David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

That, though, was water under the bridge. Without evidence, there was probably nothing he could do about it even if he ever got back to England.

‘When are you leaving?’ Steveni asked.

‘Tomorrow. There’s a Legion supply train leaving for Ekaterinburg in the morning. I’ve arranged to be on it. I’m to take a communication from Colonel Ward to the consul there, Mr Preston, and then a note to Syrový.’ He paused. ‘The thing is, I’ve not had the opportunity to tell Valentine.’

‘Valentine?’

‘Perhaps you know him as Hart,’ Paul said.

‘I’ll see he knows,’ said Steveni briskly. ‘Any message?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘For anyone else, perhaps?’ Steveni was smiling again.

‘Do you know her?’

‘We’ve met socially.’

‘Then tell her I’ve gone, will you? If you meet socially again, that is. It is what she wanted, after all.’

‘And that’s all?’

Paul was grateful for the dark again.

‘Tell her I’ll find her. Somehow.’

He hadn’t seen Steveni again. Had not seen any of them except for Ward the following morning as he had said his goodbyes. The bluff soldier-cum-politician had returned his salute and offered his hand.

‘Good luck to you, lad. There’s work to be done here in Russia if the country’s to regain her rightful place in the world. And if we all play our part then it’ll be a more equitable Russia and a better future for everyone. You’ll be useful, Ross, I know.’

Ward’s fine sentiment had all been very well at the time. But Paul had long since disabused himself of any notion that he had a useful part to play in Russia. He had, indeed, long since resolved to quit the country at the first opportunity: make your own way back , as Browning had told him in Cumming’s office all those months ago.

The trouble with resolutions, though, was that they could not always be put into effect. The opportunity to leave had never arisen.

He had presented his note from Ward to Syrový in Ekaterinburg. After reading the note with his one good eye, Syrový had granted Paul an interview on the strength of Paul’s being present in Omsk during the coup and privy to the subsequent meeting between Kolchak and Ward.

Ripples from the coup had already passed through Ekaterinburg. The day after Kolchak’s assumption of power in Omsk, White officers in the town had stormed the Palais Royale Hotel where the party leader, Chernov, and other SRs were based. A member of the Constituent Assembly had been killed and Chernov and other leading SRs taken prisoner. Only the timely arrival of a Czech unit saved them from summary execution. The Czechoslovak National Council intervened and ensured that all prisoners and any other endangered SRs were transferred to Ufa, where remnants of Komuch still resisted, rather than to Omsk. But it did little good. At the end of the month Kolchak issued ‘Order 56’, suppressing the remnants of Komuch and had any remaining members of the administration and other leading SRs arrested and transferred to Omsk. Chernov managed to escape but few others did.

It became clear that the Legion — beyond its rescue of Chernov at the Palais Royale Hotel — was not going to step in on behalf of the Social-Revolutionary Party. Gajda had promised Kolchak the Legion’s neutrality in the event of a coup and had delivered it. In its wake the promise left a seething atmosphere of resentment. The air in Syrový’s office had been thick with it.

Paul explained what he had seen and what he knew to have happened during the coup. Syrový and Diterikhs heard him out, although when he had requested permission to return to the Legion unit he had been serving with before Voitzekhovsky had brought him to Ekaterinburg, he could see they were not keen. Syrový’s face had remained as blank as his eye patch until Diterikhs, inclining his head towards Syrový, said a few words in an undertone that Paul could not catch. Perhaps it was his contacts in Omsk that swayed their decision, presupposing the day might possibly come when he might prove useful. They acceded to his request and Paul left feeling like a doubtfull asset squirreled away against future adverse conditions. Two days later the Czechoslovak National Council meeting in Chelyabinsk advised soldiers of the Legion not to co-operate with the new regime nor obey officers who supported Admiral Kolchak.

‘We should let the Reds have him and all the rest of his drunken rabble.’

Romanek, finally replying to Paul’s remark about someone having to draw the short straw, startled him back into the present.

He had assumed their conversation over. It was hard to disagree with Romanek’s sentiment, though, even if the Reds weren’t making much of an effort to reach Kolchak. With winter closing its iron fist on the country, they seemed to have concluded that there was little point in fighting for a town they could have for the asking in a day or two. Their army was still advancing, bringing their guns up over the ice of the Irtúish, but they were hardly moving any faster than the train Paul was travelling on. In truth, there was no hurry. Sooner or later not only Omsk but the rest of Siberia would be theirs for the taking.

‘We owe him nothing,’ Romanek continued to mumble.

Paul wasn’t arguing.

Having returned to the front, he found that Karel Romanek had been pleased to see him back even if few of the others were. It hadn’t been much over three weeks since he had left the train and, managing to reclaim his old bunk without too much difficulty, he found little had changed. But this, in the wake of the news filtering out of Omsk was deceptive.

To Paul’s surprise, news arrived that Krasilnikov and his fellow conspirators had been brought to trial.

‘Propaganda. For the Allies sake,’ Romanek cynically insisted. ‘If they’re found guilty they’ll get no more than a slap on the wrist.’

And he had been almost right. The trial proved to be a stage-managed affair and, despite confessing to having engineered the coup, Krasilnikov and the others were acquitted. The court accepted their defence that their coup had been staged to pre-empt an SR insurrection.

Karel merely spat on the floor and looked in askance at Paul.

The verdict seemed to give a signal to Kolchak’s Stavka , White officers regarding the decision as authority to take their revenge on those they saw as primarily to blame for the disintegration of Imperial Russia. Anyone with a connection to Kerensky and the former Provisional Government was murdered on the street. An insurrection in Omsk’s industrial suburb of Kulomzino was put down by Kolchak’s army, killing hundreds of workers and SRs. Then, in December, came the news that Cossacks had gone on a rampage in the city, burning houses, beating and killing anyone suspected of SR or Bolshevik sympathies.

For Paul the nadir had been reached when some SR prisoners, freed during the brief workers’ insurrection but who had returned to prison on its suppression upon guarantees of safety, were brought before a hastily arranged military court and shot. Their guards, reluctant to give them up, had shared their fate. Their bodies, in a phrase he remembered Valentine having used, were ‘transferred to the Republic of the Irtúish’.

But it was not only Paul who was sickened by the stream on news coming out of Omsk. The massacre brought about a sea change within the Legion. The soldiers’ committees, always in sympathy with the Social-Revolutionary Party, mutinied and, taking their National Council at their word, the Seventh Regiment and parts of the Fifth and Sixth, refused to serve at the front.

Paul didn’t doubt that their decision would merely confirm Kolchak in his view that the Legion was unreliable. Had the Supreme Ruler , as he now styled himself, had the strength, Paul was sure he would have attempted to suppress it; liquidate it, in that oft-used euphemism. But he lacked the strength and the admiral had to satisfy himself with ordering Czechs and Slovaks to assume the passive role of guarding the Trans-Siberian line.