Chapter XII: The Day of Shame

Sunday, November 11, must go down on the calendar of the red Russian year as a day of shame. On that day there was a sacrifice of the innocents as needless as it was useless, and those responsible were not the military school cadets, nor the soldiers and workmen whom they fought, but a little group of older men who stayed safely beyond the reach of guns and sent mere boys to do their fighting for them.

That the toll of victims was not much greater was due to an American, whose part may still be remembered in Petrograd when the fallen city is risen again.

Shortly before noon Sunday, I was sitting in my room in the War Hotel, wondering at the quiet, broken only by the ringing of the church bells, when two shots abruptly shattered the silence. They were followed by the noise of excited voices, and the clatter of many feet in the halls.

I hurried out to the stairs, but an officer turned me back at the first landing.

“They are fighting downstairs--you had better keep to your room,” he said.

I retraced my steps, and on the floor above caught the elevator and dropped swiftly down. The lobby was swarming. Soldiers were running about everywhere, men and officers were shouting, and nobody could tell what was happening. I walked to the door in time to see an armored car turn the corner and make for the hotel. Several other people saw it at the same moment, and there was a rush for the stairs. The car came to a halt at the entrance.

Suddenly a boy officer, a cigarette hanging nonchalantly from the corner of his mouth and a revolver in his hand, lined the Bolshevik guards up against the wall and disarmed them. He had come with the pass-word of the Military Revolutionary Committee, and the paper he carried in his pocket was stamped with the blue seal. It did not occur to any one at that moment that either the pass-word or the seal could have been stolen. The soldiers obeyed every command of the Military Revolutionary Committee without question. Not until they were prisoners and had heard the lock on the basement door turn behind them did they realize that they had been tricked.

“Who are they?” everybody asked. “Has Kerensky come? Is Korniloff here?”

I put the question to a Russian admiral standing near me. He shook his head in despair. “God knows, madame. I don’t.”

The boy officer and his squad departed as suddenly as they had come, carrying most of the rifles with them. Quiet settled on the hotel. The old guard was in prison, and there was no new one. Two small boys picked up a couple of rifles left behind, and slung them across their shoulders in imitation of the armed workmen.

“Krasnia Gvardia!” (Red Guard!), one said, hunching down into his coat. A woman laughed hysterically.

I left the hotel, and followed the officer down the Morskaya to the telephone building two blocks below. Motor-trucks and a couple of touring cars had been placed across the street as a barricade to traffic; and the crowd, warned back by uniformed men with rifles in their hands, kept at a safe distance.

Albert Williams was standing in the doorway, talking to a group of soldiers. They were very evidently not Bolsheviki, and I crossed the street to find out what had happened there. He drew me quickly into the shelter of the courtyard and began to explain. The telephone exchange was once more in the hands of the military school cadets, and they were momentarily expecting a counter-attack by the Red Guard and the sailors. A tall, dark-eyed boy, one of the ten who had stood guard over the Provisional Government in the Winter Palace, related in perfect English the events of the morning.

At daybreak an automobile drove up to the door, and two officers stepped out. They said that Kerensky was on his way to Petrograd and would arrive in a short time with two regiments. They provided the boys with the seal of the Military Revolutionary Committee and the proper pass-words, told them to go to the first cluster of guards gathered around one of the street-corner fires, surprise them, overpower them by numbers, and take their guns away. Their orders then were to take the telephone exchange and the War Hotel by means of the pass-word, and hold them until Kerensky arrived.

The boys started blithely forth, convinced that they were preparing the way for the restoration of the Provisional Government and it was merely a matter of an hour or two before the victorious troops of Kerensky would come to relieve them.

“I don’t see why he does not come,” he ended plaintively. “We can’t hold out long alone.”

At this time there was only an occasional volley, but at two o’clock the firing began in earnest from both ends of the street. The cadets, mere children in this business of war, built barricades of boxes and boards across the sidewalks, and when the supply of these was exhausted they carried logs from a wood-pile. They took up positions behind these frail protections and fired at the attacking forces, which came at them from two directions. Some hid behind the motor-trucks, resting their guns upon the engines. Some lay flat in the mud upon the wooden cobbles, and fired from underneath the cars.

