‘Well, I did have a lot of luck.’
‘Hell with that. Man makes his own breaks, mostly. I suppose having that exploit on your record is why you landed your present job – right?’
‘Had something to do with it, anyway.’
‘Moral in that, somewhere… But what news of those people since? Did you hear from Solovyev?’
‘I heard he’d married Nadia.’
‘Well…’
‘Heard it from her, actually. He was on his way back to rejoin the Volunteer Army by then. But anyway – that’s the story – complete, and as they say unabridged.’
‘Deuce of a yarn, at that.’
The Welshman nodded. ‘Bloody hell…’
Bob reflected now, while the train rumbled on towards Debaltsevo, that this had been the first time he’d spoken Nadia’s name aloud – in any personal context, anyway – since those events of a year ago. The dully informative nature of the statement and the flatly unemotional tone of voice in which he’d made it echoed over and over in his mind, adapting itself as he dozed off to the rhythm of the train’s wheels – heard he’d married Nadia, heard he’d married Nadia…
Scott’s voice broke through: ‘Not married, Cowan, are you?’
‘What?’ Surfacing: with Nadia still in his mind… ‘Oh. No, I’m not. Are you – either of you?’
Davies had shaken his head, pretending to shiver. Scott said, ‘Damn near was. Back in ’14. Damn near thing.’ He shifted on the seat, yawning. ‘Taught me a lesson. You think something’s a calamity, later you get to see it was the best thing could’ve happened.’
*
It was dark when they reached Debaltsevo, too dark to see much detail, only that it was bigger than the other places they’d been through. There was a long wait outside the station before they finally got in, and when they did there were soldiers on the platform to prevent anyone disembarking. Scott had just discovered this – he was on the step of the carriage arguing with a corporal – when a lanky, red-faced captain, the stars on his shoulder-boards only scratched on in blue crayon, arrived at the double, panting apologies and introducing himself as a liaison officer from the staff of General Mai-Maievsky. He had a lot to say, but what it boiled down to was that the Volunteer lines north of Kharkov had been broken – two days ago, apparently – and there was fighting now in the town itself. The men and machines of ‘A’ Detachment RAF, still on their train, were stopped at Kupyansk – about seventy-five miles this side of Kharkov – which was itself in danger of encirclement by Red cavalry. In fact Kupyansk should be all right for a day or two, but—
‘Is General Holman at Kupyansk too?’
‘General Holman?’ The Russian turned his hands palms-up. ‘I don’t know this general…’
‘So what else, Captain?’
‘Tonight your train has to stay here, unfortunately. Only hospital trains coming through, tonight. There have been heavy casualties, you see – and while there is a chance to get them out—’
‘Of course. But in the morning—’
‘Then you can continue, sir.’
‘To Kupyansk?’
‘Well – yes, I think…’
‘If Budyonny hasn’t got it cut off by then, eh?’ He looked round at the others. ‘That could make for some real problems.’
7
Mid-morning, clattering northward… They’d been woken in the first light of dawn by what they’d taken to be the train’s departure, but the movement had been only a shunting operation, the removal of certain box-cars which some higher authority must have decided wouldn’t be needed on that broken Kharkov front. This probably made sense, since retreating (or routed) armies as often as not left most of their material behind in any case. But within about two seconds of having his eyes open Scott had seemed to go crazy: yelling at Davies, both of them pulling greatcoats and boots over their underwear and tearing out, leaping down on to snow-covered cinders in the icy dawn and rushing back along the train, Scott bellowing like – Davies’ description afterwards – a bull moose… His anxiety had been that some of the RAF box-cars might be detached and left behind. There were two full of petrol in drums and one loaded with ammunition, bombs, engine spares and other equipment, Davies had explained – he being the first to return, winded but laughing to himself, imitating the major’s antics and bull-like roars as he’d gone pounding along the train checking the markings on each wagon.
Eventually he’d come back, scowling at the Welshman. ‘What’s so funny, you damn fool? Lot of use we’d be up there without gas – eh? Imagine how tickled Collishaw’d be if we showed up without it?’
