Katya was jostled and shoved into a third-class compartment.
She got a place by the window, and settled her bundle of darned clothing on her lap.
Low-lying meadows, Don swamplands, smoke on the horizon, the misty outlines of Bataisk, unconquered by the Germans, rushed by.
At the foot of a steep riverbank were half-submerged fishing villages, clay huts, orchards, overturned boats, boys carrying a fishing net.
Then came the milky expanse of the Sea of Azov, with a few sails slanting in the distance upon it.
The cold chimneys of the Taganrog factories followed.
Steppe.
Mounds.
Abandoned mines.
Big villages scattered over the elopes of chalky foothills.
Hawks against the blue sky.
The whistle of the engine, as mournful as these dreary spaces themselves....
Morose peasants ... the iron helmets of the Germans at the stations.
Katya, hunched up like an old woman, looked out of the window.
It must have been something extraordinarily sad and exquisite in her face that made the German soldier on the opposite seat gaze long at this unknown Russian woman.
His gaunt, weary face, with the nickel-rimmed spectacles, also seemed to bear the stamp of grief.
"The guilty will be made to pay for all, gnadige Frau, the time will come," he said softly, in German.
"That's how it will be in Germany, that's how it'll be all over the world. The great judge will come... its name is Sozialismus...."
At first Katya did not realize that he was speaking to her, and she merely lifted her eyes to his big, clean, nickel-rimmed glasses.
The German gave her a friendly bow:
"Does the gnadige Frau speak German?"
"Yes," said Katya.
"When one suffers greatly, one may find consolation in the thought that one is suffering in a good cause," said the German, tucking his feet beneath the seat, and lowering his brows, so that he was now looking at Katya from over the top of his glasses.
"I have gone deeply into the history of man.
After a long period of quiet we are once more entering a period of catastrophe.
Such are my conclusions.
We are present at the beginning of the death of a great civilization.
The Aryan world has already been through one such epoch.
That was in the fourth century when the barbarians destroyed Rome.
There are many who see in this analogies with our times.
But it is not true.
Rome was destroyed by the idea of Christianity.
The barbarians merely mutilated the corpse of Rome.
Modern civilization will be transformed by socialism.
It was destruction then, now it will be construction.
The most destructive ideas of Christianity were: equality, internationalism, and the moral superiority of the poor over the rich.
These were the ideas of the barbarians feeding that monstrous parasite, Rome, which was wallowing in luxury.
That is why the Romans feared and persecuted the Christians.
But there were no constructive ideas in Christianity, it did nothing to organize labour.
It contented itself on earth with destruction alone, promising all the rest in heaven.
Christianity was merely a sword, an instrument of destruction and punishment.
Even in heaven, and in the ideal life, it could promise nothing but the hierarchical class and official state of the Roman Empire in reverse.
And this was its basic defect.
Rome set against it the idea of order.
But at that time disorder, universal chaos, was the cherished dream of the barbarians awaiting the hour when they should storm the walls of Rome.
And the hour did come.
The cities were reduced to heaps of smoking ruins.
Corpses, with stakes through their hearts, crushed by the chariots of the barbarians, lay about the roads.
There was no help—Europe, Asia Minor, Africa, were in flames from end to end.
The Romans hovered like birds above the conflagration of the whole world.