to the rows of bayonet-toting youths in front of hirn - 'Listen! I am a regular officer. I went through the German war, as Staff Captain Studzinsky here will witness, and I know what I'm talking about! I assume full and absolute responsibility for what I'm doing! Understand? I'm warning you! And I'm sending you home! Do you understand why?' he shouted.

'Yes, yes', answered the crowd, bayonets swaying. Then loudly and convulsively a cadet in the second rank burst into tears.

To the utter surprise of the regiment and probably of himself, Staff Captain Studzinsky crammed his gloved fist into his eyes with a strange and most un-officer like gesture, at which the regiment's nominal roll fell to the floor, and burst into tears.

Infected by him several more cadets began weeping, the ranks disintegrated and the disorderly uproar was only stopped when Myshlaevsky, in his Radames voice, roared an order to the bugler:

'Cadet Pavlovsky! Sound the retreat!'

#

'Colonel, will you give me permission to set fire to the school building?' said Myshlaevsky, beaming at the colonel.

'No, I will not', Malyshev replied quietly and politely.

'But sir,' said Myshlaevsky earnestly, 'that means that Petlyura will get the armory, the weapons and worst of all -' Myshlaevsky pointed out into the hallway where the head of Tsar Alexander I could be seen over the landing.

'Yes, he'll get all that', the colonel politely agreed.

'You can't mean to let him, sir?'

Malyshev turned to face Myshlaevsky, stared hard at him and said:

'Lieutenant, in three hours' time hundreds of human lives will fall to Petlyura and my only regret is I am unable to prevent their destruction at the cost of my own life, or of yours. Please don't mention portraits, guns or rifles to me again.'

'Sir,' said Studzinsky, standing at attention in front of the colonel, 'I wish to apologise on my own behalf and on behalf of those officers whom I incited to an act of disgraceful behavior.'

'I accept your apology', replied the colonel politely.

#

By the time the morning mist over the town had begun to disperse, the blunt-muzzled mortars on the Alexander High School parade ground had lost their breech-blocks and the rifles and machine-guns, dismantled or broken up, had been hidden in the furthermost recesses of the attic. Heaps of ammunition had been thrown into snowdrifts, into pits and into secret crannies in the cellars, while the globes no longer radiated light over the assembly hall and corridors. The white insulated switchboard had been smashed by cadets' bayonets under Myshlaevsky's orders.

#

The reflection in the windows was blue sky. The two last men to leave the school building - Myshlaevsky and Karas - stood in the sunlight on the square.

'Did the colonel warn Alexei that the regiment was going to be disbanded?' Myshlaevsky asked Karas anxiously.

'Yes, I'm sure he did. After all, Alexei didn't turn up on parade this morning, so he must have been told', replied Karas.

'Shall we go and see the Turbins?'

'Better not by daylight, as things are. It won't be safe for officers to be seen congregating in groups ... you never know. Let's go back to our apartment.'

Blue skies in the windows, white on the playground and the mist rose and drifted away.

Eight

Mist. Mist, and needle-sharp frost, claw-like frost flowers. Snow, dark and moonless, then faintly paling with the approach of dawn. In the distance beyond the City, blue onion-domes sprinkled with stars of gold leaf; and on its sheer eminence above the City

the cross of St Vladimir, only extinguished when the dawn crept in across the Moscow bank of the Dnieper.

When morning came the lighted cross went out, as the stars went out. But the day did not warm up; instead it showed signs of being damp, with an impenetrable veil suspended low over the whole land of the Ukraine.

Ten miles from the City Colonel Kozyr-Leshko awoke exactly at daybreak as a thin, sour, vaporous light crept through the dim little window of a peasant shack in the village of Popelyukha. Kozyr's awakening coincided with the word: 'Advance.'

At first he thought that he was seeing the word in a very vivid dream and even tried to brush it away with his hand as something chill and threatening. But the word swelled up and crept into the shack along with a crumpled envelope and the repulsive red pimples on the face of an orderly. Kozyr pulled a map out of a gridded mica map-case and spread it out under the window. He found the village of Borkhuny, then Bely Hai, and from these used his fingernail to trace the route along the maze of roads, their edges dotted with woods like so many flies, leading to a huge black blob

the City. Added to the powerful smell of Kozyr's cheap tobacco, the shack reeked of homegrown shag from the owner of the red pimples, who assumed that the war would not be lost if he smoked in the colonel's presence.

Faced with the immediate prospect of going into battle, Kozyr was thoroughly cheerful. He gave a huge yawn and jingled his complicated harness as he slung the straps over his shoulders. He had slept last night in his greatcoat without even taking off his spurs. A peasant woman sidled in with an earthenware pot of milk. Kozyr had never drunk milk before and did not wish to start now. Some children crept up. One of them, the smallest, with a completely bare bottom, crawled along the bench and reached out for Kozyr's Mauser, but could not get his hands on it before Kozyr had put the pistol into his holster.

Before 1914 Kozyr had spent all his life as a village schoolmaster. Mobilised into a regiment of dragoons at the outbreak of war, in 1917 he had been commissioned. And now the dawn of

December 14th 1918, found Kozyr a colonel in Petlyura's army and no one on earth (least of all Kozyr himself) could have said how it had happened. It had come about because war was Kozyr's true vocation and his years of teaching school had been nothing more than a protracted and serious mistake.

This, of course, is something that happens more often than not in life. A man may be engaged in some occupation for twenty whole years, such as studying Roman law, and then in the twenty-first year it suddenly transpires that Roman law is a complete waste of time, that he not only doesn't understand it and dislikes it too, but that he is really a born gardener and has an unquenchable love of flowers. This is presumably the result of some imperfection in our social system, which seems to ensure that people frequently only find their proper metier towards the end of their lives. Kozyr had found his at the age of forty-five. Until then he had been a bad teacher, boring and cruel to his pupils.

'Right, tell the boys to get out of those shacks and stand to their horses', said Kozyr in Ukrainian and tightened the creaking belt around his stomach.

Smoke was beginning to curl up from the chimneys of Popel-yukha as Colonel Kozyr's cavalry regiment, four hundred sabres strong, rode out of the village. An aroma of shag floated above the ranks, Kozyr's fifteen-hand bay stallion prancing nervously ahead of them, whilst strung out for a quarter of a mile behind the regiment creaked the waggons of the baggage train. As soon as they had trotted clear of Popelyukha a two-color standard was unfurled at the head of the column of horsemen - one yellow strip and one blue strip of bunting tacked to a lance-shaft.

Kozyr could not abide tea and preferred to breakfast on a swig of vodka. He loved 'Imperial' vodka, which had been unobtainable for four years, but which had reappeared all over the Ukraine under the Hetman's regime. Like a burst of flame the vodka poured out of Kozyr's gray army canteen and through his veins. In the ranks, too, a liquid breakfast was the order of the day, drunk from canteens looted from the stores at Belaya Tserkov; as soon as the vodka began to take effect an accordion struck up at