China Seas

by John Harris

  ‘More likely, to escape having to fight,’ Willie said. In his mind even now after all the intervening years was the sight of a white-tunicked figure on a Chinese pony spurring away from the column of wretched missionaries he had left to be butchered by the Boxers.

  There were tears in Nadya’s eyes. ‘Probably that,’ she agreed. ‘It would be like him.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘He was assigned to Kolchak’s headquarters.’

  ‘Then the rumours must be wrong and Kolchak must be succeeding. That twister would never be there if he weren’t. He has no claim on you, Nadya. You divorced him.’

  ‘He says I didn’t.’

  Willie grabbed her arm. ‘Did you or didn’t you?’

  Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There were papers, but now he says they aren’t genuine.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘Did you give him any?’

  ‘Yes. To get rid of him. He was smiling all over his hateful face. He promised he wouldn’t come back.’

  ‘He’d better not while I’m here,’ Willie said grimly.

  It was already October, but there was no sign of the colder weather and the rivers hadn’t yet frozen, which meant, as Willie well knew, that if Omsk had to be abandoned, since Kolchak wouldn’t be able to drag his guns across the ice, everything, guns, transport and heavy equipment, would all have to be abandoned. It was clear the Whites were intending to defend the place at all costs, even against the advice of the experts.

  ‘I have to go there, Nadya,’ he said, and immediately, from the look in her eyes, he knew that his guess that things were in a bad state was right.

  ‘It’s dangerous,’ she said. ‘Kolchak believes Omsk is a symbol and must be defended to the end. He talks of dying in the streets with his loyal followers.’

  She promised to turn all her contacts among the refugees now arriving in Vladivostok in huge numbers towards Brassard at the Alexsandr. Brassard was beside himself already with the articles that were turning up, because the place was full of people who had arrived by road and rail, exhausted, hungry, and terrified by the excesses of the Bolsheviks. Trapped Tsarist officers were being stripped to their underwear and lined up against barns and shot by machine guns, their hated epaulettes nailed to their shoulders. Terrified women with children to feed were only too willing to sell the treasures with which they had escaped. Many of them had lost touch with their families and pathetic notices were displayed on the station platform. ‘Piotr. We are moving south to Harbin. Join us there. Ilya.’ ‘Mother. Please bring the children. Rudolf has gone to China as arranged. Join him at once. Natasha.’

  It wasn’t difficult for Willie to obtain a seat in a train going west because by this time only the trains going east were of interest to the refugees. But he was regarded with some suspicion by the policeman on the gate. It was his old friend from the docks.

  ‘Ah, my friend, the Anglichani,’ he said. ‘On your journeys again, I see. What is it this time? Spying for the Imperialists? Let’s see your papers.’ He studied Willie’s passport then looked up over it. ‘Why would you be wanting to go to Omsk, my friend? Most people are wanting to get away from Omsk.’

  ‘I have a trainload of coal there,’ Willie lied. ‘I don’t want to lose it.’

  The policeman grinned. ‘You’ll have to hurry, Anglichani, because the Bolsheviki are coming on fast.’

  ‘You sound delighted.’

  ‘Perhaps I am. Vladimir Ilyich Mozhevsky has no love for the White armies.’

  ‘But not enough for the Bolsheviki to go and fight with them?’

  The policeman glared. ‘Watch your tongue, Anglichani! I’ll be looking out for you.’

  The train was packed with soldiers, most of them none too willing to fight, and bodies jammed the corridors, with equipment, parcels, cases and baskets. With the air stale with closed doors, there was a great deal of bad temper. The stations and wayside halts were crowded with people waiting for transport east, or with local peasants on shaggy ponies for whom the arrival of a train was always a major event. It was obvious there was collusion between the railway staff and the Communists because the trains were always being halted and a truck detached on the excuse that it had a hot axle box and there was no one to repair it.

  ‘It’s a plot,’ the British officer in command of the train snarled as they were held up for the fifth time.

