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Soon after dawn the next morning it was apparent that the rebels did not have the force needed to "drive the Russians back to their snowfields" as their propagandists had promised. The Russian counterattack was successful. On the northern sector of the line, General Shchegelsky's troops overran the insurgents' line, drove them through bogs, thickets, and swampy patches of pine forest, and finally charged up the steep slope of Donzu Hill and captured the cemetery which crowned it. General Essen, south of the Ilburz, stormed the insurgents' strong points in Mez and pinned several hundred against the river, killing most of them when they tried to escape. His troops also seized the towns of Naeermer, Chokhoril, and St. Paul Maiorka and crowned the day by capturing the Kutam-da-Hafra waterworks and securing the municipal water supply.
And the Sasanfanif had remained quiescent.
Dimitri foresaw trouble with General Azarov over this, and it wasn't long in coming. It was hard to judge whether the commanding general would be more displeased with a staff officer who had proven himself right or with one whose judgment had been proven wrong. The trick was, Dimitri knew, to bolster General Azarov in his opinion that he was the fountainhead of all military wisdom, at least east of Kyiv. Then it didn't matter if one were right or wrong. But Dimitri realized that he had none of the talents of the courier and would have to leave subtleties like that to other men.
He was summoned to the general's office shortly after 12 noon. The general was plainly pleased with the success of the Russian counterattack, but he was not a man to be carried away by momentary elation to the point where a subordinate's failings would go unnoticed. General Azarov wore a schoolmasterly frown and his plump fingers beat a judicious tattoo on his desk. He launched into the indictment at once.
"Our troops have behaved splendidly. Our staff work, on the whole, has been excellent. But I find cause to be displeased with just one person at IX Corps headquarters today. That person is you, Captain. I'm sorry to say that, Karamazov. I personally selected you for my staff because I liked what I read in your file. You've had experience leading troops, and you've also attended the Command School at the Mikhailovskaya Military Artillery Academy. You're an educated soldier, and I believe you are devoted to your duty.
"All this makes it the more difficult to understand how you could have overestimated the influence and strength of the so-called Sasanfanif. On your repeated warnings that there would be trouble behind the lines, I kept a big detachment of troops in the city, when they should have been in the forward positions. I bear the responsibility for accepting your advice, but now it is my duty to ascertain just how I was led astray.
"Is it possible, Captain, that you are something of an alarmist? Or that in trying to make your work seem more important you overemphasized a few scraps of information gathered from highly dubious native sources? Or that, worse yet, you were led to believe in something that doesn't exist, a phantom, a figment of the imagination?"
Dimitri listened to the argument with outward composure, although he was bone-weary, had spent the night at provost-guard headquarters in the old Sultan's prison and kept his temper while Colonel Spravtsev joshed him about "your private goblin." He felt a strong impulse to tell General Azarov to shut up his gibbering, a temptation quickly stilled.
"To all your questions, sir, he said at last, "I must respectfully say---no."
Committed though he was to a military career, there were times when it was possible to envy a civilian's right to speak his mind more forcefully.
"Military brevity," said the general, "is to be commended on most occasions, but I need a more definitive answer."
"I believe, sir, that the Sasanfanif is still lying low. As General Alyokhin has suggested, they might not have received the signal for an uprising because none was planned this soon. Even so---perhaps without orders---there were people shouting at one of our wagon trains in the Mudil district this morning."
"They could have been rebels, not members of any organization within the city."
"I rode out and looked over some of the slain, sir, and I'd say they were townsfolk, not members of the insurgent forces."
"These people all look alike, Captain, as you well know. Dirty robes, ragged pantaloons, maybe a rifle and a bandolier, or a balarat---you can tell one from another. In any case, I intend to dispatch most of the provost guard into the field as fast as possible."
"I would not advise that, sir."
"I need those men in the expeditionary columns we'll soon be sending into the interior of Turania. We've driven the rebels back, now we must drive them away, break them up and scatter them. That's going to take troops."
"A serious outbreak in the city with all our forces scattered in the field might be disastrous, sir."
"Captain, I respect officers that stand up on their hind legs and state their honest opinions, but I'll be goddamned if I'll let anyone argue with me."
