by Max Hennessy
Katerina glanced at Higgins but his face was expressionless as he stepped forward quickly and put his hand on her arm. As he gently separated her from the old lady, she climbed into the Rolls with him, and Potter swung a long leg over the door of the Hispano, his face drawn in the leaden light and all his smiles gone abruptly, so that she knew he’d been gay only for her benefit.
‘Right,’ she heard him say quietly as he passed Busby. ‘The station, Sergeant-Major. And, for God’s sake, make it quick. She can’t take much more of this.’
* * *
The platform was chaotic, and the station yard so jammed as to make shunting impossible. The weather was colder than ever now and the pools of water solid ice.
Potter, head down against the storm and looking pinched and cold, led them unerringly through the crowds, however, and round the back of the engine sheds towards the fringe of the yard. The trains that jammed every track were full of refugees, with wagons converted into crude living rooms, some of them even with windows cut in the sides and the sliding doors replaced. All kinds of gear was piled on the roofs – everything from motor-cycles and carts to household furniture of all descriptions – and the spaces between the buffers had been covered by planks and stacked with wood for stoves or made into minute living quarters. Round one of the little platforms there was a crowd of weeping women, and she saw men lifting down the stiff body of a girl about her own age who had died from the cold.
Hardacre’s train was standing on the edge of the yard, alongside the line to the south. There was an old-fashioned engine with a funnel like a great six-foot bucket, and khaki-clad men in the doorways of the wagons waved and smiled at her as she followed Higgins.
She managed to smile back through her tears, and Higgins helped her into the carriage where one of the broken windows was jammed with an old mattress. There was a small compartment with a table in it where they could eat, and a white enamel stove, and next door a compartment with bunks.
‘Best we can do,’ Potter apologised briefly. ‘Hardly the place for a honeymoon.’
She placed her few packages on one of the bunks, then Higgins had to leave to discuss his plans with Potter, who was to go ahead with the cars, and as he apologised, she realised she was more in command of the situation than he was. Alone, however, she felt empty and she swallowed, blew her nose and forced herself to go outside again.
MacAdoo was standing on the steps, brushing snow off his coat. ‘We’re leaving soon,’ he said. ‘For God’s sake, don’t disappear.’
She smiled. ‘I’m not going far. Just to the wounded.’
The corporal’s new wife, a weeping shopgirl from Nikolovssk, looked up as she entered and began to wail. Katerina put her arm round her and patted her shoulder automatically, abruptly aware of her own loneliness and misery.
As she did so, there was an explosion in the distance beyond the sheds, and an outbreak of shouting from the station. MacAdoo put his head in the door and jerked a thumb.
‘They’ve heard Budenny’s on his way,’ he said. ‘The news has just come in. He’ll be cutting the track some time during the night. That’s the Engineers starting to blow the points.’
On the road alongside the railway yard, great masses of people were gathering in a great traffic jam, in sleighs and carriages and carts, sitting silently in the snow, too enveloped in despair even to raise their heads as the explosions continued. While they were waiting, Higgins came up with Potter, their faces dark.
‘Come on, Hardacre,’ Potter said, gesturing to the men who clung round the doors of the trucks. ‘Let’s have you. Your bloody pals have turned awkward again.’
The three of them marched off, struggling through the growing drifts, and Katerina could see them arguing in the distance with a knot of railway officials. Then Potter came stalking back and turned out a squad of men with rifles. Putting them through a quick arms drill in the falling snow in full view of the railwaymen, he marched them to where Higgins and Hardacre were still arguing, and after a while a sullen yardsman appeared and threw the points.
The Engineers arrived soon afterwards with their equipment and everyone climbed aboard, and the train jerked as the engine blew steam.
‘We’re off,’ MacAdoo said, clasping his hands above his head like a boxer.
As it happened, however, they were shunted about the yard for another three hours, with interminable halts between each move. The weather seemed to be growing colder with every hour that passed, and the snow came down thicker. By the time they finally left, darkness was already approaching and the snow was coming in great whirling clouds that were swept by the wind and plastered the sides of the train.
