by Simon Boxall
The guide, completely unflustered, told them what he wanted them to do. The first group was already making ready to leave; Yulia was going along with Anna and Pyotr. The other group was led into the safety of the forest and the guide told them to bivouac down amongst the bracken and the ferns until his return. Georgii made his way back and said his goodbyes to Yulia, Anna and Pyotr. Yulia and Georgii swapped their overcoats.
It was a tearful goodbye, as far as goodbyes were concerned. The two children did not want to leave and virtually had to be dragged off after the guide by Yulia.
For a long time, after the first group had departed, Georgii stood there staring off in the direction that they had walked off in. Then he solemnly turned around and headed off back to the second groups temporary encampment.
The funny thing was that in all the time that they had travelled as a group Georgii had only had time for Yulia, O'Reilly and the two children. Occasionally he had spoken to the guide and, on several occasions, he had made small talk with some of his other fellow, travellers. But, as was his custom, he kept himself to himself. Not unsurprisingly the others had done the same. In this 'Golden Age of Paranoia', no one was going to completely trust the other, unless they had to; you could see it in their eyes, as Georgii Radetzky knew only too well the Cheka, and its informants, were everywhere.
Sitting down amongst some tall forest ferns, Georgii started to think. It was obvious that the two groups were after him. The reason; it was simply this, he knew too much. His presence could only jeopardise the wellbeing of the others. He looked at his watch. It was only an hour since the first group had set off. So looking around him, Georgii went to his pack and fished out his field glasses, and then he made one of those life changing, Georgii Radetzky, executive decisions. One of those decisions, would ultimately, send his life off in a completely different direction. On the pretence of going to answer the call of nature, Georgii set off after them, but made sure that he kept a safe distance. It didn't take him long to catch up with the first group.
Georgii reflected on the moment, shook his head, and then chuckled quietly to himself. Old Okhrana habits die hard, he thought!
Chapter Forty Three
The interview that Stalin conducted with Comrade Trofimov was short, sharp, and, as usual, sweet. He congratulated her on the excellent piece of information that she'd provided. Joseph Stalin was feeling good, in fact, on the inside he bordered on the ecstatic.
This did not go unnoticed. Trofimov decided that she would pull out all the stops. She enquired whether the 'Comrade Commissar' had made any dinner arrangements, if not, would he care to dine with her.
Comrade Stalin, as he stood there pondering the 'Granite Faced Slag's' not so unreasonable dinner request, decided to 'Play hard to get', under the pretence that he had to make all haste and get to Lvov. Matters of 'National Security' rested in his hands and he had decided to make an early start in the morning. But if she could wait until his return, he would be more than delighted to take up her invitation.
But it was true, he had to get on after Radetzky. Strike whilst the iron was hot, too much was at stake, and he simply could not afford to let the trail go cold. So, after an impromptu working dinner, and several phone calls to Moscow, Joseph Stalin had decided on a firm line of action. The Lithuanian driver would stay with him and Sergo Ordzhonikidze and a team of experienced and trusted Kevshors would arrive 'Poste-haste' to augment their party.
The plan was, when they arrived they would fan out into the forest to track down the illusive Radetzky. Also 'The Commissar for The Nationalities', was only too aware that the 'Central Committee' had given him a job to do and 'do-it' he must. So at four the next morning he pressed on towards Lvov.
Two weeks later, on a brisk May morning Joseph Stalin rubbed his hands gleefully. He felt pleased as punch. The trap he had laid was set and the net was slowly closing in around Georgii Radetzky.
Brusilov was in place and, unwittingly, 'The Old-boy' would be the bait. The Lithuanian was leading the party and the unsuspecting Georgii was moving in the right direction, towards Brusilov's cavalry encampment.
Chapter Forty Four
Georgii's guts had further deteriorated. He now felt distinctively uncomfortable, and his arse was getting sore, but through stubbornness and grim determination he managed to keep on trailing the first party.
