The Bloody White Baron (39 page)

Meanwhile, Ungern's soldiers were huddled together in small groups, wet, filthy and hungry. They had gathered wood from the forest to start
small fires. Their only food for the last two weeks had been whatever they could seize from the locals during days of desperate riding through the hills, Red soldiers hot on their trail, which had left them mentally and physically exhausted. Even so, many could not sleep, still gripped by fear. It was hard to know which was the greater terror; the Bolsheviks or Ungern's random sadism. At least the Bolsheviks took prisoners. When they heard the shots they gathered in confusion and panic, not knowing what was happening. Whatever was going on, it was bound to be bad.

The conspirators seized command, rallying the other soldiers around them. They rounded up Ungern's two chief executioners, Burdokovskii and Veselovskii. Accounts are confused, but it seems they were led off on the pretext that they had been summoned by Ostrovskii, the chief of staff, before being summarily executed with their former comrades' swords. They must have guessed their fate when Burdokovskii shouted to Ribo, ‘Doctor, where are you taking us?' and heard in reply, ‘To the place where you have sent so many others!' Still, the Teapot managed a final moment of defiance, sneering, ‘Me? How dare you!' before his head was cut clean from his shoulders by way of reply. Veselovskii was indignant when arrested: ‘Only “the grandfather” has the power to arrest me!' he protested.
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Makeev dealt with Veselovskii himself, remembering how afterwards he ‘glared with hatred, watching the blood spurt from his head, and wiped the blade on the grass'. The remaining men began to move through the hills, but found the night-going too rough, and so stopped and waited for dawn.

Meanwhile, Ungern had found his horse but lost his division. He rode back, looking for his men, still thinking, he said later, that the camp was under attack by the Bolsheviks. When they ‘were not in the same place' it began to dawn on him that something was afoot. Seeing the chief of the artillery, Dmitriev, he asked, ‘Who ordered the regiment to move?' Told it was ‘an order from your staff', he asked who the messenger was, but Dmitriev claimed not to know. Ungern cursed him as ‘an old fool', ordered the artillery to stop and rode on after his straying division.

The three hundred or so men who had been at the camp were now strung out through the hills in three or four large groups, although with stragglers all around. They were almost all Russians, with a smattering of Chinese; the Mongol troops had mostly broken away and were
making their own way through the hills, or disappearing among the locals. The conspirators were clustered together, like children huddling against a monster, when they heard the sound of hooves and the hushed whisper of ‘The Baron! The Baron!' They had gathered in a low valley, leaving a cordon of a hundred men and several machine-guns at their rear to guard against Ungern's approach. He had ridden round it, unseen in the darkness, and emerged in their midst. Ribo described how ‘the officers surrounding me hastily rushed aside, snatching out revolvers as they ran and clicking the shutters of their carbines'.
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He ‘pulled out his old Colt, having resolved to blow my brains out rather than undergo the tortures which we all expected if we fell into the hands of the Baron'. Several of the officers, including Evfaritskii, were so frightened they disappeared on horseback into the night, where all but two of them were captured or killed by the Bolsheviks.

Ungern shouted in the darkness, ‘Who are you! What group!' but nobody answered. He called out for Burdokovskii, asking where he had gone, and somebody replied sarcastically, ‘He has gone to see the chief of staff . . .' At last he recognised one of his commanders, a man named Ochirov. ‘Where are you going?' he screamed. ‘What have you started? I order you to return the regiments back to the camp!' Ochirov answered firmly, ‘We shall not go back. We wish to go to the East and save ourselves. We want nothing to do with Tibet.'

Weapons drawn, the conspirators faced their lone target. There were other soldiers present, a few dozen in total, including several machine-gunners, positioned on the hillside by the valley. The mutineers were now undoubtedly in charge, and few, if any, of the men had any sympathy left for Ungern, but yet they did nothing. Ungern was only one man but, despite their previous murderous intentions, his presence was still overwhelming. Everyone save Ungern was paralysed by fear. Ungern began to harangue the troops in his high-pitched voice, riding from group to group as they stood silent and frozen. By his own account he told them that ‘to go east was impossible, that there would be a famine, that they must go to the west'. According to others, his language was apocalyptic, drawing upon the texts he knew best. ‘Alternating threats with terrible curses, he told them that they would gnaw each other's bones in famine, and that tomorrow the Reds would exterminate them one by one. The answer was all the same; obstinate, terrible silence.'
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Nobody moved.

Ungern's adjutant, Makeev, was the first to act, the spell conjured up by his own fear, the Baron's curses and the night-time darkness broken only after Ungern's mare accidentally nudged him. He saw him suddenly illuminated as the moon broke through the clouds. ‘It was terrible. His mad eyes were shining, shining [. . .] the Baron sat on the saddle without a cushion, his horse beat its hoof upon the ground.'
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He drew his Mauser and fired at his master, but missed. The crack of the shot snapped the others back into the world and they opened up with everything they had, including the machine-guns. Somehow, no bullet so much as grazed him. Perhaps no one could quite bring himself to shoot straight at the man who had alternately led and terrorised them all for the last three years, or perhaps Ungern's superb instinct for survival saved him again. He saw ‘bullets all around me. Then I realised what business was afoot.'

