Knight Without Armour (27 page)

A.J.’s first idea was to get as far from the danger-zone as
possible, and with this intention he hurried Daly through the rapidly
thronging streets. At intervals of a few minutes came the boom of the gun,
but the shells were bursting a safe distance away. Daly was not
nervous—only a little excited; and on himself, as always, the sound of
gun-fire exercised a rather clarifying effect. He began to reckon the chances
of getting well out of the town before the real battle began. There was irony
in the fact that for weeks his aim had been to reach some place that was held
by the Whites, and that now, being in such a place, his chief desire was to
get out of it. It would be the most frantic folly, he perceived, to trust
himself to this local and probably quite temporary White success, for his
judgment of affairs led him to doubt whether the White occupation could last
longer than a few days at most.

Disappointment faced him when he reached the outskirts of the town, where
an iron bridge spanned the swollen river. White guards were holding up the
crowd of fugitives who sought to cross, while other guards were hastily
digging trenches on the further bank. They were all in an excitable,
nerve-racked mood, aware of unwelcome possibilities, and prepared to act
desperately and instantly. Not a single refugee, they ordered, must leave the
town; this was to prevent spies from reporting to the Reds the preparations
that were being made for the town’s defence. The ban applied to women
and children as well as to men, and was being enforced at every possible
exit.

There was nothing to be gained by arguing the point, apart from which,
A.J. was anxious that both he and Daly should remain as inconspicuous as
possible. He felt that their best chance of safety lay with the crowd of
dirty, ailing, poverty-stricken wretches who, merely because nobody cared
about them at all, were usually exempt from too close attention by either
side. Most of them were squatting miserably in doorways along the road back
to the town, nibbling precious fragments of food, or rebandaging their torn
and blistered feet.

It was an anxious morning for Novarodar. Shells fell every ten minutes or
so on the centre of the town, but many did not burst, and even the others
were of poor construction and caused little damage. Once one realised that
the likelihood of being hurt by the long-range bombardment was considerably
less than that of catching typhus from the town’s water-supply, it was
possible to ignore the intermittent booming and crashing. But such
philosophic detachment was not possible to everyone, and towards midday there
was evidence that many of the White defenders were themselves losing nerve.
Already rifle- fire was being exchanged between the White trenches and
advanced Red scouting- parties. During the afternoon the leaders of the local
Soviet were dragged out of prison by White guards, lined up in the
market-square, and ceremonially machine-gunned before a public for the most
part too apprehensive of its own immediate future to be either repelled or
elevated by such an entertainment.

During most of the morning A.J. and Daly sat patiently in a side-street
with a crowd of other refugees. But in the afternoon, shortly after the
shooting of the Soviet leaders, White guards toured the town in motor cars
and rounded up all who were out of doors. Those who had no homes were lodged
in some of the big rooms of The town-hall.

Thus it happened that the refugees had a sort of grand-stand view of the
entry of the Bolsheviks into Novarodar, which took place about five
o’clock in the afternoon, after a sharp and bloodthirsty battle at the
town outskirts. At some points the Whites had resisted to the last, but at
others they had run away into the town and sought refuge in houses.

Mysteriously and marvellously there appeared a dazzling array of red flags
to greet the invaders. The actual march into the town was an almost
suspiciously quiet affair. Not a rifle-shot, nor a cheer, nor a lilt of a
song disturbed the march of those squads of hard-faced, bearded veterans and
grinning, wild-eyed boys, caked with mud and blood, badly clothed, flushed
with bitter triumph, helping their wounded along or carrying them in
improvised stretchers made of great-coats. The Red leader, a keen-looking
youth of not more than twenty, halted his troops in the market-square and
read a proclamation declaring the friendliest intentions of the invaders
towards all who had not given assistance to the Whites.

From the large windows, mostly broken, of that first-floor room in the
town-hall, history could be seen enacting itself at a prodigious rate. The
first task after the reading of the proclamation was to deal with the White
prisoners actually captured in the trenches outside the town. These men,
battered and mud-stained as their captors, were lined up and machine-gunned
from a roof on the opposite side of the square—not very copiously,
however, for there seemed to be a shortage of ammunition. Their bodies, some
still twitching, were then dragged away and piled in a heap in a side-
street.

