David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Had his mother stayed in Russia he supposed she would have at last found something in common with the rest of the family. Although holding radical views — or revolutionary views, as Uncle Ivan, had seen them — had not prevented her from living up to her position as a member of the ruling elite. All well and good while they had lived in Russia, but unfortunately once she had discovered this hitherto unsuspected taste for airs and graces, she had continued to live up to them even once they had returned to England. The fact that she could no longer afford grand houses and estates did not stop her from acting as though she could. After banishing her the Rostovs had at least had the good grace (or perhaps just deep enough pockets) to settle an allowance on her for living expenses, and another on Paul for his education. And it had also been his understanding that, despite their doubts concerning the marriage, there had been a lump sum of sorts settled on them as well, in respect of his father’s memory. Which was the least they could do in Paul’s opinion since, as soon as Sergei Nikolayevich had died, they had tied up his share of the Rostov fortune in the labyrinthine Russian legal system.

This had made little impact upon Paul at the time. As far as he was concerned, his father’s legacy was always something of a waterlogged conception, something he had never quite been able to isolate from the rest of the sunken fleet at Tsushima. Neither had he ever quite decided whether the gratuitous lump sum had been a blessing or a curse, encouraging as it had his mother’s extravagance while at the same time staving off insolvency. Now it had become academic. His mother’s capital had long since been exhausted and, having completed his education, Paul’s allowance had also dried up. What had also dried up, since the Bolshevik seizure of power, had been the income stream provided by the monthly allowance for his mother’s living expenses. That had abruptly ceased several months earlier and had been one of the reasons why he had thought a sound capital investment would be a good idea. The upshot of that, of course, was that the investment had been neither sound nor a capital idea and had disappeared, along with what savings he had, down the road with the departing Valentine.

He supposed it was always possible that the monthly allowance might be restored, although the bank had suggested this would be dependent upon a reversal of the recent events in Russia. So it was against this pecuniary — not to say mercenary — background that he couldn’t escape the irony of being recruited, in part, to persuade his cousin Mikhail that the Legion would support his efforts to reinstate the old order. In essence, reinstating the autocratic order for Mikhail could mean reinstating the money order for his mother.

The real irony though, and the one that bit a little deeper, was that, while for years he had been subjected to the influence of his mother’s political views and those of the exiles she had entertained, he had remained untouched by them. Yet, courtesy of a couple of days spent in a filthy shell-hole with an English-born radical, he had become unexpectedly interested in the upheaval in Russia, and not a little supportive of it. To be honest he had not been able to keep fully abreast of events. The news of the February Revolution, the fall of the tsar and of Kerensky’s Provisional Government, having arrived filtered through the few English newspapers available at the front. His mother’s letters at this time, although full of the news, had often arrived in a state — if they arrived at all — that left them unreadable. A fact that given Kell’s interest in his mother was no longer so mysterious. The subsequent Bolshevik take-over when it came had coincided with the Battle of Passchendaele and by then he had far too much on his mind to worry about what was happening in far away Russia.

Later, lying confused in hospital, he hadn’t been exactly sure whether it was Corporal Jacobs and the shell-hole that had engendered his Damascene moment, or whether some hereditary inheritance from his father had finally surfaced. A mutant strain of liberalism, passed down in a practical demonstration of Darwinism, perhaps. Two years in the trenches cheek by jowl with ordinary working men might have had something to do with it, he supposed, otherwise the seeds, from wherever they had come, would have found no fertile ground.

Whatever the influences, his sympathies — in retrospect never with tsarist autocracy — had evolved into being with the Russian working classes. This was hardly something he could admit to Cumming. In this context, had things been different, he would have had no sense of apprehension at the prospect of returning to Russia. Under normal circumstances, he couldn’t see that he had anything to fear from the Bolsheviks.

After all, Jacobs who had seemed to know about these things, had told him that they were all honourable men.

They had spent two nights and two days up to their chests in that vile water, plagued by the incessant rain, by rats, and the overpowering stench of the putrefying German next to them. After the first couple of hours, once the bombardment that had killed Sykes had died down, they had tried to get back to their lines. But the Hun had been waiting for them and, as soon as they had crawled out of the shell-hole, they had had to dive back in under a hail of mortars and sniper fire. Jacobs had caught one in the leg, shattering the bone.

Paul suspected that the corporal had lost a lot of blood, although since his leg was under water there wasn’t much he was able to do to help him. Remembering what Sykes had said about Jacobs’ politics, Paul encouraged Jacobs to talk, to keep the man awake and his mind off his wound.

‘So, who are these workers’ and soldiers’ deputies, then?’ he asked, and Jacobs told him about the Soviets and how they represented the working man and were taking the means of production into their own hands.

‘Those that create the wealth should control it,’ Jacobs said, ‘not men who inherit it through an accident of birth or through manipulation of capital.’

Paul had heard all this before, of course, in the comfort of his mother’s apartments. But in that filthy shell-hole there seemed more substance to the argument.

Jacobs told him about the Bolsheviks, how they were the same as the other left-wing parties and differed only in matters of procedure. And in the fact that they were more alert to the dangers posed by reaction.

‘They only took control of Russia because no one else would,’ Jacobs maintained. ‘It’s like nature abhorring a vacuum.’

By the second night Jacobs was slipping into periods of incoherence. At least Paul thought he was. The man had begun to talk about Karl Marx and Kapital so it was difficult to say. They had eaten nothing and had only been able to quench their thirst with rainwater. Sykes was starting to smell as bad as the German and the patrol Paul had expected to rescue them hadn’t put its head above the parapet. He assumed that he and Jacobs had been given up as dead. They couldn’t call out to their lines — even though they were no more than eighty yards away — in fear that the Germans would get a fix on their voices and start lobbing mortars at them again.

Paul waited until twelve o’clock on the second night, catching Jacobs in a coherent interlude, half-pulling and half-bullying him out of the crater. They made it to the wire before the Hun spotted them.

Jacobs got hung up and Paul couldn’t free him. He was still trying when he realised the man was dead. Then a mortar exploded nearby and it felt as though a red-hot poker had been jabbed into his ear. Luckily, after that he didn’t feel anything at all.

He regained consciousness in a casualty clearing station. They had pulled him off the wire, he was told, and he was lucky. He’d caught a ‘blighty’ and wouldn’t be going back. His war was over.