Knight Without Armour

by James Hilton

  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.

  Among the commissary duties was that of visiting the prison and prison hospital, which were now under the control of the local Soviet. Both were small and crammed with White prisoners, most of whom were sullenly resigned to whatever fate might be in store for them. A few were defiant, exulting in the still-expected breakdown of the Revolution. Almost every day fresh arrivals were brought in by Red guards, and—as it were, to make room for them—others were removed by Baumberg’s orders, taken to the military camp, and shot. Baumberg never explained on what system he selected his victims; perhaps, indeed, he had no system at all. His ferocity was coldly impersonal; when he had done his day’s duty, including perhaps the ordering of half a dozen shootings for the morrow, he would go home to his daughter, who kept house for him, and play noisy capering games with his fatherless grand-children.

  The White prisoners included a score or more women, who were lodged separately in a large overcrowded room. This was a thoroughly unsatisfactory arrangement, since the room was badly needed as a supplementary hospital ward for the male prisoners, many of whom were sick and wounded. Baumberg, though he would have scorned any idea of sex-distinction, did not in fact have any of the women shot, and was willing enough to allow the majority of them to be transferred to Omsk, where the prison was larger. This only stipulated exceptions were the two most distinguished captives, whom he wished to keep at Khalinsk, and who, after the departure of the rest, were transferred to separate cells. Both had been captured by A.J.’s men in the affair at Pokroevensk. The Countess Vandaroff was one, and A.J., who had the job of visiting her from time to time, soon recommended her transference to hospital, since she was clearly going out of her mind. The other woman prisoner was the Countess Marie Alexandra Adraxine. She was of a different type; calm, exquisitely dignified, she accepted favours and humiliations alike with slightly mocking nonchalance. When A.J. first visited her, she said: “Ah, Commissar, we have met before, I think? That morning at Pokroevensk—I dare say you remember?”

  He said: “I have come to ask if you have any particular complaints—is your food satisfactory, and so on?”

  “Oh, fairly so, in the circumstances. My chief wish is that there were fewer bugs in my mattress.”

  “I will try to see that you have a fresh one, though of course I cannot promise that it will be perfectly clean.”

  “Oh, I’m not fastidious—don’t think that.” She went to the narrow mattress by the wall of the cell and gave it a blow with her clenched fist. After a second or so a slowly spurting-red cascade issued from every rent and seam. “You see?” she said. “It’s the trivial things that really bother one most, isn’t it?”

  The second time he paid her cell an official visit she thanked him for having replaced the mattress by a comparatively unverminous one. Then she said: “Have you any idea what is going to happen to me, Commissar?”

  He shook his head. “It is altogether a matter for others to decide.”

  “You think I shall be shot?”

  “No women have been shot as yet.”

  “Nevertheless, it is possible?”

  “Oh, perfectly.”

  “Would you approve?”

  “I should not be asked either to approve or to disapprove.”

  She seemed amused by his attitude. After that he did not again visit her alone, for he did not care to be asked questions which he could not answer.

  As spring advanced it could be foreseen that events in the district were hastening to a further crisis. Along the whole length of the Trans-Siberian the Czecho-Slovak prisoners-of-war, whom the Petrograd government had promised a safe journey to Vladivostok, had seized trains and station depots. This comparatively small body of men, stretched out in tenuous formation for four thousand miles, was practically in possession of Siberia, and there was talk that the Allies, instead of letting them proceed across the Pacific, intended to use them to break the Soviets and re-form the eastern front against Germany. Simultaneously the forces of counter-revolution were again massing for an attack. In April the Reds began to send important political prisoners away from the endangered districts; the ex-Emperor was removed from Tobolsk for an unknown destination. From Khalinsk there would doubtless have been a big exodus but for a dispute between the district commissars of Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg as to who
held authority over the town. Baumberg favoured Ekaterinburg; Vronstein preferred Siberian rule. A hot quarrel arose between the two officials, broken only by intermittent shootings that both could agree upon.