The Reds were quite convinced that the shot prisoners represented only a
very small fraction of the Whites who had held the town, and as night
approached, the rage of the invaders grew into a very positive determination
to root out all Whites who might be in hiding. Then began a house-to-house
search by groups of blood-maddened soldiery. The market-square was the scene
of some of the worst incidents, for in it were the larger houses and shops in
which Whites might be expected to have found sympathisers. Terrified wretches
were dragged out of doorways and clubbed to death; several were flung out of
high windows and left broken and dying on the pavements. Firing sounded from
all over the town, with now and then the sharp patter of a machine-gun. Later
on vengeance became more extended and took in the entire bourgeois element
among the townspeople; shops were looted and better-class citizens seized in
their houses, accused vaguely of having assisted the Whites, and butchered
there and then on their own thresholds.

Some of the refugees screamed hysterically at the sights that were to be
seen from the town-hall windows, and many covered their faces and refused to
look. A few, however, of whom A.J. was one, gazed on the scene almost
impassively, and this either because they were already satiated with horrors,
or because their minds had reached that calm equilibrium, born of suffering,
in which they saw that market-square at Novarodar as but a tiny and, on the
whole, insignificant fragment of a world of steel and blood. To A.J. the
latter reason applied with especial force; and more than ever, as the moments
passed, his mind clung to what was all in his life that counted—the
woman there at his side. The rest of the world was but a chaos of cancelling
wrongs, and to offer pity for it was as if one should pour out a single drop
of water upon a desert. He felt, as he gazed down upon all the slaughter,
that it could not really matter, or it would not be happening.

He was pondering and feeling thus, when a man near him, who had also been
watching the scene quite calmly; began to talk to him. He was a thin,
ascetic- looking man, middle-aged, with deep-set eyes and a lofty forehead.
His voice and accent were educated.

“If I may read your thoughts,” he said quietly, “you are
wondering just how much and how little all this can mean.”

A.J. was unwilling to betray himself by any too intelligent answer, so he
merely half-nodded and let the other continue talking, which he was more than
willing to do. He had been a professor of moral philosophy, he confided, and
was now penniless and starving. Probably also (though he did not say so) he
was a little mad. He expounded to A.J. a copious theory of the decadence of
Western civilisation and the possible foundation of a new and cruder era
based on elementals such as hunger, thirst, cruelty, and physical
uncleanliness. “No man,” he said oracularly, “has really
eaten until he has starved, or been clean until he has felt the lice nibbling
at him, or has lived until he has faced death.” He also praised civil
war as against war between nations, because it was necessarily smaller and
more personal. “It is better, my friend,” he said, “that I
should kill you for your wife, or for the contents of your pockets, than that
we should stand in opposing trenches and kill each other anonymously because
a few men in baroque armchairs a thousand miles away have ordered us
to.”

Conversation was several times interrupted by gusts of machine-gunning;
once a spray of bullets shattered the already broken windows and several
refugees were cut by falling glass.

About two in the morning there was a sudden commotion in the building
below, and a Red officer, armed with two revolvers, rushed into the room with
the brusque order that all refugees were to form up in the square outside for
inspection, since it was believed that many White guards and bourgeois
sympathisers were hiding in disguise amongst them.

