WE TAKE TO SLEIGHS
The Reds were all this time coming nearer; and, finally, at Bolotnaya,
we had to abandon our train and take to sleighs. We had the very best
reason for doing so, as, in the first place, we were blocked behind a
long ribbon of trains without any prospect of getting off for a week;
and as, in the second place, we were told by General Pepelaiev that
Novo-Nikolaevsk had been captured, and that the Reds were making a
cutting-off movement from it, north of the railway, on sleighs, with
Oyash or perhaps Bolotnaya as their objective. “I am leaving myself in a
few minutes,” said Pepelaiev in conclusion. “If you stay here forty-eight
hours longer you will certainly be captured.”
As a matter of fact the Reds were at Bolotnaya long before the expiration
of that time, but they did not find us there, for we had left the village
some six hours earlier. We had great difficulty in getting sleighs, for
every sleigh was being used, either by its owner or by troops who had
commandeered it; and the town commandant on whom I and another officer
called told us that it was absolutely impossible for him to get us
vehicles of any description. My companion happened to meet in the street,
however, some Jaeger officers belonging to a howitzer battery which had
been equipped a year before by General Knox, and these officers said
that all our party could travel in the sleigh of their detachment. The
conditions were such, however, that the ladies could not be brought; but
we persuaded the commandant of an echelon on the west track to take one
of our railway carriages with him, and into this carriage we crowded all
the women, children, and old people who had been specially entrusted to
us. There was no room in this carriage for any of our officers save one,
who was sick, and the train commandant would not attach more than one
additional carriage to his train, which was on the point of leaving. This
carriage reached Taiga safely with all its occupants, and we joined it
there afterwards.
Having thus done all we could for our Russian _protégés_, we tried to
find our sleighs, but that task was rendered exceedingly difficult by
the darkness, the crowds, the confusion, and the fact that there were
many sleighs, all rushing past at a great speed, and that we had no means
of telling which were ours. Finally, a number of vehicles went past
laden with ammunition, equipment, and baggage; and one of our Russian
officer-interpreters cried out: “These are they. Jump on anyhow!” He
himself, together with his wife, were comfortably installed in the best
sleigh, but there was no time to ask him for explanations on that or any
other subject, as he shot past like an express train.
How the rest of us managed, without mishap, to scramble aboard the
succeeding sleighs borders on the miraculous, but, as I discovered three
days afterwards, none of us was left behind on this occasion. Owing to
the weight which it already carried, no sleigh could take more than
one passenger, so that for most of the next three days we were each
isolated by the darkness and the cold as effectually as if we had each
been imprisoned alone in an underground dungeon with hundreds of miles
between us. All the energies of every one of us were concentrated on the
task of clinging to the pile of baggage on which he sat, and on watching
continually for the first symptoms of frost-bite in his face and limbs.
None of us had enough spare force even to think of anything else. In
ordinary times a sleigh can travel from Bolotnaya to Taiga in one day,
but we took three days owing to the fact that we made a detour to the
north in order to avoid the traffic, and for the same reason we travelled
most of the time by night.
Owing to the roughness of the road and to the number of gullies,
camouflaged with snow, which had to be crossed, we were frequently thrown
off our sleighs, and several of us got lost for a considerable time in
the forest. Private James of the Hampshires, who had just come from the
hottest part of India, where he had had a sunstroke, got one of his
heels frost-bitten, and the affected part turned black as tar. Another
of our party, after having been pitched out of one sleigh and knocked
down by another, and run over by a third, and rapped on the knuckles by
the driver of a fourth on which he had managed for a moment to get a
precarious hold, finally fell into the deep snow alongside the track on
top of a frozen corpse; and there was hardly one of us that escaped some
adventure of the same kind. It was a serious matter to get thrown off
one’s sleigh, and that for the following reasons: the track was narrow,
the snow on each side deep, the pace very rapid; and it was, therefore,
no easy matter to get aboard another sleigh, especially as the driver
always objected to a stranger attempting to board him in the darkness.