I watched the fight, first from behind the barricade in the courtyard, then went upstairs to a front window where I could look down upon the street.

In a room on the second floor, Antonoff, head of the Red Guard and member of the Bolshevik War Commissary, was a prisoner.

The crowd outside the building, led by a factory worker and reinforced by sailors, learned that Antonoff was in the building, and were mad to be at the throats of the men who were holding their leader. They had still another grievance against the cadets. Many of these same boys had been captured once in the Winter Palace, and allowed to go free. They had broken their parole, and the sailors especially were bitter to think they had to sacrifice more of their comrades to re-arrest them.

In the middle of the afternoon the cadets suggested a peace parley, offering to surrender Antonoff if they were allowed to go free.

“We’ll take Antonoff ourselves, and kill every last one of you,” came back the answer.

The boys grew desperate.

“Why doesn’t Kerensky come? Why doesn’t Kerensky come?” they asked again and again.

There was no one to answer. The older officers, who had been directing them, completely disappeared. The stock of ammunition diminished. A Red Cross automobile dashed up to the building at half-past two, left a box of hand-grenades, and departed again.

A machine-gun had been set up on a wooden box in the street, and in the courtyard a woman with a shawl over her head loaded and reloaded the tape. The attacking forces were pressing closer and closer upon the building. The street barricades were abandoned. A few of the cadets poured up the stairs and into the front rooms. At four o’clock I was moved from my place at the window.

“We want to shoot from here,” one of the cadets explained.

With that they smashed the glass with the butts of their rifles, and took their places behind the yellow silk curtains. I walked across to a window overlooking the court. Two cadets passed into the building bearing a wounded comrade, who lay limp in the arms of his bearers.

“Come away from here. They’re down in the courtyard at the foot of the stairs!” somebody shouted.

With that the hall was deserted. Men and girls fled to the back of the building. In a pantry I found a boy officer with a huge breadknife, trying to cut the buttons from his coat with hands that trembled so they made a long job of it. Still another was tearing frantically at his epaulets. In an ante-room behind the switchboard three more discovered the street clothes of some mechanics, and were quickly stripping themselves.

Suddenly the thing for which these boys had striven--the coveted gold braid and brass buttons of an officer’s uniform, symbol of their superiority--had become their curse. Any one of them would have given the last thing he possessed on earth for the suit of a common working-man. Stripped bare of every scrap of the pride and tradition of their class, they were caught in the grip of a fear that drained every drop of blood from their faces and every bit of courage from their hearts.

Wandering about from room to room, stopping here and there to say “Kharasho!” or “Nichevo!” to some poor girl dissolved in tears upon a bench, I came out finally in a corridor where Mr. Williams was standing with his interpreter. A cadet officer had hold of the lapels of his overcoat, and was pleading with him to take it off and let him escape. The boy’s bronze face was gray with fear, and his words tumbled over each other in jumbled incoherence. I glanced from him to the American, and saw a pair of eyes full of pain and indecision. A tense, silent moment followed--a moment in which I held my breath and waited.

The shooting outside had stopped. Dark was closing in around us. Everything for me was obliterated but the one man asking for something that might save his life, and the other to whom it was second nature to give, torn between conviction and desire. I knew the tumult in his soul.

The coat of rough brown cloth and American cut was strikingly different from any other in Russia, and it had become a familiar garment in revolutionary Petrograd. Its owner was an excellent speaker, and he had talked to the men at the front, on the fleet, and in the factories, and wrapped in the brown coat he had slept in peasant huts from Moscow to Kieff.

The Russian workmen loved him and trusted him, and he had come to know them and to believe in the integrity of their idealism. He had pity for these frightened fellows, but he was almost as bitter as a Red Guardsman at the breaking of parole, the stealing of passes, and the illegitimate use of the Red Cross car.

