II CANNON MEAT

One instance is the case of Maxim.

The story of Maxim will tell much of Russia at war. With its movement, its color, and its pictures it will contain much of the sum total that one can see or feel in the empire of the Czar to-day. In it there is the theme of the fourth of the four great dramatic facts of this conflict.

The first of these great dramatic facts, I think, is the spirit of Great Britain. No empire has ever been given the free-will service of so many men willing, if need be, to die. I spoke to a Scotland Yard secret-service man in Norway of the millions of British volunteers. “You were in England!” said he. “You saw It.” He spoke as if It were a vision.

And the second is the efficiency of Germany. I have been in five countries, and two of them are Germany’s bitterest enemies. But even where anti-Prussianism is almost madness, whether among statesmen and officials, those who fight and those who wait, or those who fear and those who have suffered, there is mingled in one breath hatred and admiration.

And the third is the dignity of France. This, too, is felt everywhere. At the cold, narrow gate of Russia, on the frontier between Finland and Sweden, I met General Pau on his way to visit the Czar’s army. This distinguished veteran officer of France, one-armed and not tall of stature, behind his heavy gray brows and white mustache has a countenance filled with a strange combination of power and sadness. That which is firm and resolute and that which is reflective and tender mingle in the expression of his features. I spoke of the dignity of France, and then feared I had taken too great a liberty and had changed too abruptly from some hurried words about the Russian army, whose General Staff headquarters I had just left. He smiled, however, quietly and with pleasure. “France is patient and strong,” he said. “If necessary, she will suffer without complaint, but also she will remain calm after her victories.” The Russian commandant of the frontier station looked at Pau with blinking eyes and wet his own lips with the tip of his tongue. But he said nothing.

And the fourth drama of the conflict concerns a terrible thing. It is the human flesh of the endless hordes of men. It is the stockyard hordes of armies like the Russian army. It is the story of the millions. But, individually, it is the story of Maxim.

Russia is a country of peasants; if Maxim were destined to be born in Russia, the chances were three to one that he would be a peasant, and that Maxim should be a peasant fate decreed. Fate dropped him, a pink and squirming thing, in a little Russian village a day’s journey from Petrograd, and almost that distance from Moscow.

Maxim represented Russia as much as any soul could represent Russia. He was more Russian than the Czar, more Russian than any bureaucrat. He was a Slav, a peasant; he was one of the 120,000,000 cast in the image of God and tilling the soil. More than this, his infancy represented Russia because the lusty health of his young flesh combined with the stare of his blue eyes, in which no one could quite tell whether there were simplicity or guile, dense ignorance or the ancient meditations of old Oriental mysteries. Above all, Maxim had the quality which is the essence of the charm of Russia and Russia’s peasantry. It was not picturesqueness; it was not simplicity or elusiveness: it was potentiality; it was possibility. Like Russia, Maxim was a humanized question mark; he was a slate upon which nothing had been written. No one could tell whether he was the world’s yesterday or the world’s tomorrow.

He was born into a world of earth and wood. And in this, too, he represented Russia, for Russia is a civilization of earth and wood. That which satisfies the hunger of the Russian mind is ownership of soil; it is the passion of the empire. That which satisfies the hunger of his body is eaten with a wooden spoon from a wooden bowl.

The home of Maxim, for whom destiny has marked out a part—a little but significant part—in the great world war, was of wood. Snow and wind from the lowering skies of Russian winters had turned to weathered gray the unpainted exterior of the half-thatched peasant home, the roof of which extended to cover the shed in which the horse, the two cows, and a pig were kept. Inside, in the room where Maxim, his sister, and his father and mother spent all of their indoor hours, the reverse side of the lumber was yellow-brown, unplastered, and undecorated, except by clothes that hung on the wall, by four covers of a magazine published in Moscow, wooden utensils on a shelf, and a painted wooden icon hung in the corner so that a saint of the Russian orthodox church might ever cast upon the room a benevolent stare from brown, doelike eyes. There was a large wooden table and a stove of tiles with a mouth always hungry for wood.

