Knight Without Armour

by James Hilton

  After reclosing the door of the coupé, he washed in the lavatory- basin and completed his toilet. The other man’s uniform fitted him very well indeed, as did also the military top-boots. The brakes were already grinding on the wheels as he pulled down the window-blinds, half lay down on the couch, took up a magazine that was on the table, and closed his eyes. If anyone opened the door from the platform it would appear that he had fallen asleep whilst reading.

  The rest of his scheme was comparatively simple, if only he could escape attention at Tarkarovsk. Between Tarkarovsk and the next station there was almost sure to be some suitable spot where, before dawn, he could jump from the train and slip away across country. The disappearance of a high officer would create a stir, but only eventually; it would be more natural first of’ all to assume that any one of a dozen minor mischances could account for it.

  The train jerked and jangled to a standstill—Tarkarovsk—Tarkarovsk. A sound of shouting reached him from outside and then the scurry of footsteps running along the platform as the train halted. He did not think Tarkarovsk was a very large place, but of course even the smallest stations were crowded with refugees. Suddenly sharper cries pierced the general din, and the door of the coupé opened violently to admit an intruder very different from any A.J. had anticipated. He was of small stature and corpulent, was dressed in a black frock-coat and trousers, and carried a rather shabby top-hat. “Welcome, sir!” he cried, making a profound bow. “As chairman of the local council of Khalinsk, I bring you the town’s most gracious felicitations.” A.J. rose in astonishment, whereupon the other, smiling and still bowing, took hold of his hand and gave it a tremendous shaking. The dream in which A.J. had been living for so long turned a corner now and swept into the infinite corridors of another dream. Somehow or other he found himself stepping out of the train; porters immediately entered it and began lifting out quantities of luggage. Other men in frock-coats and top-hats were presented to him, and he heard the little man saying sweetly: “The cars are waiting outside, sir, if you are ready.” He walked across the platform and out into the courtyard, where a huge Benz was waiting. He got in; several frock- coats followed him; the luggage was packed into a second car behind. Then the two cars lurched forward along a dusty uneven road. He did not speak, but his companions, evidently thinking he was very sleepy, commiserated with him on the inconvenience of arriving at a country railway station at half-past three in the morning. Soon the road widened into the typically Siberian town of Tarkarovsk. The cars pulled up outside the small hotel, and A.J. was informed that a room had been engaged for him and that he could take a rest, if he chose, until breakfast, after which the journey to Khalinsk would be resumed. He gave rather vague thanks and said the arrangement would suit him very well. The frock-coats conducted him upstairs to his room with obsequious gestures and then went drown again, he guessed, to have many drinks and much gossip about himself.

  About himself—that was the question. Who was he? Who was he supposed to be? Why was he being taken to Khalinsk? And why the finery of a frock-coated railway station reception at such an hour? Then, alone in the rather dingy bedroom as the first light of dawn paled against the edges of the window-blinds, it occurred to him that the contents of his pockets might afford a clue. He examined them; he found a thick wallet containing a large sum in paper money and several official documents. One was a letter from Petrograd addressed to a Colonel Nikolai Andreveff, of Krasnoiarsk, appointing him Commissar of the town and district of Khalinsk, Western Siberia. And another was from the local council of Khalinsk, tendering their best respects and expressing sincere appreciation of’ the privilege conferred on them by the Petrograd government. A.J. read them through, put them back in the wallet, and then sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. He was still in his dark dream, and he dared not try to waken. There was no help for it; from the moment the frock-coat had entered the train at Tarkarovsk, a third identity had descended on him like a sealed doom.

