The Dangerous Years (8 page)

It was the beginning of a hectic few days. Whenever he was off duty, Kelly found his way to Vera Brasov’s arms. Thinking about Charley, at first he felt guilty, but the feeling soon passed because Kimister seemed to be receiving all the letters that had previously come to him and he had to face the fact that their affair appeared, after a lifetime of taking Charley for granted, to have come to an end.

At a distance of two thousand miles he could hardly blame her and it wasn’t hard to put his guilt aside. He was aware that the news of what was happening between himself and Vera Brasov was passing round the fleet and he knew that Kimister would inevitably have passed it on to Charley. But in accepting foreign service, he felt he had done no more than any normal naval officer would do and that Charley probably expected too much from him. He suspected it was a shelving of responsibility to salve his own conscience, yet in his heart he also felt he’d been rejected and wasn’t entirely to blame.

Vera Brasov made no bones about her pleasure in him. She taught him to call her
‘Tsaritsa moyevo
serdsta’
– the queen of his heart – and in the mornings across the pillow greeted him in Russian.

‘Dobroye utro
, Kelly Georgeivitch! Oi,
anglichanie
, you are good in bed!’

She wasn’t as sentimental as she pretended, however, and though her love-making was expert, he found her several times watching him with a curious soullessness in her eyes. Despite her denial, he knew she
was
using him as an insurance against the future.

‘Make no mistake, Kelly Georgeivitch,’ she pointed out coolly, ‘these armies of ours are not as good as they seem. And at the moment, all is going well because we have broad rivers between us and the Bolsheviki. I don’t think anyone here has stopped to think what will happen when the winter comes and they freeze.
Then
, the ice will be thick enough to bear horses and wagons and guns, and the barriers they present will disappear overnight.’

Kelly’s new command was pulled by a ninety-ton monster of an engine, decorated in red and black and liberally sprinkled with flags. Its name,
Invincible
, was painted in Kyrillic characters along its side and there were more flags on the front and rear of the train and on the corners of every carriage. Living quarters were provided by a coupé for the officers and senior NCOs and two fitted-out cattle trucks called kerplushkas for the men. The rest of the train consisted of the usual armoured repair truck followed by a sandbagged flat car mounted with machine guns, behind which were trucks with a six-inch naval gun and four 12-pounders. Each piece of rolling stock had an iron flap over the buffers so that it was possible to pass from one to the other while the train was in motion.

‘Bit tricky in a heavy sea, sir,’ Rumbelo grinned.

The living quarters were luxurious, with potted plants, red velvet seats, and gold-framed paintings. As Kelly stared at the picture of a half-clad girl on a leopard skin, the door from the sleeping quarters opened and he was startled to see Kimister.

‘What the devil are you doing here?’ he demanded.

Kimister gestured. ‘New job,’ he said, ‘They’ve given me command of the train.’ He sounded uneasy and unhappy. ‘I’ve got Russian infantry, a Royal Artillery team, a gun’s crew from
Queen Elizabeth
, and another naval officer.’

Kelly grinned. ‘Try again, old son,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve got it wrong.
I’m
the other naval officer and you certainly haven’t got
me
.’

They had expected to move off quietly with nothing more than a send-off from Orrmont, but the Russian authorities had decided otherwise, and three batteries of newly trained artillery, which were also due to go to the front, had been drawn up alongside the train with a regiment of Cossacks, dramatic, fierce-looking men on small shaggy ponies, with long lovelocks of hair curled Cossack-fashion over their left ears. They had brought their horsetail regimental standards, and an altar had been erected alongside the railway line. As they waited, a priest in glittering robes and surrounded by acolytes advanced slowly towards them. As he lifted his hand, church bells started.

‘Good God,’ Kelly said to Galt. ‘I think they’re going to marry us!’

The solemnity of the service was intensified by huge crucifixes and a choir whose base voices in Gregorian chants competed with the wild pealing of the bells. The Te Deum finished, a Russian officer stepped forward with a silk banner which he handed to Kelly, and there were more muttered prayers, more choral acrobatics and enough holy water flung about to wash the train. As the priest vanished, the artillery clattered past followed by the Cossacks, singing as they went, the music conducted by the officer in front with his whip.

