
The ghost of a smile hovered over the corners of her lips.
"Can it be she doesn't realize how terrible it all is?
I can't understand this spirit of universal forgiveness."
A group of unarmed soldiers stood at a corner.
One of them, a pock-marked fellow with a black eye, held under his armpit a loaf of greyish bread, from which he was slowly tearing off a bit at a time, and as slowly munching it.
"You can't make out what the power is here—Soviet or something else," another was saying to him. This one had a wooden chest to which was tied a pair of worn felt boots.
The one eating the bread replied:
"The power belongs to Comrade Broinitsky.
Let's go and find him, he'll give us a train, and we'll go away.
If we don't we'll have to rot here till kingdom come."
"Who is he?
What's his rank?"
"Military Commissar, or something...."