David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Since then, though, they had lost the initiative. Trotsky had reorganised the Red Army, bringing in more Latvians as well as German and Austria-Hungarian POWs, and the hard-line SRs had returned to the Bolshevik fold. Romanek’s rhetoric which, on the advance had sounded like a crusade, now in retreat sounded more like sour grapes.

Karel’s next topic, Paul knew, would be a vehement tirade again the old tsarist officer-corps’ assumption of the Komuch army’s leadership. But having heard it all before, he now regretted having stirred Romanek up.

In an attempt to head off the lecture, he asked:

‘Any news of Gajda?’

Radola Gajda was another rising star who, like Čeček, had been overlooked when Syrový had been made commander of the Legion. In Gajda’s case because of the man’s hubris.

Karel, flummoxed at having his train of thought derailed, stopped complaining about the Bolshevik’s treatment of the SRs.

‘Gajda? He’s at Omsk. He arrived from Vladivostok with some Russian admiral and a British general in tow. Is that why you asked? There’s something about it in the paper.’

Paul sat up. ‘A Russian admiral? Who? What’s his name?’

‘Given the scarcity of Allies in this neck of the Russian woods,’ Karel replied, repaying Paul’s earlier sarcasm in kind, ‘I thought you’d be more interested in your British general.’

‘Funny.’

‘His name’s Kolchak. It seems Boldyrev, the commander-in-chief of the so-called Directory has made him minister of war.’ Karel’s face betrayed his distaste. ‘Another tsarist restorationist like Kappel, I suppose.’

‘When did they get to Omsk?’

Romanek turned back a few pages. ‘About a week ago, it says.’

‘And how old is the paper?’

Romanek looked to the front page.

‘What’s today’s date?’

‘The eighth, I think.’

‘November? It’s about three weeks old, then. Why the interest?’

‘It was Admiral Kolchak I was sent here to meet. I’m supposed to liaise between him, the Legion and the Allies.’

Paul suspected he had already told Romanek this, having explained it to just about every Legion officer he had encountered. Like much else now regarding the Allies, though, most of those he had told had either taken what Paul said with a pinch of salt, or dismissed his story as a downright lie.

‘Kolchak, the Legion and the Allies,’ Karel ruminated. ‘Spot the missing side of that triangle.’ But his voice lacked the bitterness Paul was accustomed to when the subject of the Allies’ arrival was ever mooted. ‘What does it matter now, anyway?’ Karel asked. ‘More to the point, I would have thought, is what is Gajda doing with Kolchak if he’s to be the new minister of war? Komuch is the rightful government here, not any reactionary Directory of Five.’

‘I don’t suppose it’s easy for Komuch to argue they’re a government when they’ve lost all their territory,’ Paul said.

Romanek grunted and went back to his newspaper. It was the Czech’s usual response when the facts were at odds with his opinions.

Paul lay back on his bunk once more, thinking that, despite it, Romanek had a point. What was Gajda doing with Admiral Kolchak?

The name was one of the first Paul had heard on joining the Legion. Radola Gajda, a Slovak, was one of their heroes. The youngest of their commanders, he was among the first officers to resist the Bolsheviks’ attempt to disarm the Legion. Commanding échelons east of the Urals, he had got sick of the constant delays and harassment they had had to suffer at the hands of the semi-autonomous Soviets controlling the various regions of the Siberian railway line. Despite Lenin’s orders to speed the Legion through to Vladivostok, their trains had been halted at every town and subjected to incessant demands to give up arms and supplies before being allowed to continue. Back in the early summer, after weeks of what Gajda regarded as blackmail to surrender weapons and food and anything else the Bolshevik authorities took a fancy to, he had drawn up a plan of attack to take the Bolsheviks head on. It had taken the authority of the Czech National Council to dissuade him from breaking the Legion’s neutrality. And it was generally supposed that it was this aggression that had precluded Gajda’s appointment as overall commander and had handed the job to Syrový.

More recently, Gajda had been along the Trans-Siberian line beyond Irkutsk, securing the thirty-nine Baikal railway tunnels east of the lake through which the Legion had to pass to reach Vladivostok and which the Bolsheviks were threatening to dynamite. If Gajda had come west again it could only mean that he was to be part of Masaryk’s acceptance of the Allies desire for the Legion to form a new eastern front.

Paul closed his eyes, listening to the muffled sound of men beyond the wooden planking of the boxcar. The locomotive was getting up steam. They would be rejoining the rest of their échelon soon and he wondered if now they, too, would be turning west and making a stand. The Allies might have blackmailed Masaryk and the Council into keeping the Legion in the Urals, but how much actual support would they provide if the Legion stayed to fight? The Allies had already let them down once. Could they expect the Legion to believe that this time they would keep their word?

Paul pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers and sighed. Now he supposed he would have to try to meet Kolchak. He had more or less accepted that his mission had been a failure; having been on the retreat since losing Kazan two months earlier, it was hard to see it in any other terms. He had realised as much as they had departed the city under the Red Army’s final bombardment.

Paul had clambered aboard the last barge to leave as the Red Army sailors had moved through the streets of Kazan and down across the flood plain. In his hurry to get on board he had collided with another Legion officer and they had fallen, tangled together, onto the deck.

‘ Kapitan Gavenda,’ the officer said, dusting off his trousers and offering Paul his hand. ‘My apologies.’

‘My fault,’ said Paul, shaking Gavenda’s hand and squatting behind the equipment cluttering the deck as the barge pulled out into the river.

Gavenda gestured across the receding flood plain and said something about the Red Army advance, pulling a crumpled copy of the Bolshevik paper, Izvestia , from his pocket. He said he had taken it from a dead sailor and pointed to the contents of a telegram it had printed from some Bolshevik functionary named Stalin. The telegram gave the Party’s reaction to the attempt on Lenin’s life and called for ‘open, mass, systematic terror…’

‘That’s nothing,’ Gavenda said, and went on to quote something he’d read in a copy of Krasnaya Gazeta , the Red Army newspaper, demanding ‘that their enemies to be drowned in blood, floods of blood of bourgeoisie, as much as possible…’

There was something hysterical about it all and cowering on the deck of the barge seemed to Paul the ideal position in which to ponder the incongruities of Bolshevism. Lenin had launched the Bolshevik October revolution with his call for ‘Bread, Peace and Land’. Paul had never heard the Bolshevik leader speak so could only presume the man was a remarkably persuasive orator. After all, peace was an elusive condition and to achieve it the soldiers on the eastern front under the tsar had stopped fighting and pursued a revolution. The absurdity of Trotsky’s army now having to fight to maintain their peace treaty with the Germans was, to say the least, bemusing.

Paul supposed it made Lenin’s demand for ‘peace’ yet another example of the Bolshevik propensity for using convoluted logic to attain their ends. The slogan, Paul discovered later, was one Karel Romanek was fond of quoting, and not without a measure of sarcasm.