Pyotr and Anna were right; two other groups were trailing the party. Both kids had been most definitely 'Spot On' when they had told him about the Lithuanian guide communicating with one of the parties. Looking through his field glasses, and stretching his powers of deductive analysis to the limit, Georgii could see that the first group the Lithuanian communicated with was 'Cheka'. But 'Cheka' with a difference. With that party, there were also others he had not seen for a long time; it was those swarthy looking blackmarketeers from the railway yards of Moscow. The other group, if you could really call it a group, varied from one or two persons in size. It soon became obvious that both groups were tracking him, but now one of the groups was also now keeping 'a-weather-eye' upon the other.
As Georgii Radetzky knew, you didn't have to be a genius to work out that the first group were acting for 'The Commissar of The Nationalities'; but the question of who the second group were, nagged at the back of his mind, Georgii spent a lot of time dwelling upon this fact, but to that question, as of yet, he could not find an answer.
The further West he tracked the group, Georgii found that it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to maintain a safe distance. The forest occasionally gave way to fields and remote farming communities. The place was also crawling with armed groups, refugees and other disparate characters. Like everybody else, they were all desperately seeking safety and shelter.
War had always had been a surreal experience. Anyone, as far as Georgii was concerned, who had made it through from beginning to end of the last one deserved a medal. But here, in the forest, people were carrying their possessions on their back; they scurried off and around, only to reappear a while later. Also armed bands were passing him more frequently. They all wore the same 'hollowed-out', sunken, dirty faces. Men carried injured comrades on stretchers and supported other`s, you could see that survival was the main priority. All of them ignored the lice ridden, stomach rolling Georgii Radetzky, as they flitted off towards the relative safety of the rear. The thunder of artillery was, sometimes, all around. Sometimes it would abate, only to start up again from a different direction.
Occasionally he would glean some information of value from a passerby. Georgii found out from one group of refugees that the Vistula River lay some twenty miles ahead. They beckoned him to come with them, but he politely declined. As he was only too aware, around here you never knew who your friends were. He reasoned it was best to travel on alone by himself.
There was also the slight problem of his guts. Georgii was now stopping every twenty to thirty minutes to relieve himself. This meant that he had to move sharply in order to keep up with Yulia's party; despite all of the delays he always managed to find them. He put this down to the fact that, as the group threaded its way through field and forest they too faced the same problems as he did. On one or two occasions he caught good glimpses of Pyotr, Yulia and Anna, and this, temporarily, seemed to give his spirits a lift.
But it was the forest which never ceased to inspire. On many an occasion Georgii found himself looking up towards its roof; shafts of light burst through the canopy and illuminated the ferns, fauna and the other plants that littered the forest floor. In a way, it reminded him of when he was a young boy when he had wondrously gazed at the insides of a giant cathedral atrium. Childhood awe had now returned; the shafts of light endlessly played with the physical features of the dusty forest; as the light, back then, had set the giant stain glass windows of his childhood on fire. The boughs of giant silver birches, like pillars lifted up towards the heavens, which streamed down clear shafts of magnesium light.
At one stage Georgii found himself leanin
g against the trunk of a giant oak tree. In front of him, about half a mile away, was the first party. They, he could see, were making ready for the night. The following day he was hungry and Georgii's head had started to ache with a vengeance. He'd spent the better part of that day, when he wasn't trailing the party, retching his guts up, Georgii was also painfully aware of the fact that he was rapidly becoming dehydrated and, in every other respect, he was beginning to lack nutrition and fibre to continue. In short his body was starting to flag.
He looked around him, and saw that at the base of a giant tree there was a clump of wild mushrooms. 'Fuck it' Georgii thought, he was desperate to eat anything. He looked longingly at the mushrooms, they looked pretty normal to him. He looked away and then looked back at them. The temptation was too much for Georgii Radetzky to contain; he grabbed a big fat one and bit right through to the stem. 'By Christ, it tasted good,' he thought. In a second bite, he had finished off the stem, and by the fourth bite he was well into demolishing a second mushroom, when the world started, slowly at first, to spin and, at this point, he couldn't hold on any longer. His guts completely gave way and the contents started to trickle down his legs.