"I beg your pardon, sir?"
"Dismissed!"
Dimitri kept out the general's way the rest of the day. He considered putting a request for transfer to duty in the field, but realize that would be an admission of failure. He still believed that the Sasanfanif existed and could raise hell behind the lines, with less than a thousand troops charged with maintaining order among a quarter of a million natives in the city. He was convinced that there were hundreds of armed men in the city only waiting for the signal to fall upon the Russian garrison; that the native metal workers were working night and day to supply balarats for the dissidents, and that when the attack came the provost guard would have its hands full trying to restore order. Late that afternoon, however, General Azarov ordered that two of the three guard battalions in the city be sent into the lines the next morning.
That night, while Dimitri was on duty in the office of the chief of staff, the outbreak he expected, though not quite so soon, erupted inside the city. The telegraph connecting headquarters with the provost-guard post at the old prison brought news that fires had been started in the Abas and Bakri districts. The fires had been started with coal oil, and inside an hour the situation grew critical. The Sasanfanif were running wild in the streets. The city fire brigade, reinforced with Russian troops, was having enough trouble trying to halt the progress of flames racing through bamboo and thatch buildings when sharpshooters began firing at them and balarat men hacked away at the fire hoses.
Even worse news then came over the wire from Colonel Spravtsev. A strong force of insurgents had somehow slipped through the Russian lines and with the Sasanfanif's support had taken over the Khas district, with its foreign banks, trading companies, and warehouses. Five or six hundred men were barricaded in the quarters and could not be dislodged without a full-scale assault.
General Azarov was away from headquarters, conferring with his division commanders at the front, leaving General Alyokhin to deal with the situation inside the city. General Alyokhin kept Dimitri so busy drafting orders that Dmitri barely had time to reflect that his warnings of that afternoon had been proven right with amazing swiftness, and no time at all to congratulate himself on their accuracy.
General Alyokhin summed up the situation as they labored over the orders at his desk, with orderlies hurrying in from the Signal Corp room every few minutes. Obviously not enough fire-fighting equipment was available to handle the two big fires in the Abas and Bakri simultaneously. Nor were sufficient troops on hand to cope with the insurgents and their Sasanfanif supporters in those two districts and the Mudil at the same time.
"We have a number of supply depots in the Abas," Dimitri said. "Suppose we concentrate against the fire there and give up in Bakri until morning. As for the fighting force holed up in the Mudil, I'd suggest that we contain them for the time being, keep them pinned down until morning and then take the place street by street."
They went over to the ordnance map on the wall and considered the plan in detail, General Alyokhin quickly deciding that it was the only feasible plan of action. The orders to that effect went out over the Signal Corps wires. After that, there was little to do at headquarters but wait for daylight.
Towards midnight the provost guard started setting off powder cartridges and blew apart a number of buildings standing in the path of the flames in the Mudil. The heavy jolts of the explosions shook even the massive foundations of the palace. Downriver, the flimsy dwellings of the Bakri district went up by the hundreds in the huge column of smoke and flame that turned the sky to the west a dozen livid shades of scarlet and orange.
"Still no attacks on our lines," General Alyokhin said sometime later. "Damn lucky for us the rebels haven't learned to coordinate their operations or we'd be in huge trouble."
By 3:00 in the morning the fires in the Abas and Bakri were burning themselves out and the fire brigade reported that both would be brought under control by dawn. The provost guard had used rifle butts and bayonets to drive Rakllama's sympathizers off the streets in those quarters.
In the meantime, a battalion of Perm volunteers kept the dissidents who'd barricaded themselves in the Mudil district under a constant fire that discouraged them from sallying forth against the rest of the city. The populace was not inclined to rise up in their support. The sight of burning homes and shops presumably persuaded the people that Rakllama's proclamations about "driving the infidels out" were likely to produce only more misery for them. The night of balarat and torch which Rakllama had been promising for so long now seemed a horror to the people of Korosum.
As dawn approached three battalions under command of Colonel Spravtsev were assembling near the station on the Kostrovkar-Korosum Railroad, which was situated on the southeastern edge of the Mudil district.