  So he became Nikolai Andreyeff, Commissar of Khalinsk, and he began to wonder whether he would be fortunate enough to arrange an escape before he was found out. As it chanced, it became increasingly impossible to arrange an escape; but then, on the other hand, he was not found out. Both time and place were, in fact, especially favourable to the impersonation; Khalinsk was a small town, well away from the main avenues of Siberian communication, and too remote at first even to be affected seriously by the Revolution itself. Most of its inhabitants, some ten thousand or so in number, were quietly and prosperously bourgeois; the surrounding district provided abundant food, and though the usual exchange of exports and imports with European Russia had been impeded, that had meant to the folk of Khalinsk no greater privations than a shortage of cotton-thread and Ford motor parts, and the necessity to use their best butter as axle-grease for farm-wagons. Khalinsk, indeed, was a little island of normality in the midst of a rising sea of chaos, and its new Commissar fitted into its peaceful scheme of things without much difficulty. Everyone agreed that he was a ‘queer’ man with ‘queer’ ways, but most were glad, in their bourgeois hearts, that Petrograd had not sent them a fire- eater. About a week after his arrival news came that his wife and child had died of typhus in Vladivostok, and Khalinsk people felt much sympathy for the quiet, rarely-speaking man who had to sit in his office signing travel-passes while his family were buried at the other end of a continent. When someone ventured to express that sympathy, all he received was a patient ’Thank you—it is most kind of you’—courteously given, but somehow not an encouragement to continue.

  Once a visitor to Khalinsk who had known of Colonel Andreyeff in Krasnoiarsk commented that he would hardly have recognised him for the same man. “He was a wild fellow in those days—always ready to crack a joke—or another man’s head, for that matter. And now look at him!”

  Khalinsk looked at him quite often, for the commissary office was in the centre of the town, adjoining the court-house and the prison, and the Commissar walked between his office and his hotel four times a day. In the hotel he had rooms of his own and took all his meals in private. But Khalinsk people could see him in their streets, and behind his desk whenever they had business with him; he presided, too, in the local courthouse, and paid official visits to the prison. His justice was firm, and the town’s young bloods soon learned that they could play no tricks with the new ruler; yet it was noticed and commented upon that in court he always looked as if he were only half attending and didn’t really care what happened.

  His subordinates respected him, with the possible exception of Kashvin, the assistant commissar. Kashvin, a local youth of considerable intelligence, felt that the Petrograd authorities had needlessly superseded him in bringing Andreyeff from Krasnoiarsk, and he was the more antagonistic to his superior because he could not, with all his shrewdness, understand him. The two men, indeed, were complete opposites. Kashvin was cordial, unscrupulous, an astute observer of politics, and an impassioned orator. Probably, too, he was clever enough to foresee that power at Petrograd would eventually pass into the hands of extremists. During the autumn the normally easy-going life of Khalinsk did very rapidly deteriorate; a garrison of soldiers arrived from Europe with new and wilder doctrines; they were hardly willing to obey their own officers, much less a local commissar. Great excitement, also, had been caused by the establishment, in custody, of the ex-Emperor and his family at Tobolsk, a few hundred miles away. Throughout October conditions grew more and more turbulent, and it was clear that the situation in Petrograd was already slipping out of the hands of the moderates. Then in November came news of the Bolshevik revolution, and an immediate acceleration in Khalinsk and all such places of the trend already in progress.

  Even Kashvin found it increasingly difficult to keep his balance on the political tight-rope. Following a custom beginning to be prevalent, the soldiers had got rid of their officers and had elected others from their own ranks; unfortunately, however, they obeyed their elected superiors no better th
an anyone else. Kashvin’s loudest oratory could not persuade them to cease their plundering raids into the town shops. Andreyeff did not try the oratorical method; he collected a few personal supporters and made arrests. Sternness succeeded for a while, until, quite suddenly, the blow was struck. While the Commissar was sitting at the courthouse one morning in January, the building was surrounded by soldiers and a spokesman entered to deliver an ultimatum. The soldiers, he announced, wished to choose their own commissar as well as their own officers; they had been in communication with Petrograd and had received official support; so would, therefore, the Commissar kindly consent to consider himself no longer a commissar until a vote had been taken? Most observers expected Andreyeff to give a sharp answer, but, to general surprise, he merely smiled (which he so rarely did) and replied: “Certainly—with pleasure.” The vote was taken there and then, and Kashvin was elected Commissar, with Andreyeff as his civilian assistant. Again it was expected that the latter would indignantly refuse to serve under his recent subordinate, but Andreyeff continued to give surprise by his easy acceptance of the situation. And, indeed, the reversal of position made more difference in theory than in fact. Kashvin, though nominally in authority, was completely at the mercy of his military supporters, while Andreyeff, exactly as before, continued his patient work of issuing ration- cards, arranging for the distribution of food and fuel, and making out travel- passes.

  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, mo
reover, 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.