ovement at the end of that year._

THE JEW

(A STORY)

BY M. ARTZIBASHEF

It so happened that the second platoon of the third squad of the
Ashkadar regiment found itself completely cut off from the main body
of the army, and this without the loss of a single cartridge or
soldier.

How this came about, and why a group of men, fifteen or twenty strong,
had suddenly become an independent fighting unit, none of them could
tell.

At the outset, the entire Ashkadar regiment zealously trudged
throughout the long autumn night along an interminable road, leading
no one knew where, into the dark, damp, and hostile distance. To smoke
or to converse was forbidden. In the dark, the black mass of the
regiment, bristling with its bayonets like some huge, porcupine-like
creature, crawled steadily onward, filling the air with the shuffling
of innumerable feet. The men kept stumbling over each other, and
swore viciously in half tones; they slipped in the mud and sank
knee-deep into the wheel-tracks filled with cold water. "Some road!"
they sighed quietly.

At dawn the regiment was brought to a halt and was stretched along the
edge of a wide potato field, which the soldiers had never seen before.
It was drizzling with sickening persistence, and the dark-blue
distances, mildly sloping and mournful, were blurred in the haze of
the rain. On both sides, as far as eye could reach, ranks of grey
officers and soldiers were wretchedly soaking in the rain. Water was
dripping from their sullen faces and it looked as though they were all
weeping over their fate--the fate which had cast them upon this
strange, unknown, God-forsaken field. In a few hours many of them will
perhaps be lying dead amidst the half-rotted potato stems on the wet
soil with their pallid faces upturned to the cold heavens, the very
ones which now weep also over their dear, distant country.

Behind, a battery crew was vainly attempting to set the cannon which
were sinking into the soaked plough-land. One could hear the hoarse
angry voices, the cracking of whips, and the heavy, strained snorting
of horses. In front of them lone officers wandered in drenched cloaks
in the rain; still farther behind the curtain of rain and the thick
fog there rumbled cannons and it was impossible to tell whether they
belonged to the enemy or not. At times the shooting seemed to come
from afar-off on the right. Then the rumble of the guns was deep and
muffled like the sound of h