David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Paul stared at it in horror. The man tried again to say something, waving his arm weakly in the air. Paul dropped to his knees beside the blacked body and began shovelling snow onto the still smouldering clothes.

The man made another unintelligible noise before his arm fell to his side.

Paul put his face closer. ‘What? What are you saying?’

And even as he looked, something about the blackened skull appeared horribly familiar. The size of the skull? The bulk of the charred body? The shape of what was left of the ruined features…?

‘ Pavel …’ the voice rasped. Then, sucking air, it rattled for a second and fell silent.

Paul fell back into the snow staring at the corpse. It was Mikhail. It had been Mikhail. He scrambled onto his knees again and grabbed Mikhail’s shoulders. The coat was still hot and the charred material fell to pieces under his hands. He got to his feet and went to each blackened corpse in turn, desperately staring into each devastated face. The acrid odour of burnt cloth and aroma of cooked meat filled his nostrils. Some of the bodies still clung to a vestige of life; others were already growing cold in the freezing air. Medics shouldered him aside to reach the injured but he pushed his way back. He examined each body for a trace of what might have been Sofya. When there were no more bodies left to examine he returned to the blazing station and the wrecked train.

It had been left to the men of the Czech and Slovak Legion to start clearing the wrecked train, hauling what they could of the twisted metal off the track by hand and fixing rope and hawser to what they couldn’t, pulling it off with the locomotives. Nothing could be saved of the station. Nothing could be done for the dead.

Paul worked alongside his comrades. Sometime before dawn he found a coat that looked like the one Valentine had been wearing. The fur collar was singed and the expensive material smeared with blood. Of Valentine’s body, he found no trace. Along the track, the remnants of Kolchak’s convoy had finally been galvanised into action. Officers had begun gathering up what they could find of the scattered treasury, picking through the wreckage and piling gold bars into sacks, stuffing paper money into bags. They even chased the charred scraps of government bonds that were drifting across what was left of the station on the Siberian wind.

It was lost on no-one that the Red Army was no more than a day or two behind them. Kolchak’s Stavka looked on. Having recovered what they could of the Imperial Treasury, they offered no help to the men of the Legion nor were asked for any. There was no time to waste on wastrels. They had spent their war dining in Omsk’s fine restaurants, socialising and playing the officer. Their soft hands and softer bodies were as useless for clearing a line and relaying a damaged track as they had been at waging the admiral’s war.

By dawn enough of the tangled debris had been cleared to allow the trains to pass. Paul, filthy and dog-tired from working all night, trudged back to his boxcar. From the wreck of two trains, a snaking giant of twenty-nine coaches had been formed to carry Kolchak and his guards, his staff and his treasure to Irkutsk. Ahead were trains carrying his ministers and officials and the loot from Omsk. Behind was a Legion broněviky , scattered remnants of his army, detachments of Poles, Ukrainians and Serbs, and a Bolshevik Russia.

For his part, Paul was sick of it. He would do what he could to defend himself and his comrades as they retreated east but he wouldn’t lift a finger for those who had only wanted to help themselves. There was nothing left in Russia for him now and the sooner he left the better.

Along the track he passed a line of dead and injured where they lay in the snow. Sheets had been found to wrap the most horrific; the rest having to make their bed on the hard ice. There was nothing to be done for the worst of the injured. The Czech’s rudimentary infirmary couldn’t cope and what useful medicines had been in Omsk were said to have disappeared, sold by profiteers on the black market. The dying would have to be abandoned, either to perish of their wounds or freeze to death in the snow. Some of the women from the trains were doing what they could, cleaning them up and trying to soothe burned flesh with whatever salve they could find. One, a kneeling girl as black and dishevelled as those she tended, glanced briefly at Paul as he approached. Her once fine clothes were now little more than ruined rags. Her grimy face was smeared with blood. She turned back to the injured man in front of her for a second then looked up again. She stood. She stared and hesitantly started towards him. A step… two… then she broke into a run, tears streaking through the dirt on her face.

He had been sitting in the café for two hours nursing a newspaper. According to the chalk board behind the counter he had also been drinking coffee. The muddy liquid had tasted bad hot; now, as cold as the rest of the café, it tasted infinitely worse. He grimaced as he finished his third cup, pushed it aside and glanced out the window.

The dull afternoon light, brightened by a fresh snowfall, was turning to dusk. Condensed steam, tobacco smoke and a grimy film on the glass combined to obscure the view but he could see the block of flats across the road well enough. Having watched the building, those around it and the few vehicles parked along the road, he was satisfied no one else was watching the entrance to the flats. And as equally sure no one was watching him watching the entrance. Several people had entered the block while he’d sat there and more had left, but not the man he had come to see. There was no hurry. He picked up the newspaper again and read the headline. Below it a column of smudged print described how Jan Masaryk — the son of Thomas Masaryk whose letter Paul had carried across a continent — had been found dead the previous day in the courtyard beneath his bathroom window.

There was a sense of having come full circle. But that was mere illusion, the consequence of an orderly mind trying to tidy away an untidy situation. In reality it was less full circle than it was full stop. An ending. After all these years.

He had told himself there was no hurry only because it was now too late to hurry. He was doing what should have been done at least a year, probably two, earlier. After all, it hadn’t been difficult to see which way the wind was blowing.

The phrase reminded him of Ward. He recalled the politician turned soldier had used it once in Omsk. What was that, thirty years before? The colonel of the hernia battalion was long dead now, a bad heart having taken him off some years before the war. Paul had visited him when he had finally got back to England and they had met at the House of Commons. By that time Ward had been returned as a Liberal, the things he’d witnessed in Russia persuading him to break all ties with Labour and socialism.

The meeting had proved to be a pleasant reunion. Ward had written a book about his experiences with the Middlesex Regiment shortly after he had returned. With The Die - Hards in Siberia , he had called it. He had deliberately not mentioned Paul in the book, he had told him, in deference to his SIS connection. He hoped Paul didn’t mind. Paul didn’t mind, though it had been odd reading about events at which he had been present without being acknowledged. It was as if his had been a non-corporeal presence, something intangible. Ghostly. Well, there had been plenty of those left behind.

Ward asked what had happened after Paul had left Omsk. Ward’s curiosity was natural enough but Paul had not gone into detail. Living through it had been hard enough; talking about it would have been an unnecessary elaboration.