Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  Here the new movie begins, with a montage of overlapping shots showing Boyle in action in the no man’s land of the post-revolutionary Eastern Front. There is a fictional quality to these tales of Boyle’s adventures in eastern Europe—the kind of stories that English schoolboys thrived on through the pages of the Boy’s Own Paper. They come to us not through Boyle, who tended to shrug off his own exploits, but from a reputable eyewitness, Captain G. A. “Podge” Hill, the British intelligence officer who was from time to time Boyle’s comrade-in-arms. Indeed, Hill himself later confessed that he had played down Boyle’s role in some dauntless deeds in his memoirs to build up his own part in them. If Boyle’s new adventures seem to have the earmarks of a Saturday matinee movie serial—and they do—they are not the less impressive because they are true.

  The southeastern sector of Europe at this point was in turmoil. Romania had been torn in half by the advance of the Central Powers. The provincial town of Jassy (Iasi) had replaced Bucharest as its temporary capital. The Russian army was disintegrating and the provisional government was tottering.

  Boyle was in the thick of it, as Hill’s memoirs, Go Spy the Land, make clear. He records one incident where Boyle prevented a near riot in the provincial town of Mogilev on the Dnieper (now in Belarus). Feeling was running high at the presence of the Allied Military Missions to Russia, which were doing their best to counter German-Austrian propaganda among members of the newly formed Soldiers’, Sailors’, and Peasants’ Council. A meeting of the council was agitating to have the missions expelled or their members murdered. In the midst of this hullabaloo, Boyle strode onto the stage of the assembly and started to speak, with Hill translating. There was a movement to rush the stage, but Boyle’s voice, “clear and musical,” to quote Hill, held the audience. In a short speech, full of references to Russian history, Boyle reminded his listeners that Russians had never surrendered. “You are men, not sheep!” he told them. “I order you to act as men!” Thunderous applause followed as one young Russian leaped on the stage and cried, “Down with the Germans!” That ended the anti-Allies uproar.

  A stranger who didn’t speak a word of the language walking onto the platform and subduing an angry mob! It strains credulity. But Hill was there, on the stage with Boyle, translating his words sentence by sentence as he uttered them. As so often in the Boyle story, fact again outdid fiction.

  At the request of the Romanian government through its consul general in Moscow, Boyle undertook a special mission. Some twenty tons of paper, including diplomatic documents and all the currency that the beleaguered Romanians had had printed on Moscow presses, were in peril. Because the Russians were impressed by Boyle’s work on organizing the Romanian railway system, he and Hill were able to secure a private carriage and the rolling stock they needed to pack four cars with the Romanian papers. They hooked these up to an overcrowded southbound train and set off for the harassed country nearly a thousand miles to the southwest. The journey was fraught with danger, for the route lay directly through territory over which the Bolsheviks and the Russians were contesting.

  Boyle and Hill were running the gauntlet through a land in ferment. When undisciplined Bolsheviks tried to uncouple the cars at a small railway station, Boyle crept out under cover of darkness and knocked the leader cold. On the way to Kiev, the train stopped dead for lack of fuel, and Boyle organized a human chain of passengers to bring back logs from a nearby clearing in the forest. With some men up to their armpits in the soft snow, the logs were passed back to the stranded locomotive until the tender was piled high. The engineer finally got up steam and they reached Kiev, where they were able to attach their cars to another train.

  At Zhmerinka, forty miles from the then Romanian border, a Bolshevik officer stopped the train, shunted the rescuers’ cars onto a siding, and trained a gun battery on the station to prevent any escape. Boyle’s response was to throw a party and an impromptu concert for the Bolshevik soldiers to show his lack of concern and to conceal his next scheme. Fortunately, in the yard an engine stood in constant readiness for shunting purposes. Hill and Boyle boarded it and forced the engineer and stoker at gunpoint to pick up the cars carrying the Romanian treasures. After Boyle cut both the telephone and the telegraph wires, the train with the pair aboard set off at top speed. Twenty minutes later they reached a level crossing barred by a gate. When the engineer refused to crash through, they kneed him to the floor. Seizing the throttle, Hill opened it to full speed and “the good old shunting engine carried everything before it in its stride.” When they finally reached Jassy, they were met by an escort of 250 Romanian railway gendarmes and a body of Romanian army cavalry to secure the country’s vital papers. It was Christmas Eve, 1917—a bright moment in an otherwise dark year.

  Boyle was in Petrograd when the Kerensky government fell and the Bolsheviks took over. Six days of street fighting prevented any trains from leaving the capital, and Moscow was starving. The untried Bolshevik regime was forced by circumstances to release the former minister of war, General Alexei Manikovskii, from prison with orders to feed the army. Manikovskii sent for Boyle, who had just been made chairman of the All-Russia Food Board, and asked him to go to Moscow to untie the railways knot and get supplies moving.

  Boyle’s methods were unorthodox, but they worked. By pitching entire trains over embankments and pushing empty cars into the fields, he eliminated the bottleneck in three days, and the Russian armies on the Eastern Front were saved from starvation.

  Both Russia and Romania had signed armistices with the Central Powers that December, and the Germans were moving in to occupy the country. Boyle now turned his attention to averting a war between the Russian Bolsheviks and Romanian forces. After weeks of hard negotiations with the Germans at the very gates of the capital, Boyle, shuttling by light plane between Jassy and Odessa (and once nearly brought down by a Romanian anti-aircraft battery), finally got his way. An agreement between the Russians and Romanians brought an end to hostilities in late February 1918 and was followed in May by a peace treaty between Romania and the Central Powers signed at Bucharest.

  In effect, Boyle was acting as an unofficial and unaccredited agent, as William Rodney has noted and as Hill well knew. Boyle had contacts among high-ranking Soviet officials as well as some senior Allied representatives; moreover, he could move freely about the country, unlike the Allied ambassadors and ministers who were cooped up in Petrograd and cut off from what was going on in Russia because their governments had not yet recognized the new regime.

  Early in January 1918, for example, an important and dangerous plan was worked out by the commander of the French mission to Romania in which Boyle would use the authority he had been given by the Bolsheviks “to drift locomotives from the North to South Russia and create as much disorder and confusion in the Railways Systems in the North as possible”: in short, an act of sabotage. In that same period the Romanian prime minister, Ion Brătianu, asked Boyle to go to Petrograd on his behalf on a delicate mission to assure Leon Trotsky, then Bolshevik commissar for foreign affairs, that the Jassy government wanted to avoid friction between Romania and the new Soviet regime.

  Motion pictures, like stage plays, tend to be divided into three acts. The first act of The Saviour of Romania was now complete. Since every good movie requires a love interest, the second begins in March 1918, when Boyle meets Marie, the alluring Queen of Romania.

  She was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, tall, elegant, spirited, intelligent, and still beautiful at forty-three—everything, in short, that a queen should be. It was she who had stiffened the spine of her Hohenzollern husband, the weak and vacillating King Ferdinand, persuading him to put his natural inclinations aside and join the Allies in their war against the Germans and the Central Powers.

  She was a romantic in the grand sense. At the moment of her greatest despair, the arrival of a bold and unconventional Yukoner gave her courage. At their first brief meeting on March 2, she had only the vaguest idea of who he was, but he was ce
rtainly impressive. “A very curious, fascinating sort of man, who is frightened of nothing, and who, by his extraordinary force of will, gets through everywhere. The real type English adventurer books are written around.”

  The second meeting lasted two hours, with the Queen at her lowest ebb. The Allied missions were vacating Jassy, fearing the German advance would cut them off, and the Queen stayed up to make her farewells. It was a black night, the rain pouring down as if to accentuate her anguish. Then, into the reception hall, uniform dripping from the deluge, walked Joe Boyle. “Have you come to see me?” she asked as he advanced to meet her. “No, Ma’am,” Boyle replied, “I have come to help you.”

