Light Cavalry Action

by Max Hennessy

  The bridge was empty, with no traffic moving towards it, and there was an ominous quiet over the town. The last train had passed over the bridge the previous day and the townspeople were waiting now for the Reds to occupy the place. Although the large numbers of White troops passing through prevented them from storming it, they already had machine guns trained on the bridge and had brought all south-bound traffic to a halt.

  The station had long since ceased to function and the railway organisation had fallen to pieces. The last of the British, they were informed, had passed through days before and there was no news of Prideaux and the headquarters personnel from Khaskov.

  Potter met them, his face gloomy, his eyes strained, his cheeks raw and his lips broken with the cold. ‘We’ll probably have to walk across the bridge,’ he said, ‘and see what we can pick up on the other side. Suggest I go in front with the Rolls to make way.’

  That evening Higgins went with him to find provisions and medical requirements, but the town was silent under the snow. Shops were shuttered and houses dark, and the streets were empty except for occasional marching squads of men or an exhausted troop of cavalry drooping in their saddles. In the main square, bodies were hanging from the lamp-posts, the snow in the folds of their clothing, and the hospital was like a madhouse with its rows of stretchered sick and wounded. Nobody seemed to be working anywhere in the town, and at the hotel where they tried to get a meal, though the lights blazed in every room there seemed to be no staff on duty. The windows were boarded up and broken glass from a shattered chandelier littered the floor.

  There was firing in the early hours of the next morning and, when the Rolls investigated, its crew saw that the iced-up river on either side of the bridge was marked with sprawled figures lying in groups where the machine guns on the bluffs had caught them.

  As daylight grew, they saw it was going to be misty and Higgins gave orders to prepare to move. The town was suddenly full of people again, two human currents seething in opposite directions along the curving slushy Borodinskaia. The riff-raff of the broken White armies were pushing among them, half-drunk and breaking into deserted houses to find a strip of red material that would provide them with immunity from Budenny’s revenge, and there seemed to be more bodies hanging from the lamp-posts, both men and women now, and desperate people stripping the clothing from the dying refugees.

  The snow was still falling, soft and wet and depressing, and the industrial area along the right bank of the Don – the silent paper mills, distilleries and shipbuilding yards – was black against the sky.

  As soon as the short twilight approached that evening, and with the firing growing noisier all the time, they assembled on the track alongside the train, faces strained and taut, the women and civilians in the middle. A machine gun was tap-tapping in the distance but a few terrified refugees still tried to make their way across the ice.

  ‘They’ve got guns trained on that goddam bridge,’ MacAdoo warned, and Higgins nodded.

  ‘It’s a risk we have to take,’ he said. ‘March the men off, please.’

  * * *

  The courtroom was silent as everyone leaned forward to listen. Higgins’ voice was still quiet and for those at the back it was difficult to catch his words without straining.

  ‘The Red Army was firing deliberately on the bridge and the ice,’ he said. ‘But the traffic had started moving as soon as the light had gone. Everyone was prepared to take a chance. Some got across. Some didn’t.’

  He drew a breath that seemed painful, then he glanced across to his wife, who smiled at him, and went on.

  ‘Fortunately, the mist had thickened during the day and with approaching darkness had begun to hide everything, though bullets were still falling on the approaches to the bridge. There was a lot of shouting and I could hear women crying, but with the Rolls in front, we were able to force our way through the crowds.’

  * * *

  ‘Keep well up,’ Higgins kept calling as he walked alongside the column of men. ‘Don’t let them get between us and the Rolls.’

  At the rear of the column, Sergeant-Major Busby and a dozen men marched with rifles at the ready, licked around by the crowd. Higgins was the last man on the bridge.

  In the fading light, the refugees were hurrying across the ice in hordes now, while behind them on the bluffs, the last suicide remnants of the White Army formed for a stand. Already, through the mist, they could see the sparkling flashes of Bolshevik shells falling among them and, in the dim light, it looked like a vast painting of Napoleon’s Crossing of the Beresina.

  Men were still working on the bridge as they marched, slaving with picks to plant the charges that would destroy it. Bullets had fallen among them and some of them lay still against the parapet, in pools of their own blood.

  ‘Keep moving,’ Higgins was calling. ‘Don’t let anything stop you.’

  The column marched steadily forward in the darkness behind the Rolls, untouched by the panic around it. Occasionally, a half-crazed woman tried to break in among them, seeing safety in their firmness, but they forced her out gently with gunbutts, keeping their ranks unbroken in spite of the uproar.

  The machine-gun bullets started to strike the bridge again and they heard the whine as they winged away into the air. The women screamed and a few of the younger soldiers ducked their heads. The panic seemed to be growing, and the refugees, gripping their bundles, were yelling now in a growing confusion of sound that was terrifying in its volume.

  Katerina was walking alongside the stretchers, her head held high, and it seemed to Higgins almost as though in the chaos she were seeking death.

