Knight Without Armour

by James Hilton

  A.J. and Daly, like the rest, were waiting for the floods to subside. They were both keen to get away, and even the hospitality of the Valimoffs, so unstintingly given, would not induce them to stay an hour longer than had to be. The Valimoffs assured them that Novarodar was quite safe whatever happened, but A.J. did not think so. At last a day came when the floods showed signs of falling. He had made all preparations for departure, had accepted supplies of food from the still generous Valimoffs, had thanked them, and pressed them in vain to take some money in return for all their gifts and services; and then, just as he was tying up a final bundle, one of the young men rushed in from the street with the news that Samara had fallen.

  All Novarodar was in instant uproar. With Samara in Bolshevik hands the last hope that the Czech retirement was only temporary disappeared. Worse still, the White line of retreat was cut off; Novarodar was now ringed round on three sides by Red troops, and the fourth and only line of escape was waterlogged. White refugees were gathering in little excited groups to discuss the matter; some set out across the swamps, and later on that very day a few stragglers carne back, mud-caked from head to foot, to report catastrophes as horrible as any that were to be feared.

  Once again A.J.’s plans suffered a blow. There seemed little hope now of ever catching up with the recreating Czechs. A.J. and Daly talked the whole question over with the Valimoffs; the latter, of course, thought that the best plan would be for them to stay, disguised as they were, in Novarodar. But A.J. was still all for movement; he felt instinctively that every moment in Novarodar was, as it were, a challenge flung to Fate. He talked of making for the Don country, where White troops, under Denikin, had already driven a northward wedge to within a few score miles of Voronesk. His eagerness increased as he computed the chances of the plan. Denikin’s army, he argued, was more likely to advance than to retreat, since, unlike the Czechs, it had a solid backing of support from the local populations. And it was an advantage, too, that the way towards Denikin was the way towards the Black Sea ports. Had he and Daly succeeded in reaching the Czechs, their sole line of escape would have been by the long and tedious Trans-Siberian journey, during which anything might have happened, and with the chance of being held up indefinitely in the Far East. But to reach Denikin’s army was to reach at once a far simpler gateway to the outer world.

  In the end it was agreed that the southward plan should be tried; it was, in fact, the only practical alternative to remaining in Novarodar. “We shall trust to our disguise,” A.J. said, “and work our way, by trains, if we can find any, through Kuszneszk and Saratof.” He agreed, however, in view of the change of plans, to postpone departure to the following morning.

  The Valimoffs were keenly interested in the adventure, and, though discouraging at first, soon came to regard it with tempered enthusiasm. In particular the mention of Saratof roused them to a curious interchange of looks amongst one another which A.J. did not fail to notice. That evening, after the excellent dinner with which he and Daly were always provided, Madame Valimoff humbly presented herself and craved an interview. He treated her politely, as he always did, but with reserve. Daly was more cordial, and this cordiality, natural as it was in the circumstances, had often given him a feeling which he could only diagnose as petulance. The fact was that Madame Valimoff, behind her obsequious manners, was an exceedingly strong-willed person and had, he was sure, acquired a considerable influence over Daly, whether the latter was aware of it or not. He had no reason, of course, to believe that this influence was for the bad, yet somehow, though he could not explain it, he had misgivings.

  Madame Valimoff, with many apologies for troubling them, soon came to the point. Before the Revolution, she said, she and two of her sons had been servants in Petrograd at the house of the Rosiankas. Prince and Princess Rosianka had been murdered by the Reds at Yaroslav; there was a large family, all of whom had been massacred with their parents except the youngest—a girl of six. This child, the sole survivor of the family and inheritor of the title, had been hidden away by loyal servants and taken south. It had been intended to smuggle the child abroad, but, owing to increased Bolshevist vigilance, it had not been possible to reach the Black Sea ports in time. The two servants, a former butler named Stapen and his wife, who had been a cook in the same household, were now living in Saratof, and the child was still with them there.

