David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

They stopped at midday. The wind had dropped and they gathered around Capek and the useless scrap of paper he called a map, discussing whether or not they were heading in the right direction. Paul hung on the periphery. His opinion, naturally, was not canvassed. The horses took the opportunity of a stop to paw at the snow to find grass. One of the men scattered the little fodder for them that they had taken off the partisans while the young prisoner they had taken, still slung over the back of one of the ponies, vomited down the animal’s flank. Paul pulled his head up and gave him some water from his flask. They ate some more cold rations and then, after fifteen minutes, resumed their march. Capek moved them down onto the ice below the river bank, sending the pony burdened with the prisoner ahead to test its thickness. The ice held and the patrol followed.

Two hours later in deepening gloom they came to a small railway bridge crossing the river. Capek scrambled up the bank and stood on the line, sniffing the air like a bloodhound.

He beckoned them to follow and crossed the wooden bridge as the rest of them climbed up the bank. On the bridge, the sky through the trees appeared grey like a wash of dull paint. Paul could feel a faint movement of a breeze against his face and caught a tang of wood smoke on the air. The patrol was picking its way along the track ahead of him, following Capek. He hurried to keep up, unaccustomed to the weight of his new winter coat.

Half a mile along the line they were challenged by outlying guards. A few hundred yards later they found the train.

They called them broněviky . Iron-clad monsters, they straddled the railway like sullen rhinoceroses; armoured beasts that had evolved their hard carapace as protection against a harsh environment. Ahead of the locomotive, lengths of protruding rail had been chained on a flatbed wagon, ready for use either for repairing damaged lengths of line or, more brutally, as a battering ram against opposing trains. Some broněviky were armed with artillery pieces; most had rows of machineguns that bristled like spines behind the protection of heavy armour plating. Perhaps the largest things some peasant villages had ever seen, the appearance in a district of these leviathans, snorting smoke and steam, invariably inspired awe and terror. It amazed Paul that the patrol had somehow managed to lose theirs.

Paul’s train was one of fifteen. The rest of the échelon lay on the main line and formed part of the Legion’s rear guard, the bulk of the remaining army now having been strung out across the length of Siberia from the Urals to Vladivostok. Paul’s échelon had been moving east again, retreating in the face of a Red Army rejuvenated by Trotsky’s reorganisation and bolstered by the growing number of peasants who were deserting the People’s Army of Komuch in favour of the Bolsheviks. Like the bands of partisans they were encountering — peasant supporters of the Social-Revolutionary Party — Komuch’s peasant army had become disillusioned by forced conscription and finding themselves once again under the yoke of a re-emergent tsarist officer class. No one was sure how long the deserters would tolerate Bolshevik brutality but with their aid, since September, Trotsky had retaken Kazan, Simbirsk and Samara and was now threatening Ufa. The rearmost regiments of the Legion were constantly harried by Red units looping ahead of their positions and cutting the line in front of them in an attempt to isolate trains. In an effort to forestall this, the Legion was obliged to take each branch line they came to and try to outflank the Reds and isolate them . Paul’s train had left the main line in an out-flanking manoeuvre ten days earlier. With the patrol back at last, he was hoping they could now rejoin the rest of the échelon and shake the feeling of being sheep separated from the rest of the flock, lost in a forest full of wolves.

Walking alongside the train, Paul experienced once more the sense of astonishment he had felt upon first joining the Legion; seeing how, since seizing the trains, along with the stations and miles of track from the Bolsheviks after the mutiny at Chelyabinsk, they had organised themselves. Some of the locomotives and stock were already armoured, sheathed in steel and iron plating, others had been armoured as they travelled. They called their cars teplushkas , a colloquial Russian word for the heated goods wagons that usually carried people. Having found themselves in an almost untenable position, the Legion had made a remarkable best out of a seriously bad business. Most trains were overcrowded, it was true, given the number of men moving east — sometimes as many as forty to each boxcar, with nothing more than boards for bunks — but Paul had been fortunate in his allocation and shared one end of a boxcar with three Czech second lieutenants — podporuciks , as they called themselves.

While some of the boxcars had been adapted as quarters, the flatbed wagons had been armoured and carried machineguns and light artillery, if they were fortunate enough to possess it. The rest of the train was made up of a miscellany of rolling stock: mess huts, field hospitals, staff headquarters… On the western front Paul had become used to battalions having to fend for themselves when equipment promised by Staff usually failed to materialise. Here the Legion had turned the ability to forage and improvise into an art. They were now a well-equipped army, able to strike and — crucially — move and keep mobile, despite the Red Army’s propensity for cutting the line and ambushing them. Disciplined and efficient, he had found the Legion not only able to defend itself but also to repair the line when needed. They had bakers’ vans and galleys and, beyond the rudimentary hospital, a veterinarian unit to care for their horses; even a tailor to run up the clothes they needed.

The Czech and Slovak POWs from the eastern front — as well as those already living in Russian territory — came from a variety of backgrounds and professions. Some had wives and travelled in married quarters. Paul had discovered that there was hardly a job required that someone in an échelon couldn’t turn his hand to: men on one of the trains, he had learned, had come across a discarded printing press and got it working again and now the Legion printed its own newspaper — an edition of Českoslovensýk densk , a Czech-language paper that used to appear in Kiev.

Not that Paul could understand the thing when he did see a copy — his Czech was still rudimentary — and, at the rear of the retreating Legion and often cut off as they were, editions of the paper were out of date by the time they reached them. Up-to-date news was hard to come by although confirmation of the fact that Masaryk and the Czech National Council had openly acceded to the Allies’ pressure for the Legion to become part of a new front had run up and down the line without the need of a newspaper. It was the main topic of discussion. There was to be a new offensive and men all along the Trans-Siberian were being turned around and brought back west. There were mutterings of discontent, and more, even talk of another mutiny.

The irony that the contents of Paul’s letter had finally been given legitimacy was not lost on him. It was all politics, of course: as the war was drawing to a conclusion in the west, Masaryk needed Allied support in any peace talks in order to win Czech and Slovak independence. That support came at a cost and the Allies’ price would be the defeat of the Bolsheviks.

It was not going down well. The bulk of the Legion had been fighting through necessity — to maintain their independence and to get out of Russia — yet many of the rank and file were in sympathy with Bolshevik politics, if not their methods. On the eastern front, Red propaganda had persuaded many Czechs and Slovaks of their virtue. Still more had found natural allies in the Social-Revolutionaries. Talk of having to fight alongside former tsarist officers against the Revolution had once again rekindled talk of mutiny.