Trying to get into a sleigh was like trying to get into an overladen
boat pushing off from a wreck, and the _izvoshchik_ sometimes treated an
intruder as the boatman would, striking at his benumbed hands with the
butt-end of his whip in order to make him release his hold. And he could
not be blamed for doing so, as any addition to the weight drawn by his
tired horse might have been fatal to himself, and lead to the loss of the
ammunition which he carried. Besides, it must be remembered that this was
not a joy-ride, but a _sauve qui peut_. It was a time of war—nay, more
than that, it was the worst period of the most terrible civil war which
modern history has seen. The wonder is that such of us as were thrown out
ever escaped being left behind.
One of our party who fell off his sleigh the first night managed, after
floundering about for some time in the snow, to get into another. It was
some time before he discovered that this sleigh did not belong to our
party, and was, moreover, going in the wrong direction, perhaps to bring
information to the Bolsheviks. Being wrapped up in furs and blankets, the
two other occupants did not at once notice his presence; but, as soon as
they did, they promptly threw him out, and then he found himself in a
desert of snow without any other sleigh in sight. Luckily, however, he
met by the merest chance a Jaeger horseman, who enabled him to overtake
our party which had been held up by a gully. Had he been left behind
he would have tumbled about hopelessly for a few hours through the
illimitable white waste; he would have fallen into gullies; he would have
lost his spectacles; his eyes would have become filled with snow; his
eyelashes would have become heavy with icicles; and, finally, his frozen
corpse would have been added to the hundreds of others which marked the
track of Kolchak’s terrible retreat. I was afterwards told at Omsk by
Mikhailov, the war correspondent of the _Pravda_, who had taken part
in the pursuit, that about a thousand frozen corpses of White soldiers
had been found by the Reds in the snow between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk,
and we ourselves came across five or six corpses between Bolotnaya and
Taiga. And here I might say, though I began this account for the general
public with the deliberate intention of telling nothing about the really
frightful and terrifying aspects of this _débâcle_, that, in some of the
Russian Red Cross trains, callous hospital assistants made a practice
of stripping corpses stark naked, and then piling them in the open,
like logs of wood, alongside the track. Their object in stripping them
was to get their garments, clothing being in that intense cold as much
a necessity of life as food; but I could never understand the want of
reverence for the dead and of regard for the feelings of the living which
was exhibited by the exposure of these bodies on the roadside, even in
large towns like Novo-Nikolaevsk, when it would have been easy to put
them inside the many deserted houses, where school children could not
collect around them as they did, or to cover them with at least a few
shovelfuls of snow. Ordinary burial was, of course, out of the question,
for the frozen earth was hard as granite and would have had to be blasted
with dynamite.
During a life spent in war, sometimes conducted in savage countries, I
have never seen similar disrespect shown to the dead save in China, and
there only in the case of decapitated criminals; but I must say that,
in the present instance, this disrespect was exhibited only by those
dead-house gentry whom prolonged warfare, even in civilized lands,
tends to dehumanize. Handling corpses as they do every day of their
lives, these hospital ghouls sometimes have in the end literally no more
respect for a dead man than they have for a dead horse. They become like
animals, losing absolutely and for ever the instinctive reverence on this
point which we find even among the most degraded races. With the soldiers
in the field it is always different; and, despite their far greater need
for warm clothing, I never knew during this retreat of Russian soldiers
taking even the overcoat from one of their comrades who had fallen by the
wayside.
I refrain from saying a word about the appalling typhus horror, which led
in one case to an echelon reaching its destination with 50 per cent. of
its passengers dying or dead, but I felt that I must make some allusion
to the terrible fact mentioned above, owing to the profound impression
of savagery and utter demoralization which it made on my comrades and
myself. It seemed to us that even the most elementary observances of
the most primitive civilization had been swept away by this tidal wave
of civil war, that human culture had collapsed, and that the end of all
things was approaching.