Dimitri suggested to General Alyokhin that he take the headquarters company stationed at the palace and join the provost guard for the attack, arguing, "It won't be easy for Colonel Spravtsev to pry those people out of thick-walled banks and commercial buildings after they've had almost twelve hours to prepare themselves."
"I warn you that General Azarov has a low opinion of staff officers who involve themselves outside their scholarly sphere," General Alyokhin said. But he smiled wearily and added, "We don't really need a guard company here, they'd be of more use to us in the Mudil. I'll take the responsibility of sending you to Colonel Spravtsev."
Half an hour later Dimitri was leading the company on the double towards the railroad station on the edge of the Mudil. The men looked trim and soldierly as they swung through the smoky streets, fitted out with their green-white uniforms and furry kubanka campaigning hats. They were very smart about presenting arms and turning out the guard for distinguished callers at Makhan-e-Maroun. Dimitri could only hope they were as soldierly as they looked.
They skirted the smoldering fringe of the Abas ghettos, now a black ruin with an occasional tongue of flame leaping out of the debris, and marched along a narrower thoroughfare in which sleepless inhabitants leaned out of their balcony windows and watched the march of Company A, their faces bleached with anxiety, wondering whether the whole city would be fought over and finally burned to the ground. Dimitri remembered the Sasanfanif's leaflets and could not resist stealing an occasional glance at the rooftops. But nothing unfriendly descended from them.
In the square outside the railroad station almost a thousand men, most of them volunteers wearing old-school Prussian blue, were lined up and waiting for action. A battery of mountain howitzers was drawn up nearby with their mule teams, caissons, and gunners. A moment after Company A arrived the four feisty little guns began booming and tossing their shells into the buildings lining a wide street up ahead.
Dimitri reported to Colonel Spravtsev, who was lounging in the trainmaster's office, smoking a pig-tailed Chinese cigar and drinking coffee from a small tin pail.
His shiny skull gleamed with perspiration and his blue tunic was grimy after a night of trying to protect the fire lines in the Abakuhov, but there was a look of almost boyish glee about him. Spravtsev was enjoying his work. He was rejuvenated by the prospect of battle. Dimitri could only wish that some of that warrior's joy could be transmitted to him.
"You couldn't stay away, could you?" Spravtsev said.
"I'm not quite as eager to get shot at as you might think," Dimitri said. "In fact, there's nothing at all I like about the idea. But I thought you might be able to use a company of Regulars before the morning's out."
"Well, now, everyone's welcome in the turkey shoot. Plenty of wild game for all...I'm going to take my battalions straight down the street leading into the plaza and shoot the place up good and proper. You can take your company on a flanking march and come up behind the square. No telling what we may drive into your line. Tell your men to be careful not to be caught in any crossfire."
Dimitri saluted and started to leave, but Spravtsev called him back. "You ever been under fire before, Karamazov?"
"No, I came out here too late for that."
"You'll now know why the Czar's been paying you for lazing around a post all these years."
"I thought he had something like this in mind."
Colonel Spravtsev stuck out his big callused hand and shook hands with his junior. "Good luck, old son. We'll make short work of it, between the two of us. I wish we had those six troops of the 5th with us. You'd better move off right away, we'll be going in less than half an hour from now."
Dimitri took Company A on the roundabout route through the Mudil leading to the north border of the square. Here, too, fires had burned out patches of adobe huts and stone houses. Inside the undamaged houses, people stayed behind barred doors and shuttered windows. Even the goats, dogs, and chickens had been brought under safe cover. The whole district was buttoned up in anticipation of the fighting.
Dimitri and his company had swung around to the north of the square, which was surrounded by the offices of shipping and trading companies headquartered in Vladivostok, Bombay, and Hong Kong, and the branches of British-owned banks, by the time the sounds of battle burst over the lazy morning air---volleys of musketry, followed by yells from the rooftops, explosions of howitzer shells, splintering of bamboo and crunching of masonry.
Dimitri passed along the command to fix bayonets and started for the plaza on the double. Sergeant Zykov was at his heels, brandishing his sawed-off musket.
