The cycle of war violence and dehumanization

War’s violence in the novel does not end with a battle or remain confined to soldiers: it enters hospitals, administrative decisions, refugee journeys, and family life, then returns as retaliation. Across these settings, people are reduced to numbers, categories, or threats, while coercive acts carried out in the name of order perpetuate the very disorder they are meant to suppress.

From Battlefield to Hospital

The consequences of fighting arrive first as a matter of sheer volume. A truck with two trailers brings wounded men to a Moscow hospital, where overcrowding has already spread from passages and landings into the women’s wards. The battle of Lutsk has intensified a pressure the hospital can barely contain: the wounded are not an abstract consequence of military events but a continuing demand on civilian medical space.

At a mobile first-aid station, the same pressure appears on the road. Exhausted soldiers returning from four days of heavy fighting lie nearly motionless as unsprung ammunition carts rattle past with wounded men. The casualties have been gathered from the battlefield only half an hour earlier; many are unconscious, and the staff must quickly bandage them and operate on the most urgent cases. The carts’ military purpose has become indistinguishable from their improvised medical use, while the surviving soldiers are too depleted even to react as the wounded pass.

The battlefield itself is seen through the uncertainty of a failed attack. Lieutenant Antipov leads his men across an exposed field, running ahead and beside them as they advance toward enemy trenches. From an observation post, Galiullin watches shells burst in front of the attackers and, unable to see what happens in the smoke, believes the lieutenant and his men have been killed. The account makes both the physical risk and the limits of witnessing central: Antipov is captured when his platoon surrenders, but the battlefield produces a false report of his death. War destroys lives and also distorts knowledge of who has survived.

Coercion in the Name of Order

As military conditions worsen, violence becomes formal policy as well as battlefield action. With a new offensive planned, revolutionary courts-martial are instituted and the death penalty, recently abolished, is restored to improve the army’s morale. The measure presents punishment as a tool of military effectiveness; its immediate context suggests a political authority trying to recover control over forces strained by war.

That coercive logic is enacted when Commissar Gints addresses surrounded rebels of the 212th Infantry from a pile of timber within a ring of Cossacks. He begins with appeals to duty and the fatherland, but the exhausted soldiers meet his language with indifference and hostility. He then threatens them with death unless they disarm and surrender their leaders. His speech cannot restore the authority it invokes: the men’s war experience and their distrust of political appeals have made such phrases ineffective. The episode exposes the gap between official language and lived experience, while showing how quickly an appeal to collective duty turns into a threat against individuals.

The same pattern appears in the account of Strelnikov’s authority. He gains the authorities’ confidence by taking opponents by surprise and rapidly investigating, trying, sentencing, and enforcing judgments. His actions suppress desertion and reorganize recruitment, but their efficiency depends on concentrating military and judicial power in one figure. The account connects restored control to swift punishment rather than to a repaired social order, so the apparent success of coercion carries the cycle forward.

Retaliation and the Loss of Human Measure

In the forest, the execution of thirteen condemned men—eleven accused ringleaders and two male nurses condemned for brewing vodka—turns revolutionary discipline into a scene of organized killing. After imprisonment and maltreatment, the prisoners are described as having lost their human appearance. The escort drives them toward the edge of a rocky platform; an attempted protest by Rzhanitsky adds confusion, but does not halt the execution. A volley kills most of the condemned, and a second kills the rest, including the boy Terioshka Galuzin. The scene presents a procedure meant to secure obedience, yet its setting and method make the supposed boundary between order and violence impossible to sustain.

Violence also spreads through civilians displaced by the fighting. Among refugee women trekking with sacks, bundles, and babies, some mothers, exhausted and deprived of milk, abandon their children or turn back, judging a quick death preferable to starvation. Others show exceptional courage and self-command. The contrasting responses resist treating the refugees as a single undifferentiated mass: war imposes the same peril on people whose capacities and choices differ, while leaving even the strongest to bear the consequences of displacement.

