"Come on, give us another engine!
Are you sick of life, you son-of-a-bitch?
Let the train pass!"
Then, rushing to the engine, which was in the last stages of collapse, driver and stoker having escaped to the steppe, they would shout:
"Coal! Wood!
Break up the fences, chop up the doors and window-"frames!"
Three years before, not many questions had been put as to whom and for what we were fighting.
The heavens opened, the earth shook: mobilization, war!
The people realized that the time for dreadful events had come.
The old way of life was over.
Take up your rifle!
Come what may, there will be no going back to the old ways.
The grievances of centuries came to a head.
By the end of three years people had discovered what war meant: a machine gun in front, a machine gun behind—and weltering in dung and lice, till one's turn came.
Then a shudder passed over the people, their heads swam—Revolution! Recovering, they began to ask: "And what about us?
Are we to be cheated again?"
They listened to the agitators: "Aha! we were fools, were we? Then now we will be wise! We've fought enough—now let's go home and take our revenge.
Now we know whose bellies our bayonets are intended for.
There's no more tsar, and no more God.
Nothing but us.
Home—to divide the land!"
The troop trains from the front went like ploughs over the plains of Russia, leaving in their wake wrecked stations, shattered rolling stock, plundered towns.
From villages and farmsteads came screeching metallic sounds—men were sawing the ends off their rifles.
The Russian people were settling down on the land in good earnest.
And once again, as in far-off days, the huts were lighted by burning flickering rushlights, while the women stretched their yarn on the hand looms of their great-grandmothers.
It seemed as if time were rattling back towards long-past ages.
It was the winter of the year when the second revolution, the October Revolution, broke out.
Petersburg, famine-stricken, plundered by the villages, penetrated through and through by Arctic winds, surrounded by the enemy, shaken by plots, a city without coal or bread, its factory chimneys cold, a city like an exposed human brain, kept broadcasting from the Tsarskoye Selo radio station ideas as violent as bombshells.
"Comrades!" A lean fellow perched on a stone pedestal, his "Finnish cap" worn back to front, was shouting himself hoarse in the chill air. "Comrade deserters, you have turned your backs upon the imperialist reptiles ... we, the workers of Petersburg, tell you: you did right, Comrades! We're not going to be the hirelings of the bloody bourgeoisie.
Down with the imperialist war!"
"Dow-ow-own...." The syllable rolled languidly over the groups of bearded soldiers.
Their rifles on their shoulders, their bundles on their backs, they stood in heavy fatigue before the equestrian monument to Tsar Alexander III.
Snow lay on the black mass of the tsar's figure, and on that of the orator in his wide-open jacket, haranguing the crowd from beneath the muzzle of the stumpy bronze horse.
"We mustn't throw aside our rifles, though, Comrades!
The Revolution is in danger. The enemy is rising against us from all the corners of the world. In his predatory hands are mountains of gold and terrible weapons of destruction. He trembles with joy to see us drowning in blood. But we will not flinch. Our weapon is our ardent faith in world social revolution. It is coming, it is near...."
The end of his sentence was borne away on the wind.
A broad-shouldered man with his coat collar turned up stood near the monument.
He seemed to be taking no notice of the monument, the speaker, or the soldiers with their bundles.
But suddenly a chance phrase caught his ear, or rather, not so much the phrase itself, as the frenzied conviction with which it was yelled out from beneath the muzzle of the bronze horse:
"Get this into your heads—in six months the root of all evil—money—will be destroyed for good, There will be no more hunger, want, or humiliation.... Take what you need from the public treasury. And we'll make privies out of the gold...."
Just then, however, a gust of wind drove the snow deep into the speaker's throat.
Bending over in fretful vexation, he began coughing, and could not stop. His lungs seemed to be bursting.
The soldiers stood where they were for a few minutes, and then, their high caps swaying, they dispersed, some to the stations, some right across the town, to the other side of the river.
The orator crawled down from the plinth, his nails slipping on the frozen granite.
The man with the turned-up collar called out in a low voice:
"Hullo, Rublev!"
Vasili Rublev, still coughing, buttoned up his jacket.
He did not put out his hand, but glowered at Ivan Ilyich.
"Well, what d'you want?"
"I'm just glad to see you...."