The light below the forests canopy burned with an intensity he had never experienced before. Georgii Radetzky tried to move, but found he was paralysed from top to bottom. The branches of the tall mighty oaks and elms started to bend, unfurl in all directions; thousands of voices were speaking in different tongues and all of them seemed to be directed at him. Having now slid down the trunk, Georgii found that he was slipping in and out of consciousness. He could not make out what was being said. Ferns were now growing arms and legs and green faces had started to appear on the ends of their stems. Occasionally he could make out a snippet of a word but, it all seemed, to him, to be complete and utter gibberish.
The brilliance of the natural light began to subside, but had now been replaced by an impenetrable blue black; and diarrhoea was still oozing, uncontrollably, out of his rear-end. Fighting the darkness Georgii rolled his head from side to side; saliva was dribbling out of his mouth. He could feel all of the strength draining out of his feeble body; he could only liken it to a flickering candle down on the last of its wick. The forest was now quite still. Leaning his head against the wooden trunk, Georgii Radetzky suddenly found himself the sole witness, to a weird and wonderful firework display. White lights shot up out of the ground and briefly illuminated the forest. On and on, went 'Mother Nature's' display ... As he lay there watching this strange and bizarre spectacle; the seasons started to change and time had started to accelerate; leaves turned from brown to green. Acorns turned to trees; butterflies turned to papilla, rain sprung up out of the ground and summer turned to winter. On and on went this bizarre spectacle. Georgii continued to dribble; by now the contents of his stomach were soaking into the ground and his eyesight slipped in and out of focus.
The strange sensations never gave up and, as his head spun round and round, Georgii slowly gave up the fight to stay in the present. As he sank down into the world of the unconscious, the last thing he remembered before he finally passed out was a young man with a pimply green face, dressed in what appeared to be an oversized 'Red Army' uniform, pinch him on the cheek.
Chapter Forty Five
Ever since Dominic Falkowski had been hit in the face by an obtuse Russian schoolboy, in the school playground, of all places; Dominick Falkowski was adamant about this one fact. He simply hated Russians. Their whole culture, their language, even their smell nauseated him. He had spoken to others about this 'hatred', so he figured it was because of his 'Arch' Polish-ness, and he supposed it was the same for all other patriots, wrongly or rightly he assumed, it had always been this way.
They, the Russians, took the best jobs the best women and the best land. Now at the age of twenty three he had a score to settle. In his heart there was a 'Wrong' that desperately needed to be righted. And the birth of the Polish nation, soon after the end of 'The Great War', had given him the very excuse he needed to redress this imbalance. In fact the great dream for all Poles was to re-establish their nation's former prestige, along with its eighteenth century borders.
Dominick Falkowski had been born twenty three years earlier near 'Luck' in the east. As his mother had always maintained he had been born to 'Good' Polish stock. He believed it! Apart from the incident with the Russian bully, Dominik's mother would always reassure him, especially when he came home in tears, that on that day he most definitely had been the better man. 'Don't you worry 'little one',' she said, one day the Russians will get what's coming to them. You see! No one likes them!' Others thought differently of 'Little' Dom's playground heroics. Despite that premature glitch, Dominik had always kept his head down and out of trouble.
At school, even though he tended to be somewhat sickly, on occasions; Dominik Falkowski matriculated top of his class and, in the summer of nineteen fourteen, was all set to read medicine at the University of Warsaw. Then the 'Little Father' threw a wobbly and mobilised the army and, despite being of 'Good-stock', he was refused entry on grounds of flat feet, into, his most Imperial Majesties army. As far as he was concerned it wasn't his fight anyway. He hoped they would lose.
