During the early months of the new year the position at Khalinsk was still worsening. The nearness of Tobolsk, with its illustrious prisoners, brought to the district a heavy influx of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary spies, German and Allied secret agents, and freelance adventurers of all kinds. Tobolsk was their goal, but Khalinsk was a safer place for plotting. Half the pedlars and market-dealers were in the service of one or other organisation, and every day brought new and more startling rumours. In March a regiment of the new Red Army arrived from Ekaterinburg to relieve the older men who had already served through most of the Siberian winter. Many were criminals freshly released from European prisons; the best of them were miners and factory-workers lured into the army by generous pay and rations. They were all completely undisciplined and changed their officers with monotonous regularity.
Towards the end of March the long succession of rumours did at length culminate in something actual. Late one night the telephone-bell rang in the commissary office; A.J., who was there working, answered it; the call came from a post-house half-way between Khalinsk and the railway. The message reported that there were rumours that the Trans-Siberian line had been cut by White guards, assisted by Czecho-Slovak prisoners-of-war.
A.J., tired after a long day of wrestling with the complications of a new rationing system, took no particular notice, since such scare messages arrived almost regularly two or three nights a week. But a quarter of an hour later another message came—this time from Tarkarovsk; no train, it said, had arrived from the east since noon, and there were rumours that counterrevolution had broken out at Omsk. A.J. rang through to the garrison but could get no answer; Kashvin, he guessed, would be in bed and asleep; he walked, therefore, a mile or so over the hard snow to the soldiers’ barracks. He found the place in a state of utter chaos and pandemonium, with all the officers more or less drunk and incapable. Most of the men were in a similar condition; it was a saint’s day, and by way of celebration they had looted several wine-cellars in the town. A.J. tried to make known the dangerous possibilities of the situation, and while he was actually in the officers’ room there came a further telephone message from Pokroevensk, ten miles away, conveying the brief information that counter-revolutionary bands had occupied and plundered a neighbouring village. At this a few of the officers struggled to rouse themselves, and men were hastily sent to the armoury for rifles and ammunition. Meanwhile orders were given for a general turn-out, but out of nearly a thousand men only two hundred could be equipped for whatever emergency might arise. Hundreds were so drunk that they could not stir from the floors on which they had collapsed; many also were sleeping with women in the town and could not be reached at all.
A.J. himself took a rifle and a belt of cartridges, and soon after midnight the detachment, in charge of an officer, set out along the gleaming snow-bound road. The cold air soon cleared the drink-sodden heads of the men, and they stepped out at a good pace in the direction of Pokroevensk. Ruffians though most of them were, A.J. found them almost pathetically companionable and full of amazement that he, a civilian commissar, should be accompanying them. Surely, as a government official, it was his privilege—his perquisite, as it were—to keep out of all serious danger?
He smiled and answered that he had come because he knew the district very well—the roads, directions, and so on. It would not matter his temporarily deserting the office-desk; there was Kashvin in charge. And at this the men laughed. Though they loved to let themselves be stirred by Kashvin’s eloquence, a moment such as this brought out their secret contempt for the man whose tongue was so much mightier than his sword.
During the first hour the men sang songs—not spirited marching songs, but dragging, rather melancholy refrains that seemed to be known by all. One was ’Far away and over the marshes’—a weird recitative about exile; another favourite was ‘A Soldier lays down his Life.’ Into these slow, crooning tunes the men somehow contrived to insert a strange ghost of rhythm, hardly noticeable to the listener, yet sufficient to keep them in rough, plodding step. After the first few miles, however, A.J. suggested that they had better march in silence, since voices carried far in that still, cold atmosphere. The men obeyed him, not instantly as from a military order, but with a gradual trail of voices from high melody to the faintest murmur amongst themselves. The officer who should have had the wit to give the order was staggering along, still very drunk. The men said tranquilly that it was because he was not satisfied to get drunk like other men; he dosed himself with a sort of yeast-paste which produced more permanent effects.
The remaining events of that night might serve as a model for much that was happening and that was yet to happen throughout the vast territory between the Pacific and the Vistula. All the typical ingredients were present—confusion, rumour, inconsequence, surprise. To begin with, at Pokroevensk, which was reached about three in the morning, the officer in charge suddenly collapsed and died. A.J. telephoned the news to Khalinsk and gathered that the town was in the wildest panic; rumours of an overwhelming White advance along the line of the Trans-Siberian were being received, and the garrison was already preparing to evacuate the town. This seemed to A.J. the sheerest absurdity as well as cowardice, but he could not argue the matter over the wire with a person who, from the sound of his voice, was still half-drunk. He determined, if the soldiers were willing (for of course he had no real authority over them), to march on to the railway and tear up a few lengths of line—the usual and most effective way of delaying an advance. The men agreed to this plan, and were just about to leave Pokroevensk, when a mortifying discovery was made. The ammunition that they carried would not fit the rifles, the former being of French pattern, while the latter were Japanese. Similar mistakes, the men said, had often been made during the war against the Germans. It meant, of course, that the detachment was practically unarmed, and A.J. could see nothing for it but to return to Khalinsk as quickly as possible. But then something else happened. In the grim light of dawn a band of White guards swept suddenly into the village along the frozen road from the west; there were several hundred of them, all fully armed and all in a mood to wreak terrible havoc upon a small village. They were not, however, prepared for A.J. and his couple of hundred men. Still less was A.J. prepared for them. He realised that a fight would be hopeless, and rather than have all his followers shot to pieces he would prefer to surrender; he had none of the more spectacular heroic virtues, and conceived that a soldier’s aim should be to preserve his own life at least as much as to destroy his enemy’s. As it chanced, however, the White captain thought similarly, and was, moreover, a little quicker in action. He surrendered to A.J. a few seconds before the latter could possibly have reversed the compliment. It was amusing, in a way, to see four or five hundred well-armed Whites surrendering to less than half as many Reds who could not, if they had tried, have fired a shot. The White captain explained that he was not really a very convinced White; he had always, in fact, inclined to be a little pink. Some of the White soldiers raised cheers for the Soviets. A.J. nodded gravely; the procedure was very familiar.