  Queen Marie of Romania, Boyle’s friend, confidante, and reputed mistress who enjoyed striking poses like this for the camera. She was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

  Marie’s fervent recollections of those midnight hours vibrate with the kind of passion one associates with cheap nineteenth-century novels or early twentieth-century movies. “I tried to let myself be steeled by the man’s relentless energy, tried to absorb some of the quiet force which emanates from him. I poured out my heart to him in those hours.… I do not know all that I told him, the memory is a blur, but I made a clean breast of all my grief and when he left me and I said that everyone was forsaking me, he answered very quietly, ‘But I don’t,’ and the grip of his hand was as strong as iron.”

  Boyle left almost immediately for Odessa to implement the peace treaty with Russia that the Romanian cabinet had finally signed. Before he went, Marie reminded him that more than two dozen of her country’s most notable citizens—ex-ministers, politicians, industrialists, members of the aristocracy—were being held hostage in Odessa by the Bolsheviks, awaiting a prisoner exchange for Russians held in Romania. The situation was precarious. The prisoners were locked up in Turma, a heavily guarded prison fortress. Around them, something close to civil war was breaking out between leaders of the inexperienced Bolshevik regime and so-called White Russians. Under the new treaty, which Boyle himself had pressed for, the hostages were to be dispatched by rail from Odessa to Jassy while the four hundred Russians hived in Romania would get safe transport back to their own country. It was not to work out that way.

  Now another remarkable woman enters the picture—a doughty Canadian, Madame Ethel Greening Pantazzi, whose husband, a high-ranking Romanian naval officer, was one of the hostages. A friendly source within the prison had bad news for her. The Bolsheviks in charge, she told Boyle, had decamped with all the prisoners’ money, valuables, and personal papers, leaving them guarded by the much-feared pro-Bolshevik Battalion of Death. Instead of being taken to the railway station for the journey home, they were being pushed onto the waterfront where the steamship Imperator Trajan waited to take them away, perhaps to their deaths.

  Odessa was in a state of chaos. With Madame Pantazzi as his interpreter, Boyle hurried here and there vainly seeking a Romanian official who might be empowered to assist in an exchange of prisoners that he himself had negotiated. “I’ve been up in the Yukon and know how to deal with men like these,” he told her. “They have never gotten the best of me yet!”

  Boyle was in his element at such moments. At the dockside they found that active preparations were being made to spirit the hostages away. As they rushed off again in search of aid, Boyle turned to her with a smile. “Quite a day for a lady!” he remarked. “I like this sort of thing—do you?” And Madame Pantazzi had to admit to herself that “in spite of the anguish tearing at my heart about B. [her husband], I was surprised to find I rather did.”

  Unable to find help, they returned to the dockside. Here a series of tussles took place, with some hostages who were forced onto the ship trying to shoulder their way back down the gangplank and into the crowd while others were being driven back by guards. Members of the death battalion were firing indiscriminately into the throng, and Boyle realized that the safest place for the prisoners was aboard the ship. Pinned down momentarily by the press of people, he spotted Madame Pantazzi and shouted, “I can’t stand this. I’m going with them!” To which she replied, “Go! Or they are all dead men!” (The dialogue may seem overheated, but the story of this venture, as recorded in Madame Pantazzi’s book Romania in Light and Shadow, was confirmed subsequently by the hostages themselves.)

  Unarmed and with only the uniform he stood in, Boyle forced his way up the steep gangplank to reach members of the death battalion who were beating an old man. He seized two of the tormentors, banged their heads together, and threw them back on the dock. The ship finally pushed off with a thousand Bolsheviks on board and all the hostages lined up on deck to be counted by the meticulous Boyle, who found that nine were missing or dead.

  Where were they headed? Clearly not to Romania. After three days poking about the Black Sea and being turned away at several ports, the Imperator Trajan with its hungry and dispirited human cargo, was finally allowed to dock at Theodosia. The Battalion of Death refused to give up its prisoners—an alarming state of affairs, especially when Boyle received a whispered warning from a sympathizer aboard the ship. The prisoners, he said, were to be marched to an ammunitions shed and “accidentally” blown up.

  Boyle and the high-class Romanian hostages he rescued from the death battalion.