Bob had asked whether the main party hadn’t had any with them.
‘Course they have. But we need every pint and more. Could be no supplies locally at all. Eh?’ Glaring at Davies again. ‘The way things are right now? Christ, you know how these people organize themselves even when it’s going well. How many trainloads d’you reckon they’ll be sending after us – suppose we deploy from this what’s-it-called place, how many flying hours’d we have?’
‘You have a point, Sam.’
‘Damn right I have!’
‘But you’ll feel better when you’ve had some breakfast.’
They’d finished the whisky last night. And Bob had drunk a silent toast to Nick Everard – who by about that time, he’d guessed, would have been ashore in Theodosia getting married to his countess. Before that, though, he’d gone with the liaison captain to find the local medical team – all that were left of the staff of a base hospital which had now been evacuated – to ask whether anyone knew anything about the present location of Letuchka number seven. There’d been only one doctor, who with two Estonian nurses had been left to render any necessary assistance with the hospital trains on their way through from Kharkov and Kupyansk, and all he’d known about Letuchka Syem was that it wasn’t one of theirs – that it was not one of the letuchki that had been sending wounded soldiers back to Debaltsevo. This was the system, apparently – the mobile hospitals patched up lightly-wounded men and returned them to the front, and sent cases that were more serious but which had some chance of surviving the journey in open carts back to their own base hospitals. The doctor’s guess was that a number seven would most likely be – or have been – somewhere to the west or northwest, and they’d have despatched their wounded to the hospital in Ekaterinoslav. Or – possibly – to Kupyansk.
So one might get more positive guidance in Kupyansk.
Touch wood. Ekaterinoslav was about 150 miles west. If that was the area in which the letuchka was operating, getting to it would be even more of a problem than he’d anticipated.
Might even – he thought, with Budyonny’s cavalry in mind –be impossible.
Just on the off-chance, he’d tried the girls’ names on the Estonian nurses. But he might as well have talked Chinese to them. He’d hesitated then, with yet another name in mind and the Estonians’ round blue eyes shifting uncertainly between him and the weary little doctor… Asking himself then, Why? When she’s none of your damn business? What’s the point, for God’s sake?
In any case, she was probably in Simferopol. In comparative safety – for the time being. And as the wife of an officer in the Volunteer Army, who could also claim to have worked with the Royal Navy in the Caspian, she’d be entitled to be evacuated in a British ship. If there was a ship available – and a berth in it: and if either she had Nikolai Solovyev with her, or she was prepared to leave without him.
Which, being Nadia, having committed herself to him she probably would not be.
The liaison captain had escorted him back to the train – there was a curfew in force, passengers in transit were forbidden to disembark, and the sentries who were posted around the station had been given carte blanche to shoot if in doubt. Bolsheviks hid themselves away like bloody rats, the captain had explained, crept out of their holes at times like this to commit acts of sabotage and murder. The railway was of course a prime target.
‘Rats in the ascendancy, rather, at the moment?’
At this moment – yes. But – we haven’t given up, you know. And with the arrival now of your flying machines – well…’
‘Still on their train at Kupyansk, you said. Is Kupyansk really about to be cut off?’
‘They could hold out there, you see. Giving our own formations time to rally and regroup.’
‘Let’s pray you’re right… But tell me, Captain – this is a long shot, but – d’you know a Captain Count Nikolai Solovyev, by any chance?’
He didn’t. He was sure there was no Count Solovyev on Mai-Maievsky’s staff. Nor in any of the immediately subordinate commands.
‘But here we are now, Commander…’
Scott and Davies had surprised him with the warmth of their welcome. They hadn’t liked to help themselves to the whisky in his absence.
*
Four or five hospital trains had passed through Debaltsevo during the night, and this was another now puffing southward. Passing in a blur of thickly falling snow, the two trains were only a few feet apart, the southbound one’s newly-painted red crosses discernible even through fogged windows. Then – gone, with the snow whirling in its slipstream.
