The train started up again. The soup had been a half-way decent shtshyi, with good meat. Brodmann had gone to sleep. The others read or scribbled in notebooks. That was how they fought our Civil War. Yet every man in that carriage probably had more blood on his hands than a dozen Cossacks. Sometimes cavalry trotted alongside the train. The riders gave Red salutes and waved. If we moved slowly they would exchange shouts with the troops. We were carrying guns and soldiers. Every coach was armoured. Sometimes, as in our own, they had been fitted with a hotchpotch of sheet-metal riveted at random. The windows were largely unprotected. In the event of an attack we were supposed to throw ourselves to the floor and hope for the best. But there were no attacks. Hrihorieff and the Bolsheviks between them had brought a kind of peace to the area. It would not be long before they fell out amongst themselves. In common with the Whites, they all had a hatred of the Nationalists. But the Devil was amongst us. Never had Russia been so divided. Only now are the wounds healing, but Islam and Zion still threaten the Slavic race.
I was to see Hrihorieff the next day. Following his usual habit he had taken over a good-sized town. Mounted on a white Arab, like Skoropadskya’s, he was reviewing his troops: motley, swaggering Cossacks in a thousand varieties of clothing, armed with good carbines. Their ponies, as always, were lovingly groomed. The Zaporizhian Ataman was fairly short, his head was shaven, he had grey, Mongolian features, but he was no play-actor. He handled his horse well. His uniform was ‘pure’ Cossack, without any stupid antique adornments. He drew his strength from his troops as Constantine did when he returned from England to claim the Roman Empire. He was a true soldier. He had served bravely in the War. He laughed, he gesticulated, but his horse was always firmly controlled, never allowed to skip or rear. Thus he displayed the intelligence and the will lying beneath the braggadocio. This was why the Cossacks allowed him to be their master: to lead them on their daring attacks on great Ukrainian cities. I understood why Yermeloff had planned to become indispensable to the Ataman, why Grishenko was so useful. If Lenin or Trotsky had possessed half Hrihorieff’s manliness we should never have suffered the disasters and consequences of War Communism. There is none, in all that frightful crew, I would have served more willingly than Hrihorieff, yet I continued to be nervous of his followers. Pretending to disapprove of the pogromchik bandits, he nonetheless used them for his own ends, as Queen Elizabeth had used her pirates. Ultimately they might, in spite of Yermeloff’s guess, be eliminated, as Lafitte was cast out after serving his turn in the American Revolution. Trotsky would cheerfully have killed most of his allies by 1921. He invited them for peace-talks or political meetings and had them shot. Trotsky learned bandit ruthlessness but not bandit courage. I am a child in such matters.
The train stayed another day in a siding, then took us away from Hrihorieff’s garrison to a nearby Bolshevik camp. This contained more uniforms but it was only slightly less orderly than the partisan camps. Many Red Cavalry Cossacks were drunk, though Chekists tried to control them. These commissars had far more authority than any ordinary officer. They were greatly feared, as Lenin wanted them to be. I was doubly glad I was an ‘activist’, with comrades who still talked of ways and means of getting me to Odessa. We were thirty or forty versts closer, I think. I was not good at judging distance or the passage of time. Nikolaieff, if that were our destination, was relatively near to Odessa, east along the coast. Kherson was even further east, on the Dnieper, as Nikolaieff was on the Bug. The two towns were strategically important. They were served by main railway lines and rivers leading directly to the sea. Large ships docked at both. With these cities taken, an army approaching from Alexandriya would be able to attack Odessa with its large well-equipped Allied and White garrison. This was the substance of most debates over the coming days. Allied ‘interventionist’ forces defended Kherson and a reluctant German garrison occupied Nikolaieff. Though supported by French or English warships, the cities were vulnerable. However there was considerable dispute between Hrihorieff and the Bolsheviks about strategy. I suspect Antonov wanted any victories for himself. Brodmann claimed to be winning partisans over to the Bolshevik cause daily. They were now, he said, describing themselves as ‘Bolsheviks’ instead of ‘Barotbists’. I was unimpressed. They seized on slogans and Parties for comfort because they could no longer fight for God. At least the Whites knew what was of value to them. With better leaders, they would have given us back God and our Tsar. The Roman Empire never fell. It lives on in spirit. God will return to Russia. There is a religious revival. Byzantium remains in the soil, in the hearts of the people.
The train moved a few versts a day. Grubby snow melted and revealed a ruined land; as bandages are peeled away from an unhealed body.
What surfaced, like detritus from wrecked and violated ships, was disgusting: we saw half-eaten human corpses, not savaged by beasts, but by men and women. Peasants were now being shot for cannibalism, for selling human flesh as animal-meat. We saw burnt-out cottages and farms; the shells of honourable old mansions; the broken skeletons of ploughs and carriages; the bodies of untended cattle and sheep, hides and fleeces rotting on stinking bones. It was our shame. We had hidden it in winter, as we always do. But when buds were on those trees not smashed by shells, when shoots sprang from earth not desecrated with oil and fire and human filth, our crimes were revealed. No enemy had committed these atrocities, unless it was Karl Marx. This had been done in the name of the Ukrainian nation: in the name of Russia: in the name of Unity: in the name of Humanity: in the name of Brotherly Love. No Crusade was ever more shamefully perverted. The Holy Sepulchre had been stolen from our hearts. And guilt, as guilt will, made our soldiers even more savage. The tales we heard were terrible: of Jews and Whites toasted over fires on sheets of steel, of mutilations and rape; of the most disgusting sexual atrocities committed on men and women. Spring came, but not peace. In Russian the word for World is Peace; the word for Peace is Us; they are all derivations of the same thing: the word for Us is Earth. That is why we speak of ‘our earth, our world, our peace, ourselves’; why we make that identification foreigners rarely understand. To violate our earth is to violate everything. We are not mystics. It is only our language which is mystical. Because of its resonances. It gives us our great literature, our poetry, our songs, our music. It makes associations a German, for instance, cannot begin to perceive unless he speaks Russian lovingly and fluently. The steppe-dweller becomes touchy and despairing if his land is attacked by unnatural things. The Cossacks fought not for Bolshevism, not for Whites or Greens or Blacks; they fought, purely and simply, against the roads, the railways, the cities. Their idyllic Russia was a Russia of wide skies and small villages, of horses and cattle. If they could have accepted the twentieth century, the world would have been sweet for them. They would have been able to create more freedom than any they had previously known. But they attacked a town to raze it, to loot it, to take their booty home. Even Hrihorieff, even Makhno, both of them strategists of great cunning and not illiterate men, could not understand that the cities were fundamental to their world. This ignorance was the chief cause of their downfall. Control of the cities was the key to the freedom they sought. They discussed this, but they did not feel it. A Cossack must feel something in his bones before he can accept it. It was the Jew, the world over, who controlled the cities; he is its first real, instinctive modern city-dweller. Even those in the shtetls hated the steppe.