Knight Without Armour

A.J. was in no doubt as to his proper course of action. Such a distinguished party must be conveyed to Khalinsk and held as hostages. He arranged this promptly, after arming his men with the rifles taken from the White soldiers. Khalinsk was reached by noon, and by that time the atmosphere was completely changed; the Whites had everywhere been defeated, and Red reinforcements were already arriving from Ekaterinburg. A.J.’s prisoners were examined and locked away in the town jail, with the exception of most of the soldiers, who were permitted to join the Red army. In the reaction that followed the excitements of the whole episode A.J. felt a certain bewildered helplessness; all was such confusion, incoherence, chaos—a game played in the dark, with Fate as a blind umpire. The chapter of accidents found itself interpreted as a miracle of intrepid organisation, with A.J. as the hero of the hour. Even Kashvin congratulated him. “I would have accompanied you myself,” he explained, “but as Commissar, it would have been improper for me to leave the town. Now tell me, Andreyeff, do you think it would be better to ask for Japanese ammunition to fit he rifles or for French rifles to fit the ammunition?” He then showed A.J. a few reports he had drafted and which were to be telegraphed away immediately. They were all circumstantially detailed accounts of atrocities committed by White guards—women raped, babies speared on the ends of bayonets, wounded men tortured to death, and so on. Kashvin seemed extremely proud of the collection. “But surely,” A.J. said, “you can’t have received proof of all this in so short a time?” Kashvin replied cheerfully: “Oh no—they are my own invention entirely; don’t you think they read very well? After all, since we have no rifles and ammunition for the present, we must do what we can with moral weapons.”

And, as it further chanced, the Whites had committed atrocities, though less ingeniously than Kashvin had imagined. The Reds, too, were not without a natural lust for vengeance. Hundreds of prosperous local inhabitants were thrown into prisons on charges of having been in sympathy with the White insurrectionists; wholesale raids and arrests were made, and the Khalinsk prison was soon quite full. Meanwhile in the town itself all semblance of civilian authority vanished. A strongly Red local Soviet was appointed by the soldiers; Kashvin, despite prodigies of oratory and private manoeuvre, was deposed from office and a Jewish agitator named Baumberg took his place. A.J. was allowed to remain as assistant-commissar because he was personally popular and because nobody else either wanted or was capable of performing his various jobs. These jobs now vastly increased, especially as food grew less plentiful and disease broke out in the overcrowded prison and barracks. Baumberg was a loud-voiced, heavy-featured Pole whose ferocity in public was only rivalled by an uncanny mildness in private life. At the age of twenty he had been accused (falsely, he said) of killing a gendarme; he had thenceforward spent twenty years in a military fortress and twenty more in exile at Missen, in the desolate tundra region of North Russia. Now, at sixty, he was being given his opportunity for revenge, and he was having no mercy. His ruthlessness gratified the soldiers, and his speeches, sincerer if no more extreme than those of Kashvin, were constant incitements to violence. Yet he was a pleasant person compared with the military commandant, an ex-railwayman named Vronstein. Vronstein was a psycho-pathological curiosity; he, too, had been long in exile, and its results had been an astounding assortment of perversions. Even his sadism was perverted; when prisoners were punished or shot he would never watch the scene himself, but would insist that a full and detailed report, complete with every horror, was submitted to him in writing. Over such reports he would savagely and secretly gloat for hours. Baumberg openly despised him, but there was a sinister power about the fellow which gave him considerable hold over the soldiers.