Five trains, say. How many wounded in each?
And – quite a different thought – how many nurses?
But also – attempting a double-take – had those been people, not freight, on the roofs of the box-cars?
He said, ‘My nurse girls could have been in that.’
‘Do they have nurses in those trains?’
‘I don’t know. Wouldn’t you suppose they would?’
Not the happiest of thoughts, either. Nurses Pilkington and Reid en route to Novorossisk – getting out, while Robert Cowan travelled north – in – in search of them… Then – tangentially – the image shaping in his mind wasn’t of English nurses but of a tall, dark girl – her soft dark hair would doubtless have been trimmed short if she had to wear some sort of nurse’s headgear – tall, dark, rather pale-skinned, with wide-apart grey eyes and a wide, full mouth. He was picturing her exactly as he’d known her and dreamed of her – except she’d have cut her hair – seeing her now, this minute, in that other train, making her way along the corridor between compartments crowded with soldiers in bandages, bloodstained uniforms: that long-legged, long-waisted, supple figure, swaying to the motion of the train: and in close-up then as she paused at a compartment doorway: that look of calm, compassionate appraisal which he remembered so very, very clearly…
But – in point of fact – she was far more likely to be at Simferopol. It was the obvious place because when she’d written that letter she’d still been in the Crimea, and because when she’d worked with Irina in Moscow she’d been employed mainly on secretarial duties. She’d had experience of such work, having spent the first years of the war helping her father in the administration of his vast estates, and secretarial skills had been what that hospital had needed. Administration would still be her most valuable contribution, therefore, and it seemed likely that they’d have retained her in some kind of headquarters job, rather than have sent her off into the wilds. Which of course was why he’d dreaded the prospect of having to go up to Simferopol, from Sevastopol. Just a few days ago, for God’s sake: it felt like a month… But the thought of having to start his enquiries at the military hospital there, where the Misses Reid and Pilkington had done their training – as much of it as they had done – and quite possibly finding himself face to face with Nadia, having to mumble something like No, it’s not you I’ve come for…
The hell it wouldn’t have been. Once he’d set eyes on her again. And maybe – just maybe – for her, too…
‘Jim.’ Scott spoke for the first time in half an hour. ‘When we get to whatever this damn place is called—’
‘Kupyansk?’
‘If the Flight’s still there, and if this lot’s going on through – God knows, but it’s possible – what you and I have to see to, like greased lightning, is getting our wagons uncoupled and tagged on to the others.’
The Welshman nodded. ‘Although I’d imagine if they’re still there they’d have unloaded by this time.’
‘Not if the place looks like being cut off, you dolt.’
‘More so, I’d have thought. Wouldn’t you want to get a few of the crates into the air?’
‘Maybe. Take a look-see… And – maybe gain some time, at that… Sure. But then – my guess is we’ll pull out – bloody quick, too, while we still can.’
‘So why would they be sitting there now, even?’
‘Waiting for us?’
‘Pull out, you say?’ Bob asked him. ‘D’you mean back to where you came from?’
‘I mean out of Russia. By way of Novorossisk and your gallant boys in blue. Finish.’
‘The finish you said you personally can’t even contemplate.’
‘Well.’ A shrug. ‘Has to come sometime. For me, later the better, that’s all.’
‘Would’ve been nice to have seen our crowd winning first, wouldn’t it?’ Davies added, ‘In point of fact – almost better not to’ve joined in at all, than get all their hopes up then duck out when it’s beginning to go bad.’
‘Say that again.’ Scott nodded. ‘Bloody politicians. Sixes and sevens and all a-dither. Like us being only instructors, then we can fight. Army must not fight, mind you – but they send in tanks, and if the British don’t drive them who in hell can? I tell you, Cowan, makes me bloody puke. How is it with the Navy?’