The whole company, numbering between five and six hundred, were marshalled
in long lines facing the town-hall front, where other groups of refugees were
already drawn up. The procedure had a certain ghastly simplicity. Red
officers, carrying lanterns, peered into the faces of each person, searching
for any evidences of refinement such as might cast suspicion on the
genuineness of identity. Hands were also carefully inspected. When A.J.
observed these details he felt apprehensive, not on his own account, but on
Daly’s. The examining officers, shouting furiously to those who from
weakness or panic could not stand upright, were certainly not in a mood to
give the benefit of any doubts. Those whose faces were not seared deeply from
winds and rains, or whose hands were not coarse and calloused, stood little
chance of passing that ferocious scrutiny. Slowly the group of suspects
increased; the ex- professor of philosophy was among the first to be sent to
join it. The officer who was examining those near A.J. was a coolheaded, trim
young fellow much less given to bullying his victims than the rest, but also,
A.J. could judge, much less likely to be put off by a plausible tale. He did
not linger more than a few seconds over A.J.—that grim, lined face and
those hands hardened by Arctic winters were their own best argument. At Daly,
however, he paused with rather keener interest. A.J. interposed with the
story he had prepared for the occasion—that she was his daughter, a
semi-invalid, and that he was taking her to some distant friends by whom she
might be better looked after. The officer nodded but said: “Let her
speak for herself.” Then he asked her for her name, age, and place of
birth—all of which had been agreed upon between A.J. and herself for
any such emergency. She answered in a quiet voice and did not seem
particularly nervous. That clearly surprised the questioner, for he asked her
next if she were not afraid. She answered: “No, but—as my father
has just said—I am ill and would like to be allowed to finish my
journey as soon as possible.”

While the youth was still questioning her, another officer approached of a
very different type. He was a small, fat-faced, and rather elderly Jew,
glittering with epaulettes and gold teeth and thick-lensed spectacles. One
glance at the woman was apparently enough for him. “Don’t argue
with her, Poushkoff,” he ordered sharply. “Put her with the
suspects—I’ll deal with her myself in a few moments.”

Poushkoff saluted and then bowed slightly to Daly. “You will have to
go over there for a further examination,” he said, and added, not
unkindly, to A.J.—“Don’t be alarmed. You can go with her if
you like.”

They walked across the square, and on the way A.J. whispered:
“Don’t be alarmed, as he said. We’ve come through tighter
corners than this one, I daresay.” She replied: “Yes, I know, and
I’m not afraid.”

The second examination, however, was brutally stringent. The Reds were
determined that no White sympathiser should escape, and it was altogether a
matter of indifference to them whether, in making sure of that, they
slaughtered the innocent. The fat-faced Jew, who appeared to be the
inquisitor- in-chief, made this offensively clear. He took the male suspects
first, and after a sneering and hectoring cross-examination, condemned them
one after another. He did not linger a moment over the professor of
philosophy. “You are a bourgeois—that is enough,” he
snapped, and the man was hustled away towards a third group. When this grew
sufficiently large, the men in it were arranged in line in a corner of the
square and given over to the soldiery, who, no doubt, took it for granted
that all were proved and convicted Whites. Then followed a scene which was
disturbing even to A.J.’s hardened nerves. The men were simply clubbed
and bayoneted to death. It was all over in less than five minutes, but the
cries and shrieks seemed to echo for hours.

Many of the waiting women were by that time fainting from fear and horror,
but Daly was still calm. She whispered: “I am thinking of what he
said—that one hasn’t lived until one has faced death. Do you
remember?”

The Jew adopted different tactics with the women. He wheedled; he was
mock-courteous; doubtless he hoped that his method would make them implicate
one another. With any who were even passably young and attractive he took
outrageous liberties, which most of the victims were too terrified to resent,
though a few, with ghastly eagerness, sought in them a means of propitiation.
When Daly’s turn came, he almost oozed politeness; he questioned her
minutely about her past life, her parents, education, and so on. Then he
signalled a soldier to fetch him something, and after a moment the man
returned with a large book consisting of pages of pasted photographs and
written notes. The Jew took it and began to scrutinise each photograph with
elaborate care, comparing it with Daly. This rather nerve-destroying ordeal
lasted for some time, for the photographs were numerous. At last he fixed on
one, gazed at it earnestly for some time, and then suddenly barked out:
“You have both been lying. You are not a peasant woman. You are the
ex-Countess Alexandra Adraxine, related to the Romanoffs who met their end at
Ekaterinburg last July. Don’t bother to deny it—the photograph
makes absolute proof.”