Knight Without Armour (14 page)

A.J. himself took a rifle and a belt of cartridges, and soon after
midnight the detachment, in charge of an officer, set out along the gleaming
snow-bound road. The cold air soon cleared the drink-sodden heads of the men,
and they stepped out at a good pace in the direction of Pokroevensk. Ruffians
though most of them were, A.J. found them almost pathetically companionable
and full of amazement that he, a civilian commissar, should be accompanying
them. Surely, as a government official, it was his privilege—his
perquisite, as it were—to keep out of all serious danger?

He smiled and answered that he had come because he knew the district very
well—the roads, directions, and so on. It would not matter his
temporarily deserting the office-desk; there was Kashvin in charge. And at
this the men laughed. Though they loved to let themselves be stirred by
Kashvin’s eloquence, a moment such as this brought out their secret
contempt for the man whose tongue was so much mightier than his sword.

During the first hour the men sang songs—not spirited marching
songs, but dragging, rather melancholy refrains that seemed to be known by
all. One was ’Far away and over the marshes’—a weird
recitative about exile; another favourite was ‘A Soldier lays down his
Life.’ Into these slow, crooning tunes the men somehow contrived to
insert a strange ghost of rhythm, hardly noticeable to the listener, yet
sufficient to keep them in rough, plodding step. After the first few miles,
however, A.J. suggested that they had better march in silence, since voices
carried far in that still, cold atmosphere. The men obeyed him, not instantly
as from a military order, but with a gradual trail of voices from high melody
to the faintest murmur amongst themselves. The officer who should have had
the wit to give the order was staggering along, still very drunk. The men
said tranquilly that it was because he was not satisfied to get drunk like
other men; he dosed himself with a sort of yeast-paste which produced more
permanent effects.

The remaining events of that night might serve as a model for much that
was happening and that was yet to happen throughout the vast territory
between the Pacific and the Vistula. All the typical ingredients were
present—confusion, rumour, inconsequence, surprise. To begin with, at
Pokroevensk, which was reached about three in the morning, the officer in
charge suddenly collapsed and died. A.J. telephoned the news to Khalinsk and
gathered that the town was in the wildest panic; rumours of an overwhelming
White advance along the line of the Trans-Siberian were being received, and
the garrison was already preparing to evacuate the town. This seemed to A.J.
the sheerest absurdity as well as cowardice, but he could not argue the
matter over the wire with a person who, from the sound of his voice, was
still half-drunk. He determined, if the soldiers were willing (for of course
he had no real authority over them), to march on to the railway and tear up a
few lengths of line—the usual and most effective way of delaying an
advance. The men agreed to this plan, and were just about to leave
Pokroevensk, when a mortifying discovery was made. The ammunition that they
carried would not fit the rifles, the former being of French pattern, while
the latter were Japanese. Similar mistakes, the men said, had often been made
during the war against the Germans. It meant, of course, that the detachment
was practically unarmed, and A.J. could see nothing for it but to return to
Khalinsk as quickly as possible. But then something else happened. In the
grim light of dawn a band of White guards swept suddenly into the village
along the frozen road from the west; there were several hundred of them, all
fully armed and all in a mood to wreak terrible havoc upon a small village.
They were not, however, prepared for A.J. and his couple of hundred men.
Still less was A.J. prepared for them. He realised that a fight would be
hopeless, and rather than have all his followers shot to pieces he would
prefer to surrender; he had none of the more spectacular heroic virtues, and
conceived that a soldier’s aim should be to preserve his own life at
least as much as to destroy his enemy’s. As it chanced, however, the
White captain thought similarly, and was, moreover, a little quicker in
action. He surrendered to A.J. a few seconds before the latter could possibly
have reversed the compliment. It was amusing, in a way, to see four or five
hundred well-armed Whites surrendering to less than half as many Reds who
could not, if they had tried, have fired a shot. The White captain explained
that he was not really a very convinced White; he had always, in fact,
inclined to be a little pink. Some of the White soldiers raised cheers for
the Soviets. A.J. nodded gravely; the procedure was very familiar.