  Madame Valimoff then produced a letter from this ex-butler, written some weeks previously and delivered by secret messenger. It conveyed the information that the child was in fairly good health, and that Stapen was constantly on the watch for some chance of sending her south, especially now that Denikin was advancing so rapidly. It was a risky business, however, and the person to be trusted with such a task could not be selected in a hurry. “You see,” Madame Valimoff explained, after A.J. and Daly had both examined the letter, “the Bolshevists have photographs of all the persons they are looking out for, and the little princess is of course one of them. So many escapes have been made lately that the examination is now stricter than ever.”

  Briefly, Madame’s suggestion was that he and Daly, when they reached Saratof, should call at Stapen’s house and take the princess with them into safety. She was sure they were the right sort of people to carry through such a dangerous enterprise successfully. She gave them Stapen’s address and also a little amber bead which, she said, would convince him of their bona-fides, even if he did not recognise them. “But he probably will,” she added. “Butlers have a good memory for faces, and I’m sure you must sometime or other have visited the Rosiankas.”

  Daly admitted that she had.

  After Madame Valimoff had gone, A.J. was inclined to be doubtful. Madame’s dominant personality, the delivery of Stapen’s letter by secret messenger, and various other significant details, had all made him gradually aware that Madame was a person of some importance in the sub-world of counter-revolutionary plotting. He did not himself wish to be drawn into White intrigue; his only aim was to get himself and Daly out of the country, and he had no desire to jeopardise their chances of success for the sake of a small child whom they had neither of them ever seen. “If the child is safe at Saratof,” he argued, “why not let her stay there?”

  All that Daly would say was that there could be no harm in promising the Valimoffs to do what they could. “Our plans,” she said, “may have to be altered again, so that we may never go anywhere near Saratof. We can only give a conditional promise, but I think we might give that—we really owe them a great deal, you know.”

  It was true, beyond question, and later that evening A.J. assured Madame Valimoff that he would certainly call on Stapen if it were at all possible. Privately he meant the reservation to mean a great deal.

  Very early next morning he bade farewell to his hosts, to whom he felt immensely grateful, even though he had not been able to like them as much as he felt he ought. He could not imagine how Daly and himself would have managed without them; they had provided food and shelter just when it had been most of all needed, and now they were prodigal to the last, making up bundles of well- packed and artfully disguised food supplies for them to take with them on their journey. A.J. thanked them sincerely, yet was never more relieved than when he turned the corner of the street.

  Only a few moments afterwards a loud boom sounded from the distance, together with a shattering explosion somewhere over the centre of the town. The streets, which till then had been nearly empty, filled suddenly with scurrying inhabitants, all in panic to know what had happened, while a few youths, White cadets, rushed by in civilian clothes, hastily buckling on belts and accoutrements as they ran. A.J. did not stop to make enquiries, but he gathered from overheard question and answer that the White refugees had organised a coup d’état during the night, had killed the Soviet guard, taken possession of all strategic points, and were now preparing to defend the town against the approaching Red army. The latter, however, had evidently learned of these events, and were bombarding the town (so the rumou
r ran) from an armoured train some miles away.

  A.J.’s first idea was to get as far from the danger-zone as possible, and with this intention he hurried Daly through the rapidly thronging streets. At intervals of a few minutes came the boom of the gun, but the shells were bursting a safe distance away. Daly was not nervous—only a little excited; and on himself, as always, the sound of gun-fire exercised a rather clarifying effect. He began to reckon the chances of getting well out of the town before the real battle began. There was irony in the fact that for weeks his aim had been to reach some place that was held by the Whites, and that now, being in such a place, his chief desire was to get out of it. It would be the most frantic folly, he perceived, to trust himself to this local and probably quite temporary White success, for his judgment of affairs led him to doubt whether the White occupation could last longer than a few days at most.

