The way I look at it—however much you eat, you want to eat again the next day.
A man's got to work."
Semyon tapped with his nails against the log.
"The earth is burning beneath you, and you lie down and sleep."
"Perhaps in the navy," said Alexei firmly, "or in the towns, the revolution is not over yet. But it was over here the moment the land was divided up.
This is how it will be from now on: first we'll get in the crops, and then we'll start on the committees.
By St. Peter's day there won't be a single Poor Peasants' Committee left.
We'll bury them alive.
We're not afraid of the Communists.
We're not afraid of the devil himself, remember that...."
"Stop it, Alexei Ivanovich, look, he's all of a tremble," said Matryona softly.
"What can you expect of a sick man?
"I'm not sick! I'm a stranger here, that's what it is!" shouted Semyon, rising and walking over to the wattle fence."
The conversation went no further.
Two bats flittered across a strip of the dying sunset glow like two disembodied spirits.
Here and there lights burned in windows—supper was over.
Songs—the voices of girls—came from a long way off.
The singing broke off abruptly, and the tipetty-tip of horse's hoofs was heard on the broad twilit street.
The rider halted, called out something, and gave rein to his horse.
Alexei took his pipe out of his mouth the better to hear, and rose from his seat on the logs.
"What can have happened?" asked Matryona in tremulous accents.
At last the rider came in sight and galloped up to them—a hatless, barefoot lad.
"The Germans are coming!" he yelled.
"Four people have been killed in Sosnovka."
After the conclusion of peace, about the middle of March, New Style, the German troops started an offensive against the Ukraine and the Donbas from Riga to the Black Sea.
Under the terms of the Peace Treaty the Germans were entitled to 75 million poods of grain from the Central Rada, 11 million poods of live cattle, 2 million geese and hens, two-and-a-half million poods of sugar, 20 million litres of spirits, two-and-a-half thousand truckloads of eggs, four thousand poods of lard, in addition to butter, hides, wool, timber and the like....
The Germans attacked the Ukraine according to all the rules of war, in khaki-clad and steel-helmeted columns.
The weak covering detachments of the Reds were mowed down by the German heavy artillery.
Troops passed, followed by motorized transport, vast artillery parks, the guns camouflaged in brightly coloured zigzag lines; tanks and armoured cars clattered by, pontoons, whole bridges for crossing rivers were borne past.
Aeroplanes buzzed incessantly overhead.
It was the march of technique against an almost unarmed people.
The Red detachments, composed of war veterans and peasants, miners and industrial workers, badly organized and numerically inferior to those of the Germans, retreated, fighting, to the north and east.
The Central Rada, which had sold the Ukraine to the Germans, was substituted at Kiev by General Skoropadsky, late of the tsar's suite. Clad in the traditional Ukrainian blue coat so dear to the Ukrainian nationalists, he held the hetman's mace and struck heroic poses:
"Long live the Ukraine!
From now on and ever after—peace, order and prosperity!
Workers—to the lathes, peasants— to the plough!
Red devils—begone!"
A week after the herald of disaster had galloped along the main street of the village of Vladimirskoye, a mounted patrol appeared early one morning beside the windmills on the chalky slopes. It was composed of twenty riders on tall black steeds—tall, un-Russian looking fellows, in short, greenish jackets and braided uhlan caps.
They looked down at the village, and dismounted.
There were still people in the village—many had not gone out into the fields that day.
At sight of the horsemen little boys ran from gate to gate, the women shouted to one another over the wattle fences, and soon a crowd had gathered on the open space in front of the church.
By looking up they could clearly see the Uhlans posting two machine guns beside the mills.
And almost immediately after, from the other side, iron-rimmed wheels clattered over the village street, a whip cracked, and a pair of foam-covered horses harnessed to a military cart, came at full trot into the square.
A clumsy-looking soldier with light eyes and a protruding jaw, wearing a fatigue cap and a tight uniform, was in the rider's seat.
Behind him, arms akimbo, sat a German officer, a strange, fierce-looking gentleman, with a glass in one eye, and a cap that looked as if it had just come out of the shop.
Huddled against his left side was an old acquaintance—the prince's bailiff, who had run away from the estate the previous autumn in his underclothes.
There he sat, Grigori Karlovich Miel, glowering at them in his good coat and warm cap—round-faced, freshly shaved, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles.
The peasants felt their skins tingle when they saw Grigori Karlovich.
"Caps off!" shouted the strange officer suddenly in Russian.
Some—those nearest to the carriage—sulkily pulled off their caps.