Bloody Sunset
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
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Postscript
Also by Alexander Fullerton…
Copyright
Bloody Sunset
Alexander Fullerton
1
Earth and stones erupted as shells plunged down along the crest of the rising ground ahead, and those were Russian gunners – their battery would be on the blind side of the ridge, Bob guessed – scrambling down the slope this way. ‘Getting out from under’ – a manoeuvre which seemed to be their almost invariable reaction to finding themselves under fire or direct attack. The sergeant of the North Staffs on the seat beside him gestured – helplessly, wordlessly, his only comment that brusque gesture and the expression of disgust on his blunt features. He shouted now with one hand ready on the truck’s door – ‘This’ll do us, sir – thank you, near as you’ll get, I—’
A shell’s scrunching whistle ended in an explosion so close that the shower of debris came with solid, rattling impacts in the blast, the truck’s windscreen miraculously surviving as Bob brought it to a sliding, jarring halt at a slant of about thirty degrees. The wheels on one side were in churned dirt and the others on rock – the sergeant being absolutely right, this was about as far as you’d get on any wheels, and in all the circumstances a lot farther than Bob should have chanced it. But – in for a penny… The sergeant shouted back over his shoulder as he jumped, ‘Come on, boys, out!’ – then he was running, the rest of them following and spreading as they ran, up towards the ridge and the fall of shot while the Russians altered course away, diverging to their right, as unwilling to meet these Englishmen as they were to stand up to Turkish shellfire. Bob turning the truck meanwhile, the ramshackle old conveyance lurching this way and that like a drunken camel but still miraculously not bogging down – yet – and with the battle all astern now, he had in his mind’s eye those poor bloody riflemen so ready to assume the role of gunners – if they got that far, lived that long – some of them, a lot wouldn’t, you could bet – toiling into it up the ridge with their set, desperately youthful English faces… The road wasn’t far ahead now – thirty yards, with a bit of a bank to get over, a haze of other fighting over and around the oilrigs of Binagadi about two miles to the north and – here, closer, and as concerned his own fortunate self – the high ground, cliff-like escarpment, he’d be climbing it in a minute, touch wood – towering all along on his right, the south, that great bulwark protecting Baku town. Bulwark for the time being – until the Turks got up there… Over the low bank: crashing over, listing wildly with a noise like jolting scrap iron, the old rattletrap lifting and crashing down again, one side and then the other; as he dragged the wheel over he saw three Russians in the road ahead, two of them with a wounded man dragging between them, swinging half-round to face him now as they heard the truck coming up behind them and obviously taking it for granted that he’d pick them up. But there was a first-aid station only a few hundred yards away – he’d noticed it on the way here, just minutes ago, and searching that way now he could see a tent’s sloping roof, the scarlet cross. Then he was pounding past the three Russians – one head hanging, the other two open-mouthed, disbelieving…
Poor beggars. But it was nothing new, that tactic of ducking smartly out of awkward corners. Just a few days ago General Dunsterville had personally witnessed a whole Russian battalion taking to its heels, and he’d written to the Baku authorities – the Central Caspian Dictatorship, they called themselves – stating bluntly that if local troops continued to run away whenever they were shot at, he – Dunsterville, head of the British military mission – wasn’t going to continue wasting British lives, he’d evacuate Baku and let them take their chances.
Which would mean the Turks would walk in, virtually. Apart from the handful of British troops here, the only fighting men worth a damn – apart from the Turks themselves, of course – were Colonel Bicherakov’s Cossacks, but they were about 300 miles north-west, holding Petrovsk and its environs against the Bolsheviks in the north and west.