‘Confused. At the moment we’re allowed to protect the Kerch Peninsula and the Crimean ports. But as you say, the politicians, back home—’
‘Sam,’ Davies suggested, ‘why not take our discharge here in Russia, then sign on to fly for Denikin?’
Scott grimaced. ‘On a hiding to nothing, pal. Too few, and – hell, you know how they are. Bloody heroic now and then, but short of everything that matters – including what’s rotting on the quaysides – and three-quarters of ’em only half trained. Whereas the Bolsheviks are finally getting themselves into passably good shape – and they’ve a whole lot of machines the Huns left behind. Not to mention a few Huns flying for them.’
‘Germans flying for the Red Air Force?’
‘Sure. Run into ’em a few times, haven’t we, Jim?’ He nodded to Bob. ‘Fokkers, Albatrosses, Spads, all kinds. All right, a lot don’t count for much, we knock ’em down like bloody pigeons, but then you get a couple really well handled, and – bet your sweet life, those are no Red Air Force pilots.’
‘Mercenaries…’
‘That’s one word for the bastards. I know some shorter ones.’
‘Might there be mercenary work – somewhere or other – that’d solve your problem?’
‘None I can think of that I’d touch.’
‘Oh?’
‘Christ.’ The stare continuing… ‘Would you want to risk you neck – and kill guys, your neck or theirs – in aid of something you didn’t give a damn for?’
‘I wouldn’t. But from what you were saying before, I’d have thought—’
‘You’d have thought wrong.’
He nodded. ‘Glad to hear it.’
‘Hmm.’ Scott took his pipe out of a pocket, blew through it, delved in another pocket for tobacco. ‘I’m my own worst enemy. Except for Jim here, of course.’
*
Towards mid-morning they passed a big crowd of refugees trekking south parallel to the line of the tracks. Infantry with horse-drawn carts among them, and groups of horsemen in the lead and on the flanks. The train had been climbing for most of the past two hours, mostly through forest, and since then they’d been crossing featureless snow-covered plain, and although the snow had stopped falling when they’d been about halfway up to the plateau, up here with not even a tree to focus on it was like staring into a white infinity, no way to be sure you were seeing ten miles or ten yards. Then suddenly – maybe one had been half asleep – these survivors, if it wasn’t beggin
g too many questions to call them that, seeming to fill the landscape. They were following the line of a road which hadn’t been visible until now, and overflowing it, spreading over the slightly higher ground on both sides. The horsemen might have been riding as escorts, or were just cavalry lucky enough still to have horses under them; and the carts might have been full of wounded or – women, probably, children… But not even one of them, mounted or on foot, had so much as turned a head to glance at the train as it passed.
No energy to waste. You could read it in the bent backs, figures around the carts dragging at those horses’ heads, and the saddle-horses on the column’s flanks floundering in snow that was sometimes stirrup-deep as the riders urged them on. No spare energy, and no interest – in anything outside their own single-minded, urgent progress.
Then the whole crowd of them had passed, leaving a flattened, brownish swathe across the snow. Bob thinking yet again – with a greatly increased sense of urgency of his own – that he’d have to have these pilots’ help.
Davies growled, ‘Not very jolly, is it?’
‘More coming.’ Scott, from his seat beside the window, nodded in the direction the train was travelling. Then – frowning round at the others – ‘Why haven’t we seen anything like this until now?’
‘Because their line of march coincides with the railway tracks here. And didn’t before.’ He thought it was fairly obvious. ‘We were slanting in from the southeast before, weren’t we?’
Scott was looking slightly dazed. He’d turned back to the window now: shaking his head, as if he was trying to convince himself No, I’m not seeing this…
‘This’ being the reality of defeat. When you actually saw it was the moment in which it became real. Out there – now – men, and women, obviously – struggling to get away, save their lives. There – within shouting distance, if it hadn’t been for steamed-up glass and the train’s racket… But nothing less than that: if anything, a little more, because torture and rape would come into it too, invariably did – as every one of those struggling creatures – there, in your sight this minute – knew for sure.
Look to the Wolves Page 11