Along a narrow street, a crevasse between tall apartment buildings, which led directly to the square, the company was suddenly confronted by a group of dissidents fleeing from a shell-shattered adobe structure. Trapped between falling masonry and the Russian soldiery, the Turanians chose to fight it out with the Russians. There were thirty to forty of them, at least half of them armed with rifles. Dimitri ordered his men to take cover just as the Turanians kneeled and fired their first crooked volley. He heard one of his men screaming and saw another silently thrashing the dusty street with legs rendered unrecognizable by a stomach wound. The screamer had been grazed by a ricochet.
"At them!" Dimitri yelled as he rose from the deep gutter where he'd taken refuge.
He aimed his revolver at a dissident, fired and missed His target was undersized but bristling with arms, including an antique Arabian musket, a balarat, and two bandoliers of ammunition crossed over his chest. An army mule would have buckled under such a load. He was such a splendid little bastard that Dimitri couldn't help but admire him for an instant.
But the Turanian had spotted Dimitri at the head of the Russian column, decided he was an officer and coolly took aim with his musket fifty-odd yards away. The report of the shot was about as horrifying as a gigantic whip-crack just behind his right ear. He might have made a good Strelsti centuries ago, thought Dimitri. What a shame I will have to kill him.
By this time the distance between the Turanians and the Russians had closed to twenty yards. Noting that the Turanian was frantically reloading, Dimitri raised his revolver to fire again. Before he could pull the trigger, however, Sergeant Zykov, almost at his elbow, cut loose with his special musket. The Turanian almost seemed to dissolve in a red mist; the charge practically cut him in two, and he lay in the street like a bag of butcher's offal.
The Turanians, frantic warriors in smoke-blackened robes, refused to surrender. They screamed unintelligibly and slashed the air with their balarats. It took two or three well-placed shots to put them out of commission. Dimitri saw one dissident with a hole in his chest, pumping out enough blood to fill a bucket charge down on a large and whole-skinned Russian, who was so appalled that he tossed down his Mosin Nagant and ran away. One of his comrades coolly dispatched the wounded and berserk Turanian by catching the balarat on the butt of the rifle and then bayoneting him.
Two of the Turanians ran into a courtyard and tried to climb the wall to escape down an adjoining street.
Dimitri and Sergeant Zykov cornered them against the wall. The Turanians brandished balarats streaked with blood. There was no use demanding they surrender.
Dimitri shot one, Zykov the other. Zykov made sure of Dimitri's kill by walking over and firing his musket into the man's head.
"Can't trust the sons-of-bitches to stay dead," Zykov said. "They sure do have a lot of get-up-and-go."
The firefight in the street was now over; at least a score of the Turanians had been killed, another dozen wounded too seriously to continue putting up a fight, and a number of others had managed to flee through houses and over the roofs. Company A had eight casualties: four dead, three wounded---and the husky lad who had deserted under fire and would be placed before a firing squad the next day at dawn.
The company spent the rest of the morning battering down doors and searching for dissidents hiding in the houses and commercial buildings. Every structure on the approaches to the plaza had to be searched from top to bottom, for the people living in them, no matter how disillusioned they might be involuntarily sheltering. The Sasanfanif had promised reprisals against any family who betrayed a dissident.
By noon the battle of the Mudil was finished. Only a handful of dissidents managed to escape and make their way back to their own lines. More than 300 others lay dead on the rooftops, behind barricades, in courtyards and alleys, wherever they'd been hunted down by the Russian soldiers.
Dimitri reported to Colonel Spravtsev at the railroad station, as bloody and begrimed and powder-blackened as his superior. Both men were exhausted, but Spravtsev's fatigue was that of the athlete who has successfully performed the skills for which he has trained himself.
Dimitri's fatigue went deeper; he felt sick with an unidentifiable disgust and despair. Killing, as he had long suspected, was just killing, and there was no virtue in it, no matter whether it was called forth by king, God, or country, or all three.
"You look dead beat, old son," Spravtsev said, thrusting a flask of cognac at him. "Take a good pull at that."
Dimitri pushed the flask away. "It wouldn't do me any good."