The blunt-nosed truck was grinding uphill now. Gradient steepening until the track had become a series of hairpin bends up the face of the escarpment, and Bob resolving not to breathe a word about this to anyone – since he’d had no business being here, no right even to have been behind the wheel of this antique vehicle in the first place. Not that he could very well have refused to stop and pick up those soldiers, after their sergeant had waved him down and begged a lift, their own lorry having given up the ghost. They’d been off duty – in some billet in the area of Cherniye Gorod, presumably – and there’d been a panic call for any available reinforcements to be rushed up to the Binagadi/Mud Volcano section of the thinly-held defences, and Bob Cowan, Lieutenant RNR, who’d been on an unauthorized visit to – well, to a young lady, in Cherniye Gorod, the oil town two miles east of Baku itself – had happened along, in the event seemed even to have made himself useful.
But in fact – he realized this now, with time to think about it – it was all of a piece, parts of one picture. His purpose in visiting Leonide had been to urge her to get out of Baku before the Turks fought their way in – with consequences that would be truly dreadful, indeed had been seen elsewhere in recent months. Turks, with Tartars at their heels, thirsty mainly for Armenian blood but not being all that particular, and anyway Leonide was half Armenian, through her mother. Dunsterville hadn’t been issuing any idle threat in that letter to the local bigwigs, at this stage it did look like touch-and-go whether he’d hang on or pull out, and without the British stiffening – British taking the brunt of the fighting and casualties, in fact – these others wouldn’t stem the tide for more than ten minutes. It was plain lunacy for her to stay and risk it, especially since she didn’t even belong here. Her family home was on the other side of the Caspian, at Krasnovodsk; she was in Baku only to fix things up domestically for her recently widowed uncle, set him up with a good housekeeper, and so forth, then go back home. This uncle, George Muromsky, was a big noise in the oil business, while Leonide’s father Sergei in Krasnovodsk also traded in oil but more importantly was a member of the Trans-Caspian government.
Which was how Bob had met her. In Krasnovodsk he’d been required to attend an official reception given by Colonel Peter Fleming, the British military commander in Krasnovodsk, and Sergei Muromsky had been the guest of honour, accompanied by his wife and daughter. Daughter Leonide Sergeyevna Muromskaya being petite, dark-haired, dark-eyed, vivacious and exceptionally pretty, as lively and talkative as Bob himself was taciturn – at any rate this was how others thought of him, he knew, although the truth as he saw it was simply that he didn’t chatter much – and both she and her parents had been intrigued to meet this rather large young Englishman who when he did feel obliged to do more than smile, nod or grunt was able to do it in absolutely fluent Russian. While from his own point of view, she was a refuge and relief from the monastic and professional seclusion of naval life; and having the advantage of the language, being in fact half Russian himself – well, why not?
* * *
In the Baku dockyard he parked the truck where it had been earlier this morning, behind a go-down they’d taken over for Royal Navy stores, and shut its door quietly, intending to walk away and with luck have nobody even aware the truck had been made use of; but actually thinking more about the
fighting he’d just come from, hoping to God the Turks would be repulsed again this time, and wondering how long it would take – if they weren’t – to complete the evacuation: and from this back to a natural concern for Leonide. Not that she was in any way his responsibility; but neither she nor her uncle seemed to appreciate just how precarious the military situation had become, that they could not rely for ever on a mere handful of British troops holding off a whole Turkish army… Deep in thought, he’d barely turned his back on the truck when a voice called jarringly from an open doorway, ‘Took a little joyride, did we?’
The West Country tones of Mr Dewhurst, Gunner, were unmistakable. Bob paused, saw the tall, ginger-headed Warrant Officer as he emerged from the shed with a look of triumph on his pink, long-nosed face.
‘Morning, Guns.’
‘Any time you’ve a hankering for my department’s transport—’
‘You weren’t here to ask. Bit early in the day for you, I dare say.’ He saw the dig go home… ‘And I was in a rush.’
‘You’re in the rattle now, I reckon.’
‘In the rattle’ meant ‘in trouble’. A man up on a disciplinary charge was ‘in the rattle’… Dewhurst elaborated, ‘Been shoutin’ for you all over. Past hour or more… Well, I saw the truck was gone, and I drew me own conclusions, but—’
‘You didn’t let on. You’re a pal, Dewsy. Who wants me and what for?’