A comparatively minor matter was the reckless way in which the Russian
soldiers threw away their lives by drinking motor spirit. Though they
had no motors, and though they found their guns, their ammunition, and
sometimes even their rifles too heavy to bring along with them, they
managed nevertheless to carry occasionally in a sleigh, which they
handled with the most exquisite skill and care, a huge cylinder of motor
spirit whereof some of them were mad enough to drink. After a few hours
of wild hilarity many soldiers who had tasted this poison collapsed, and
then fell an easy prey to the terrible Demon of the Ice, who was always
on the alert, always watching for a chance to strike.
Just as a railway engine has to stop periodically in order to take in
water and fuel, so had we to stop occasionally in order to absorb, in the
warm cottages, a supply of animal heat. We did not eat or drink anything;
we simply sat or stood till the marrow in our bones had thawed. Then
we went again into the external cold, whose first touch was like the
blow of a whip across the face, and prepared to push on. No matter how
warmly one was clad, even though one was protected by layer upon layer
of non-conductors like hot water in a Thermos flask, a leakage of the
animal heat still went on steadily, and, unless one replenished his stock
of vital warmth several times a day by the means I have described, he was
inevitably overtaken by sleepiness, collapse, and death.
I pitied from my heart the poor Siberian peasants, whose houses were
thus invaded all day and filled every night by endless relays of armed
men who ate up all the food; used up all the fuel; took away all the
fodder, sleighs, horses, and cattle; and frequently compelled all the
men and boys to accompany them. When Kolchak’s armies afterwards went
to pieces at Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk, they left behind them, like spars
and wreckage marking the spot where they had gone down, thousands of
these unfortunate peasants, their horses lost, their sleighs smashed,
themselves without money or food or any means of getting back to their
homes. I have got terrible statistics bearing on this subject, but this
is not the place to give them; and I shall here confine myself to saying
that districts, large as England, where there formerly were villages and
cultivated fields, have now been reduced to the condition of deserts and
are quite uninhabited.
The patience of the unfortunate peasants in the face of all these
calamities was almost Christ-like, but, on the other hand, the private
soldiers who invaded their houses could not help doing so, for was it not
“war,” which excuses everything?
On one occasion the soldiers who filled a peasant’s hut and who, to do
them justice, kept as quiet as mice were politely requested by the owner
to go outside for a few moments in order that the good woman of the house
might give birth to a child. When they returned the child had already
come into the world, and the mother, evidently none the worse for the
ordeal she had just gone through, was at the fireplace making tea.
Sometimes most of the floor was covered with sleeping soldiers tightly
wedged together, and whenever one of these recumbent forms stirred
itself and got up, there was a move towards the vacant place on the part
of those who had been left standing and expectant. It reminded me of
strap-hangers in a crowded London tramcar moving towards a vacated seat.
I might here observe that this promiscuous way of sleeping contributed to
the spread of typhus, as did also the habit of wearing clothes taken from
corpses.
Sometimes mere children were taken from the villages in order to drive
sleighs for the retreating troops. Two of our British soldiers who had
brought some brandy with them once offered some of it to a burly driver
who sat in front of them, and who accepted the offer with alacrity, but
in a curious, piping voice. When, towards evening, all three went into a
house to warm themselves, the Tommies looked on in astonishment, while
their driver peeled off coat after coat, growing gradually smaller and
smaller as he did so, until at last, when they had begun to fear that
there was no human kernel at all inside all those furry husks, a small
boy of about fourteen years of age stood grinning before them.
My own experiences on this trip were not as bad as those which some of my
comrades had, but naturally they impressed me more, not only because they
were my own, but also because I was older than most of the other members
of our party, whose average age, if we exclude old Sergeant-Major Walters
and a few others, was somewhere about nineteen. During the first night’s
wild ride I had taken advantage of a stoppage to get out and walk, for
my feet were getting frozen. Then a very common thing happened. The long
line of sleighs stretching into the darkness in front of me suddenly put
itself in motion. The sleigh ahead of mine went off like an arrow shot
from a bow. My sleigh followed automatically, despite all the efforts
of the driver to moderate the speed of his horses until I could get in.