More important than the White soldiers was a party of civilians whom they
had been escorting. These were various personages, more or less illustrious,
who had escaped from European Russia and were hoping to cross Siberia and
reach America. They had travelled disguised as far as Tarkarovsk and had
there given themselves into the hands of a White detachment which, in return
for an enormous bribe, had undertaken to get them through to Omsk.

A.J. was in no doubt as to his proper course of action. Such a
distinguished party must be conveyed to Khalinsk and held as hostages. He
arranged this promptly, after arming his men with the rifles taken from the
White soldiers. Khalinsk was reached by noon, and by that time the atmosphere
was completely changed; the Whites had everywhere been defeated, and Red
reinforcements were already arriving from Ekaterinburg. A.J.’s
prisoners were examined and locked away in the town jail, with the exception
of most of the soldiers, who were permitted to join the Red army. In the
reaction that followed the excitements of the whole episode A.J. felt a
certain bewildered helplessness; all was such confusion, incoherence,
chaos—a game played in the dark, with Fate as a blind umpire. The
chapter of accidents found itself interpreted as a miracle of intrepid
organisation, with A.J. as the hero of the hour. Even Kashvin congratulated
him. “I would have accompanied you myself,” he explained,
“but as Commissar, it would have been improper for me to leave the
town. Now tell me, Andreyeff, do you think it would be better to ask for
Japanese ammunition to fit he rifles or for French rifles to fit the
ammunition?” He then showed A.J. a few reports he had drafted and which
were to be telegraphed away immediately. They were all circumstantially
detailed accounts of atrocities committed by White guards—women raped,
babies speared on the ends of bayonets, wounded men tortured to death, and so
on. Kashvin seemed extremely proud of the collection. “But
surely,” A.J. said, “you can’t have received proof of all
this in so short a time?” Kashvin replied cheerfully: “Oh
no—they are my own invention entirely; don’t you think they read
very well? After all, since we have no rifles and ammunition for the present,
we must do what we can with moral weapons.”

And, as it further chanced, the Whites
had
committed atrocities,
though less ingeniously than Kashvin had imagined. The Reds, too, were not
without a natural lust for vengeance. Hundreds of prosperous local
inhabitants were thrown into prisons on charges of having been in sympathy
with the White insurrectionists; wholesale raids and arrests were made, and
the Khalinsk prison was soon quite full. Meanwhile in the town itself all
semblance of civilian authority vanished. A strongly Red local Soviet was
appointed by the soldiers; Kashvin, despite prodigies of oratory and private
manoeuvre, was deposed from office and a Jewish agitator named Baumberg took
his place. A.J. was allowed to remain as assistant-commissar because he was
personally popular and because nobody else either wanted or was capable of
performing his various jobs. These jobs now vastly increased, especially as
food grew less plentiful and disease broke out in the overcrowded prison and
barracks. Baumberg was a loud-voiced, heavy-featured Pole whose ferocity in
public was only rivalled by an uncanny mildness in private life. At the age
of twenty he had been accused (falsely, he said) of killing a gendarme; he
had thenceforward spent twenty years in a military fortress and twenty more
in exile at Missen, in the desolate tundra region of North Russia. Now, at
sixty, he was being given his opportunity for revenge, and he was having no
mercy. His ruthlessness gratified the soldiers, and his speeches, sincerer if
no more extreme than those of Kashvin, were constant incitements to violence.
Yet he was a pleasant person compared with the military commandant, an
ex-railwayman named Vronstein. Vronstein was a psycho-pathological curiosity;
he, too, had been long in exile, and its results had been an astounding
assortment of perversions. Even his sadism was perverted; when prisoners were
punished or shot he would never watch the scene himself, but would insist
that a full and detailed report, complete with every horror, was submitted to
him in writing. Over such reports he would savagely and secretly gloat for
hours. Baumberg openly despised him, but there was a sinister power about the
fellow which gave him considerable hold over the soldiers.