The retaliatory logic becomes explicit when a mutilated man reaches the partisan camp carrying a board that threatens further reprisals unless the partisans surrender their arms. His account attributes atrocities to punitive forces under General Vitsyn, including torture and killings. The threat is presented as retaliation for crimes attributed to a Red unit that had no connection with the Forest Brotherhood. The violence thus reproduces itself through accusation and punishment across group boundaries: the victims are threatened not for an act they committed, but as representatives of an opposing force.

Family Destruction and the Cycle’s Aftermath

The report from the dying man reaches Pamphil Palykh as more than news of violence: it gives shape to the fate he fears for his own family. His fear for them intensifies, and, in a state the narrative identifies as insanity, he kills his wife and three children to forestall the suffering he imagines awaiting them and to end his own anguish. The same razor-sharp ax he had used to carve toys for the children becomes the instrument of their deaths. That he does not kill himself immediately afterward leaves him roaming the camp in a condition of profound distress while Liberius, the doctor, and the army soviet debate what to do with him. The episode brings the war’s public machinery of threat and reprisal into the family, where protection itself has been transformed into catastrophic violence.

The doctor later recalls the autumn’s shooting of the rebels and Pamphil’s killing of his family as parts of one seemingly unending, senseless sequence. Red and White atrocities rival one another, each outrage breeding another; the doctor’s recollection conveys the cumulative burden of witnessing rather than presenting the violence as a single isolated shock. The novel’s pattern is therefore not simply that war inflicts suffering, but that military coercion, political punishment, and retaliatory fear repeatedly turn people into targets or instruments. Even the institutions that claim to restore order—courts, commands, and armed organizations—operate within a cycle that leaves civilian life and family bonds increasingly exposed to violence.

Family Destruction and the Cycle’s Aftermath

The report from the dying man reaches Pamphil Palykh as more than news of violence: it gives shape to the fate he fears for his own family. His fear intensifies, and, in a state the narrative identifies as insanity, he kills his wife and three children to forestall the suffering he imagines awaiting them and to end his own anguish. The same razor-sharp ax he had used to carve toys for the children becomes the instrument of their deaths. That he does not kill himself immediately afterward leaves him roaming the camp in profound distress while Liberius, the doctor, and the army soviet debate what to do with him. The episode brings the war’s public machinery of threat and reprisal into the family, where the impulse to protect has been transformed into catastrophic violence.

The doctor later recalls the autumn’s shooting of the rebels and Pamphil’s killing of his family as parts of one seemingly unending, senseless sequence. Red and White atrocities rival one another, each outrage breeding another; the doctor’s recollection conveys the cumulative burden of witnessing rather than presenting violence as an isolated shock. The novel’s pattern is not simply that war inflicts suffering, but that military coercion, political punishment, and retaliatory fear repeatedly turn people into targets or instruments. Even institutions that claim to restore order—courts, commands, and armed organizations—operate within a cycle that leaves civilian life and family bonds increasingly exposed to violence.

Family Destruction and the Cycle’s Aftermath

Pamphil Palykh’s fear for his family intensifies after he hears a dying man describe reprisals and threats against the partisans. In a state the narrative identifies as insanity, Pamphil kills his wife and three children, believing that he is sparing them the suffering he imagines awaiting them and ending his own anguish. The same razor-sharp ax he had used to carve toys for the children becomes the instrument of their deaths. He does not kill himself immediately afterward; instead, he roams the camp in profound distress while Liberius, the doctor, and the army soviet debate what to do with him. The episode brings the war’s public machinery of threat and reprisal into family life, where the impulse to protect has been transformed into catastrophic violence.

The doctor later recalls the autumn’s shooting of the rebels and Pamphil’s killing of his family as parts of one seemingly unending, senseless sequence. Red and White atrocities rival one another, each outrage breeding another; his recollection conveys the cumulative burden of witnessing rather than presenting violence as an isolated shock. The novel’s pattern is not simply that war inflicts suffering, but that military coercion, political punishment, and retaliatory fear repeatedly turn people into targets or instruments. Even institutions that claim to restore order—courts, commands, and armed organizations—operate within a cycle that leaves civilian life and family bonds increasingly exposed to violence.