Colonel Spravtsev took a swig himself. "Soldier's breakfast," he said. "It damn well does me good."
Dimitri wanted to get away from here. His old friend seemed like a partner in a particularly gruesome crime, at the moment. "Have I permission to move my company back to corps headquarters?" he asked with a formality that caused Spravtsev to glance at him curiously.
The colonel shrugged. "All we need here now is burial details. Not much left of the plaza. Nice shooting by that battery of howitzers. I suppose those British bankers on the Malabar Coast who own most of the property around here will be bleating all over the place. Well, that's Moscow's headache. Say, you know those Volunteers make damn good soldiers. They went for those people with a sharp appetite. I'll see you this evening after I get a few hours' sleep...."
Eventually, for cleaning out the Mudil in "swift and thorough fashion," Dimitri and Spravtsev were both officially commended in reports forwarded to the Kremlin. This was due mainly, they did not doubt, to the influence of General Alyokhin. Unofficially, they began hearing of General Azarov's displeasure a matter of hours after the successful action in the Mudil. Both were deeply in the wrong, from the commanding general's viewpoint, particularly one jealous of his reputation for being wise in council. Dimitri had committed the prime indiscretion of proving General Azarov wrong about the Sasanfanif. Any career officer, Dimitri realized too late, must take care to place his superior in a position where he can never be mistaken. Dimitri henceforth would be the ghost at the feast, a constant reminder to the general that he had miscalculated the chance of internal troubles in the city. A general needs all the confidence he can muster, and Dimitri's continued presence at headquarters would be intolerable. As for Spravtsev, it became quickly known that General Azarov blamed him for not recognizing the danger of rebel activity behind the lines.
The view of the headquarters courtiers was that both were "not quite staff material, but excellent line officers."
The job of detaching them from the IX Corps staff---like many other unpleasant housekeeper chores---fell to General Alyokhin as chief of staff. He received them alone in his office adjoining General Azarov's one morning late in February and tried his best to put a good face on the matter of their severance from the staff.
"Have you gentlemen heard of the plans being worked for an expedition to clear the oblast of Kenzank?" he asked, concentrating, in his embarrassment, on the problem of getting his pipe to draw properly. "Interesting problem in desert operations." The general's tone was carefully pedantic, which did not become him, Dimitri thought. "We plan to send a provisional brigade down the Ilburz in boats and then across the Kenzankian desert to the city of Ikapoghar, some sixty miles deep in enemy territory. How would you like to go along with the expedition? I think it could be arranged."
Colonel Spravtsev spoke up with his usual bluntness. "I suppose this means we're getting sacked."
Dimitri asked, "Would it mean a field command, sir, or would we be attached to the force merely as observers?"
"I'll take up the colonel's remarks first," said General Alyokhin. "You should know by now, Spravtsev, that nobody gets sacked from a staff appointment. That would be a tacit admission by the commanding officer that he had made a mistake appointing you in the first place. No, you'll have to take it as presented, Colonel----a chance to get back with ground troops. Frankly, isn't that what you want?"
Spravtsev studied the punkah slowly stirring the air overhead, and finally said, "I don't know much about being a glorified police chief, sir, but there's an unavoidable inference that I've failed in my duty."
"Oh hell, that's got nothing to do with it," the general said without patience. "When will you men stop worrying about what might go into your files? Take things as they come. Did you know that, during the Turkish War, I spent almost a year in a military prison? One of our own prisons, mind you. And that was just because I was too finicky over a possible reflection on my record. I hasten to add that I was restored to rank and duty before the war ended. Anyway, damn and blast the records. Do as you're told, and let your superiors suffer the consequences."
"Superiors are seldom required to suffer consequences," Spravtsev said, adding hastily, "if I may say so without offense."
General Alyokhin ignored Spravtsev's comment and turned to Dimitri. "Now, to answer your question, Captain Karamazov, you'll both be given troop commands, of course. You'll have a regiment and the bright promise of promotion to full colonel, Spravtsev. You'll have a battalion in the same regiment, Karamazov. All infantry, unfortunately.