Among the commissary duties was that of visiting the prison and prison
hospital, which were now under the control of the local Soviet. Both were
small and crammed with White prisoners, most of whom were sullenly resigned
to whatever fate might be in store for them. A few were defiant, exulting in
the still-expected breakdown of the Revolution. Almost every day fresh
arrivals were brought in by Red guards, and—as it were, to make room
for them—others were removed by Baumberg’s orders, taken to the
military camp, and shot. Baumberg never explained on what system he selected
his victims; perhaps, indeed, he had no system at all. His ferocity was
coldly impersonal; when he had done his day’s duty, including perhaps
the ordering of half a dozen shootings for the morrow, he would go home to
his daughter, who kept house for him, and play noisy capering games with his
fatherless grand-children.

The White prisoners included a score or more women, who were lodged
separately in a large overcrowded room. This was a thoroughly unsatisfactory
arrangement, since the room was badly needed as a supplementary hospital ward
for the male prisoners, many of whom were sick and wounded. Baumberg, though
he would have scorned any idea of sex-distinction, did not in fact have any
of the women shot, and was willing enough to allow the majority of them to be
transferred to Omsk, where the prison was larger. This only stipulated
exceptions were the two most distinguished captives, whom he wished to keep
at Khalinsk, and who, after the departure of the rest, were transferred to
separate cells. Both had been captured by A.J.’s men in the affair at
Pokroevensk. The Countess Vandaroff was one, and A.J., who had the job of
visiting her from time to time, soon recommended her transference to
hospital, since she was clearly going out of her mind. The other woman
prisoner was the Countess Marie Alexandra Adraxine. She was of a different
type; calm, exquisitely dignified, she accepted favours and humiliations
alike with slightly mocking nonchalance. When A.J. first visited her, she
said: “Ah, Commissar, we have met before, I think? That morning at
Pokroevensk—I dare say you remember?”

He said: “I have come to ask if you have any particular
complaints—is your food satisfactory, and so on?”

“Oh, fairly so, in the circumstances. My chief wish is that there
were fewer bugs in my mattress.”

“I will try to see that you have a fresh one, though of course I
cannot promise that it will be perfectly clean.”

“Oh, I’m not fastidious—don’t think that.”
She went to the narrow mattress by the wall of the cell and gave it a blow
with her clenched fist. After a second or so a slowly spurting-red cascade
issued from every rent and seam. “You see?” she said.
“It’s the trivial things that really bother one most, isn’t
it?”

The second time he paid her cell an official visit she thanked him for
having replaced the mattress by a comparatively unverminous one. Then she
said: “Have you any idea what is going to happen to me,
Commissar?”

He shook his head. “It is altogether a matter for others to
decide.”

“You think I shall be shot?”

“No women have been shot as yet.”

“Nevertheless, it is possible?”

“Oh, perfectly.”

“Would you approve?”

“I should not be asked either to approve or to
disapprove.”

She seemed amused by his attitude. After that he did not again visit her
alone, for he did not care to be asked questions which he could not
answer.

As spring advanced it could be foreseen that events in the district were
hastening to a further crisis. Along the whole length of the Trans-Siberian
the Czecho-Slovak prisoners-of-war, whom the Petrograd government had
promised a safe journey to Vladivostok, had seized trains and station depots.
This comparatively small body of men, stretched out in tenuous formation for
four thousand miles, was practically in possession of Siberia, and there was
talk that the Allies, instead of letting them proceed across the Pacific,
intended to use them to break the Soviets and re-form the eastern front
against Germany. Simultaneously the forces of counter-revolution were again
massing for an attack. In April the Reds began to send important political
prisoners away from the endangered districts; the ex-Emperor was removed from
Tobolsk for an unknown destination. From Khalinsk there would doubtless have
been a big exodus but for a dispute between the district commissars of
Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg as to who held authority over the town. Baumberg
favoured Ekaterinburg; Vronstein preferred Siberian rule. A hot quarrel arose
between the two officials, broken only by intermittent shootings that both
could agree upon.