  Boyle moved quickly. Borrowing money from the British consul in town, he bribed the captain of a small freighter, the Chernomor, to take the group to Romania. He had already engaged twenty Chinese soldiers from the Bolshevik International Brigade ostensibly to guard the hostages but actually to keep an eye on the unreliable members of the death battalion. At the last moment as the freighter made ready to sail off, the Chinese escorted their charges on board, catching the death battalion watchmen aboard the Trajan off guard. When two rushed over to find out what was happening, Boyle suggested they board the freighter and he would explain. When they did so, he locked the pair in a cabin and the Chernomor steamed away.

  It took days of negotiation at the Black Sea ports of Sebastapol and Sulina, marked by threats, bribery, and bluff on Boyle’s part, to get his charges back to Jassy. There he found himself a national figure, cheered by thousands and decorated with the country’s finest honour for what Marie, in her diary, called “a prodigious feat of unselfish energy.” Suddenly the man from the Yukon was the Saviour of Romania, providing that country with a hero when it most needed one.

  None of this was lost on the British army hierarchy or the bureaucrats and politicians in Canada who had struggled to put a damper on Boyle’s activities and vainly tried to keep him under close control. The elusive Boyle was hard to pin down. Every time the War Office tried to reach him, he had slipped away on a new adventure. The British ambassador in Petrograd considered Boyle a meddling freelancer with no military authority and at the end of December 1917 had wired his Foreign Office urging that he be recalled. The British in turn put pressure on Canada, and as a result the Duke of Devonshire, as governor general, issued an order unique in Canadian military history requiring him to come home. But where was Boyle? Somewhere in eastern Europe where the British couldn’t reach him. By the time he reappeared in Jassy to a tumultuous welcome, the authorities were forced to backtrack. The British ambassador in Jassy was told to retain Boyle “so long as his services were considered useful.”

  This was the climax of Boyle’s career. He had helped negotiate the Russian–Romanian peace treaty, had risked his life to save some of the country’s notable citizens, and had brought back the nation’s archives and currency. The Bolshevik leaders of Russia held him in greater esteem than did the Canadians. As Bruce Lockhart, the unofficial British agent in Moscow, reported to the Foreign Office in April, “Trotsky has frequently asked about him and would be glad to make use of his services.”

  To the snobbish military establishment he was nothing more than a civilian and a nuisance. He continued to wear his uniform long after hostilities had ceased, a stubborn insistence that galled one highly placed Canadian staff officer who desc
ribed him as “a bluffing adventurer … who should not receive official encouragement.” Every effort was made to force him out of this trademark costume, but he had an answer to that. He had switched to civilian clothes just once, he said, but that act had nettled George V, who admired him, often inviting him to breakfast at Buckingham Palace. The King told him that as his sovereign he was ordering him to get back into the uniform that he had earned by his work for the Allied cause. At least that is the story Boyle told, and no one had the temerity to check it with the crusty monarch.

  Boyle went on wearing the uniform for two more years in spite of further attempts to stop him. When much of Romania was under German occupation he had made a point of going everywhere in khaki. “Tell him to take off that uniform or I shall have him shot,” Mackensen, the commanding German field marshal, told the Romanian war minister. Boyle’s response was forthright. “Tell him that no German living will compel me to take off my uniform. I carry a single action Colt, and I am a man of my word. I promise to drill holes in the first German be he general or private who lays violent hands on me.” They left him alone from that moment.

  Why this insistence on wearing the uniform? Other field officers sometimes wore mufti on informal or private occasions. Not Boyle. For him, the pleated serge with the lapel buttons of gleaming Klondike gold and the yukon shoulder flashes identified him not just as a Canadian but as a special kind of Canadian—a Northerner from the most glamorous corner of the Dominion, known the world over. It made him unique. No other officer bore that form of identification. It gave him status, and in eastern Europe it gave him authority.

  There was more to it than that. Here, in the company of strangers, these magical symbols, combined with his field officer’s crown and pip, served to give reassurance to a man whose financial edifice was tottering. They reminded him, as they reminded others, that on the face of it he was Colonel Boyle, King of the Klondike—commander of men, mining magnate, soldier of fortune, confidant of a queen. He wore his uniform like a second skin and he had no intention of peeling it off.