  At last came news that Omsk itself had been taken by the counter- revolutionaries. Khalinsk was then caught up in another sudden scurry of panic; military and civilian authority both made preparations to evacuate the town; stores and ammunition were packed and sent away west; and Baumberg’s speeches grew more and more tumultuous. Kashvin’s invented atrocity stories now began to trickle back with many elaborations; they drove the Red garrison to the highest pitch of fury, and this, in the absence of any convenient battlefield enemy, was vented upon the White captives in the prison.

  One night the quarrelling between Baumberg and Vronstein came to a head. Difficulties had arisen over the provision of transport for sending certain of the prisoners to safer places—safer, that was, from White capture. Rather than run the risk of any being rescued by their friends, Vronstein was for a wholesale massacre; but this was too much for Baumberg. The two stormed and threatened each other, Vronstein declaring in the end that he would march at the head of his soldiers and take the prison by storm. As soon as he had left the commissary office, Baumberg turned to A.J. in his suddenly normal and placid way and said: “I do believe the fellow means it. He’ll have them all murdered before the night’s out. Andreyeff, I think you ought to go to the prison and get out the two women. Petrograd will be furious if they are slaughtered by those drunken hogs.” He added, a little pompously: “The women are both very important links in the chain of evidence against the enemies of the Revolution, and I have already received strict orders that they are to be taken care of. When the counterrevolution has been crushed, they are to be put on trial in Petrograd—I tell you that in confidence, of course.”

  It was almost midnight when A.J. reached the prison. Even so soon there was in the atmosphere a queer feeling of impending terror; the prison-guards were nervous and inclined to question his authority. It was obvious that most of them, if only to save their own skins, would join with the soldiers in whatever bloodthirsty orgy was to ensue. A.J. sought Countess Vandaroff first; she was kept in an outlying part of the prison under semi-hospital conditions. As soon as the warder unlocked her door she sprang screaming out of bed and crouched in the furthest corner of the cell. A.J. began: “Do not alarm yourself, Countess, but get ready to move away at once. You are to be taken elsewhere.” Then, as he saw the warder’s eyes upon him, he knew that he had blundered. In the hurry of the moment he had called her ‘Countess’. Commissars had been degraded and private soldiers shot, he knew, for less than that. Perturbed by the possible results of his slip, he went on to the other woman’s cell. She was asleep and had to be awakened. He gave her the same message, but with careful omission of the forbidden word.

  Waiting in the prison-hall for the two women to present themselves, he could hear the sound of shouting and rifle-fire from the barracks not far away. Intense nervousness had by this time communicated itself to warders and prisoners alike; all were wide awake and chattering, and A.J. wondered what might be in store for them during the next few hours.

  Countess Adraxine appeared first; she had put over her shoulders a light travelling cloak that still retained a trace of its original fashionableness, and she carried a few personal belongings in a small bundle. In the presence of the guards he did not speak to her; they waited for a moment in silence, and then he despatched one of the guards to fetch Countess Vandaroff. A little later the guard returned with the astonishing news that the woman was dead. A.J. rushed to her cell; it was true. Mad with terror at the thought that she was to be taken away and shot, the woman had killed herself by a desperate and rather difficult method: she had stabbed herself repeatedly in the throat with an ordinary safety-pin, and had died from shock and loss of blood.

  A.J. was a little paler when he rejoined the other prisoner. There was no time to be lost, and accompanied by guards the two hurried out of the prison and across the town-square to the commissary office. Baumberg was waiting; he had heard of the suicide by telephone and was in a fine fury. The Petrograd authorities would hold him responsible; how was it that the woman had been allowed to have in her possession such a dangerous weapon as a safety-pin; and much else that was extreme and absurd. Then, with one of those sudden returns to mildness that were such an odd trait in his character, he handed his assistant a sheaf of papers. “You are to take the remaining prisoner to Moscow, Andreyeff; there you will hand her over to the authorities. Two guards will go with you. Here are all the necessary papers; you will board the first train west from Tarkarovsk. The horses are waiting outside—you must set out instantly, for the latest news is that the Whites are advancing quickly along the line from Omsk.”

