David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

They kept to the bank of the river, following its bends and making east by the compass. Earlier the glow in the sky to the west, glimpsed through the trees, had been taken for the low sun. Now, with dusk approaching, it still glowed unnaturally bright. Not the sun, but some burning village.

Paul tucked the tails of his bashlyk hood into his coat against the cold. The snowstorm had caught them unprepared. They had been away from the train for two days, wandering disorientated through a forest that looked strangely different under snow. They had originally been attempting to outflank a detachment of Reds who were trying to outflank them and cut the line to their rear. Instead, they had found one of the units of partisans who now seemed to infest the forest like lice. One never knew which side they were on until they started shooting. Most held some sort of allegiance to the SRs but since the Social-Revolutionary split with the Bolsheviks in the summer many of the peasant groups had gone their own way. Some held no allegiance to anyone but themselves.

It had snowed again overnight, the temperature dropping even further. It was still dark with a rising wind when Lieutenant Capek, the officer in charge of the patrol, had got them on their feet before they’d been buried under the growing drifts. Tired and half-frozen, Paul had fallen in with the rest, chewing on a piece of dried meat from his dwindling rations while the lieutenant and his sergeant argued about which way the railway line lay. Finally settling on a north-west direction, they walked for an hour in silence, the sound of their progress muffled by the deep snow. When they blundered out of the trees into the small clearing, they had surprised themselves as much as the band of partisans they found camped there.

Capek hadn’t waited to ask questions. The firing started as soon as he saw the band. Paul pitched headlong into a drift, struggling to free his Mauser from the awkward wooden holster. The gun was a 7.63mm Czech issue semi-automatic, nicknamed the ‘broomhandle’ from the fact the wooden holster doubled as a detachable shoulder stock. He hadn’t had it long but had already grown to hate it, forever stubbing his fingers on the rigid holster. Now, amid a chaos of rearing horses and running men, he struggled to get a gloved finger through the trigger-guard. By the time he had sent a few erratic shots into the mêlée in front of him, two horses and half-a-dozen men were down in the reddening snow. The rest of the partisans had run for the trees. Paul emptied the Mauser after them for good measure and climbed to his feet. The Czech beside him didn’t get up. He was sprawled on his face, leaking a bloody stain from his head which was already freezing in the snow.

Paul bent over him and made sure he was dead, then joined the rest of the patrol in mopping up. Some muffled shots came from the trees and another, louder, rang through the clearing as someone put a wounded horse out of its agony. The rest, still tethered, reared in alarm.

The patrol had lost one man killed and another wounded. Eight partisans lay dead in the snow with another as good as, his lower jaw shot off and blood that showed no sign of stopping soaking into the collar of his coat. He was looking up at the circle of men standing over him, making a noise that was part scream and part gurgle. As he approached them, Paul wondered why the man wasn’t extended the same courtesy as had been given the horse. Looking around the clearing, though, he saw that Capek was absent. Off chasing the remaining partisans through the trees, no doubt; the man had an unquenchable thirst for aggression. No one else in the patrol appeared prepared to shoot a prisoner without his say-so and none of them thought to ask Paul. He may have been a captain and outranked Capek but he wasn’t a Czech. Looking at the bleeding creature, Paul decided to shoot him himself, but the Mauser was empty and by the time he had taken off his gloves and then fumbled more bullets in with numbed fingers, the man had lost consciousness and had collapsed quietly back in the snow.

They began stripping the dead of their clothes and weapons and divided them up among themselves. One of the men, a Slovak and friendlier than some of the others, passed Paul a Kirgis coat, a voluminous fur garment which, when on, felt like the embrace of a polar bear. He managed to swap his boots for a pair of valenkis , the tough felt Russian footwear that kept out not only cold but water too. The partisans had been cooking and one of the Czechs got their fire going again, heated up their breakfast and doled out a portion to each man. Paul sat on a fallen tree trunk and ate the pottage, not as good as the meals they served on the train but still the first hot food he had eaten since the patrol had left the line.

Lieutenant Capek returned, pushing a trembling prisoner into the clearing in front of him. He was a young boy with an adolescent beard that didn’t hide his pitted face and who looked scared out of whatever wits he might once have possessed. He stared around at them all then averted his eyes, gazing fixedly at the snow at his feet. The lieutenant ate some breakfast while the rest of them stripped the camp of anything useful. They burned what was left to deny it to anyone else.

Having finished his breakfast, Capek poked the toe of his boot several times at the wounded partisan till he came round, then made his quaking prisoner watch while he dispatched the wounded man with a shot to what was left of his head. His point made, Capek, in no hurry to find out on which side the partisans had been, trussed his young prisoner to the pommel of a horse and following a track through the trees led them out of the clearing.

Paul trudged through the deepening snow in the footsteps of the man in front. There were bloodstains on his new coat, he noticed, although he’d not found any bullet holes in the fur. The stains recalled how, a lifetime ago, he had got blood on his jacket the day he had met Cumming. Now, the odd bloodstain didn’t worry him at all — once he’d ascertained it wasn’t his own. After all, there was no shortage of blood in Russia. It flowed with the liberality of a river.

He had been lucky to get out of Kazan. The Baltic Fleet destroyers they had passed while on Captain Malinovsky’s little steamer had moved up the Volga the same night Sofya and Valentine had left. The destroyers had joined the artillery in the bombardment of the city and Paul had watched the flash of the ships’ guns from Syuyumbéka tower. The Arsk Group, Azin’s peasant army, sitting astride the railway line to the east had already taken the villages of Kinderle and Klykli. They were a mix, Paul was told, of Tartar remnants of an old Khanate from the Kazanka River region, and of Votyaks, a peasant people who spoke the Udmurt language. Presumably, unlike the peasant supporters of the SR Party who had joined The People’s Army of Komuch , they had swallowed Lenin’s promises of Land, Bread and Peace.

It was an odd peace, and Paul had wondered how long it would be before the Votyaks realised that the Bolshevik Holy Trinity came at a price. They would get their land and bread but only once they had attained peace, and the catch to that bargain was that they had to fight for it first.

The sailors of Raskolnikov’s flotilla were a different matter. They had been in the forefront of the Revolution since the beginning, were more politically aware than the peasant armies and committed to Lenin and Trotsky. You could see as much in the disciplined manner they had come ashore at first light, impervious to the artillery Komuch had used to counter their bombardment. As the sailors pushed towards the city, the rear Legion units and what remained of the Komuch forces were in danger of being encircled. The army group on Volga’s left bank was moving in from the north to close the ring. The last hours were chaotic. Men had scrambled to get aboard whatever river-worthy craft was left. The skiffs and leaky barges that had been rejected when any craft worth having had been commandeered, now looked like godsends. The defenders had tried to retreat in an orderly fashion but demoralisation was written across every face. Komuch and the Legion had held the city for just one month, long enough for every reactionary and tsarist officer who had been in hiding while the Bolsheviks were in control to come crawling out of the woodwork. As soon as they had sensed which way the wind was blowing, these remnants of the tsarist army and administration had made sure they had got out first, abandoning the rest of the civilian population to the approaching whirlwind. As usual in war, any consideration of the rank and file had come a poor second. They would just have to trust to luck — if the concept of luck applied as far as the Bolsheviks’ scientific theory of history was concerned. Paul had a nasty suspicion that the only thing that would be applied to the civilian population would be the barrel of a gun. One couldn’t expect anything else. When Kazan had been taken in August and the boot had been on the other foot, all the Bolshevik sympathisers remaining in the town had been rounded up and shot. That hadn’t been on the orders of the Legion, or even of Komuch , as such. From what Paul had heard, it had been Kappel’s decision.