I clutched the rear of the vehicle, but my desperate attempts to hoist
myself aboard were all in vain, owing to the weight of clothing which I
carried. I wore two fur overcoats, one on top of the other, and likewise
two pairs of fur gloves, the outer pair having only one compartment each
for the fingers. As in addition to this I carried a haversack crammed
tight with my belongings, it is not surprising that my agility proved
unequal to the effort demanded of it, and that I rolled back into the
snow while my sleigh shot on ahead.
When I had scrambled to my feet, my spectacles rendered almost opaque by
snow and ice, I found that two or three sleighs had already dashed past,
and that another was rushing down on me. My attempt to get into this one
was an even greater failure than my first attempt had been. I was knocked
down instantly, and by the time I had risen again, I saw that there were
only two more sleighs to pass. This sight nerved me to a supreme effort,
and I succeeded in gripping with my hands the rear end of the last sleigh
but one. As I could not pull myself up, however, I was dragged along
helplessly behind, and should soon have had to relinquish my hold, had
not Sergeant Murray, a Canadian who happened to be riding in the sleigh,
succeeded, but with great difficulty, in hoisting me aboard. Luckily
the Russian driver was temporarily paralyzed (with drink), or he would
promptly have thrown me out again.
The violence of my exertions so told on me that I never quite recovered
my strength during the rest of this sleigh trip, and on the last day
I was near getting lost completely. Through some misunderstanding the
sleigh to which I was clinging got separated from the rest of the convoy,
and at nightfall I found myself in a strange village, the only one of
our party. A fatal tendency to sleep had nearly mastered me several
times during the course of the day, and now, with no place to go to, I
was hardly able to walk, and would willingly have lain down in the snow
if I had not known well what that would have meant. The few houses that
the village contained were crammed with people, while the streets and
open spaces, as well as the roads for miles around, were filled with
thousands of soldiers unable to find shelter. Forcing my way into one
house I found it crowded with Russian officers, all fast asleep, and
some of them sitting bolt upright in chairs, looking as if they were
dead. The conviction that some of them were dead—dead of typhus—made me
beat a hasty retreat, and then I tried another house, where I was lucky
enough to find one man awake. He proved to be Colonel Ivantsev of the
14th Jaeger Volunteer Regiment, a kindly Russian officer, who, seeing
my exhausted condition, insisted on my staying with him, gave me some
tea, and allowed me to sleep on the floor. He himself spent most of the
night trying to straighten out the hopeless affairs of his regiment, to
get food for his soldiers, and to arrange for their departure next day.
At 4 o’clock in the morning, while it was still very dark, I accompanied
him in his sleigh to Taiga, passing all the way through a great forest
which, with its solemn silence and its dark pine-trees laden heavily with
snow, was a place of almost unearthly beauty. What set off that beauty
astonishingly were the huge fires kindled in it by soldiers who had been
unable to find shelter in the villages. Large numbers of such soldiers
passed the night seated around those camp-fires, whose red flames lit
up the white, frozen plain and illuminated the dark recesses of the
forest. But though those great conflagrations, which dotted the _taiga_
for miles and miles, were to the last degree picturesque, they meant,
unfortunately, that thousands of poor soldiers could not get proper
sleep. No wonder that I often saw men fast asleep in sleighs which they
were supposed to be driving, and even on horses which they were riding.
At Taiga I met my companions at the railway station in our old carriage
which had just come through from Bolotnaya, and which moved off soon
after my arrival.
Thus came to an end a sleigh journey which was certainly no “joy-ride,”
so far, at least, as I was concerned. If ever again I have to take part
in a Russian retreat, I will pray that my flight be not in the winter.