Valentine merely smiled. ‘The restaurant is open,’ he said. ‘I suggest we get something to eat.’
They edged past a knot of soldiers standing outside the door arguing with each other about whether they could afford to eat, and found a table.
‘How far from the front are we?’
‘About two hundred versts,’ Valentine said. He glanced at the troops hovering outside the door. ‘I suppose they spent all their money in the station restaurant at Murom. They don’t look as keen to get to the front as they did in Moscow. Perhaps they’ve heard how Trotsky treats those not showing enough resolve.’
‘How does he treat them?’ Sofya asked, looking at the menu.
‘He shoots them.’
She shrugged. ‘My brother always said that’s what we should do when they wouldn’t fight, so nothing much has changed for them, has it?’
Paul could just picture his little cousin behind the conscripts, prodding them towards the front like cattle. That would have been Mikhail all over, keeping someone else between him and the guns. ‘I thought that’s what they did do,’ he said.
‘They tried,’ said Sofya, ‘and the soldiers deserted.’
‘The difference with Trotsky,’ said Valentine, ‘is that it’s not just those who won’t fight he executes. He shoots every tenth man in any unit not showing the requisite courage.’
‘Why don’t they mutiny here?’
‘He doesn’t rely on ordinary soldiers to do the shooting. He has political commissars and a Bolshevik core only too happy to do the job.’
A waitress came to the table. They asked her what was available and she pointed at the menu. They ordered everything.
‘No shortage of food here,’ said Sofya, eating fresh bread and wiping butter from her chin.
Paul worked his way through a plate of blinis, looking at the soldiers still debating whether or not they could eat.
‘Where are their officers?’
Valentine had a bowl of borsht. ‘They all wear the same uniform these days. The new Red Army has abolished signs of rank. Every man is a comrade now, equal in the sight of the state. As long as they do what the commissar says, that is.’
‘What rank is a commissar?’
‘He’s the political officer. He outranks everyone. No order is issued without his agreement and if he thinks the officers aren’t sufficiently revolutionary, he removes them. He gestured towards a thin bespectacled youth arguing with a man behind the counter. Despite being in uniform, he looked more like a student than a warrior. He was shouting and took his revolver from its holster and placed it on the counter.
‘That’ll be a commissar,’ Valentine said. ‘Negotiating free food for the men, no doubt.’
The man behind the counter looked down at the gun and then at the waitress who was waiting nervously at his shoulder. He nodded vigorously.
‘Of course,’ the man said to the commissar, ‘but of course, comrade.’
‘It was the same after the Revolution in Petersburg,’ Sofya said. ‘You couldn’t get on a tram for the crowds of soldiers and sailors riding for free. Everyone else had to pay, of course. They’re nothing but bandits.’
‘Lower your voice,’ Valentine warned.
She glared at him.
The commissar waved to the men at the door and they filed inside filling the empty tables.
They looked like conscripts to Paul. He had seen enough of their kind on the western front to recognise the type, close enough to the fighting now for all their initial bravado to leech away. They had the dull blank faces of village youths, still pliant enough to walk towards the guns when ordered to do so. That would make them the perfect soldiers from any commander’s point of view.
They ate until they were full, pooling their money to pay the bill. Valentine sorted through the assortment of coin and paper.
‘Start getting rid of your accounting tokens. Any Kerenski roubles, too. They may not take them in Kazan and they certainly won’t want the Bolshevik money.’
There may have been a revolution but Paul had noticed how most people still preferred to be paid in the old imperial rouble, no matter whose head was on the note.
The train steamed east again, out of Alatúir. After ten minutes Valentine excused himself, making his way towards the carriages that held the troops. He was gone some time and when he returned he gestured for Paul to sit beside him.
‘I’ve been talking to one of the officers. They’ve all got copies of this.’ He handed Paul a printed news sheet:
The Fifth Army has been assigned the task of taking Kazan. Our enemy is trying to break through from Kazan to Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, Vyatka and Vologda, to link up with the Anglo-French troops, and to crush the heart of the workers’ revolution – Moscow. But before Kazan stand the workers’ and peasants’ regiments of the Red Army. They know what their task is: to prevent the enemy from taking a single step forward: to wrest Kazan from his grasp: to throw back the Czech mercenaries and the officer-thugs, drown them in the Volga, and crush their criminal mutiny against the workers’ revolution. In this conflict we are using not only rifles, cannon and machine guns, but also newspapers. For the newspaper is also a weapon. The newspaper binds together all units of the Fifth Army in one thought, one aspiration, one will. Forward to Kazan!
It was signed L. Trotsky.
‘Not the sort of thing they circulated on the western front,’ Paul said. ‘Czech mercenaries and officer-thugs? Drown them in the Volga…?’
‘Quite,’ said Valentine.
‘Not that many of those fellows we saw back in the restaurant will be able to read it. Their officer said most of them are illiterate.’
‘If Trotsky’s in the habit of shooting them if they don’t advance,’ Paul said. ‘I should imagine they’ll get the message even if they can’t read.’
‘It’s like his speeches.’
‘The point is,’ said Paul, ‘we’ve still got to get through this Fifth Army somehow. Did you find out if they’ve blockaded the Volga or not?’
‘Yes, they’ve got a flotilla of steamers on it under Raskolnikov.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘One of the Kronstadt sailors who helped the Bolsheviks seize power.’
‘Well if they’ve got the steamers, how are we going to find one to take us through their flotilla?’
‘Take one of theirs?’ Valentine suggested.
‘And how do you propose we do that? We’d have to get right up to the lines first.’
‘I assume the train will run to the lines.’
‘That will mean staying on it. How can we do that without raising suspicion?’
Valentine smiled at him in that smug way of his that Paul was beginning to find irritating.
‘I sort of gave the officer I was talking to the impression we’ve been sent by the Central Committee to rebuild the Party apparatus once Kazan has fallen. He swallowed it, so it might be enough to get us to the lines.’
‘But Trotsky’s there!’ Paul objected. ‘He’ll have people with him ready to do that, surely? They won’t believe us without specific orders… proper documentation…’
‘We’ve only to bluff our way as far as the lines,’ Valentine said. ‘I’m not planning on introducing myself to Trotsky. Once we’re off the train and find ourselves a steamer it won’t matter. And we’ll have the element of surprise.’
We’ll have bullets in the back our heads, Paul felt like saying. If they were caught, they’d be taken for the kind of officer-thugs Trotsky had written about. Or worse, agents of the Anglo-French invasion. They’d be shot out of hand. What they’d do to Sofya didn’t bear thinking about.
They were still some versts before the station at Sviyázhsk when the provodnik came through the carriages with a soldier telling anyone who wasn’t with the army that they would have to get off the train.