‘Better ask the Admiral. He’s still on board, far as I know.’
On board HMS Zoroaster, this had to mean. And by ‘the Admiral’ the Gunner meant Commodore Norris, Senior Naval Officer Caspian. Zoroaster was one of eight merchant ships which the Royal Navy had commandeered and armed with four-inch and four-seven guns hauled overland on trucks and tractors and camels’ backs from Basra on the Persian Gulf. A major undertaking and a hell of a journey, by river barges most of the two hundred miles from the head of the Gulf to Dizful, and from there another four hundred over deserts and mountains via Hamadan and Kazvin to Enzeli, transporting not only guns but the ammunition for them, as well as a mass of other naval stores and one forty-foot CMB – Coastal Motorboat – plus depthcharges, searchlights, wireless telegraphy equipment – all the gear they’d needed to transform eight old rustbuckets into warships – of a kind…
They were flying the White Ensign now, anyway. Their commanding officers were British, with an assortment of British and Russian officers and crews. The letters HMS still looked and sounded a bit odd when prefixed to such ships’ names as President Kruger, Emil Nobel, Allaverdi, Slava, Babiabut, Zoroaster – this last-named and the Kruger being currently in Baku, the others either at Krasnovodsk or on patrol.
Four of the flotilla of eight were constantly at sea. The Bolsheviks held Astrakhan, at the top end of the Caspian and the mouth of the Volga, with a sizeable naval force, some of which had recently been transferred from the Baltic by way of that mighty Russian river; and since Comrade Trotsky had mentioned Baku as being high on his acquisition list, the maintenance of an efficient watch at sea was obviously essential.
Bob climbed the gangway to the deck of HMS Zoroaster, saluted the side and asked the quartermaster, ‘Commodore on board?’
‘Gone ashore, sir.’ The leading seaman added, ‘But he was wanting you, sir – everyone’s been—’
‘CO on board?’
‘In his cabin, sir.’
To be wanted in a hurry wasn’t all that unusual. Bob had been appointed to this circus for sea duties with interpreting as a sideline, but as things had turned out it was very much the other way round. There was a shortage of Russians who could manage a little pigeon-English, let alone British with even a smattering of Russian, whereas Bob had been born and raised in St Petersburg – known for the last four years, since the outbreak of war in 1914 in fact, as Petrograd – and he was probably the only man in Baku at this moment who was equally at home in either language.
He knocked on the cabin door, heard a gruff ‘Come in’, and pushed the door open.
‘Morning, sir.’
‘Well…’ Lieutenant-Commander Eric Barker – RNR, his nautical background was Merchant Navy like Bob’s – was a heavy-set, prematurely balding man in his middle thirties. Small blue eyes glittering in reflected sunshine as he glanced up from his desk… ‘Well, at last!’
‘No idea – until a minute ago. I gather the Commodore—’
‘He went up to the Europa half an hour ago, had to collect some Russian there. General Dunsterville wanted him and you—’
‘Take the stores truck, may I?’
‘If it’s available – I suppose – and if—’ He’d checked suddenly, and slapped his own forehead. ‘Damn it. Clean forgot, you’d have gone without it. Here.’
Handing him a buff-coloured ‘OHMS’ envelope with Lieut. Cowan RNR scrawled on it in the blue indelible pencil invariably used by the Commodore’s yeoman of signals. A signal therefore, or cable by landline – communications with the outside world still had to be routed via Basra – and very likely passed to him for translation into Russian, for the Commodore to pass on to someone or other… Bob ripped it open: focused on its signalese address and opening words with a sense first of surprise, then shock, then – dismay.
He was sitting – not having been conscious of the act of doing so, only finding himself in the round-backed wooden armchair…
‘Bad news, Bob?’