A pale young Russian Guards officer stepped forward.

‘Captain Takhatin,’ he introduced himself sombrely. ‘I am to be your liaison officer. I think perhaps this time they give me an easy job.’

‘Wasn’t the last one easy?’

The Russian’s face stiffened. ‘The last time,’ he said, ‘I am evacuated wounded. But perhaps I am lucky because a week later the others are all murdered.’

It set Kelly back on his heels. It was one of those unexpected anecdotes that always seemed to be turning up in Russia which completely prevented any reply or words of sympathy. They were so common and so terrible there was simply nothing that could be said.

Led by a light train, they set off north. It was sunset as they reached the main ranges of the Caucasus. Rocks, cliffs and pinnacles rose in front with pine forests in a smooth purple plain, and finally a river appeared, rushing from the slopes white with foam.

Kimister carried out his duties nervously so that Kelly wondered if he’d been detached from
Queen
Elizabeth
because someone wanted to get rid of him, but the artilleryman, Galt, was everywhere at once, enthusiastically checking rations, ammunition, spare parts and tools. Occasionally they passed other trains waiting in sidings, sometimes full of soldiers docile as sheep, sometimes full of passengers packed into incredibly filthy cattle cars with barely enough room to move. They were even on the roofs and buffers and packing the windows, their pale faces full of resignation. Takhatin watched them gloomily.

‘One month ago,’ he pointed out, ‘they go north. The war goes well and they wish to go home. Now they go south.’

Oh, charming, Kelly thought. Bloody charming! With his usual luck he had found himself in the middle of a lost campaign hundreds of miles from the sea.

After a while the train began to run across a bare treeless countryside as flat as a billiard table. Occasionally they saw groups of mounted men riding alongside the track, tall, well-built men in long grey coats with cartridge belts across their chests and high karakul caps. They seemed to be weighed down with weapons and occasionally one of them fired his rifle in the air in salutation.

They spent the night in a sidings at Ekaterinodar. There seemed a great deal of nervousness about the place but the military maps on the walls showing the White armies’ advances appeared to have nothing on them to cause concern, because the whole of the Northern Caucasus seemed to be in Denikin’s pocket, while General Wrangel had just liberated the Terek region, and Kolchak, the White leader in Siberia, was advancing towards the Volga in the hope of a link-up.

There were far more troops about in Ekaterinodar even than in Novorossiisk but no less confusion. The soldiers were patient and good-humoured but they seemed to be treated abominably by their officers.

Takhatin shrugged. ‘They constantly desert,’ he said.

The following morning, as they headed further north towards Tsaritsyn, the steppe seemed more lifeless and depressing than ever. At intervals they passed villages that broke the monotony of empty earth and sky. The houses were all square, mud-brown and thatched, and the entire population, with their cattle and horses, lined the track to watch them pass.

Tsaritsyn was only just beginning to recover from its long occupation by the Bolsheviks. It was said they had murdered thousands of people before it had been recaptured, and their bodies had been placed in the ravines on the outskirts. The information seemed to bother Kimister.

The shops were still empty and the churches desecrated. The population had a shocked look and there were starving children everywhere begging for food. Wrangel’s troops were further to the north heading for Saratov as part of Denikin’s great plan, but no one seemed to have much enthusiasm for it.

A British Mission officer met them apologetically. ‘We’re sending you on tomorrow,’ he said. ‘There’s a particularly awkward Bolshie bronevik comes down from Ryazanka and stands off just beyond the River Vilyuj and hammers everything that moves. I think we can knock him out now, though, because he’s only got four-inch guns and thanks to the Navy,
we’ve
got a six-incher. We’ve arranged for infantry to advance alongside you in carts and for cavalry to spread out to right and left to make sure the area’s clear. There’s a loop line up there that runs behind a low hill and I thought we might shove you in there to wait for them to arrive.’

‘What about our rear?’

‘We have a train to follow you up and watch the track at the junction. Can you man it?’