  ‘Waggons are worth a lot to profiteers,’ Willie panted out. ‘Try parking the train across a set of points and keeping it there. They’ll soon change their minds.’

  Sure enough, within minutes the axle box was pronounced repaired and they were on their way again.

  There was incredible confusion at Irkutsk on the shores of Lake Baikal because Bolshevik forces were reported to have arrived in the vicinity. Soldiers and civilians alike were panicking to get to the eastern side of the lake, yet the track was jammed with rolling stock, none of it moving. Everybody was heading towards Vladivostok on the down line and only troops were moving on the up line. It was a nerve-wracking time, but Willie considered that his nationality would help him avoid trouble.

  There had been a sudden rise in temperature by the time he arrived in Omsk. The front was disintegrating, but nearly two hundred of the White Army’s guns were still on the wrong side of the River Irtysh and there was panic buying and hiring of boats and barges. The only bridge, which carried the railway, was impassable for horses, which meant that every gun would have to be loaded on to lorries if the retreat started. By this time, the Bolsheviks were less than forty miles away and it was being openly admitted that the town would fall within a fortnight. The foreign military missions had all left and the British railway mission, an officer and seven men, were the only foreign military personnel left in the city.

  Even as Willie ate his evening meal the bottom started to drop out of the thermometer and he woke to find the place white with frost, and Kolchak’s men struggling to get their guns across the river. Under the leaden sky and falling snow he could hear volleys of firing and thought the Bolsheviks had arrived, but he was informed that it was only political prisoners being shot.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he demanded.

  The officer of the British railway mission paused long enough in stuffing equipment aboard the train to answer him. ‘I don’t know who the hell you are,’ he said, ‘but you sound English and if you are I’d advise you to clear out. That bugger Kolchak’s already heading for Irkutsk so there’ll be no resistance when the Reds arrive and they’ll have a field day collecting the booty and rounding up the prisoners.’

  ‘Is Kolchak’s advance finished?’ Willie asked.

  ‘If you ask me,’ the officer said, ‘it never started. And, just to make sure, the advance from Estonia and Archangel’s also been flung back and Denikin in the south’s been pushed out of Orel. The Whites are in reverse on every front, so the Reds up here have nothing to distract them.’

  Willie reached Irkutsk an hour or two behind Kolchak. It was clear there was a doubtful loyalty among the railway staff and considerable partisan activity along the track. Conditions, which had dropped from indifferent to appalling within days, were rapidly becoming catastrophic and were aggravated by the snow and the bitterly cold weather which had set in. Heading westwards, he had kept his ears open and had learned that, although Kolchak had around fifty million pounds in gold with him, he was claiming it was purely to fight the Bolsheviks and hadn’t troubled to pay the railway workers or build up coal stocks along the line, so that there was no co-operation and virtually no fuel for the engines.

  Before leaving Irkutsk, Willie wired a message to Nadya Alexsandrovna to be passed southwards to George Kee in Shanghai and thence to Mallinson in London, ‘Situation collapsing. Advise complete withdrawal,’ then he packed a kitbag he found with army biscuit, tea and tinned meat, and began to head eastwards. Whenever a breakdown caused a tailback of trains, instead of alighting
and searching for food, he humped his load and set off along the track on foot to the first train in the line ahead he could force his way aboard, so that with every halt he advanced his position in the procession. There was no longer any westbound traffic at all and both tracks were monopolised by the exodus towards the east. News had arrived of a massacre in Omsk and, as the enormous traffic jam increased, Willie turned up his collar and plodded head-down into the wind.

  In the intense cold, any engine running out of coal froze at once so that its boiler burst, and pumps at watering stations were put out of action by the frost. Soldiers muffled to the eyes formed chains to fill the boiler with snow and, with the stoves in the battered coaches consuming vast quantities of wood and constantly running short, the passengers always faced the danger of death from the cold. Food was scarce and the sanitary arrangements were non-existent.