He’d leant forward: shutting his eyes, crumpling the sheet of signal pad between clenched fists. Seeing in memory the final line of the last letter he’d had from his father, a letter written from a town called Vologda ten or eleven weeks ago: and he was hearing that line from the letter, in his father’s low, rasping tone… That’ll have to be it for a while, then, old lad. See you in Blighty before too long, God willing…
God had not been willing. The old man had been taking passage from Archangel in the cruiser HMS Splendid, bound for Rosyth, and she’d been lost with all hands – either mined or torpedoed.
‘Bob?’
He looked up, nodded to the man behind the desk. ‘Sorry.’ Pulling himself together: a process which included remembering where he was, and that he was required uptown, had been about to leave – and at that, in a hurry. He paused at the cabin door: ‘I’ll – take the stores truck. Thank you, sir.’
His father had been ‘getting a bit of trouble from the old ticker’ – so he’d written in the letter from Vologda. Nothing to worry about, he was good for a few years yet, but he was being sent home ‘just to be on the safe side’. In any case there hadn’t been much useful work for him of late, in the drastically changed circumstances since last year’s revolution and the Bolshevik takeover that had followed it. In 1914 he’d been recruited by the Foreign Office and appended to the British Embassy staff with special responsibilities for war supplies and shipping: having been in trade in Russia for nearly fifty years he’d been worth his weight in gold. Then all the Allied embassies had moved to Vologda a few months ago, when Lenin had transferred the seat of government from Petrograd to Moscow: Vologda being on the railway and well placed geographically for a getaway either north to Archangel or east through Siberia, if evacuation of diplomatic staffs became desirable.
It wasn’t ‘the old ticker’ that had finished him off, anyway. Either a mine or a torpedo, the Admiralty had said. It didn’t seem to matter which – not all that much…
If it was true. Suppose he’d been late getting to Archangel, left in some other ship instead…
Out into sunshine like a furnace. Returning the QM’s salute. Rattling down the brow to the jetty.
Accept it. The old man’s dead. Drowned. Accept it, come to terms with it…
The truck was where he’d left it. Rumblings of gunfire from the north like distant thunder. He wondered how those North Staffs boys were getting on, whether they’d managed to get the abandoned guns into action, and how many of them might by this time be dead or wounded. Shouting into Mr Dewhurst’s doorway ‘I’m taking your truck, Guns!’ T
hen stooping, grasping the crank-handle: with that signal in his pocket, a physical reality, undeniable, unchangeable…
The engine fired, spluttered, roared unevenly. About the only thing there was no shortage of, here at Baku, was petrol. There were oceans of it. All the ships were oil-fired, too. The oil was of course the chief attraction of the place, to the Turks and their German allies. Well, to everyone… But the strategic situation wasn’t just that simple. Oil was part of it, and the Central Powers would certainly have loved to get their hands on these gushing wells, but – looking further, across the Caspian and over the Ust-Urt Plateau and the Golden Road to Samarkand – apart from the oil, this was a vital way-station on the Turks’ route eastward into Afghanistan and thence into British India via the North-West Frontier. The Bolsheviks had ratted on their allies, signed their own peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk – in March of this year, 1918, just a few months ago – which was why Britain had had to send in military missions to organize and support local military resistance, and a naval force to secure the Caspian.
The Caspian was the door eastward; it had to be kept shut and barred, policed by the Royal Navy. That was the object of the naval presence, the reasoning that had lain behind the decision to mount that extraordinarily ambitious overland trek – an experience which he, Cowan, had enormously enjoyed.
At the Europa he parked the truck, hurried into the hotel foyer, looked around and spotted the Armenian manager.
‘Commodore Norris here?’
‘Ah, Lieutenant Cowan! What a pleasure—’
‘Is Commodore Norris in the hotel?’
‘Ah, no, sir. But I believe he left a message…’
The message was to the effect that from here he’d been going to the Dunsterforce HQ, and Lieutenant Cowan was to report there at his earliest convenience. The manager murmured at Bob’s elbow, ‘They are saying there is a battle in progress now. Does the lieutenant have any information as to—’
Bloody Sunset Page 1