  The mist was growing thicker but, even as Higgins began to hope for safety in its obscurity, he saw the column crumble under the pressure of the howling refugees. With an effort they formed up again, and then he saw one of the marching figures stumble. His neighbour reached out and helped him on, limping heavily, then one of the women crumpled and fell in a heap, and Katerina stopped and bent over her. The Russian sergeant who had been with her simply kept on walking.

  ‘Katerina!’ Higgins reached down and dragged his wife to her feet. ‘Keep going!’

  ‘She’s hurt!’

  ‘She’s dead,’ he said roughly. ‘Keep going! Don’t stop!’

  She looked at his taut face and he saw the look of fright in her eyes, then she turned away from him and fell in with the marching soldiers again.

  They were clear of the bridge at last and he halted the little column among the buildings at the other side where they were safe from the flying bullets, and as Potter came back from the Rolls they bent over the wounded man who had sunk at last to the snow.

  ‘We’re all across,’ Higgins said to him. ‘Now we need an engine and a few carriages. Use force if necessary.’

  As the Rolls roared off, they attended to the wounded men, Katerina’s tears falling on the dressings she was checking, while MacAdoo sent a squad of men to tear doors from houses for use as stretchers.

  The following day, six miles down the track, Potter found an engine and two scared drivers. Attached to the engine were a string of a dozen coaches, and he was in the process of commandeering them when the stumbling column caught up with him.

  As soon as they realised there was a chance of the train moving, the refugees who had abandoned it, began to flood round it again and Higgins had to place men with loaded rifles along the track to prevent them swarming aboard. Another squad was filling the engine’s boiler with snow in a chain of buckets from the trackside, while others were lifting sleepers to the tender for fuel.

  Higgins saw his column aboard, then he turned to MacAdoo.

  ‘The rest of the coaches are free to the refugees,’ he said.

  Immediately the place became an uproar. Someone banged against him as they fought for places on roofs and buffers. A woman was knocked down and trampled on, and an old man disappeared under the surge of bodies, while a small dog ran up and down yapping furiously as it looked for its owne
r. Doors were torn off and windows smashed as people jammed themselves in, thirty to a compartment, and the baying sound of panic started again.

  * * *

  ‘It was a long journey,’ Higgins said slowly. ‘Every town we came to was jammed with refugees and there was typhus everywhere. The railway staffs had vanished or were dead and we had to do everything ourselves. The White armies had fallen apart by this time and there was no one to help us. We heard that Denikin was considering resignation and the news was growing worse. The Reds were bringing up heavy reserves now and the chances of the Whites holding them off grew more slender with every day. Moreover, the war of movement had started again south of the Don and the whole country was in a state of smouldering rebellion that constantly held us up. There were outbreaks of banditry that stopped all traffic for several days at a time, and more than once we had to get the women to lie on the floor while we returned the fire of guerillas. Captain Potter performed miracles ahead of us with the Rolls but it was becoming more and more difficult, and the civilians in the towns were living in fear of both armies who were forcing those who wished to belong to neither the Reds nor the Whites to take sides or be shot as traitors.’

  ‘What happened next?’ Moyalan asked quietly.

  ‘Rostov was captured soon after we left, and the Bolsheviks burned the hospitals with thousands of patients still alive in them. Then we heard that Budenny’s cavalry had got across the river and cut the line ahead of us. We managed to divert the train towards Kamyshov and I think that saved us because the Reds missed us. But it also meant that we didn’t arrive outside Novorossiisk until April 7th. We had to abandon the train south of Ekaterinodar, at Nikitapol, where we found billets for the column. As we still had the Rolls, it was decided that Captain Potter, Sergeant-Major Busby, myself and Hardacre, who had proved invaluable with his knowledge of Russian, should take rations and go into Novorossiisk to see if it were safe for us to enter.’

  ‘Why did you do this?’

  ‘Telegraph wires from both north and south had been cut by partisans and we had no idea what to expect. We still had our sick with us, and we were all hungry and cold by this time. And beside the railway the crowd of refugees was still struggling south – carrying their belongings in potato sacks or packs made from horse blankets – sometimes in sledges or carriages or bullock carts, but always so close together the animals could rest their heads on the vehicle in front.’

  ‘Who were these people? – in addition to the refugees, of course.’

  ‘There were skeleton regiments, officers without men, and men without officers, batteries dragging dismantled guns on sledges – the debris of the White Army. Everyone was competing against everyone else for food and fuel and fodder for the animals, and there were children from orphanages, monks, peasants, lunatics, deserters, fashionable women in high heels and carrying hatboxes. Nobody had time to help anyone else, and there was no pity. At every stop there were posters depicting Red atrocities, and messages pinned to walls – things like “Dear Masha, left 11th November. Wait in Odessa. Ivan.” Nobody ever gave their full names because of the distrust, and at every village and town there were always little groups of people watching the stream of refugees for relatives and friends.’

  He paused, and Moyalan studied him for a second, trying hard to imagine this small, faceless figure in the middle of the avalanche of humanity he described, keeping his little group together with some inner reserve of courage that was never obvious from the outside.