“If I give him my coat they will recognize it and think me a traitor,” he said.

I did not answer. I felt I had no right to plead with him against his principles. His Russian had completely deserted him. He turned to his interpreter:

“Tell him I can’t give him my coat, but perhaps I can help in some other way,” he said.

The interpreter obeyed, and the officer walked away with a hopeless, despairing shake of the head.

We stood for a moment looking after him, both of us possessed of a frantic consciousness that something must be done to save these boys doing the bidding of the men who had left them in a trap.

“Oh, if I could only speak this language!” I said, in a futile explosion of protest against my helplessness.

“What would you do?” my companion asked.

“I don’t know what I’d do, but I’d do something!” I answered, and started down the hall, deserted a few minutes earlier. Mr. Williams followed me.

“Find him,” he said. “I can’t give him my coat, but I will leave it here, and he can come and take it.”

I hurried past the stairway, with one swift glance toward the dark courtyard, where men from the street were crowding thicker and thicker. I went from corridor to corridor, jostling groups of frightened men and women, and stumbled at last into a back room, where most of the cadets had gathered. They had thrown down their guns and were waiting for the end. I searched the faces. The officer was not among them.

Mr. Williams, by this time possessed of a passion to find him, had been hunting in another part of the building. At the moment, for both of us, the whole tragic situation was done up in the plight of this one feeble human being trying to save his life. Every second we expected to hear the rush of men on the stairway.

“Perhaps I can do something with Antonoff,” Mr. Williams suggested. “Where are the boys?”

I led him back to the room where I had found them, and he offered to go to the imprisoned Minister of War and try to make terms of surrender that would guarantee their safety.

“Pazhal’sta, barin! Please help us! Please save us!” they cried in chorus.

With two cadets to guide him and unlock the door, he disappeared. We waited a breathless two minutes. When he returned, a queer, emaciated little fellow, stoop-shouldered and pale, walked beside him. A very long nose and a fringe of long pale hair were almost all of him visible below the wide brim of his soft felt hat. Surely the War Minister had none of the traditional appearance of a Russian military man.

“Tavarisch Antonoff, save our lives!” cried the cadets in unison. “On the word of the good revolutionist that we know you are, save our lives!”

“Where are your officers?” Antonoff asked.

“They have all left us,” they answered.

The terms of surrender were quickly made, and Antonoff and Williams started downstairs to face the crowd. The men of the Red Guard recognized their leader.

“Antonoff! Antonoff!” they shouted. “Nash, nash!” (Ours, ours!) “Where are the junkers?”

With this the men in the lead made for the stairs. Antonoff stopped them.

“I have given my word of honor as a revolutionist that these men in there shall not be killed, and as revolutionists you must keep that word.”

Some of the Baltic fleet sailors, who had come down from the _Respublica_, recognized the American.

“Americanski tavarisch!” one of them shouted.

Mr. Williams began speaking to them.

“I know the temptation you have,” he said, “but the ideals of your Revolution will be sullied if you yield to it. If you insist on fighting till you kill the last junker, it will be a useless massacre, and I will make it known around the world.”

He explained the case of the boys and their desertion by their officers, and when he finished a vote was taken. All the sailors lifted their hands. A few of the Red Guard murmured dissent.

Antonoff turned to them.

“I have made my terms of surrender,” he said, “and I will myself shoot the first man who harms one of the junkers.”

There was a ring of finality in his tone. The men looked at him in astonishment.

“Shoot us?” they cried incredulously.

“Yes,” he answered. “I would rather that we should all die than that this American should say that revolutionists of Russia were base and revengeful!”

This time all the hands went up.

A committee from the city Duma arrived at that moment, and as the cadets filed down the stairs, the leader took the hand of the first one and placed it in the hand of a sailor.

“This is prisoner number one, and I trust his life into your hands. Guard it for the honor of the Revolution,” he said.

When the last man was delivered, the sailor who brought him downstairs tossed a contemptuous glance in his direction and said: “The last of the trash!” He was quickly hushed by one of his companions.