In spite of the cheers, there was a dull aching lump of loneliness in Katerina’s breast as they moved slowly out of the yard at last, with Higgins standing beside her, holding her cold hand in his as they passed the waiting crowds of refugees. A dull silence had settled over them, and watching them waiting in mute despair, the cheering men became silent, too.
‘God help ’em,’ one of the troopers muttered, and realising that they were her people and this was her country, and that she was leaving them for ever, a muffled sob broke from Katerina.
Even as Higgins turned and slipped an arm round her shoulders in a protective gesture that warmed her and took the ice out of her heart, there was a flurry of shots behind them and the dull thud of an explosion, and as they rattled slowly past the vodka factory on the outskirts of the town, they saw crowds outside, and flames in one of the buildings, bright against a darkening sky.
For a moment, Katerina watched, her eyes wide, then a woman screamed somewhere in the darkness, harsh and fearful and frightening, and instinctively she clapped her hands over her ears and turning in the circle of his arms, she buried her face in Higgins’ coat.
Part Four
1
Higgins
Kirkham wasted no time examining Katherine Higgins, and Moyalan didn’t hesitate with the rest of his witnesses. It was now quite clear that he was anxious to bring out all the telling evidence together.
‘Call George Phelps Higgins,’ he said quickly.
* * *
Higgins walked slowly towards the witness box, a small figure more insignificant than ever with the passage of years; drab, faded-looking with his greying hair, and certainly not the man to impress by his bearing. Watching him from the back of the court, Potter found himself sitting with his fingers crossed, and his eyes flew to the quiet beautiful woman now sitting alone near Moyalan.
Moyalan was on his feet now, reading from his brief. ‘You are George Phelps Higgins, of Ash Farm, Melne-Over, in Sussex?’
Higgins nodded. ‘I am.’
‘You were a regular soldier, but you are no longer in the army?’
‘No.’ Higgins’ voice was quiet and hard to hear. ‘I resigned in 1921. Shortly after I came back from Russia.’
‘Why ?’
Higgins considered, his face blank. ‘There seemed to be little prospect of promotion and my wife was very ill at the time. I decided to give up my commission to look after her. Eventually, when I found things were working out all right, I decided I must put what little money I had to some use. I had been a cavalry officer and knew about animals. I went in for farming.’
Moyalan leaned forward over the table, resting his hands on his papers, and the court seemed to hold its breath as he looked up at the witness box.
‘Major Higgins,’ he said slowly, ‘when you wrote that letter to Comment, what was in your mind?’
Higgins stared back at him, then he frowned slightly. ‘To point out the truth, I suppose,’ he said. He sounded doubtful.
‘Because you disagreed with what was being said about General Prideaux?’
‘Yes.’
‘And, according to you, what you said in your letter was true. On many occasions, before and after the charge at Dankoi, for one reason or another, Colonel Prideaux was found wanting in command.’
‘Yes.’
&n
bsp; ‘Well, Major Higgins, we have dealt with the “before”. Now we’ll deal with the “after”. Will you tell the court what happened when you left Nikolovssk? Your mind’s still quite clear?’
‘I shall not forget it till the day I die.’
* * *
The scenes were imprinted on his mind, as though they’d been carved there in the living tissue, and he knew he’d have nightmares about them in the years to come.
He knew they were already far too late and that the whole area was collapsing into confusion. Behind them there seemed only the darkness of anonymity, as though a cloud had come down on Russia, and ahead there was only a hopeless breakdown of everything that meant civilisation. Fourteen days before they might have travelled – even if with difficulty – at least with some hope.; Now, without any sign of authority, the whole constitutional system had come to an end and, even along the thin thread of the railway, there seemed to be no sign of command and a terrible fear of the Red cavalry that petrified everyone who wasn’t working against disorder, so that the chaos was unbelievable and the inexplicable delays endless.