  In the courtyard of the office building stood a couple of tarantasses—the ordinary Siberian conveyance which, badly sprung and yoked to relays of horses, would sometimes accomplish the journey to Tarkarovsk in five or six hours. There was a small moon shining, and a sky of starlight. The roads, after the grip of winter, were on the point of thawing; in a few days they would be choked with mud. A.J., clad in a heavy soldier’s greatcoat and fur cap, superintended the stowing away of the luggage into the first vehicle, which, driven by one of the guards, pulled out into the deserted street and clattered away south towards one o’clock in the morning. A few minutes later the second tarantass followed; A.J. and the woman sat together in the back of the swaying, rickety vehicle, while the other guard drove.

  In the commissary yard A.J. had spoken a few words to his prisoner—formal courtesies and so on, but as soon as the journey began he relapsed into silence. He was, to begin with, physically tired; he had been working at more than normal pressure for weeks, and now reaction was on him. Apart from that, the stir of Countess Vandaroff’s death and the sudden unfolding of a new future gave him a certain weariness of mind; he felt too mentally fatigued to realise what was happening. Fortunately, fatigue drove away anxiety; he felt again as if he were living in the midst of some vague and curious dream, full of happenings over which he had no control and with which, in any major sense, he was completely unconcerned. He was, he supposed, bound for Moscow, yet how and even whether he would ever get there did not seem in the least important. He had a pocketful of documents stamped with all the official seals and signatures Baumberg had been able to commandeer, but he had no confidence that they were worth more than the paper they were written on. The ex-Emperor, it was rumoured, had been seized by the local Soviet at Ekaterinburg in defiance of official orders; things like that were constantly happening; anything, indeed, might happen. The only course was to drift onwards, somehow or other, inside this busy dream, always ready, in an emergency, to grope into a wakefulness that was but another dream of another kind.

  Steadily through the night the horses galloped over the softening earth. Only once was anything said, and that was at Pokroevensk, where the horses were changed and rumours were shared with the local telegraph official. The latest report was that Tarkarovsk had already fallen to the Whites. A.J., with better knowledge of distances, did not credit this, but it was futile to argue. As the journey was resumed, the woman said: “So you are going on to Tarkarovsk, Commissar?”

  “Yes.”

  “But if the Whites hold the place, that means we shall be running into them?”

  “Yes. Only I don’t believe they do hold it.”

  “What would happen if they did?”

  “You would be freed and I should be shot, most probably.”

  “Whereas, if all goes well and we get to Moscow safely, it is I who will be shot?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You strike the Napoleonic attitude rather well, Commissar.”

  “Pardon me, I am not striking any attitude at all. I am merely very tired—really too tired to talk.”

  After that she said nothing.

  He was right; Tarkarovsk was still Red, though the town a
nd district were being rapidly prepared for evacuation. The two jolting vehicles drove up to the railway station towards dawn, after a journey of nightmare weariness. Hour after hour the Commissar and his prisoner had been bumped along over the interminable Siberian plain, and now, at the station, with limbs sore and aching, they had to begin the next and perhaps more arduous task of finding scats on the train. The station was swarming with refugees from the surrounding country, most of them in a pitiable condition, and all frantically anxious to be out of the way when the White troops should enter. There had been no trains since the previous evening, though several were rumoured to be on their way. The stationmaster bowed respectfully when A.J. presented his papers; yes, he should certainly be given a compartment in the next train, but would there be any next train—that was the real question? “I cannot, you see, invent a train, Commissar—not being God, that is to say.” A.J. detected a slight impertinence behind the man’s outward obsequiousness. Of course the Whites were coming and the Reds were leaving; the fellow was adroitly trimming his sails to catch the new wind.

  Throughout the hardships of the journey and now amidst the throng and scurry of the railway platform, the woman prisoner preserved a calm that had in it still that same slight touch of mockery. Of course it was not her place to worry about the train or the White advance; if the latter arrived before the former, the advantage would all be hers. She could afford to watch with equanimity and even exultation the growing congestion of the station precincts and the increasing anxiety on the faces of the two Red guards. Yet for all that, her attitude was no more than calm; it was as if she were neither hoping nor fearing anything at all. She sat on her bundle of possessions and watched the frantic pageant around her with a sleepy, almost mystical detachment. Even when, at three in the afternoon, the stationmaster came shouting the news that the train was arriving after all, she did not move or betray by a murmur that the matter concerned her; and this attitude, because it so queerly accorded with his own, stirred in A.J. a slight and puzzled attention.