Considering the matter dispassionately as he gazed out the window, he wasn’t sure why it was making him so squeamish. It was hardly the first time he had another man’s blood on his clothes, and often a lot worse than simple blood. But he had always been in uniform then and that was the result of war, not an unseemly scuffle in an alley.
That thought prompted memories of the shell-hole at Passchendaele and although he couldn’t see it out of the window, it was nonetheless in front of his eyes…
They had been out at night on a patrol cutting wire in advance of a push. A sudden barrage had caught them in the open and they’d scattered. He had dived for cover into the nearest crater, a shell-hole half-full of filthy green water. Having slid face-down into the scum and come up coughing, he had found that two of his patrol had followed him into the hole. And that there was a third person there, too. A German, half submerged in the water and looking as if he’d been there for some time already.
‘Caw, he’s ripe,’ Sykes had said before another shell had burst overhead and Sykes never said anything else again. A piece of shrapnel split his head in two and the wet jelly that Sykes was made of had splattered all over Paul. He had used the stagnant water to wash Sykes off as best he could, unable to stop thinking that, in a few days, Sykes was going to be just as ripe as the German.
Jacobs, a corporal and the other man to follow him into the hole, had watched Paul’s efforts to clean Sykes off his uniform without volunteering to help. Then why should he? He wasn’t Paul’s servant and, as far as Paul could remember, Jacobs hadn’t cared too much for Sykes, anyway. Not that Sykes had liked Jacobs either, for that matter. The corporal was a Bolshie, Sykes had complained more than once. Paul had wondered at the time what Sykes had known about the Bolsheviks — after all, it was before they had seized power in Russia. But, as Jacobs had made no secret of his political affiliations, Paul supposed Sykes had learned what he had from the corporal himself. Paul had suspected that, sooner or later, Jacobs’ agitation was going to get him into trouble although Paul didn’t suppose Jacobs had expected the trouble to take the form of a shell-hole in no man’s land with two corpses and a bourgeois army officer. And, more to the point, Paul hadn’t expected to be sharing the trouble with him. Of course, he couldn’t exactly blame what had happened on Jacobs’ politics, a fact which after twelve hours without food and little water Paul couldn’t help thinking — in a delirious sort of way — said a lot about cause and effect. And risk and reward, come to that. Not to mention the kind of justice blind fate meted out.
He had had a lot of time to think about it, too. Certainly more than twelve hours. He had spent two days in that shell-hole with Jacobs and the uncommunicative Sykes and had come to find out just how much of a Bolshie the corporal really was.
‘There’s been an incident at Chelyabinsk.’
Paul heard Cumming but still paralysed by the captain’s use of his proper name was, for the moment, unable to respond.
Paul had no Russian friends to use his patronymic — precious few friends of any nationality left after four years of war — and certainly no other members of the Rostov family in England. No one except his mother. And she only ever addressed him as Pavel Sergeyevich as a harbinger of something more unpleasant to come. Conditioned under those circumstances, the name always put him on guard. It engendered a reflexive instinct in him rather like one of Pavlov’s dogs, but instead of anticipating being fed he was conditioned to expect unpleasantness.
Silence hung heavily following Captain Cumming’s pronouncement and Paul had plenty of time to weigh up the repercussions of there having been an incident in a faraway provincial Russian town. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t see that it could possibly have anything to do with him.
‘What kind of incident?’ he finally asked, more out of courtesy than curiosity.
‘The troop trains,’ Cumming said, leaning across the desk and pulling a sheet of paper towards him. ‘The Third and Sixth Regiments. They’ve been stuck there for some time, apparently. The Germans have insisted that priority be given to repatriating their prisoners of war.’
‘Ah,’ Paul said, in an attempt to convey the impression that things had been made clearer.
‘It seems there was some trouble at the station,’ Cumming explained. ‘A train full of Austrian and Hungarian POWs started an altercation and a Czech soldier was injured. His comrades demanded the man responsible be handed over. The Austrians didn’t want to, of course, but the Czechs are armed and the POWs aren’t so they didn’t have much choice. They handed the man over and the Czechs lynched him.’
‘Ah,’ Paul said again.
‘Trotsky then ordered the Legion be disarmed.’
Cumming looked as if he expected some sort of comment. Paul couldn’t think of one. He knew who Trotsky was, of course. Even if his mother hadn’t insisted on keeping him abreast of Russian politics the man’s name had been all over the papers since the Bolsheviks had seized power and had made their own peace with Germany. Although what it had to do with POWs in Chelyabinsk and what the Legion might be, Paul had no idea. As for a man being killed — lynched or not — well, that was hardly news, was it?
‘What is this Legion exactly?’ was all he could think to say.
A frown creased Cumming’s dog face for a second. He hung his cane on the back of his chair and sat down. Browning began leafing through a file.
‘I suppose you know them better as the Nazdar Company,’ Cumming said as Browning pulled a sheet of paper from the file.
‘First Company, Battalion C,’ Browning said. ‘Second Marching Regiment?’
‘It’s the French who are calling them the Czech Legion.’ Cumming went on. ‘The Nazdars were part of the First Foreign Regiment and the French have decided to amalgamate them into their Foreign Legion.’
Browning sniffed. ‘Beau Geste and all that nonsense.’
‘They seem keen on that sort of thing,’ Cumming added, ‘and since it’s their show I suppose we’ll have to go along with it. You’ll find there’s a lot more men in this Russian unit than the one in France you’re familiar with.’ He glanced at the file. ‘Pétain’s Thirty-Third Corps, wasn’t it?’
‘Tenth Army,’ Browning said.
‘Well, there’s forty or fifty thousand of ‘em in Russia. More perhaps.’
Paul was puzzled. He didn’t know anything about Pétain’s Thirty-Third Corps, or the Tenth French Army come to that.
He assumed Cumming had noticed his bewilderment because the captain said, ‘I know it was a long time ago, Rostov, and you’re back with your regiment now, but I take it you’ve still got your Czech and then there’s this Russian connection…’
‘What’s the French Foreign Legion doing in Chelyabinsk?’ Paul asked.
‘Not the French Foreign Legion,’ Browning insisted, ‘the Czech Legion.’
‘But isn’t Chelyabinsk on the other side of the Urals?’ Paul had never been there but knew the town from the maps of Russia his mother was forever pouring over.
Cumming stared at him with an inscrutable Chow Chow expression. ‘You’re familiar with the place?’
‘No, of course not.’
He had been ten years old when he had left Russia, hardly an age to have grown familiar with much at all. He hadn’t the faintest idea of what Cumming was talking about. He didn’t know what a Nazdar Company was, so could hardly be familiar with one; wasn’t au fait with anything the French might or might not be keen on, apart from the fact that they had some handy expressions that he wasn’t averse to using now and again — like au fait, come to think of it; and, on top of all that, he had never read Beau Geste…