Knight Without Armour

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.

More important than the White soldiers was a party of civilians whom they had been escorting. These were various personages, more or less illustrious, who had escaped from European Russia and were hoping to cross Siberia and reach America. They had travelled disguised as far as Tarkarovsk and had there given themselves into the hands of a White detachment which, in return for an enormous bribe, had undertaken to get them through to Omsk.