"Don't presume that I'm trying to jolly you along when I say I wish I were going with you. Here, read this." He shoved a paper at them which proved to be his application for a line command. General Azarov had scrawled at the bottom of the paper, "Not recommended." General Alyokhin continued, "I wished command of that expedition to the Kenzankian desert. The idea for the campaign came out of my head. I thought of it as a kind of reward for grinding away at this desk for so many months. But General Berezin is arriving from St. Petersburg in a week or two, and the command goes to him. So you see, gentlemen, we all have reason to grumble. I'd say you're lucky to be going into the field."
By the time they left General Alokhin's office they were convinced that the chief of staff was not merely being diplomatic in assuring them of their luck, that incurring the displeasure of General Azarov would, in this case, do less harm than good. Alokhin handed over orders detaching them from duty with the staff and requiring them to report in three days to the provisional brigade at Morkhai, where the expeditionary troops were being assembled.
Morkhai stood oozing from the south bank of the Ilburz, three or four miles downriver from the former line of dissident trenches and blockhouse, half a dozen miles from Korosun. The town itself looked macabre. With its half-rotten rooftops, grimy stone walls, and broken roads, Morkhai possessed an eerie atmosphere. The brigade, or what little of it had been collected by the time Dimitri and Spravtsev arrived, was encamped south of the town, as far as possible from the noisome river flats.
In a month's time, according to orders from corps to brigade, fifteen hundred troops were to be loaded onto a river fleet of wooden rafts, shows, and launches; they were to be escorted by three riverine gunboats and carried upriver six miles to Kenzank and along the southernmost bank to the city of Ikapoghar, marching through the desert plains nearest the city. The expedition would be fighting deep in rebel territory, far beyond fast reinforcement, should the rebels concentrate against them.
The troops being assembled for this venture were a mixed lot, Regulars and Volunteers, from a dozen different regiments. Colonel Spravtsev's regiment was to consist of a dismounted squadron of the 5th Dragoons and Dimitri's battalion of infantry. One of Dimitri's companies was already encamped outside of Morkhai. It was an Arkhangelsk Volunteer outfit, mostly Swedes, Finns, Estonians, and Latvians from the nearby fishing communities. His other company would be supplied from the troop transports arriving in early March from the east, part of the flood of men and arms being dispatched to force a quick decision in the new territory. All that Dimitri knew about it was that it would be composed of Regulars.
One afternoon in mid-March the company he was expecting swung down the road from Morkhai and into the battalion area, cadence perfect, files straight as a plumbline.
Dimitri, standing outside the HQ tent with Colonel Spravtsev and Sergeant Zykov, noted that the company seemed to be commanded by a lieutenant. The latter, however, came up to explain that the company commander was "delayed in Korosun on official business."
"Who is your commanding officer?" Dimitri asked.
"Captain Alexei Karamazov, sir," was the reply.
Dimitri dismissed the lieutenant, while he digested this piece of unexpected and unwelcome news.
"A relative of yours?" asked Colonel Spravtsev after the lieutenant saluted and withdrew.
"My brother, I presume. We haven't seen one another for some time."
"Well, well. A piece of luck. Or not?"
"Only time will tell," Dimitri said. "Alexei and I haven't always seen eye to eye. He may not care for the idea of serving under me."
Later Dimitri sat in his tent, pondering the mischance responsible for the reunion with his brother. The army usually avoided having kinfolk serving under one another's command, but apparently, the staff in Korosun had more than it could handle with the large numbers of troops coming out of the homeland and had overlooked the possibility of a relationship between the battalion and company commanders. Quite probably, he thought, Alexei's lagging behind in Korosun was a gesture of defiance undertaken when he learned who his superior would be.
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It was actually more of an entrance.
A carriage with a brown-cockaded coachman up front, and a Russian lady and a Russian captain resting intimately on the cushions behind, wheeled into camp and halted in front of battalion headquarters.
Dimitri awaited his brother in a grim mood.
"Dimitry, old sport!" Alexei cried, leaping gracefully from the carriage. "Allow me to present the Countess Arina Andreevna Maslova."
"Escort the lady to the camp gate and report to me at once," Dimitri said, biting off his words. He felt stiff and foolish in the face of Alexei's brilliant and carefree style.
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