  The road ran beside the track and, along it, on a ribbon of trampled snow, flowed a stream of humanity on sledges on horseback or on foot, skeleton regiments reduced to a few sabres, batteries dragging dismantled guns on sledges, groups of men without officers, parties of officers without men. Among the debris of the army, competing with them for shelter, fodder, food and fuel, was a straggling column of civilians whose trains had foundered, peasants driving a few skinny cattle, children, lunatics, deserters. When the trains were stationary, the passengers eyed the pedestrians with envy. When the train was moving it was the other way round. Neither group pitied the other.

  At the stations refugees waited in vain for trains whose numbers were steadily being reduced by breakdowns and hold-ups, and the stationmasters’ offices were always the scene of constant shouted arguments. Bribes and threats were used and the railway telegraph, already inadequate to deal with the official business of the railway, was clogged by appeals. Lurid posters, depicting Bolshevik atrocities and designed to stimulate recruiting, were having the opposite effect and lowering morale.

  All the way there were thousands of abandoned horses. Those still in harness had to be stopped every few hundred yards to clear their nostrils, which had become clogged with the ice formed from their breath. With Kolchak’s White roubles worthless now, it was impossible to buy shelter, so that stables were cramped with human beings, while the horses had to spend the night outside. Great numbers of them had collapsed and the villages were full of them, all as tame as pet dogs, walking into cafés or wandering through the snow. Droves of them stood out stark and black against the white of the snow-covered hills. When they fell, their meat and hides were removed immediately and the remainder of the bloody carcass left in the snow.

  With the overcrowding, typhus was rampant among the struggling horde. Because of the inadequate medical service, the unhygienic condition of the native huts and station rooms where they spent the nights and the insanitary habits of the peasants, the trains became infested, the lice, the carriers of the disease, swarming in the woodwork, the tattered uniforms of the soldiers, the peasants’ sheepskins and the speculators’ furs. Within no time, a new panic had started and, terrified of contracting the disease, any train known to be carrying typhus was hurried through without time to stop for supplies or help, and whole truckloads of people, boycotted by their fellow-travellers, perished. No one knew how many had been killed by the disease and how many by the cold as they grew too weak to feed the stoves. At every station the frozen corpses were stripped and piled on top of each other like logs because there were no coffins and no one had any time to build any.

  The magnificent Trans-Siberian Railway, completed only twenty years before, had become a long, narrow stage on which thousands of tragedies were being acted. The snail’s pace of its trains in the lethal cold spread the drama over hundreds of miles of desolate countryside in which there were no redeeming features. Misery, squalor and cowardice had brought about the chaos and only the crows, perched in enormous numbers on the trees along the track, their feathers fluffed against the frost, found any pleasure in the shuffling, jolting throng.

  The whole campaign had descended into disaster. Willie arrived at Chita ahead of the British Consul-General and the British High Commissioner, whose trains had been anchored to the rails by great stalactites of discoloured ice hanging from lavatories and kitchens so that they had to be freed by men with axes, and it was Willie who brought the news to British Military Headquarters that Kolchak had been betrayed by the Czechs and taken prisoner. When his train had reached Polovina, the half-way point between Moscow and Vladivostok, the Russian leader had been able to continue only with difficulty. At Krasnoyarsk his men had thrown down their weapons and indulged in a vast sauve qui petit, fighting for places on the trains and prepared to kill to keep them, and at Glaskov he and his retinue had been turned over to the Bolsheviks by the Czechs. Tearing off their epaulettes as they had jumped out of windows in a bid for freedom, a few of his staff had escaped, but Kolchak had been placed in gaol and there was little chance of him ever emerging alive.

  His mistress and some of his staff had also been imprisoned and the first thing that entered Willie’s mind was that Nadya Alexsandrovna’s husband, Zychov, had been among them. But at a town called Mysovaya he saw him on the station platform. It was crowded with people all struggling to get on to a train, starving men, women and children with pale frozen faces, fighting to get into carriages from which they were constantly pushed by other starving frozen people who had arrived before them and were afraid that their presence would hold up the train.