  Disappointment faced him when he reached the outskirts of the town, where an iron bridge spanned the swollen river. White guards were holding up the crowd of fugitives who sought to cross, while other guards were hastily digging trenches on the further bank. They were all in an excitable, nerve-racked mood, aware of unwelcome possibilities, and prepared to act desperately and instantly. Not a single refugee, they ordered, must leave the town; this was to prevent spies from reporting to the Reds the preparations that were being made for the town’s defence. The ban applied to women and children as well as to men, and was being enforced at every possible exit.

  There was nothing to be gained by arguing the point, apart from which, A.J. was anxious that both he and Daly should remain as inconspicuous as possible. He felt that their best chance of safety lay with the crowd of dirty, ailing, poverty-stricken wretches who, merely because nobody cared about them at all, were usually exempt from too close attention by either side. Most of them were squatting miserably in doorways along the road back to the town, nibbling precious fragments of food, or rebandaging their torn and blistered feet.

  It was an anxious morning for Novarodar. Shells fell every ten minutes or so on the centre of the town, but many did not burst, and even the others were of poor construction and caused little damage. Once one realised that the likelihood of being hurt by the long-range bombardment was considerably less than that of catching typhus from the town’s water-supply, it was possible to ignore the intermittent booming and crashing. But such philosophic detachment was not possible to everyone, and towards midday there was evidence that many of the White defenders were themselves losing nerve. Already rifle- fire was being exchanged between the White trenches and advanced Red scouting- parties. During the afternoon the leaders of the local Soviet were dragged out of prison by White guards, lined up in the market-square, and ceremonially machine-gunned before a public for the most part too apprehensive of its own immediate future to be either repelled or elevated by such an entertainment.

  During most of the morning A.J. and Daly sat patiently in a side-street with a crowd of other refugees. But in the afternoon, shortly after the shooting of the Soviet leaders, White guards toured the town in motor cars and rounded up all who were out of doors. Those who had no homes were lodged in some of the big rooms of The town-hall.

  Thus it happened that the refugees had a sort of grand-stand view of the entry of the Bolsheviks into Novarodar, which took place about five o’clock in the afternoon, after a sharp and bloodthirsty battle at the town outskirts. At some points the Whites had resisted to the last, but at others they had run away into the town and sought refuge in houses.

  Mysteriously and marvellously there appeared a dazzling array of red flags to greet the invaders. The actual march into the town was an almost suspiciously quiet affair. Not a rifle-shot, nor a cheer, nor a lilt of a song disturbed the march of those squads of hard-faced, bearded veterans and grinning, wild-eyed boys, caked with mud and blood, badly clothed, flushed with bitter triumph, helping their wounded along or carrying them in improvised stretchers made of great-coats. The Red leader, a keen-looking youth of not more than twenty, halted his troops in the market-square and read a proclamation declaring the friendliest intentions of the invaders towards all who had not given assistance to the Whites.

  From the large windows, mostly broken, of that first-floor room in the town-hall, history could be seen enacting itself at a prodigious rate. The first task after the reading of the proclamation was to deal with the White prisoners actually captured in the trenches outside the town. These men, battered and mud-stained as their captors, were lined up and machine-gunned from a roof on the opposite side of the square—not very copiously, however, for there seemed to be a shortage of ammunition. Their bodies, some still twitching, were then dragged away and piled in a heap in a side- street.

  The Reds were quite convinced that the shot prisoners represented only a very small fraction of the Whites who had held the town, and as night approached, the rage of the invaders grew into a very positive determination to root out all Whites who might be in hiding. Then began a house-to-house search by groups of blood-maddened soldiery. The market-square was the scene of some of the worst incidents, for in it were the larger houses and shops in which Whites might be expected to have found sympathisers. Terrified wretches were dragged out of doorways and clubbed to death; several were flung out of high windows and left broken and dying on the pavements. Firing sounded from all over the town, with now and then the sharp patter of a machine-gun. Later on vengeance became more extended and took in the entire bourgeois element among the townspeople; shops were looted and better-class citizens seized in their houses, accused vaguely of having assisted the Whites, and butchered there and then on their own thresholds.

