It was lost on no-one that the Red Army was no more than a day or two behind them. Kolchak’s Stavka looked on. Having recovered what they could of the Imperial Treasury, they offered no help to the men of the Legion nor were asked for any. There was no time to waste on wastrels. They had spent their war dining in Omsk’s fine restaurants, socialising and playing the officer. Their soft hands and softer bodies were as useless for clearing a line and relaying a damaged track as they had been at waging the admiral’s war.
By dawn enough of the tangled debris had been cleared to allow the trains to pass. Paul, filthy and dog-tired from working all night, trudged back to his boxcar. From the wreck of two trains, a snaking giant of twenty-nine coaches had been formed to carry Kolchak and his guards, his staff and his treasure to Irkutsk. Ahead were trains carrying his ministers and officials and the loot from Omsk. Behind was a Legion broněviky, scattered remnants of his army, detachments of Poles, Ukrainians and Serbs, and a Bolshevik Russia.
For his part, Paul was sick of it. He would do what he could to defend himself and his comrades as they retreated east but he wouldn’t lift a finger for those who had only wanted to help themselves. There was nothing left in Russia for him now and the sooner he left the better.
Along the track he passed a line of dead and injured where they lay in the snow. Sheets had been found to wrap the most horrific; the rest having to make their bed on the hard ice. There was nothing to be done for the worst of the injured. The Czech’s rudimentary infirmary couldn’t cope and what useful medicines had been in Omsk were said to have disappeared, sold by profiteers on the black market. The dying would have to be abandoned, either to perish of their wounds or freeze to death in the snow. Some of the women from the trains were doing what they could, cleaning them up and trying to soothe burned flesh with whatever salve they could find. One, a kneeling girl as black and dishevelled as those she tended, glanced briefly at Paul as he approached. Her once fine clothes were now little more than ruined rags. Her grimy face was smeared with blood. She turned back to the injured man in front of her for a second then looked up again. She stood. She stared and hesitantly started towards him. A step… two… then she broke into a run, tears streaking through the dirt on her face.
PART EIGHT
Memento Mori: Prague
— March 11th 1948 —
51
He had been sitting in the café for two hours nursing a newspaper. According to the chalk board behind the counter he had also been drinking coffee. The muddy liquid had tasted bad hot; now, as cold as the rest of the café, it tasted infinitely worse. He grimaced as he finished his third cup, pushed it aside and glanced out the window.
The dull afternoon light, brightened by a fresh snowfall, was turning to dusk. Condensed steam, tobacco smoke and a grimy film on the glass combined to obscure the view but he could see the block of flats across the road well enough. Having watched the building, those around it and the few vehicles parked along the road, he was satisfied no one else was watching the entrance to the flats. And as equally sure no one was watching him watching the entrance. Several people had entered the block while he’d sat there and more had left, but not the man he had come to see. There was no hurry. He picked up the newspaper again and read the headline. Below it a column of smudged print described how Jan Masaryk — the son of Thomas Masaryk whose letter Paul had carried across a continent — had been found dead the previous day in the courtyard beneath his bathroom window.
There was a sense of having come full circle. But that was mere illusion, the consequence of an orderly mind trying to tidy away an untidy situation. In reality it was less full circle than it was full stop. An ending. After all these years.
He had told himself there was no hurry only because it was now too late to hurry. He was doing what should have been done at least a year, probably two, earlier. After all, it hadn’t been difficult to see which way the wind was blowing.
The phrase reminded him of Ward. He recalled the politician turned soldier had used it once in Omsk. What was that, thirty years before? The colonel of the hernia battalion was long dead now, a bad heart having taken him off some years before the war. Paul had visited him when he had finally got back to England and they had met at the House of Commons. By that time Ward had been returned as a Liberal, the things he’d witnessed in Russia persuading him to break all ties with Labour and socialism.
The meeting had proved to be a pleasant reunion. Ward had written a book about his experiences with the Middlesex Regiment shortly after he had returned. With The Die-Hards in Siberia, he had called it. He had deliberately not mentioned Paul in the book, he had told him, in deference to his SIS connection. He hoped Paul didn’t mind. Paul didn’t mind, though it had been odd reading about events at which he had been present without being acknowledged. It was as if his had been a non-corporeal presence, something intangible. Ghostly. Well, there had been plenty of those left behind.
Ward asked what had happened after Paul had left Omsk. Ward’s curiosity was natural enough but Paul had not gone into detail. Living through it had been hard enough; talking about it would have been an unnecessary elaboration.
He had described how he had finally found Sofya, and that they had married. About the retreat, first to Omsk, then to Irkutsk and finally Vladivostok, he had been circumspect. There had been no necessity to describe the horrors he had seen or the act that had finally brought the curtain down on Kolchak’s time under history’s spotlight. It was an episode from which no one had emerged with much credit.
A coalition of left-wing parties in Irkutsk had proclaimed itself the Government of Siberia before the convoy had ever reached the town. The Legion trains had been held up and Kolchak declared an ‘enemy of the people’. The new government were demanding he be put on trial. In the face of a fait accompli — not unlike Kolchak’s own in Omsk a year earlier — the Supreme Ruler of Russia had had little choice but to resign. In early January 1920 he transferred control over what little was left of his army to the bandit Semenov and had been escorted by the Legion into Irkutsk. Expecting to be handed over to the Allies or at least the new government, the admiral instead was delivered to the Irkutsk Bolsheviks.
There had been a deal between the Legion and the Bolsheviks, it was said — Kolchak and his gold for safe passage to Vladivostok. Not that far-fetched a supposition. Many of the Czechs and Slovaks had been SR sympathisers and hadn’t forgotten what the Kolchak regime had done to the party and their peasant members after the Omsk coup.
At the time, Karel Romanek had tried to justify what had happened. But as far as Paul could see, using one betrayal to justify another did little more than reveal those, whom he had once thought honourable, to be mirror-images of those he knew were not.
And, true to their character and as with the former Tsar in Ekaterinburg, the Bolsheviks conducted no trial. Kolchak was shot. Afterwards — in the Irkutsk variation of the saying — he was transferred to the Republic if the Ushakovka. His body, that is, along with that of his prime minister, Pepelayev, stuffed under the ice of the Ushakovka River.