  ‘Please go on,’ he said quietly.

  ‘There were thousands of abandoned horses,’ Higgins continued. ‘They were starving and many of them were dead and the dogs were eating them. They were as tame as pets, but nobody had any time for them, and everyone was concerned only with keeping moving and avoiding typhus.’

  ‘But the typhus spread?’

  ‘Yes. The sick were hated by the healthy and whole truckloads died for want of attention, and anyone who dropped behind was caught by the Reds, who killed them with hammers to save ammunition. If they were officers, they nailed their epaulettes to their shoulders first or turned them naked into the snow to freeze.’

  The silence in the courtroom was heavy and stifling, a sick horrified silence, and as Moyalan stopped Higgins at last, it seemed that everyone drew a long shuddering breath of relief.

  ‘I think we can safely leave it there, Major Higgins,’ Moyalan said quietly. ‘What were you hoping for when you got to Novorossiisk?’

  ‘We hoped to find Colonel Prideaux waiting for us. We left our people in a large grain store which provided some sort of shelter. It wasn’t much, though, and smelt of rats. My wife was still working with the sick, but she was quiet and far from well, and I was worried. But the streets were deserted and the refugees seemed to have vanished south ahead of us and the place seemed safe. The weather was still icy and we had to burn anything we could lay our hands on.’

  ‘Please go on. What happened when you reached Novorossiisk?’

  * * *

  They dropped into the city in the last of the daylight. They were cold from hunger because they had not been able to get much for some time but coarse Russian bread and a soup of rice and barley. Every building seemed to be jammed with terrified people, and they had heard that there were long lines of refugees outside the embarkation office.

  The centre of the town seemed quiet, however, and uneasily suspecting something was wrong, they parked the Rolls in an alley and left Potter and Busby with it; and Higgins and Hardacre, removing all badges that could identify them, made their way to the waterside on foot.

  With the black-grey sea nibbling against the frost-bitten land, the Bora, the cold wind of the coast, was searching out the emaciated bodies of the refugees beneath their ragged clothes. The gale had swept through the railway vans where hordes of wretched people huddled, and the hospitals were besieged by the sick and the hungry. The bodies that lay about the streets were blue with the cold and robbed of their boots and coats, while typhus-stricken soldiers died wherever they could find shelter.

  As they drew nearer the water’s edge, they saw more bodies lying in the streets, and the stooping figures of civilians trying to remove them. Then, across a bleak square walled by flat-fronted empty buildings, they saw a line of horsemen waiting in the shadows.

  Hardacre’s muttered question to a watching man with the aged face of a corpse told them what had happened. Budenny’s cavalry had got there before them.

  Quietly, their hearts sinking, they pushed on to the waterside, where hulks of ships, raddled with dirt and with green slime hanging from their neglected cables, crowded the wall. The sky was a spiderweb of masts and cordage, and a group of small boys were stoning semi-frozen oil-bound ducks for food. But the killing seemed to have finished, and no one interfered with them in the growing darkness.

  The Italian Lloyd office was still open but there were only a couple of scared clerks still working there.

  ‘Denikin went days ago,’ they were told. ‘There’s nothing left. They’ve all gone to Constantinople. They even called out the cadets from the high schools to hold Budenny back.’

  ‘What about the British and the French?’ Hardacre asked.

  ‘Lloyd George called them home. There were battleships and transports in the harbour evacuating White officers and their families for days.’

  The picture became clearer as they talked. The full weight of the human avalanche had arrived at the end of March, in a nondescript mass of soldiery and civilians, engulfing the city in a sea of misery in which the typhus had reaped a terrible harvest. The evacuation had been a shambles, because everybody had known that only escape could save them from the bloody vengeance of Budenny. There had been vast crowds outside the shipping offices pleading, bribing, threatening, as they tried to gain places on the ships, but the French and the British, caught up in something they had never expected, had been forced to be rigid. No one but White officers’ wives and wounded had been allowed aboard the trans
ports in addition to the remnants of the White armies. Odessa had already fallen, with the refugees murdering each other in their attempts to get to the boats.

  When the remnants of the British Mission had marched in – men from the Guards, the Highlanders and other regiments who had fought throughout the European War, nine hundred soldiers caught up in a holocaust of revolution they hardly understood – artillerymen were already smashing the breech blocks of their field guns and toppling them into the water.

  While the big guns of the battleships had flung shells over the town at the hills where Budenny was massing his troops, Grenadier Guards had had to disperse at bayonet point the mobs trying to climb the gangways. Men and women had committed suicide as they had been refused passage, and girls of good breeding were selling themselves in hovels in the town to get money for a fare. The R.A.F. had destroyed their brand-new planes by driving a tank over them before toppling the tank itself into the sea, and then there had been a last frantic stampede, before the battleships had left. The waterfront had been black with human beings and already the local Bolsheviks were firing into them. In the oily water alongside floated luggage, furniture, saddles, and the bodies of animals, men, women and children.

  Now, everything had gone and the place was quiet again.