Ken Follett - Fall of Giants

He walked her to the door. “Can I see you tomorrow?” he said.

“When?”

“Early.”

She laughed. “You never pretend, Gus, do you? I love that about you.”

That was good. I love that about you was not the same as I love you but it was better than nothing. “Early it is,” he said.

“What shall we do?”

“It’s Sunday.” He said the first thing that came into his head. “We could go to church.”

“All right.”

“Let me take you to Notre Dame.”

“Are you Catholic?” she said in surprise.

“No, Episcopalian, if anything. You?”

“The same.”

“It’s all right, we can sit at the back. I’ll find out what time mass is and phone your hotel.”

She held out her hand and they shook like friends. “Thank you for a lovely evening,” she said formally.

“It was such a pleasure. Good night.”

“Good night,” she said, and she turned away and disappeared into the hotel lobby.

When the snow melted, and the iron-hard Russian earth turned to rich wet mud, the White armies made a mighty effort to rid their country of the curse of Bolshevism. Admiral Kolchak’s force of one hundred thousand, patchily supplied with British uniforms and guns, came storming out of Siberia and attacked the Reds over a front that stretched seven hundred miles from north to south.

Fitz followed a few miles behind the Whites. He was leading the Aberowen Pals, plus some Canadians and a few interpreters. His job was to stiffen Kolchak by supervising communications, intelligence, and supply.

Fitz had high hopes. There might be difficulties, but it was unimaginable that Lenin and Trotsky would be allowed to steal Russia.

At the beginning of March he was in the city of Ufa on the European side of the Ural Mountains, reading a batch of week-old British newspapers. The news from London was mixed. Fitz was delighted that Lloyd George had appointed Winston Churchill as secretary for war. Of all the leading politicians, Winston was the most vigorous supporter of intervention in Russia. But some of the papers took the opposite side. Fitz was not surprised by the Daily Herald and the New Statesman, which in his view were more or less Bolshevik publications anyway. But even the Conservative Daily Express had a headline reading WITHDRAW FROM RUSSIA.

Unfortunately, they also had accurate details of what was going on. They even knew that the British had helped Kolchak with the coup that had abolished the directorate and made him supreme ruler. Where were they getting the information? He looked up from the paper. He was quartered in the city’s commercial college, and his aide-de-camp sat at the opposite desk. “Murray,” he said, “next time there’s a batch of mail from the men to be sent home, bring it to me first.”

This was irregular, and Murray looked dubious. “Sir?”

Fitz thought he had better explain. “I suspect information may be getting back from here. The censor must be asleep at the wheel.”

“Perhaps they think they can slacken off now that the war in Europe has ended.”

“No doubt. Anyway, I want to see whether the leak is in our section of the pipe.”

The back page of the paper had a photograph of the woman leading the “Hands Off Russia” campaign, and Fitz was startled to see that it was Ethel. She had been a housemaid at Tŷ Gwyn but now, the Express said, she was general secretary of the National Garment Workers Union.

He had slept with many women since then-most recently, in Omsk, a stunning Russian blonde, the bored mistress of a fat tsarist general who was too drunk and lazy to fuck her himself. But Ethel shone out in his memory. He wondered what her child was like. Fitz probably had half a dozen bastards around the world, but Ethel’s was the only one he knew of for sure.

And she was the one whipping up protest against intervention in Russia. Now Fitz knew where the information was coming from. Her damn brother was a sergeant in the Aberowen Pals. He had always been a troublemaker, and Fitz had no doubt he was briefing Ethel. Well, Fitz thought, I’ll catch him out, and then there will be hell to pay.

Over the next few weeks the Whites raced ahead, driving before them the surprised Reds, who had thought the Siberian government a spent force. If Kolchak’s armies could link up with their supporters in Archangel, in the north, and with Denikin’s Volunteer Army in the south, they would form a semicircular force, a curved eastern scimitar a thousand miles long that would sweep irresistibly to Moscow.

Then, at the end of April, the Reds counterattacked.

By then Fitz was in Buguruslan, a grimly impoverished town in forest country a hundred miles or so east of the Volga River. The few dilapidated stone churches and municipal buildings poked up over the roofs of low-built wooden houses like weeds in a rubbish dump. Fitz sat in a large room in the town hall with the intelligence unit, sifting reports of prisoner interrogations. He did not know anything was wrong until he looked out of the window and saw the ragged soldiers of Kolchak’s army streaming along the main road through the town in the wrong direction. He sent an American interpreter, Lev Peshkov, to question the retreating men.

Peshkov came back with a sorry story. The Reds had attacked in force from the south, striking the overstretched left flank of Kolchak ’s advancing army. To avoid his force being cut in two the local White commander, General Belov, had ordered them to retreat and regroup.

A few minutes later, a Red deserter was brought in for interrogation. He had been a colonel under the tsar. What he had to say dismayed Fitz. The Reds had been surprised by Kolchak’s offensive, he said, but they had quickly regrouped and resupplied. Trotsky had declared that the Red Army must go on the offensive in the east. “Trotsky thinks that if the Reds falter, the Allies will recognize Kolchak as supreme ruler; and once they have done that they will flood Siberia with men and supplies.”

That was exactly what Fitz was hoping for. In his heavily accented Russian he asked: “So what did Trotsky do?”

The reply came fast, and Fitz could not understand what was said until he heard Peshkov’s translation. “Trotsky drew on special levies of recruits from the Bolshevik Party and the trade unions. The response was amazing. Twenty-two provinces sent detachments. The Novgorod Provincial Committee mobilized half its members!”

Fitz tried to imagine Kolchak summoning such a response from his supporters. It would never happen.

He returned to his quarters to pack his kit. He was almost too slow: the Pals got out only just ahead of the Reds, and a handful of men were left behind. By that evening Kolchak’s Western Army was in full retreat and Fitz was on a train going back toward the Ural Mountains.

Two days later he was back in the commercial college at Ufa.

Over those two days, Fitz’s mood turned black. He felt bitter with rage. He had been at war for five years, and he could recognize the turn of the tide-he knew the signs. The Russian civil war was as good as over.

The Whites were just too weak. The revolutionaries were going to win. Nothing short of an Allied invasion could turn the tables-and that was not going to happen: Churchill was in enough trouble for the little he was doing. Billy Williams and Ethel were making sure the needed reinforcements would never be sent.

Murray brought him a sack of mail. “You asked to see the men’s letters home, sir,” he said, with a hint of disapproval in his tone.

Fitz ignored Murray’s scruples and opened the sack. He searched for a letter from Sergeant Williams. Someone, at least, could be punished for this catastrophe.