Day followed day of blanketing snow, grinding frosts and icy mists, with the orange ball of the sun hanging among the blackened trees and the light coming in weak amber rays, until it gave way to darkness and increased cold. And with the night came a need for extra alertness against the guerilla bands which had sprung up along the railway track, taking advantage of the chaos to prey on stranded trains and the long columns of shuffling refugees that made the road alongside a desperate pilgrimage of misery.
Hour after hour he spent scanning the blank horizon beyond the stark poles of the trees, his ears, it seemed, constantly filled with the thump and crash of demolitions as the engineers blew up bridges or points behind them. At every village station along the route to Khaskov, where the long ribbon of carriages and trucks and engines was held up, the sidings had become the graveyard of old rolling stock and abandoned pullmans where criminals had taken refuge; and people came to him – men, women and girls, and Russian officers of all descriptions – flooding after him into every Railway Officer’s room he visited, begging him to help them.
But there was nothing he could do. There were always messages from Barry who was moving ahead of them, but never anything from Prideaux in Khaskov, and already every scrap of space on the train had been given up to civilians who claimed to be British and to whom he considered lay his first duty. Already they were overcrowded, yet he knew that if any more came he would somehow have to accept them, too, because they had already heard that Budenny had cut the line outside Nikolovssk, and that only a dozen trains were behind them now.
The Reds were expected hourly at every station at which they halted, and always, at every step, he had to turn out a squad of men with rifles. By bribery and threats, and the efforts of Hardacre and the British Railway Officers, whom they picked up one after the other and took along with them as they moved towards the coast, they managed to move the train up the south-bound ribbon, forcing unwilling and surly railwaymen to shunt them until they had gained a few places in the stream of traffic.
They travelled between five and ten miles a day, and at Makyansk the Red cavalry cut the track just behind them, marooning many of the trains they had just passed, and the stories that came in were full of murder and atrocity and hatred. At Yazheskoye, assisted by MacAdoo’s threat to shoot the stationmaster on the spot, they were shunted on to the less-crowded north-bound track and for about fifty versts they were able to make good progress, but at Senevpol a monumental traffic jam had built up that held them for days, the attitude of the railwaymen growing more hostile as the Reds drew nearer.
Unbelievably, the weather continued to grow colder, with flurries of snow that plastered the sides of the train and froze at once into ice, and though they had plenty of food and drink, it was growing more and more difficult to obtain fuel for the greedy stoves. Katerina spent most of her time swathed in scarves and old army-issue jerseys, a small, white-faced figure, still cheerful, however, and insisting on being responsible for their sick.
With every day they spent together, with every moment he spent in her company, he became more deeply in love with her, trying to catch every inflection of her voice, every gesture, in case she should change her mind and leave him without even a memory.
‘If I catch typhus,’ she said calmly in answer to his protests about her working with the sick, ‘then that is how it was meant to be.’
At Vilekonya, where they were held up for eight nerve-racking days and nights of sporadic shooting while the station was cleared and the White troops fought off the Reds from behind a barricade of snow cemented to iron hardness with water that had turned to ice, he spent all the little personal money he still possessed in buying her more warm clothes, and as much as he dared of the regimental funds in his possession on disinfectants in the hope of staving off what he now knew were epidemic proportions of disease. In spite of the cold, it wasn’t hard to buy furs, and when Potter appeared out of the blue with the Rolls, Higgins took the car and acquired as many as possible for the use of the wounded. No one seemed to care what happened to them and property was changing hands at panic prices.
At Chelyinsk, while the numbed passengers descended and exchanged news or brewed tea, secure in the knowledge that they couldn’t be left behind because the train was so overloaded it was always possible to catch it up before it gathered speed, he and Hardacre bombarded the stationmaster’s office with enquiries for the expected instructions from Khashov, but there was nothing but a laconic message from Barry informing them that headquarters had been evacuated.
Higgins’ heart sank at the news, but with all his years of experience and all his knowledge of the Regular Army, he still couldn’t believe they’d been abandoned.