The tides of war swept this way and that. The Tsars 'Tin-pot' army was outmanoeuvred and pushed back by those wily foxes Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Nineteen seventeen came and went and Dominik Falkowski's prayers were answered. Lose they did, and by spectacular standards as well. After all, he reasoned, nobody did failure like the Russians. Especially after the bread riots in St Petersburg and the mutinies of Poles in the Austro Hungarian army; all this, along with the German collapse on the western front, Woodrow Wilson, 'The Great Friend', had kept his word and the Second Polish Republic had been born.
But now it was the end of May nineteen-twenty. Ever since 'The Greater Polish Uprising', of the previous year Dominik had been wearing army fatigues. Now he found himself leading a small detachment, a 'Special Operations Unit', of the newly reconstituted Polish army. He looked at his map, they were somewhere in the vicinity of Slutsk.
He knew they were near their objective because, during the briefing earlier in the day, 'Military Intelligence' had told him that radio intercepts had reported that the Comrade Commissar, their meet, was most definitely in the locality. It was also at the meeting that the intelligence officer had introduced the young lieutenant to his charge, none other than Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Putting on a brave face, whilst trying to suppress the rising bile of revulsion, Dominik Falkowski forced himself to be polite to this visiting dignitary. A few minutes later the same officer, taking him by the arm, took Dominik over to one side and had also told him that General Pilsudski had taken more than a special interest in the successful outcome of this operation. If it was a success the young lieutenant could expect a promotion in the field. Those, the officer said, were Pilsudski's very words!
Scratching his sweaty brow with his dirty nails, Dominik Falkowski, like Georgii Radzetsky before him, pondered on the fact, that this forest stretched from the Baltic too the Pacific. He tugged on the string attached above his left ankle three times, and then signalled to the unit to move on. They obediently followed him.
Chapter Forty Six
In his makeshift field HQ, Joseph Stalin had made himself quite at home. Outside his tent he watched a dragonfly hover and then speedily make off in the other direction. Whilst he watched this spectacle he puffed away at his pipe.
The morning had started badly. The Lithuanian people trafficker, Florijonas, had appeared to give his men the slip near the Vistula River. The Poles had successfully counter attacked and the Red army was falling back in disarray. Kamenev was screaming for assistance. He could scream all he liked, but he wouldn't get any help from him. He got up and walked over to a large map that was spread all over a large table. With his finger The Commissar circled an area of dense woodland near the Vistula River. He puffed long and hard on his pipe. Joseph Stalin knew that it was in this area that Georg
ii Radetzky would be found. To him it only seemed a matter of time. He would get that file off Radetzky. The phone rang, he lifted up the receiver, and the news was good and bad. Radetzky had been picked up by one of Brusilov's pickets, but the bad news was he was unconscious and in a bad way.
In the meantime he could break camp and get on the move. If he was on the move he could still resist requests from Moscow to go to the aid of the incompetent Kamenev. But to placate the Kremlin he could make all the right noises and appear to go through the motions. Maybe he could head back towards Tver. Trofimov had successfully pacified local dissent, and remembering the last time they had met, he had distinctly got the impression that she wanted some carnal action out of him.
The phone rang again; he spoke for a moment and then replaced the receiver. The news was good, after months of trailing Radetzky the end appeared to be in sight; the moment he came round, would be the moment he made his move.
He thought of God, and the fact 'The Almighty' never, ever, let him down. It was a good feeling, a very good feeling indeed. The Lithuanian driver came over with the news that they had to move, and move fast, the Polish were coming.
Stalin returned to his tent. All of his religious paraphernalia had been left back in Moscow. No sense getting caught with that lot he thought. He closed his eyes for a moment and contemplated his future destiny. Russia was going to be rightfully his; there was no contest here, his plans were now so advanced, it was all almost within his hands, Russia would be his! End of story. The emissary he'd sent to Pilsudski, 'Good Old' Sergo, had returned with a message from the Polish leader. Things were starting to pick up again and, this was not an understatement, things most definitely were on the up.
He went back over to the table and looked at the message: