“If they are already whispering in coffee houses before mobilization and not a single one goes, it’s the seams!”
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How writers of different centuries and countries described the scenes of conscription for war.
“I saw a heartbreaking scene”
Author: Lev Tolstoy
Work: “War and Peace”, 1865
Event: Patriotic War of 1812
On the third day, I saw a heart-rending scene. It was a batch of recruits recruited from us and sent to the army. One had to see the state in which the mothers, wives and children of those who were leaving were, to hear the sobs of both! You would think that humanity has forgotten the laws of its divine Savior, who taught us love and forgiveness of insults, and that it considers its main merit to be in the art of killing each other.
From a letter from Marya Bolkonskaya to her friend Julie Karagina.
“Like a hurricane, she hit the province”
Author: Vikenty Veresaev
Work: “In the Japanese War”, 1907
Event: Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905)
At the end of April, mobilization was announced in our province. They talked about her in a muffled voice, they had been waiting for her for three weeks, but everything was kept in the deepest secret. And suddenly, like a hurricane, it hit the province. In the villages, people were taken directly from the field, from the plow. In the city, the police called the apartments in the dead of night, handed the conscripts tickets and ordered them to immediately come to the station. From one engineer friend they took all his servants at the same time: a footman, a coachman and a cook … There was something indifferently ferocious in this incomprehensible haste.
Thoughts of the protagonist – a field doctor about the mobilization that began in the Tula province.
“Women roar, drunken yell”
Author: Maksim Gorky
Work: “Complaints”, 1911
Event: Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905)
I had to be in Staraya Russa during the mobilization; standing on the platform they put the soldiers in the wagons, the women roar, the drunks yell, the sober look as if they will be skinned in an hour. Immediately, you know, it is clear that the people, you understand – the people! – is going to defend his country from an insidious enemy, and so on. Among other regrettable faces I see one – a real kind of great Russian: breasts, beards, hands, a potato nose, blue eyes and – this calm face … such a patient, damn it, face, so confident … confident that nothing good cannot be, never will be! And this is not mobilization for him, but liquidation of life, all life, you understand!…
I told him: “What are you, my brother, so, huh? You go to such a thing, but there is no spirit! It is necessary, my brother, to have a fighting spirit, we must hope for victory and return home with glory! “We, your honor,” he says, understand this! We, he says, agree to do everything that is ordered. ”-“ Yes, you, I say, how is it yourself – do you want victory? — “For us, he says, it’s not just a victory, but at least we don’t have to fight at all.” Then the non-commissioned officer shoved him into the car.
From the story of an officer who observed the mobilization in the Novgorod province.
“Food, they say, is hearty in the regiment”
Author: Alexey Tolstoy
Work: “Walking through the torment”, 1920
Event: World War I (1914–1918)
– And what, tell me, from your village willingly went to war?
“Many went hunting, sir.
Was there a rise?
Yes, they got up. The food, they say, is hearty in the regiment. Why not go. Still, look – how it is and what. And if they kill you, it’s all the same to die here. Our land is very meager, the earnings are bad, we live from bread to kvass. And there, everyone says, the food is very good, twice a day they eat meat and official sugar, and tea, and tobacco, smoke as much as you want.
Isn’t it scary to fight?
– No matter how scary, of course – scary.
Dialogue between journalist Antoshka Arnoldov and peasant Fyodor from the village of Khlyby near Moscow.
“We knew about the mobilization three days before the order”
Author: Michael Bulgakov
Work: “White Guard”, 1925
Event: defense of Kyiv from the troops of Petlyura (1918)
“Mobilization,” Turbin went on venomously, “it’s a pity you didn’t see what was going on in the precincts yesterday.” All money changers knew about the mobilization three days before the order. Great? And everyone has a hernia, everyone has the top of the right lung, and whoever does not have the top, just disappeared, as if he fell through the ground. Well, this, brothers, is a formidable sign. If they whisper in coffee shops before mobilization and not a single one comes, it’s all over! Oh, bastard, bastard! Yes, after all, if since April he (Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky.— “b”) instead of breaking this vile comedy with Ukrainization, he would begin the formation of officer corps, we would now take Moscow.
Alexei Turbin in a conversation over dinner with friends – white officers.
“Let’s stand for a day – and go home”
Author: Mikhail Sholokhov
Work: Quiet Don, 1928
Event: World War I (1914–1918)
The pub is closed. The military bailiff is gloomy and preoccupied. At the fence along the streets – festively dressed women. One word in a diverse crowd: “mobilization.” Drunk, hot faces. Anxiety is transmitted to the horses – screeching and fighting, angry neighing. Over the square there is low-hanging dust, on the square there are empty bottles of breech, pieces of cheap sweets.
… nearby, the sergeant-major in a red-rimmed beard is arguing with a battery:
— Nothing will happen! Let’s stand for a day – and back home.
– Well, how is the war?
— Whoa, dear friend! Opposite us, what power can stand on its feet? …
The farm chieftain poured oil of joyful words to the Cossacks crowding around him:
— War? No, it will not. Their nobility the military bailiff said that this was for clarity. You can be calm…
Four days later, the red convoys took the Cossacks with regiments and batteries to the Russian-Austrian border.
Conversations of the Cossacks in the first days of mobilization.
“Not freedom, but drill”
Author: Erich Maria Remarque
Work: All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929
Event: World War I (1914–1918)
We were convinced – first with surprise, then with bitterness, and finally with indifference – that everything here is apparently decided not by reason, but by a shoe brush, not by thought, but by the once established routine, not by freedom, but by drill. We became soldiers out of good will, out of enthusiasm; but here everything was done to beat this feeling out of us …
From the speech of the protagonist Paul Bäumer about mobilization in Germany.
“The Fatherland accepts any sacrifice”
Author: Louis Ferdinand Celine
Work: “Journey to the End of the Night”, 1932
Event: World War I (1914–1918)
But the war, decidedly, is going on too long. And the longer it drags on, the more difficult it is to imagine a person repulsive enough to inspire disgust in the fatherland. It now accepts any sacrifice, no matter who makes it, any cannon fodder. The Fatherland has become infinitely unpretentious in the choice of its martyrs. There are no more soldiers for him who are unworthy to carry weapons and, most importantly, to die with weapons in their hands and from weapons.
According to the latest information, they want to make a hero out of me. It seems that the mania for homicide has become completely irrepressible, since they began to forgive the theft of cans of canned food … Until now, however, petty thieves had the advantage in our republic that dishonor deprived them of the right to carry patriotic weapons. But tomorrow this order will change, and I, a thief, will return to my place in the army.
From the conversation of the protagonist of the novel Bardamu with his friend Zubrezh about mobilization in France.
“There was nowhere to hide”
Author: Bruno Jasensky
Work: “The main culprit”, 1936
Event: Soviet-Polish War (1919–1921)
Newspapers vying with each other assured that this was not the same war at all, but a completely, completely different one: a sacred campaign in defense of civilization from the advancing eastern barbarism. Resurrected only two years ago, independent Poland, by virtue of a special mission destined for it from above, was obliged to advance the outposts of the cultural West to the Dnieper. However, they wrote about the same thing about the previous war… He knew that the newspapers were the same non-commissioned officers, only for civilians… As for him, he sniffed enough, until he vomited blood, and you won’t take him to these things.
He locked himself at home and tried to sit out. He had some savings, enough to wait it out. At that time, he was still remarkably naive – he believed that perhaps they would leave him alone. He was found at home and handed a mobilization ticket. On the streets, disheveled respectable ladies caught young people in civilian clothes and took them to the nearest police post, tearing off their ties as they went. There was nowhere to hide. Every street, as soon as you set foot on it, slammed shut like a mousetrap.
Thoughts of the protagonist about the mobilization campaign in Poland.
“War is something completely different.»
Author: Vyacheslav Kondratiev
Work: “Sashka”, 1979
Event: Great Patriotic War (1941–1945)
“Why are you going to war, girls? Shouldn’t…
– What do you! Is it possible to sit in the rear when all our boys are fighting? It’s a shame…
So you volunteer?
— Of course! All the thresholds at the military registration and enlistment office were knocked down, one answered and laughed.
“Yeah,” laughed the other.
And Sashka, looking at them, smiled involuntarily, but a bitter smile came out – these little girls still don’t know anything, war is tempting for them, as they look at an adventure, but war is something completely different …
Then one of them, looking straight into Sasha’s eyes, asked:
– Tell me… Only the truth, always the truth. Is it scary there?
“It’s scary, girls,” Sasha answered very seriously. – And you need to know this … so that you are ready.
We understand, we understand…
The conversation of two Soviet girls with the main character of the novel, a soldier Sasha, returning from the front.
“The woman wailed for a long time”
Author: Nikolai Nikulin
Work: “Memories of the war”, 2007
Event: Great Patriotic War (1941–1945)
Meanwhile, the war was going on somewhere. Something happened, but no one really knew anything. The wounded began to be brought to hospitals, the mobilized left and left. The scene of the dispatch of the marines stuck in my memory: right in front of our windows overlooking the Neva, soldiers, fully armed and equipped, were loaded onto a pleasure boat. They were calmly waiting for their turn, and suddenly a woman ran up to one of them with a loud cry. She was persuaded, reassured, but to no avail.. The soldier tore off his convulsively clenched hands by force, and she continued to cling to her duffel bag, her rifle, her gas mask bag. The boat sailed away, and the woman wailed for a long time, banging her head against the granite parapet of the embankment. She felt what I learned much later: neither the soldiers, nor the boats on which they were sent to the landing, never returned.
Description by the author of mobilization fees.
“Psycho, I want to kill”
Author: Gustav Hasford
Work: “Old Men”, 1979
Event: Vietnam War (1955–1975)
I came to tell you about the call.
There is a building in New York called Whitehall Street, where you go in, you are immediately injected there, inspected, detected, infected, despised and raked in. Once I went there to undergo a medical examination – I go in, sit down, and the night before I had a good drink, so when I went in in the morning, I looked and felt better than ever. Because I wanted to look like a simple typical American kid from New York … I go in, sit down, and they give me a piece of paper and say: “Boy, you need to see a psychiatrist, room 604.”
I go up there, I say: “Psycho, I want to kill. I mean, I want to kill. Kill. I want, I want to see, I want to see blood, and pus, and intestines, and veins in the teeth … Then the sergeant comes up, slams the medal on my chest, sends it further along the corridor and says: “Well done. Our guy.” This is where I really got sick.
Description by the main character Joker of the work of the medical board.
“There are a lot of helicopters in the army, and I only have you”
Author: Gallego Rina Gonzalez
Work: “Saturday Candle in Iraq, or Operation Mickey Mouse”, 2018
Event: Iraqi War (2003–2011)
Her husband’s call got her out of bed early yesterday morning. It was deep evening in Iraq then. Who would have thought that her Tom, who served eighteen years in the reserve and did not go anywhere further than Wyoming, would go to Iraq as a volunteer. He was an excellent mechanic, repairing helicopters and loved his job. “Understand, Ruth,” he said on the day of mobilization, “there is one young growth. They think they know everything, but mechanics need experience. A helicopter is a serious thing, it doesn’t like a blunder.” Watching her husband, along with other mobilized reservists, get on the bus, Ruth thought: “I don’t care about your helicopters – there are a lot of helicopters in the army, but I have only one.”
The conversation of the main character of the novel, Ruth, with her husband on the day of mobilization.
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