Paul joined him by the fire, warming his hands. ‘I’m looking for Mikhail Ivanovich Rostov. He was staying here this time last year. His sister lived with him.’
‘Gone,’ the old man said.
‘Where to? How long ago?’
‘East. Where do you think? All gone east.’
‘How long ago?’
‘How should I know? Who do you say?’
‘Rostova, Sofya Ivanovna Rostova. A tall woman, brown hair. Her brother was shorter, overweight.’ Paul tried to remember their suite number but couldn’t.
‘Rostov?’ The old man gave the name some thought. He shrugged. ‘A week. Maybe more.’
Getting warm, Paul took off his hat and unbuttoned his coat. ‘Is the hotel empty?’
‘You’re looking for a room?’ The old man chuckled. ‘Put your money away. We’re full. Every room is taken.’
‘I don’t want a room. I’m looking for the Rostovs.’
‘Your money is of no use.’ He pulled some crumpled notes out of his pocket and pushed them into the fire. ‘See? Worthless. The Bolsheviks won’t recognise it. You have gold? Jewels, maybe?’
‘No.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Take a room if you want one. Throw whoever’s in it out. No one pays anymore.’
‘I’m not looking for a room. I’m looking for Mlle Rostova.’
‘Gone, I told you.’
Paul turned to leave, buttoning his coat again.
‘I’d take off the uniform if I were you, comrade,’ the old man said over his shoulder. ‘They say the Bolsheviks shoot soldiers if they find them, especially Czechs. And if they don’t, the workers from Kulomzino will. Or string you up. They’ll be here shortly to welcome the Reds and they’ve a score to settle for the massacres last year.’
Paul left, hand tightening on the Smith & Wesson in his pocket.
He had considered going to the British consulate where Valentine had been living the year before, but he’d forgotten where it was and felt unsettled by what the old man had said. The previous November tsarist officers had been ferocious in putting down a Bolshevik uprising in the working class districts. There were debts owing in Omsk and they would be paid before the Red Army arrived. Any man in uniform other than Red would be among the first to settle.
He pulled his hat down over his head and, turning up the collar of his coat, quickly made his way back to the railway station.
Amid the chaos, Paul stopped at the edge of the platform to light a cigarette. Nothing had changed in the few hours he had been gone although it seemed as if they had finished loading the trains. The soldiers guarding them looked bored, their faces pinched with the cold. Even the crowds they were keeping at bay had grown apathetic. They were no longer pressing forward but stood outside the cordon, as if waiting for something to happen that might alter their situation.
Nothing was going to. This was how it ended. Karel Romanek had been right when he had said the previous winter that the White advance wouldn’t last even if, for a few brief weeks in the spring, the sceptics had begun to think they might be proved wrong.
When Gajda had advanced out of Perm in March, fighting his way for 150 versts towards Viatka where the railway linked north to Kotlas on the River Dvina, it had looked for a while as if a link with Ironside in Archangel would be forged. To the south, General Khanzhin moving west retook Ufa and advanced towards Simbirsk and Samara. Uprisings against a Red Terror that had executed seven thousand peasants there had disrupted the Bolshevik advance.
But it hadn’t lasted. In the face of defeat, Lenin softened his attitude to the peasants. At the same time Kolchak hardened his, making statements on land reform that alienated them. Despite advice from Knox, and against Gajda’s wishes, Kolchak moved too soon. No reserves were yet trained or equipped and when Khanzhin, with his supply lines over-extended, was checked west of Ufa, the retreat began. Gajda’s flank to the north was exposed and by mid-June he was back in Perm. To stem the tide, Kolchak committed what few reserves he had — among them the Volga Corps of General Kappel. But it was too late. Kappel’s forces — the remnants of the Peoples’ Army of Komuch — were peasant SR supporters who immediately deserted in droves, not to the Red Army but to partisan groups fighting in Kolchak’s rear. By the end of June, Ufa had been lost again, Perm went on July 1st. Ekaterinburg followed in the middle of the month and Chelyabinsk at the beginning of August. With the loss of the Urals any possibility of a link with Ironside — however faint — had finally been abandoned. It hardly came as a surprise in the middle of August when the Allies abandoned Kolchak, too. In the west, the Supreme Ruler had come to be regarded as a liability. It was decided in the corridors of power that Deniken in the south was a better bet.
News that the troops in Archangel had pulled out reached Paul at the end of September. By then Ward and his regimental band had already returned to Vladivostok. Now there were no longer any Allies left to the west of Lake Baikal — except for the few liaison officers like himself, stranded in Siberia.
The French still kept up a pretence of involvement, maintaining the Legion remained part of their Foreign Legion. In Vladivostok Janin continued to issue orders that no one took any notice of any more.
With the fall of Chelyabinsk, the Legion lost its headquarters. Gajda had been dismissed following the loss of Perm and quit Siberia for its eastern port of Vladivostok. Syrový’s second-in-command, General Diterikhs, took command of Kolchak’s forces. Voitzekhovsky too — a Russian like Diterikhs — had left the Legion to join the White forces. But none of the changes did much to stem the tide. When Diterikhs told Kolchak he could not hold Omsk once the Irtúish froze, he went the way of Gajda. Kappel still fought on with those few troops who had remained loyal to him, as did Deniken, Wrangel¬ and Yudenich to the north of the Caucasus and in the Baltic, but Paul knew the sun was setting on the Russia he had once known.
Had he ever had an inkling of what it was going to be like he would have refused Cumming outright. He had seen some awful things — atrocities far worse than the careless slaughter he had witnessed on the western front. There had seemed to be little malice in that, either perpetrated by those carrying the rifles or by those who directed them. Troops, after all, were just pieces upon a board to be moved backwards and forwards as circumstance allowed; if there had been a certain callous disregard for their lives, it was a detached disregard. Here he had seen more vindictive cruelty than he thought it possible to imagine. Two years of civil war had stripped any pretence of humanity from the participants. Men, women, children… all were slaughtered with an almost bestial abandon. As if not content with mere killing, the dead bodies were often as not subjected to the most repulsive acts of mutilation. And if the bodies weren’t dead… then so much the better.
He now found it difficult to believe he had been shocked by the arbitrary execution of a prisoner when on patrol with his armoured train¬ a year earlier. Compared to what he had witnessed since, Lieutenant Capek, the Czech who had led the patrol, had been a soft-hearted humanitarian.
If the sun was setting on the old Russia then he supposed the dawn had almost arrived upon the new. It was undoubtedly going to be a Red dawn, although perhaps not the one for which Corporal Jacobs had once hoped. Tsarist Russia may have been a despotic land with no more than a thin veneer of civilisation laid over its barbarous carcass, but Paul was certain that the Russia of the Bolsheviks would not even shelter beneath that masquerade. They would strip away the veneer and stretch the carcass on the rack of their ideology, brooking no compromise, allowing no deviation.