David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Kolchak, with his staff and Paul in tow, walked among Pepelayev’s men then closeted himself with the young general in his private carriage. Paul waited on the platform looking up casually at the windows and glimpsing, to his great surprise, Radola Gajda.

Paul stared and offered a salute as the fleshy-faced young Slovak glanced down at him. Gajda regarded Paul impassively for a second, nodded, then turned back to Kolchak and Pepelayev.

Late in the evening, after dining in the train’s mess wagon and killing time before having to squeeze himself back into his cot beside the bandsmen, Paul took a stroll through the train. Straying into Ward’s carriage, he saw the colonel sitting by himself.

Paul apologised for the intrusion and began backing out. Ward called him back.

‘Come in lad. Coffee?’ He stood up and poured a cup from a silver pot standing on a sideboard. ‘Sit yourself down. You’ll not find me a stickler for rank.’

Paul took the cup and sank into a sofa, thinking it would make a more comfortable bed than his cot.

‘We were supposed to visit General Verbitzky on the right flank,’ Ward said, topping up his own cup and taking the seat opposite. ‘Having seen the condition of Pepelayev’s men, though, the admiral has decided he has to go to Chelyabinsk and consult with Generals Diterikhs and Syrový.’

‘They were certainly in a sorry state,’ Paul agreed. ‘I don’t understand why they don’t have proper clothing and arms. London told me that plenty of supplies had been landed at Vladivostok. Murmansk, too, although I can see there’s no way of getting—’

‘And most of it still there,’ Ward interrupted. ‘A lot has been shipped to Omsk from Vladivostok, to be sure, but that seems to be as far as it’s got.’

‘Why hasn’t the government there sent it on to the front?’

Ward ran his fingers across the stubble of his moustache.

‘Dissension, lad. Too many factions at each others’ throats instead of at the Bolshies’ throats.’ He leaned towards him. ‘Did you know Gajda was on the train?’

‘I thought I saw him in the carriage when the admiral brought General Pepelayev back with him.’

‘General Pepelayev’s older brother, Viktor, is a member of the Omsk government.’

‘Oh?’

‘Then there’s Count Galitzin.’

‘Sir?’

‘And now instead of seeing Verbitzky, we’re to make for Chelyabinsk and Diterikhs and Syrový.’ Ward drank his coffee down. ‘Something’s in the wind, lad, mark my words.’

‘How do you mean, sir?’

Ward stood abruptly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘time for bed. We’ll be in Chelyabinsk in the morning.’

Paul, oddly disconcerted, left Ward staring out the window at a passing Russia he could not possibly see. All that was visible in the blackened glass was a reflection of Ward himself, the carriage lamps and, perhaps, his own thoughts.

Dust in summer; mud in spring and autumn; in winter, a frozen wilderness.

It was what he had been told to expect of Omsk.

Standing at the station, it wasn’t difficult to see why. Perched at the edge of the steppe on the right bank of the River Irtúish, just above its confluence with the Om, Omsk lay in the middle of nowhere.

The government had chosen the city as its capital for its strategic position. Here all the various rail lines criss-crossing the Urals met, narrowing down to the single up and down tracks that were the Trans-Siberian. But the government didn’t control the railway line; the Legion did.

A branch line ran the two miles north from the main railway station into the centre of Omsk, past a settlement of railway workshops that had grown up around it. The terminus in the town had been extended for the use of rolling stock as accommodation. With the influx of refugees the shortage of rooms was so acute that even the members of the Directory had had to be housed in boxcars.

Ward was already arranging for his own train to be moved into the town as part of his cantonment and, because they were shunting locomotives to make room, at the moment no trains were running along the branch line.

A north wind was harrying a fine spindrift of snow across the plain in ghostly waves. Paul waited at the station for a droshky but, finding none to be had and impatient to get into town, decided to walk.

Past the railway sheds, picking his way along the road beside the line — in reality no more than a series of frozen corrugations in the mud — Paul could see a collection of Tartar yurts on the plain, half buried under drifts of snow. Shadowing the line were the same sort of wooden huts he had seen throughout the Urals; squat, toad-like homes in varying states of repair, with outhouses and lean-tos attached like attenuated limbs, all squashed flat under the snow covering their roofs. Closer to town the wooden huts became grander log houses, interspersed now by buildings of brick and stone. Paul had been told that Omsk boasted many fine buildings — churches and mosques and a barracks; in the centre, by all accounts, there was a summer casino and a cadet school, a museum and theatre… Yet the civic fathers hadn’t found it necessary to pave its streets.

Ward’s train had arrived the previous evening from Petropávlovsk. He had seen nothing of the place, a centre for the trade in cattle and hides apparently, but Paul had been forced to kick his heels at the railway station for several hours while Kolchak held one of his interminable meetings. They had finally reached Omsk too late to look for alternative accommodation and he had been obliged to spend another night in the company of the Middlesex bandsmen. He slept badly and got up early, leaving Ward and his staff to arrange for their cantonment. He had been tempted to stay and assist and find himself a more comfortable berth once the Middlesex headquarters had been established — particularly since he had been reliably informed that rooms in Omsk would be difficult to find — but he had somewhere to go. A wave of displaced persons had washed along the railway line in the preceding weeks and had broken like a dishevelled tide on Omsk. Walking along the line he passed its outer ripples, ragged people with nowhere to go, trudging through the snow with what they could carry on their backs. He had an address, though, acquired from an officer on Kolchak’s staff. The Rossiya Hotel on Lyúbinski Prospékt. It was where Mikhail was staying. Paul would not find a room there, the officer had assured him, but he was hopeful of finding Sofya.

The thought of seeing her again should have lightened his mood. He had not seen her since Kazan in early September and had been all over the Urals since. Yet even the prospect of seeing Sofya again was not quite sufficient to dispel the feeling that he had wasted the intervening months. He had made himself as useful as he could, but was still unable to escape the belief that he had been of no use whatsoever. Even accepting the fact that his mission had been accomplished did not quell the sense of his own inadequacy. The Legion had formed an eastern front (crumbling though it may be) and Mikhail and his monarchist allies had been acquainted with Admiral Kolchak (albeit before Paul had even got to Russia); and the Russian gold — as desired — had passed from the Legion’s control to that of a legitimate Russian government, which he supposed the Directory to be. If there was a blot on this otherwise perfect record, it had been his inability to liaise between Poole in Archangel (or wherever the man was) and the Legion and Kolchak. And even this, he allowed, was due in main to the Allies’ lethargic preference for digging themselves into winter quarters in their frozen port instead of pressing south as had been envisaged. After all, what could he have done about that? If Poole couldn’t move south to the proposed rendezvous with all the resources at his disposal, how was Paul to be expected to move the mountain that was anti-Bolshevik Russia towards them? Yet despite this record of success — only partially qualified — he still felt the outcome, like the appearance of Omsk, to be infinitely depressing.