Andrea Barrett - Archangel

She straightened her shoulders. “Not exactly,” she said. “But I work here, my name’s Eudora MacEachern. And I’m twenty-two, not that it’s your business. I’ll get some men to help you with your friend.”

He picked up the reins. “Let them figure it out at Headquarters,” he said harshly. “Since they did it.” The pony began to move again, turning the sleigh in a wide arc.

STORIES ARRIVED AT Archangel in disjointed shards, incomplete, which Eudora like everyone else plucked from the river of gossip. Her sources were Red Cross workers and engineers, ambulance drivers and, most of all, the wounded men who passed through her X-ray room on their way to surgery. Each knew painfully well what had happened right around him, but otherwise — they had no way to grasp the whole disorganized campaign. It was the opposite of France, one officer told her. No real fronts, no lines of battle, thousands of square miles of tundra and swamp and forest dotted by tiny outposts where clumps of men slept in schoolrooms or in the homes of Russian peasants. The wounded soldiers came to her in threes and fours, packed into the boxy ambulance sleighs like eggs in excelsior, or shipped along the rivers and railroad tracks that, on the map in the hospital lounge, showed as red lines splayed like bloody fingers. The fingertips were cut off from each other, able to communicate only with Headquarters, back at the palm. The palm gave orders; sometimes the palm remembered to send supplies. The red lines told her how long the men had traveled back to the palm, hence how much time a bullet or a fragment of shell or bone had had to shift and dig through flesh.

In the dark of her X-ray room, while she waited for her eyes to adjust, the soldiers told her about fighting along a river resembling the lower Mississippi, tundra oozing edgelessly into freezing water, one step on solid ground followed by another that plunged them over their heads. They talked about the lack of supplies and the lack of guns and the lack of ammunition, all piled uselessly here in the city of Archangel; about the British officer who in his panic, and with a quart of whisky in his hand, ordered the shelling of a bridge occupied by their own troops; about the French troops that refused to fight and the Allied planes that mistakenly bombed them and the medical supplies mistakenly left behind. In the dark one soldier told her, weeping, that he’d amputated another’s leg with a pocketknife.

Mostly her soldiers were new recruits from Wisconsin and Michigan: boys who’d been drafted last June, trained for a few weeks, and then sent across the ocean. They’d all been expecting to go to France. In England, where they disembarked, they were issued greatcoats, mittens, hats, boots designed by the explorer Shackleton, and rifles designed for the Imperial Russian Army. Then they were shipped toward the Arctic Circle to fight against Russians, with whom they were not at war. Some succumbed to the influenza that swept the transports before reaching Archangel, while more were felled after landing. The soldiers still talked about those horrible weeks before the American hospital opened, when the Russian and British-run hospitals had overflowed and the sick had been crowded into barracks and docked barges.

That part she knew for herself. She’d changed beds and emptied bedpans and sponged soldiers with cool water, simple tasks mastered during her brief training as a nurse’s aide. Only after the first battles against the Bolsheviks had she begun to use the skills she’d picked up in France, which had nothing to do with her official training but were what had sent her to a place even colder and snowier than her home in the northern Adirondacks. In the dark, as she worked with the X-ray apparatus to locate the objects that had pierced her soldiers, they asked: What are we doing here?Instead of answers, they got pamphlets and proclamations, which she got too, all purporting to explain the goals of the Allied Intervention. Something about forming a barrier inside which the Russians could reorganize themselves. Something about teaching them, by example and instruction, how to rebuild an army and distribute food.

But she knew perfectly well, as did her soldiers, that the Russian army had split into factions, fighting on opposite sides of a civil war in which the Allies seemed to have chosen a side. The British had claimed that the Bolshevik government was in the hands of the Germans, thus that by fighting the Bolsheviks they were diverting German troops from France. And that this made them guests, not invaders, as the revolutionaries falsely claimed.

Eudora’s soldiers, serving unhappily under British officers, following British orders and eating British rations, didn’t see it that way. They saw chaos, confusion, peasants who hated them for invading their homes, troops on guard duty in Archangel living high while they starved and froze in the forest. They saw Bolshevik soldiers — Bolos, they called them — who seemed to be fighting with a purpose, and who left, on the snowy forest trails, eloquent pamphlets written in French and English and Russian, pointing out that the Allied soldiers were fighting for the rich, against the working people of Russia. Come over to our lines, which are your lines ! they wrote. We are your comrades, friends in the fight against the unprincipled capitalistic class .

Some first learned about the Armistice from a Bolo armed with a loudspeaker, perched on the riverbank opposite their position and orating in perfect English, under a crescent moon, about the end of this unjust war, which had slaughtered the poor to fatten the rich. And after that, they waited, as did Eudora, for someone from American Headquarters to explain why they were still here. Instead they got another proclamation, which appeared on a wall in the hospital lounge and explained that now they were fighting Bolshevism, which was the same as anarchy, which was destroying Russia. They were here not to conquer Russia but to help her. When order is restored here, we shall clear out. But only when we have attained our object, and that is the restoration of Russia . Which object, in the eyes of soldiers, never would be attained; which meant they would never leave; which for some few meant that they had to shoot themselves.

That’s what had happened, the rumors claimed, with the frozen soldier wrapped in blankets and bundled in that sleigh. Stories spread from Headquarters down through the barracks at Smolny, across the ice-locked river to the supply depot at Bakaritza, finally circling back to the receiving hospital. Eudora learned from these that the driver was one Private Boyd, a member of the ambulance company which, like the medical detachment, had been broken into small squads and attached to the soldiers scattered across the province.

Around the first of March, she heard, the platoons stationed at a tiny village near the easternmost front had been ordered back to Archangel, with the understanding that after a few weeks’ rest they’d be sent to a place south of the city where the fighting had recently grown fierce. Boyd and an infantryman, Havlicek, had been held back from the others, ordered to detour ten miles off the route and deliver supplies to a village where a few men were guarding a telephone line. They’d unloaded cigarettes, canned margarine, tea, and tinned beef and then settled in for the night: Havlicek in the back corner of one peasant’s house, Boyd near the stove in another, where two other soldiers were already billeted. In the morning, Boyd had woken to the sound of a shot and then a woman wailing from the doorway across the street. Inside, Havlicek lay in the corner, his revolver in his hand, the top of his head blown off and the walls sprayed with blood.