Outside in the Morskaya an occasional shot sounded above the shuffle of feet in the courtyard.

“Provokator! Provokator!” the sailors cried, and cautioned each other against being aroused to response.

Meanwhile the frightened telephone operators slipped quietly away in the dark. None of the terrors they had feared in the long hours of the afternoon had materialized. They all went on strike, and the next time I called at the exchange the switchboards were manned by sailors, soldiers, and a few factory workers, whose poor bewildered brains and clumsy fingers struggled desperately to master the intricate science of plugging in and plugging out.

The telephone exchange and the War Hotel were not the only spots where trouble raged that Sunday. At the Vladimirsky Military School, Bolshevik forces and cadets fought a desperate battle, and many were killed. Some of the cadets were reported to be frightfully mutilated by bayonet thrusts. On the Gogol, not far from St. Isaac’s Cathedral, there were a few hideous moments of slaughter. An armored car came down the street. Inside were three cadets and a chauffeur. The people in the street hurried into a doorway for shelter. In the group were civilian men, women, and children, and six sailors. The car came to an abrupt stop just opposite the doorway, and the guns, opening fire, sprayed death into that cluster of humans.

A workman was the first to fall, and a little newsboy crumpled on the pavement beside him. The sailors darted toward the car, and jabbed their bayonets through the holes in the steel plates. The shrieks of the men inside told plainly that the weapons had struck home. The firing ceased as abruptly as it had begun. When the shrieks suddenly died away, they dragged three dead men out and stretched them on the cobbles. They were covered with blood and bayonet wounds until they were unrecognizable. The chauffeur, who was uninjured, begged for mercy, and a Bolshevik in the crowd said:

“For God’s sake, let him go. Let’s not kill any more of them than we have to!”

It was midnight when I again returned to the hotel, which had in the meantime been recaptured by the Bolsheviki. This time they were taking no chances. The lobby and the upper floors swarmed with sailors. There were hundreds of guards where the day before there had been twenty. They had commandeered the entire second floor, and with machine-guns had taken positions in the front windows. The servants had fled. The beds were unmade. There had been no food in the hotel all day. Most of the residents had departed.

Nearly a week had passed since the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution, and we were still in utter darkness as to what was going on in the rest of the world. The last news from the outside was the joyous word that woman suffrage had carried New York State by 100,000 majority. It seemed incredible, as wild as the wild rumors that were pouring in from Siberia and the Caucasus; we did not dare believe it. Kerensky’s movements just outside the city continued to remain shrouded in mystery.

I found my desk covered with messages from kindly members of the American colony, bent on rescuing me from the storm-center of Revolution. I read them over with a sense of pleasure--that pleasure which always comes with the knowledge that warm, friendly human guardian angels are standing in the offing; but I had not the slightest intention in the world of obeying any of the well-meant advice or accepting any of the gracious hospitality. Here under this very roof was the theater in which the tremendous revolutionary drama, involving the destiny of nearly two hundred million Russians and no one could say how many others of the peoples of the world, was being played. It was for this I had come to Russia. By the side of it personal security seemed a trivial thing.

I put the notes away and went downstairs to talk with some of the sailors. Their conversation that night was chiefly of provocation. Again and again I heard the words, “Provokator! Provokator!” My Western mind had come reluctantly to the admission that provocation and Black Hundred plots were an actuality and not a nightmare of some dark age-long dead. I listened with interest to their charges against the monarchists, and wondered how much truth there might be in them.

Coming down in the elevator next morning, I met Baron B. I had not seen him for several days, and frequently I had wondered what he was doing in the new crisis. I looked up at him as he entered the lift, and there was something in his face that made me shudder inside.

“Where were you yesterday?” I asked, with as much self-control as I could muster. “We did not see you around, and we thought perhaps you had been arrested.”

He laughed--a mirthless, cruel laugh that was more nearly a sneer.

“No,” he said; “they won’t arrest me. I was out with a rifle over my shoulder. I was one of them. I was a Red Guard!”