Ungern spurred on his faithful white mare, who ‘with one bound flew up on to the top of the hill and carried [him] away from the pursuing fire of the machine-guns'. As he left his soldiers shaking in the dark, he gave one final cry: ‘Bastards!' Then he continued into the night, looking for his Mongol soldiers, who had been acting as outriders for the main force. They, at least, would be true to him. He got lost in the darkness, for they lit no fires, but found them in the new dawn, just a few miles from the main camp. Greeting their leader, Sundui Gun, the only Mongolian prince remaining in the division, he told them that ‘the army had gone bad'. The prince replied - and we can imagine Ungern shaking his head in weary agreement - ‘Russians, in general, are all bad people.'
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The Mongolians would prove no more faithful to Ungern than the Russians. The next day, Sundui Gun asked Ungern for a match to light his pipe. Ungern reached into his pockets and Sundui grabbed him by the elbows as other Mongols tackled him from behind. Binding his hands, they sat him on the luggage train. Ungern had no idea why they turned against him; perhaps they had been in on the plot from the start, or perhaps they had spontaneously decided to make a deal with the Reds; by now, after all, many of their former comrades had turned themselves over to the Bolsheviks and even started fighting for them.
Mongols who switched sides had been treated with more mercy, for the moment, than Ungern ever showed deserters.

What happened next was the source of many legends. According to several of Ungern's Russian officers, who claimed to have got the story from two other officers who had been attached to Sundai Gun's Mongolians, he was simply abandoned, left on the steppe. Most claimed that he had been given a tent, from which his Mongols had departed ‘with respectful bows'. The Russians considered it unlikely that the superstitious Mongols would simply have handed over a god incarnate to the Reds for fear of divine vengeance. Taking imaginary revenge on his tormentor twenty years later, Alioshin pictured him, after being wounded by Makeev and falling from the saddle, being discovered by the Mongolian soldiers, and then tied up and left to be tormented by ants and the sun. He hoped that ‘he fell into delirium again and again, and it felt to him as though he was being burnt alive in a haystack, as he had ordered to do to so many people'.
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There was a touch of wistfulness in the less-gruesome Russian accounts; abandonment on the steppe gave Ungern a final grandeur, as the simple Mongolians bent to their Russian superior, terrible even in defeat. Alioshin believed that even the Red Mongolian cavalry, upon discovering him and hearing his name, ran away in terror.

The truth was less dignified, though less sadistic than Alioshin's. The Mongolian soldiers continued to ride and, according to him, Ungern ‘noticed that they were going the wrong way, and told the Mongols that they could come across the Reds'.
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If his rantings at his Russian troops were anything to go by, his tone was probably less calm that he claimed. They took no notice, nor did they attempt to fight back when they were rushed by Red cavalry, ‘like lava, with shouts of “Hurrah!” and calls to throw their weapons down'. It may have been simple exhaustion, or they may have been looking to surrender from the start. Sundui Gun certainly claimed credit for it afterwards, but by that stage it was obviously sensible for him to curry favour with the Soviets. Among the Mongolians, an even less dignified version of his capture spread; he had been tackled, it was claimed, bodily off his horse in a flying leap by Sundui Gun, who was well known for his wrestling skills. The story arose at the height of Russian oppression, when it must have given the Mongolians some pleasure to think of a Russian leader, even a White one, brought low by a Mongol hero.

The Reds milled around, inspecting their new captives and their baggage. One of them found Ungern sitting despondently, his arms bound. Every Red soldier knew his name, had spent the last few months reading or hearing about his mythical cruelty and ferocity, and had been told that his capture was of the utmost importance. But this beaten, unshaven man in a Mongolian robe hardly resembled the bogeyman of legend. ‘And who are you?' asked the soldier, expecting the name of a minor White, or a fellow Bolshevik, captured by the local reactionaries. Perhaps Ungern could have brought himself a chance to escape by lying, but he was not going to deny his own heritage or rank. ‘I am Baron Ungern von Sternberg, commander of the Asian Cavalry Division,' he replied. Amazed and disbelieving, the soldier called to the others, and soon the whole group was jostling for a glimpse of the captive before he was marched off to the army commander.

Ungern had sought a heroic death in battle, but he had made contingency plans in case of capture. An ampoule of poison was always attached to a button of his robe, and he had planned to commit suicide as soon as he was taken. After ‘a minute in captivity, he put his hand into the bosom of his robe where he kept poison, but it had gone'.
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It had been shaken out at some point during his mad night ride. He tried to commit suicide twice on the journey back to Russia, but was frustrated by his guards on both occasions.

In Moscow, the Soviet leadership received news of his capture gleefully. Trotskii announced it in a typically gloating, sarcastic speech at the Moscow Soviet a week later, on 30 August. Denigrating émigré newspapers, he spoke of