Only too well aware of Kimister’s nervousness, Kelly decided that the job was made for him.

Leading the procession was a light engine pulling a truck, followed by the main unit, consisting of the truck carrying the naval six-incher from
Queen Elizabeth
, the first armoured wagon, and a machine gun flat car, pushed by the big locomotive whose boiler in Kelly’s eyes appeared to be surprisingly badly protected. Two more armoured wagons were hitched on behind the engine and another open truck full of breakdown equipment brought up the rear. A cord had been strung from a bell in the driver’s cabin over the trucks and run through ringbolts.

‘To start, we pull the rope,’ Galt explained. ‘As on a tram. One ting and we stop. Two tings and off we go again.’

There were already alarms in Tsaritsyn as they set off. The Kuban Cossacks had not only failed to take Saratov but had been thrown back as far south as Kamyshin, which only a determined attack by Cossack cavalry had wrested from the Red Army. Despite Wrangel’s objections, his orders were to continue pressing towards Saratov.

‘There isn’t a chance,’ the British Mission officer said. ‘That bloody armoured train knocks out anything that goes up the line. I think you’d better get moving.’

Leaving the outskirts of the city, they picked up a string of country carts filled with infantry, which jolted and rattled across the steppe on each side of the train. Out in the distance horsemen in long looping lines rode along the crests of low hills. At a village called Sarovkina, as they halted outside the town to eat, barefooted girls harvesting sunflower seeds stopped work to watch them. Bearded men were working little patches of soil along the sandy ground round the village orchards but the burning wind had scorched the earth, putting huge cracks across the dried ruts that stretched across a rolling prairie empty of everything but the shrivelled tawny grass and the clumps of birch and alder. As the afternoon drew to a suffocating close, the girls vanished to the river where they proceeded to bathe mother-naked, to the great delight of the men on the train.

They spent the night at Sarovkina and left the following morning before daylight to pass through the front line, mere groups of badly-equipped men waiting in hollows, mostly without boots or a single machine gun. Their faces, under the covering of wind-blown dust, were blank and haggard and Kelly could see knees and elbows sticking through threadbare uniforms. Some were without shirts and wore only woollen vests, and one or two actually wore the spiked pickelhaubes the German army had left behind at the end of the war.

There was a strange fatalism in their eyes as the train steamed past and one of their officers called out that Wrangel was falling back again towards Tsaritsyn. Just ahead there was another line of men and they could hear rifle and occasional machine gun fire.

‘Armoured trains over on our left somewhere, too,’ Galt said. ‘Indulging in a long-range duel by the method of “chuck and catch it.” ‘

The Whites were holding a hill beyond the far end of the wooden bridge that carried the railway line across the River Vilyuj, and they were worried sick that the enemy train would appear and cut the bridge behind them. A few peasants were standing near the bridge, watching, apparently quite indifferent as to who won.

With the train stopped, they could hear the unmistakable sound of 18-pounders firing, and they walked over a rise in the ground to find a battery in action in a cornfield. It didn’t seem to be firing very hard and at that moment three of the guns were in difficulty, one with a hopelessly jammed cartridge which had been thrust into a breech still covered with sand, another with an overrun trigger and the third with such weak springs its crews had to push it by hand into its cradle after every round. The Russians were staring at the silent weapons, their officers wearing woebegone expressions.

Galt looked at Kelly. ‘Ever been on a gunnery course?’ he asked.

‘Whale Island.’

‘Well, with the assistance of that leading hand of yours, I think we ought to be able to fix this, don’t you?’

They took off their coats and got two of the guns going again almost at once, while the Russian soldiers looked on from behind in amazement at the sight of officers doing manual work.

Crossing the bridge, they left Kimister in the rear train to guard against the line being cut behind them. The infantry and cavalry, well mixed together, were crossing by a wooden footbridge alongside. Then the Russian battery they’d helped fired. Its first shell fell harmlessly into the Vilyuj by the far bank, flinging a geyser of black water upwards. The others fell on the bank. Over the steam from the engine it was impossible to hear the shell bursts, and the columns of smoke seemed to rise silently.