‘That sounds easy,’ Paul remarked sarcastically.
‘They say that Komuch is in control of the Urals Soviet—’
‘And what’s Komuch?’
‘It’s short for the Committee of the Constituent Assembly,’ Valentine said, ‘or what’s left of it. After the October coup a lot of the Petersburg and Moscow assembly members joined their colleagues in those provincial capitals that weren’t controlled by the Bolsheviks. Komuch is a mixture of Mensheviks and Kadets but it’s dominated by Social-Revolutionaries. The point is, if the Bolsheviks want to stop the Legion moving to link up with Poole at Archangel — which from their point of view is the Legion’s logical move — they’ll need to retake Kazan. So we need to get there first. I can’t imagine the trains are running through the lines, but it should be possible to get quite close.’
‘Aren’t the Bolsheviks in control of the railways this side of the Urals? How close are they likely to let us get?’
Valentine didn’t answer the question. ‘Of course we’ll need to see it first. Before we commit ourselves.’
‘See what?’ Paul said.
‘The gold. Before we tip our hand, I mean. Men are apt to do odd things where gold’s concerned. And we’ll have to see how the land lies before we reveal who we are.’ His eyes seemed to have lit up. ‘Can you imagine it?’ he said to Paul, ‘eight railway cars full of bullion?’
‘But even if the Legion does have it,’ Paul objected, ‘do you really think they’re likely to hand it over on the say-so of a British infantry captain and a letter?’
‘If the letter’s from Masaryk. Don’t you think so?’
Paul had no idea. Cumming seemed to assume all Paul would need to do was show the Czechs that the orders came from the Czech National Council and the whole Legion would be ready to do his bidding. But Cumming, Paul was beginning to realise, had more faith in human nature than he had, and the further he got from London the thinner the little faith he did have was wearing. And, for once, he had to agree with Valentine: men were unpredictable where gold was concerned. At least, that’s what he’d always read. He’d had no first-hand experience himself — the closest he’d ever got to gold were the roubles Cumming had given him and they’d come attached with so much baggage that, frankly, Paul thought they were more trouble than they were worth. He wished he’d never seen the damn things. But that was all beside the point. More to it was what the Czechs would do. Would they be willing to keep the bullion until Kolchak arrived? Another consideration was this Komuch government. After all, it was Russian gold, and if anyone should have a say in how it should be used it should be the Russians. As members of what was left of the Constituent Assembly, Paul didn’t suppose many of them would want the stuff handed over to Kolchak, a former Imperial admiral and a supporter of the monarchy. Or whatever might be left of the monarchy.
It was just as well that eight railway cars full of bullion weren’t the easiest things to run off with. If they were, given the competing claims on the stuff, they’d be chasing it all over Russia.
‘Well,’ Valentine said, having got no reply to his question as to whether Paul thought the Legion would hand over the gold on Paul’s say-so and Masaryk’s letter, he said, ‘it’s our job to see that they do.’
‘I suppose so,’ Paul muttered without enthusiasm.
‘That’s the spirit.’ Valentine clapped a hand on his shoulder. ‘Do or die. Isn’t that what they say?’
It was, and Paul was familiar with the adage, even if until this moment he had never actually heard anyone say it in earnest. But then he rather suspected that the kind of people likely to give voice to that sort of notion were rarely the ones who personally did the dying.
‘Mikhail won’t be in Moscow,’ Sofya pointed out.
She put half a cucumber on the table. She had made cabbage soup with the vegetables they had brought with them and a bunch of elderly and indeterminate greens she had found in the kitchen. It was already evening. They had been at the house all day and Valentine had not returned.
‘We won’t stay in Moscow long,’ Paul assured her.
‘Where will we go? South, now Deniken’s in charge?’
Paul didn’t answer, unwilling to admit they were not going south.
Sofya spooned the soup into bowls, cut the cucumber into slices and salted it. Peasant food, Paul thought, although Sofya ate it readily enough.
‘Kornilov was hopeless,’ she said, chewing the stale bread and the cucumber. The time to march on Petersburg was July when the Bolsheviks first tried to take power. Lenin and the rest of their leaders scuttled off into hiding. The Provisional Government arrested hundreds of those that were left. That’s when they were at their weakest. The newspapers were full of stories about how Lenin had taken German money to finance his party and how they had let him and his cronies through their lines.
‘He dithered,’ she said, spooning up the soup. ‘Kornilov. When he finally moved, Kerensky declared his coup illegal. None of the officers in Petersburg seemed to know what to do and by the time Krymov and the Third Cossack Corps got anywhere near the city the Bolsheviks that hadn’t been imprisoned got into the factories and armed the workers. They went out and tore up the railway tracks.’
Sofya’s face pursed with disgust. ‘Krymov’s men called themselves “The Savage Division”, Caucasian Cossacks. What did they do? They went cap in hand in front of the Petersburg Soviet and apologised. They said they had been misled and been told the Revolution was in peril. That the Bolsheviks were slaughtering people in the streets.’ She tore another piece of bread in two. ‘They’ll really find out who’s savage once the Bolsheviks find they can get away with it… then they’ll really start a slaughter.’
Paul ate silently. He’d already seen as much slaughter as he wanted to and didn’t care to see any more. It had been bad enough at the front but at least that had been war. One always knew that once back home some semblance of normality could be found. Not here. It astonished him how a civilised country could so quickly fall into chaos. It was as if beneath a thin veneer of modernism, the medieval savagery of Russia still lived and breathed, ready to reassert itself as soon as the mask of enlightenment slipped. But then perhaps it had always been plain enough to see for those who cared to look. All autocrats, from the modernising Peter to the bungling Nicholas had been quick enough to resort to the gnout when it suited them. Well, the boot was on the other foot now. Or rather, the gnout was in the other hand.
Sofya startled him out of his reverie.
‘What did you do in England, Pasha?’
‘I was a soldier,’ he said. ‘I am a soldier.’
‘Tell me about your life there.’
Paul broke a little more bread and took a slice of cucumber. He began to tell her but found, strangely, there wasn’t much to say. He told her about his life at school and his brief time at university before, like all the other young men, he had volunteered for the army. He tried to describe how it had been at the front only to find he didn’t have the words. Then he told her how, after he was co-opted by Cumming, his relief at not having had to go back to the trenches had been tinged with a sense of guilt for abandoning those who were still there.
Finally, unable to go on, he told her instead about his mother’s life in London. How she had kept her past alive by entertaining émigrés and keeping up with political events.
‘Until her monthly allowance stopped.’
‘The Bolsheviks took over the banks,’ Sofya said. ‘They stole everyone’s money. No one could get any.’