MacAdoo seemed to think differently. ‘Some bastard’s making sure he gets home first,’ he said. ‘If there’s any blame going for this lot, it’ll drop on you.’
After another seemingly interminable halt because of the confusion, the trains began to leave again at the rate of about twelve a day but, jammed in the yard by the south-bound traffic, they knew they couldn’t possibly leave before the next morning, and they were beginning now to run short of food because every town along the track was besieged by thousands of people, some of them women wearing only nightdresses, shoes and coats, and all heading for what they thought was safety, so that prices were rising steadily all the time. Furs and jewellery were still going for a song and, on one occasion, Higgins came back from his foraging with a ring containing a Ural Mountains amethyst, which he gravely slipped on to Katerina’s finger.
‘It’s late,’ he said, as her eyes filled with tears. ‘But I’ve brought it nevertheless.’
* * *
They were now well into the New Year and the weather was icy enough for any engine that run out of fuel to freeze at once, and all water pumps along the line had to be thawed out before they could be used. Delay followed delay and at every station there seemed to be something to hold them up for days. Higgins had long since given up bothering the telegraph offices. It was clear now that no orders had ever been sent to them.
Already passengers were growing impatient with the railway and were selling their last treasures to buy carts and carriages and sledges, and were transporting their goods to the road, their places on the trains taken at once by other poorer, more hopeless refugees who waited with resigned, wretched patience for the eventual jerky start. Both tracks were jammed solid with trains now and in many of the cars the refugees lay dead in dozens from disease, cold or starvation, while along the road, threading in and out of stalled, wrecked and overturned cars and carts, more thousands trudged between the drifts, their feet slipping on the packed snow, completely ignoring the sick and wounded who, unable to take another step, clung together for warmth under the trees.
Grim-faced Cossacks rode by, pushing through the crowds, huddled in their coats, dragging carts laden with their typhus vict
ims, and over the whole dense mass there seemed to be a numbed stupefied silence, as if they hadn’t the strength to complain. The epidemic had reached fantastic proportions now and every station had its row of frozen unburied bodies and lamenting relations, while the landscape was dotted with them as far as the eye could see.
Then, at Ininyev, long after they’d thought they’d lost him, they saw Potter approaching the train as, it steamed into the yard and realised at once that he had had to abandon the Hispano. There were marks on the Rolls as though it had been hit by bullets and there was a feverish huddled figure in the back.
‘Bit of trouble outside the town,’ Potter said, the dark rings under his eyes belying his off-hand manner. ‘And I think Sidebottom’s picked up the tieff.’
They made room for another four men and their kit, and three days later, while they waited in another of the endless halts, the disease was confirmed among the sick men in the crowded trucks.
Katerina managed a twisted smile. ‘I’ll look after them,’ she offered, and when Higgins protested, she touched his face gently.
‘You know, and I know, why we are married,’ she pointed out. ‘Let us face the facts: I am working my passage to England.’
* * *
Apart from Barry and his signallers, there was no sign of British troops in Khaskov. Potter met them at the station and Barry climbed with him from the throbbing body of the battered Rolls. There was no explanation about why they had been abandoned and according to the signal log Barry had found, no orders to retire had ever been sent.
The chaos in the city was unbelievable and the sidings were a shambles of stalled trains with hostile shunters sullenly refusing to work. Potter, grey-faced and pinched with the cold, had to drive through the crowded refugees and train the machine gun on the stationmaster’s office to get even a promise of help. At last, the traffic jam began to crumble and they chugged slowly out of the station and began to pass along the coast, with the Sea of Azov grey and bleak and fog-shrouded on their right, and the road alongside the railway still black with stumbling people, but it was not until the following week that they came into the Rostov yards. A quarter of a mile away, as they approached the city, they could see the bridge across the Don, and beyond, a line of snow-covered bluffs. The river, frozen in lumps and ridges, had overflowed its banks and spread in a vast frozen lake across the fields.