  For a few seconds, among the tumult, he saw Zychov’s head and shoulders above the shoving crowd. He looked well dressed and well fed with a fur cap over his eyes, and Willie couldn’t believe what he saw. But he knew it was true and that somehow, inevitably, Zychov had been one of the few from Kolchak’s train who had managed to escape.

  For a moment, he thought of pushing through the throng and shooting him. Nobody would have noticed in the uproar because at every station there was always fighting and there were always a few dead left on the platform, but he felt too weak to attempt it and the next minute a concerted rush for the train ended in a confusion of flailing fists, screams and wails as people were trampled underfoot, and he was swept aside. When he recovered his balance, Zychov had vanished and the train was just beginning to move out, people who had failed to gain a place holding out their hands to relatives they knew they would never see again.

  As the railway ground to a halt, Willie found a place on a loaded sledge. But he got no sleep because every time he dozed off he fell from the sledge and had to pick himself up and run after it and climb back, only to fall asleep and roll off again two hours later. Bearded, sick, exhausted, his face haunted, he struggled into Vladivostok. It was freezingly cold with a fierce high wind piercing the clothes of the starving scarecrows around him. Ships in the bay were covered with ice and the gale swept through the pitiful shelters of the refugees. Stumbling from British Mission headquarters, he stopped a cab, but the driver took one look at him and refused to accept him. Vladivostok was a sick, terrified city and all control of the White forces had been lost. All that anybody talked of now was escape.

  For days he had struggled eastwards, still clinging with frozen fingers to his dwindling kitbag of food. Several times some starving man had tried to steal it from him, only to find himself staring into the muzzle of the huge revolver which had appeared from under Willie’s coat. He had survived because he had been ruthless, determined above all else to reach safety, walking when necessary, plodding with one heavy foot in front of the other through the snow, picking up abandoned clothing, riding on a train when one was moving, catching and riding any skinny horse he could find until it dropped.

  Indifferent, horrifyingly tired, he headed towards the Alexsandr Hotel. Suddenly it was difficult to place one foot in front of the other and, surrounded by the chaos of a destroyed army, he felt rotten in body and sick at heart. Brassard met him with a smile of delight which changed at once to one of alarm as he stumbled to a chair and flung himself down.
Drifting in and out of sleep, he realised something was wrong. Surely he had dreamt it all. Nadya Alexsandrovna would know what to do.

  ‘Mademoiselle Kourganova,’ he mumbled to the anxious Brassard. ‘Get her.’

  After what seemed weeks, he heard someone saying they were taking him to a hospital and he couldn’t understand why. He’d had headaches before and all he wanted was tea. Where the hell was the tea?

  Then – who was this creature in front of him that was emerging from the mists. Was it Abigail? No, it was a man, and beyond him he could see Brassard wringing his hands. He hurt all over, not pain but a wish to pull the blanket over his head and die. Someone mentioned hospital again and he heard the word ‘tyf’ and he suspected he was probably dying.

  He had been bitten by an infected louse from one of the overcrowded coaches he had ridden in or from one of the articles of abandoned clothing he’d been obliged to wear. He realised his head was shaved, his eyes bloodshot, the lashes gummed up, his lips cracked and sore, and that he could talk only in a whisper. He was almost deaf, half-blind and, staring at his bandaged wrists, he saw that he must have lost a great deal of weight. Brassard, looking terrified, was near him as he opened his eyes.

  ‘Where am I?’ he demanded weakly.

  ‘At the home of Miss Kourganova,’ Brassard said. ‘And if I’d known what I know now I’d never have left London.’

  ‘Am I ill?’

  Brassard sniffed. ‘She says you’re recovering. You had a fever. Up to 105. Your tongue was coated with a yellow fur and your teeth were loose. Then spots started to appear. I was terrified I’d get it because you were delirious and I had to tie you to the bed because you got out and smashed the windows with your hands.’

  ‘How long have I been here?’

  ‘Ten days. The hotel sent you to the hospital, but I was worried you’d die there and told Miss Kourganova. She insisted on removing you. She nursed you devotedly.’