David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

‘Well, that’s old history now,’ Cumming maintained, a little heartlessly it seemed to Paul. ‘We have to look to the future. The point is, what are we going to do about your ignorance of the Legion?’

‘Does it matter?’ Browning asked. ‘After all, he knows Mikhail Rostov and all we need is a go-between, someone Rostov will trust.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Paul said. ‘Mikhail never liked me, actually. He was an arrogant little—’

‘We can’t trouble ourselves over family likes and dislikes,’ Cumming interrupted. ‘When the chips are down blood will out. My enemy’s enemy… eh? He will see that, I’m sure.’

Paul wasn’t sure he had caught Cumming’s meaning.

‘But he’s not , is he,’ he said. ‘I mean — tell me if I’m wrong — but our enemy is Germany, right? And Russia isn’t their enemy any more. After signing that treaty…’

‘Brest Litovsk,’ Browning said.

‘Yes, Brest whatever. That means the Bolsheviks aren’t Germany’s enemy any more, doesn’t it? Or friend, come to that.’

‘Your point?’ asked Cumming.

‘That they’re no longer in the war…?’ Paul hazarded.

‘But that’s the whole point!’ Cumming roared back with sudden exasperation. His face became flushed and his monocle fell from his eye, swinging by its cord against his chest. ‘That they’re no longer in the war, that they’re not our friend. That they’re our enemy! They’re a bunch of damned…’

‘Revolutionaries,’ Browning supplied.

‘Exactly!’

‘Then who are our friends?’ Paul asked, now thoroughly confused.

‘The Legion ,’ Cumming bellowed, reaching for the paperknife again before stopping himself.

‘Oh, well,’ Paul replied with a shrug, ‘as I said, I don’t know anything about them. That would have been—’

‘The other Ross,’ Browning finished for him, sounding sick of the whole business.

‘And he’s dead,’ Cumming added. He gave Paul a look that suggested he might be wondering if the game were worth the candle. ‘Sit down Rostov,’ he sighed, ‘and I’ll try to explain it to you. In words of one syllable if that’s what it’ll take…’

It had taken a great deal more than words of one syllable.

The Nazdar companies were made up of exiles, POWs taken from the Austro-Hungarian armies, and deserters who had gone over to the Allies. Czechs and Slovaks from Moravia and Bohemia, they supported Tomáš Masaryk and the Czech National Council who wanted to create an independent nation — Czechoslovakia — from their Austrian-dominated homeland. The other Paul Ross, a speaker of Czech, had been seconded into a liaising role with the companies formed in France under French leadership.

Paul had never suspected this linguistic facility in a man he had never regarded as anything more than a nuisance. As far as Paul was concerned, the other one was just the man who always got Paul’s correspondence, who, irritatingly, would cancel appointments he had made, who one evening had even managed to take his girl out to dinner at a restaurant he had booked. This sort of thing had seemed never to happen in reverse; all Paul had ever got from his namesake were bills from creditors, useless items delivered to him that he had not ordered; messages of congratulation over mentions in dispatches that Paul had not earned. He didn’t suppose for a minute that the other Ross had ever been dunned by the Club Secretary for his bills…

But the man was dead now and Paul supposed he ought to show a little compassion. At least he had had the decency to keep the stomach wound that had killed him to himself. But then, he couldn’t help thinking, it was the other Ross’s fault that he was having to sit there listening to Cumming outline the sort of dubious operation that might just get him killed in the end anyway…

And Cumming was still chuntering on across the desk. Paul supposed he ought to make a conscious effort to pay attention. He understood that the Nazdar companies consisted mainly of Czechs, which was where the other Paul Ross had been of use, but apparently there were also Slovaks and Poles in it, too, which made him wonder if Ross hadn’t been some multi-lingual prodigy… That would leave Paul’s meagre facility with only Russian looking a poor effort.

‘The Russians,’ Cumming ventured…

‘The Russians…’ Paul echoed absently.

‘Are you listening, Rostov?’

‘Yes, sir. Of course.’

Cumming’s snout twitched. ‘The Russians,’ he said again, ‘took thousands of prisoners on the eastern front. And that’s not counting those who considered themselves to be Czech or Slovak already living inside Russian borders when the war started. It was the Czech National Council and the French who suggested the Russians recruit a corps of their own. The tsar wouldn’t have a bar of it to begin with. Chary of opening a Pandora’s Box — encourage his subservient nationalities into expecting some sort of self-determination, I daresay.’

That didn’t surprise Paul at all. He had spent too many interminable evenings before the war playing the young host to his mother’s eclectic gatherings, listening to their diatribes against the oppression under which the Poles and the Letts, the Ukrainians and the God knows who were suffering under the tsar to be unaware of how the Russians treated their subject nationalities. Neither had it gone unnoticed even to someone as bored by the whole business as he was, that the Russian prejudice against ethnic minorities extended even to Russian exiles, whatever their political leanings. No matter how radical or left-wing the Russians were, they never seemed willing to concede an inch of what they regarded as Russian soil.

Cumming was squinting at him through his monocle.

‘It wasn’t until the tsar abdicated and the Provisional Government was set up that they finally did much. They raised two divisions on the eastern front, Russian uniforms and arms, of course, and Russian officers as well. Made a good fist of things, too, by all accounts until Kerensky’s government collapsed. When the Bolsheviks took over and signed a separate peace, the Legion was left high and dry.’

He took his monocle out, polished it with a handkerchief, replaced it and regarded Paul solemnly.

‘I don’t have to tell you the consequence of forty German divisions being transferred to the western front. Aircraft and armour, all feeding the offensive. The Allies and the Czech National Council have lobbied to have the Legion transferred to France although that, of course, isn’t proving easy to arrange.’

He began rummaging among the papers on the desk. ‘Map? Where’s the damn map, Browning?’

Browning took up the rummaging and eventually came up with a roll of paper. They cleared a space and Browning opened it, pinning either end with weights.

The great width of the Russian Empire — upside down — lay spread before Paul. From Poland and the Baltic States in the west, to Kamkatchka and the Bering Sea in the east. Here and there he could see a smattering of towns and cities distributed within its vastness, dotted like lonely stars in an empty firmament and connected by only a sparse hatched line that denoted the Trans-Siberian Railway.

‘The plan had been,’ Cumming said, laying a fat finger on the line, ‘to get the Czech Legion to the western front by transporting them along here, the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok.’ He stabbed at the eastern port. ‘They were to be put on steamers, cross the Pacific to North America, and then shipped back to France.’ He glanced up. ‘A damned roundabout route in my opinion but it was a French show and there you are. It took until March to get the approval of the Bolsheviks. They weren’t keen on using the Baltic ports, of course. Too many armed men too close to Petersburg for their liking.’