David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

The French still kept up a pretence of involvement, maintaining the Legion remained part of their Foreign Legion. In Vladivostok Janin continued to issue orders that no one took any notice of any more.

With the fall of Chelyabinsk, the Legion lost its headquarters. Gajda had been dismissed following the loss of Perm and quit Siberia for its eastern port of Vladivostok. Syrový’s second-in-command, General Diterikhs, took command of Kolchak’s forces. Voitzekhovsky too — a Russian like Diterikhs — had left the Legion to join the White forces. But none of the changes did much to stem the tide. When Diterikhs told Kolchak he could not hold Omsk once the Irtúish froze, he went the way of Gajda. Kappel still fought on with those few troops who had remained loyal to him, as did Deniken, Wrangel¬ and Yudenich to the north of the Caucasus and in the Baltic, but Paul knew the sun was setting on the Russia he had once known.

Had he ever had an inkling of what it was going to be like he would have refused Cumming outright. He had seen some awful things — atrocities far worse than the careless slaughter he had witnessed on the western front. There had seemed to be little malice in that, either perpetrated by those carrying the rifles or by those who directed them. Troops, after all, were just pieces upon a board to be moved backwards and forwards as circumstance allowed; if there had been a certain callous disregard for their lives, it was a detached disregard. Here he had seen more vindictive cruelty than he thought it possible to imagine. Two years of civil war had stripped any pretence of humanity from the participants. Men, women, children… all were slaughtered with an almost bestial abandon. As if not content with mere killing, the dead bodies were often as not subjected to the most repulsive acts of mutilation. And if the bodies weren’t dead… then so much the better.

He now found it difficult to believe he had been shocked by the arbitrary execution of a prisoner when on patrol with his armoured train¬ a year earlier. Compared to what he had witnessed since, Lieutenant Capek, the Czech who had led the patrol, had been a soft-hearted humanitarian.

If the sun was setting on the old Russia then he supposed the dawn had almost arrived upon the new. It was undoubtedly going to be a Red dawn, although perhaps not the one for which Corporal Jacobs had once hoped. Tsarist Russia may have been a despotic land with no more than a thin veneer of civilisation laid over its barbarous carcass, but Paul was certain that the Russia of the Bolsheviks would not even shelter beneath that masquerade. They would strip away the veneer and stretch the carcass on the rack of their ideology, brooking no compromise, allowing no deviation.

The dawn might be red but it would be coloured by blood. More of a dusk than a dawn.

The locomotives were getting up steam. Agitated by the preparations to leave, the crowd had started milling in front of the soldiers again like nervous sheep looking for a gap in a fence. A man came up to Paul and pulled a piece of paper from his coat, waving it under Paul’s nose.

‘It is a pass to join the train. I have authorisation!’

Paul looked at the grubby pass and saw a dubious-looking stamp and a signature scrawled in an illegible hand. The man had probably bought it from some charlatan posing as a member of Kolchak’s staff. No matter the crisis, there was always time before abandoning the city for one final dishonest act, time to part one last desperate man from what little he had left. It was like simony, the medieval church’s corrupt practise of selling indulgences to ease a penitent soul into heaven, Paul reflected. Heaven in this case being anywhere except Omsk.

But it wasn’t Paul’s business and there was nothing he could do for the man. He ground the butt of his cigarette into the snow and turned away.

For some reason the phrase ‘penitent soul’ brought Valentine to mind. He didn’t know why. One could hardly describe the shameless way Valentine had admitted to the pitchblende swindle as a means of getting Paul into Russia as ‘penitent’. But that all seemed so long ago now, in another life. It didn’t worry Paul that he hadn’t tried to find the consulate. Valentine wouldn’t have been there and nor would it be on Paul’s conscience because he didn’t try. Browning’s injunction ‘to make your own way back,’ popped into his head and Paul pictured Valentine already sitting in some London club enjoying a whisky-soda, giving Paul and his predicament no more thought than how he was going to pay the bill. Yet Paul couldn’t begrudge Valentine if he had got out. Good luck to him. There was no point in feeling bitter. It was probable that Valentine had got involved in Russia at Cumming’s behest just as Paul had, and like him could always have said no. Only Valentine wouldn’t have said no, of course. Keen was the word for Valentine. Paul thought it was even possible that Valentine might try to stay in Omsk after the Red Army moved in, adopt one of his outlandish guises and bury himself behind the Bolshevik lines as he had in Petersburg.

At the end of the platform Paul dropped onto the hard-packed ice, looking up into the carriage windows as he walked the length of the convoy. He was hoping to get a glimpse of Sofya, some assurance that if she hadn’t left already she was aboard one of these last trains. Most of the windows had steamed up, though, and the soldiers were stopping anyone getting too close.

Ahead, behind their ring of bayonets, he noticed a man standing on the steps of one of the carriages, looking back towards the platform as if for someone who was late. Dressed in a fine coat with a fur collar and fur hat, he seemed the epitome of a successful merchant, or a banker perhaps. Someone who had done well out of the opportunities Omsk had afforded as was now ready to leave. As Paul approached the carriage, he realised the man was looking in his direction, waving a hand. Paul glanced over his shoulder but no-one in the seething mass of bodies behind him appeared to be taking any notice of the merchant.

The man jumped off the carriage step onto the ice and pushed his way through the ring of soldiers, still waving.

‘Ross! Ross, old man. You’re here!’

Valentine grabbed Paul’s coat and dragged him into the magic circle behind the guards.

‘I heard you were on the Legion train. It’s a bit of a scrum, isn’t it? Kolchak’s on the train behind, of course, so they won’t let anyone near.’ He laid a hand on Paul’s shoulder. ‘How are you? You don’t know how good it is to see you.’

And Valentine did look genuinely pleased. More enthusiastic than Paul had ever seen him, in fact, with the possible exception of the zeal he had formerly exhibited for the mystical properties of pitchblende. He hadn’t even asked if Paul had been followed.

‘I imagined you’d be long gone by now,’ Paul said. ‘As it happens, I was only just thinking of you.’

‘Oh, you know me, old man. Had to stay to the bitter end.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I’ve been setting up a network before the Reds arrive. We’ll need information on their regime and conditions in Bolshevik held territory… who’s who, that sort of thing…’ He nodded earnestly. ‘As you know, it’s what C sets most store by.’

Paul wasn’t sure he had ever known what Cumming set most store by.

‘Getting the word out will be the tricky part. Decent couriers are as rare as hens’ teeth. Once out, of course, they’re chary about going back in.’

‘Naturally,’ said Paul.

‘I’d invite you into my carriage, old man,’ Valentine said casting a look back over his shoulder at the misted window behind him where an officer wearing a Staff Captain’s cap gazed vacantly down at them. ‘But the gold is on this train and it’s packed with the admiral’s guards. As you see, I’m having to share my compartment with some Stavka officers. A rum bunch they are too. Rum being the word. Or perhaps I should say vodka since the fellows are drunk most of the time.’