  Some of the refugees screamed hysterically at the sights that were to be seen from the town-hall windows, and many covered their faces and refused to look. A few, however, of whom A.J. was one, gazed on the scene almost impassively, and this either because they were already satiated with horrors, or because their minds had reached that calm equilibrium, born of suffering, in which they saw that market-square at Novarodar as but a tiny and, on the whole, insignificant fragment of a world of steel and blood. To A.J. the latter reason applied with especial force; and more than ever, as the moments passed, his mind clung to what was all in his life that counted—the woman there at his side. The rest of the world was but a chaos of cancelling wrongs, and to offer pity for it was as if one should pour out a single drop of water upon a desert. He felt, as he gazed down upon all the slaughter, that it could not really matter, or it would not be happening.

  He was pondering and feeling thus, when a man near him, who had also been watching the scene quite calmly; began to talk to him. He was a thin, ascetic- looking man, middle-aged, with deep-set eyes and a lofty forehead. His voice and accent were educated.

  “If I may read your thoughts,” he said quietly, “you are wondering just how much and how little all this can mean.”

  A.J. was unwilling to betray himself by any too intelligent answer, so he merely half-nodded and let the other continue talking, which he was more than willing to do. He had been a professor of moral philosophy, he confided, and was now penniless and starving. Probably also (though he did not say so) he was a little mad. He expounded to A.J. a copious theory of the decadence of Western civilisation and the possible foundation of a new and cruder era based on elementals such as hunger, thirst, cruelty, and physical uncleanliness. “No man,” he said oracularly, “has really eaten until he has starved, or been clean until he has felt the lice nibbling at him, or has lived until he has faced death.” He also praised civil war as against war between nations, because it was necessarily smaller and more personal. “It is better, my friend,” he said, “that I should kill you for your wife, or for the contents of your pockets, than that we should stand in opposing trenches and kill each other anonymously because a few men in baroque armchairs a thousand miles away have ordered us to.”

  Conversation was several times interrupted by gusts of machine-gunning; once a spray of bullets
shattered the already broken windows and several refugees were cut by falling glass.

  About two in the morning there was a sudden commotion in the building below, and a Red officer, armed with two revolvers, rushed into the room with the brusque order that all refugees were to form up in the square outside for inspection, since it was believed that many White guards and bourgeois sympathisers were hiding in disguise amongst them.

  The whole company, numbering between five and six hundred, were marshalled in long lines facing the town-hall front, where other groups of refugees were already drawn up. The procedure had a certain ghastly simplicity. Red officers, carrying lanterns, peered into the faces of each person, searching for any evidences of refinement such as might cast suspicion on the genuineness of identity. Hands were also carefully inspected. When A.J. observed these details he felt apprehensive, not on his own account, but on Daly’s. The examining officers, shouting furiously to those who from weakness or panic could not stand upright, were certainly not in a mood to give the benefit of any doubts. Those whose faces were not seared deeply from winds and rains, or whose hands were not coarse and calloused, stood little chance of passing that ferocious scrutiny. Slowly the group of suspects increased; the ex- professor of philosophy was among the first to be sent to join it. The officer who was examining those near A.J. was a coolheaded, trim young fellow much less given to bullying his victims than the rest, but also, A.J. could judge, much less likely to be put off by a plausible tale. He did not linger more than a few seconds over A.J.—that grim, lined face and those hands hardened by Arctic winters were their own best argument. At Daly, however, he paused with rather keener interest. A.J. interposed with the story he had prepared for the occasion—that she was his daughter, a semi-invalid, and that he was taking her to some distant friends by whom she might be better looked after. The officer nodded but said: “Let her speak for herself.” Then he asked her for her name, age, and place of birth—all of which had been agreed upon between A.J. and herself for any such emergency. She answered in a quiet voice and did not seem particularly nervous. That clearly surprised the questioner, for he asked her next if she were not afraid. She answered: “No, but—as my father has just said—I am ill and would like to be allowed to finish my journey as soon as possible.”