The Baron paused to drink from his glass of lager which the ice had long since melted. Valerie eased her position a little; even now the sultry night had come her garments were still sticking to her. After a moment the Austrian went on
`It was not so bad at first. Some sense of chivalry still existed between the officers on both sides. The normal feelings of decency and humanity inherent in most men of every nation had not then been destroyed by the hideous hate propaganda which later turned honourable opponents into savages,
`The Russians sent me under escort with a number of other prisoners to Kiev. There I endeavoured to get news of my young wife. I could learn nothing definite, but from prisoners who were captured later I heard rumours that, in the national emergency, she had become a nurse and was tending the wounded on the Polish front.
`During those awful empty weeks of dull prison routine the one overwhelming craving which obsessed me was to get back to ,her. The war had not settled down sufficiently for a regular service of prisoners' letters and parcels to be established. She wrote to me, I don't doubt, but I never received any of her letters. In those early days of the war everything was chaotic. Our only news was hearsay rumours that the German drive on Paris had been checked, but that the Russian steamroller was lumbering down towards Berlin; rumours of our friends fighting on many fronts and that this or that relation had taken up some kind of national work. I could not stand the uncertainty and inaction, so I determined to escape.
`I will not weary you with details of those feverish days of preparation for the attempt, or the excitement of the actual dash for liberty, which I made with two other officers. We got away, but we were caught again two days later.
`As a punishment we were separated and each of us transferred to a harsher form of captivity. I was sent to Omsk in Siberia a little ugly town that, although it was the centre of a Government controlling thousands of square miles of territory, seemed to be composed only of many hundred shoddy, wooden buildings scattered over a great area.
`It always seemed to be raining there, except when it was snowing; and in winter the cold was intense. To appreciate the torture that cold can be you must not think of winter in Switzerland, where you are well fed and wrapped in warm furs, but of a bleak plain where the wind cuts like a knife, through garments worn paper thin, to an ill nourished body.
'Month after month dragged by. There was hardly a soul in the prison who could speak more than a few words of my language. I learnt Russian, but my spirit grew numb from continuous physical discomfort and the knowledge that I was many thousands of miles from home. In that remote place no post ever reached me, and news of the war itself was of the vaguest. All one could do was to cling to life and hope on that the war would soon be over. I could learn nothing of my wife, but all through those dark days the thought of her warm loveliness and our eventual reunion was the one thing which sustained me.
`The revolution in St. Petersburg, when it came, had no effect upon us prisoners. We heard tell of it, of course, but the Whites, who represented the old regime, dominated an area as big as Austria Hungary, of which Omsk was nearly in the centre. The Ural Mountains and vast tracts of unmapped forest lay between it and the cities where the Reds had their first successes. The dreary round of prison life went on much as before.
`When the news of the peace of Brest Litovsk filtered through we appealed to be sent home; but in the meantime spasmodic outbreaks had been taking place from one end of Russia to the other. The Red virus was spreading. Every town and village had its secret committee. The White officers were wholly occupied with their attempts to check the Revolution; they had no time to spare for the repatriation of prisoners or the means to send them home even if they had wished to do so.
`Within six months we had half a dozen different Governors. They could do nothing but tell us that, for the time being, we must stay where we were. There was a revolt among the prisoners, engineered in secret by the Bolsheviks, who were out to make any sort of trouble for the Whites. Realising the root from which the mutiny sprang, the authorities acted with the utmost brutality. Scores of the prisoners were shot down and the rest of us were herded into kennels so that a handful of troops could keep us covered with machine guns and prevent a repetition of the outbreak.
'Shortly afterwards fighting began in the streets of Omsk itself. For several days it was indecisive, but in the end the Reds gained the upper hand. All my fellow prisoners were then released except the officers. As representatives of the old order we were condemned to die.
`Those ruffians shot down my friends in batches. I dropped before they fired and feigned death. I allowed myself to be carted off and buried alive in a hastily dug trench with the bodies of the others. I nearly died of" suffocation, but, when the murderers had gone, I clawed my way out through the thin layer of earth they had shoveled on top of us. Then I started to walk home.
`I found the whole country in ferment. The hand of every man was raised against his brother. I dared not go near a town of any size, because, by that time, the Reds were in possession of all the railways.
I took to the forests, living on berries and roots and the occasional charity of solitary peasants that I encountered who seemed as utterly bewildered as myself. No one knew what was happening outside his immediate area. Everyone was terrified of strangers. The accepted policy was to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. Reds and Whites were hated with equal intensity, and both were murdered by the country people on every possible occasion when they thought they would be able to escape reprisals. I lived in a nightmare from which it seemed that I should never waken as, week after week; I progressed a few miles farther south.
'Often I had to make detours which delayed me many days. Once I built a raft to float myself across a broad river, but of its name I have no idea. Countless hours were wasted in hiding from ragged bands of desperate looking men. Sometimes sheer starvation compelled me to go into villages, and the sights I saw then do not bear a full description. Wholesale massacre seemed to have depopulated the land. Every hamlet had its quota of naked corpses rotting where they lay, and the survivors must have fled to the forests or the mountains. I saw women with their breasts cut off and bayonets left sticking in their swollen stomachs. Men with their eyes gouged out and their finger nails torn away. Little children who had been clubbed to death or impaled upon wooden stakes. If there is a God in Heaven He will call the Bolsheviks to account for the unbelievable barbarities they perpetrated during those years in order to achieve a political idea. Liberal minded theorists in every country are seeking to excuse them now. The human memory is short, atrocities are soon forgotten, but the blood and tortured agony of countless thousands of their own people still cry out against them, and any country which tolerates their disciples lays itself open to the possibility of similar horrors. They are at work in India today, and Spain. At any time there ...'
The Baron broke off and passed his hand across his eyes. `Forgive me. It is all years ago now; but when I was in Russia I saw such terrible sights with my own eyes that I am apt to get over excited when I think of what may be in store for other countries. Where was I?'
`You were telling us of your journey home,' Valerie said almost in a whisper.
'Ah, yes! Well, I lived as a wild beast, and, like an animal, I shunned all contact with men, convinced that the whole race had degenerated into packs of bloodthirsty hunters. I was still over five hundred miles from the old Austrian frontier when I sickened and was stricken down with cholera.