The outdoor world across which the young legs of Maxim first began to walk was a part of the great Russian plain, but the village of fourteen or fifteen houses was built under the shadows of four lines of birch trees, whose leafy tops waved in the summer, so that the birches writhed as gracefully as dancing dryads—as the birches wave in a landscape by Corot. Maxim’s world extended as time went on and as his hair grew more and more like flax through the bleaching of hatless summers, and then, as his body was made to have magnificent form and strength, retaining its unbent, untwisted youth through its labor in the communal fields, extended until this world of his could be said to include nearly thirty square miles. It included at least one town on the railroad from which the produce of the countryside was shipped away and in which there were such things as newspapers from Petrograd and Moscow, and a local government in the control of landed proprietors which was a cross between a paternal village-improvement association and a board of aldermen, was called a zemstvo council, and maintained schools, doctors, and hospitals. Maxim did not know that a few years ago only one person in four in Russia could read or write; it was quite a normal thing not to read or write, but Maxim learned from a traveling teacher because a plump, young thing named Vera, who looked most pretty in the old peasant heirloom dress, had learned and teased Maxim unmercifully for his backwardness. If he could have foreseen the Great War, no doubt he would not have bothered his head; for, like the millions of him, Maxim was something of a simple philosopher.

He was something of a simple philosopher, but his religion had a large part in the sweetness of his life. In Maxim there was a capacity for religious feeling of which even Father Sergius, the village priest, a rather stupid man, did not dream. Maxim’s world was small, therefore the unknown world of superstition and of religious hope appeared all the larger. The young man saw that men of his own age in the town celebrated holidays by their vodka drinking and congregated in tough gangs—a new thing in Russia—but it was Maxim and not these tough young men of the town who could represent the spirit of the Russian peasantry. Maxim simply prayed for help and purity and for the pity of a stern God; his eyes remained clear as crystals from the Urals, and there was a spring in his step as he walked over the creaking snow in his rope and basket shoes, his padded leg swathings, and his calf-skin cap, and he had deep-breathing lungs and coursing blood under his skin.

In this respect, too, he represented the real, human Russia. An American doctor in charge of one of the largest of the hospitals, receiving soldiers from the front, told me that among the six thousand muzhiks he had treated only eleven men had the diseases of immorality. “Why?” said I. “Russian peasant: religion; clean living,” said he. “I never believed an army could be so free from these diseases.”

In the winter the young man’s father went to the city where, as an izvoshchik, or single-horse public vehicle driver, in a padded coat, he earned money, not to spend upon luxuries, but with the eternal Russian muzhik’s ambition, his land madness: the same land madness which forced the abolition of serfdom in Russia and which, way down deep, consuming the Russian heart, was the real strength behind the agitation of the so-called intelligent class in cities and towns and the urban revolutionary elements that in 1905 resulted in Russia’s first Duma or national assembly: a form, if not a fact, of constitutional government. The theory of constitutional government Maxim did not understand at all, and in this respect he represented the real Russia much better than the universities and the widely diverse reform theories and the politicians of the cities. But he understood the land madness of the muzhiks, for he had it.

Maxim had also a Slav sense of a mild sort. Between himself and his own customs and the peasants and the customs of villages not far away there were vast differences. In common, however, there were Slav instincts, the orthodox religion, the vague, mysterious recognition of a vague, mysterious, government, and at bottom a childlike attitude toward the Czar which has given rise to the term Little Father. All these combined bound Maxim to other Russians, to the infinite world of Russia beyond the horizon of his own little world.

Happy enough, dreaming much, worshiping blindly, in ignorance of the modern western world, but feeling a hunger for it; not influenced much by the Orient, but feeling its ancient breath, Maxim, the human animal whose body...