Kolchak's gold

“Twice around Christmas our locomotive had run out of fuel and the boilers had frozen and burst. The third time it happened we were in the Kuznets, I think it must have been two or three days after Christmas. We uncoupled the locomotive and concocted some sort of cable truss with which we heaved and jacked and tipped the locomotive off the rails, and then the Admiral’s train reversed into us and we were coupled onto the caboose of his train. But we were too heavy and his locomotives-he had two of them in tandem on his train-only slipped their wheels on the tracks. You see, we were on the upgrade there, it was miles and miles of two or three percent grade. Even putting sand on the rails didn’t help. Our train was simply too heavy. The gold itself weighed five hundred tons-one million pounds that is-and there was all that armor plate, we had twenty-eight armored goods wagons filled with treasure. It simply wouldn’t budge.

“Our detachment-my brother’s and mine-was still manning the gold train, of course. We were not alone there, the Admiral had assigned several of his officers and their staffs to us. The gold was the most important thing in his existence then and of course he wasn’t going to trust it to two dozen worn-out soldiers like ourselves. We were knee-deep in colonels and brigadiers and it was a curious arrangement because officially my brother and I- subalterns in rank, you know-were in charge there but we had more high-ranking officers than enlisted men on our train. Naturally none of them took orders from us. But we were all in the same hopeless situation and there was very little friction-the officers were as terrified as our enlisted troops, no one had the strength to be abrasive.

“All the officers on the Admiral’s staff kept vying for assignment to our train. There were a number of reasons. We were always the first to receive food and firewood, for instance. The Admiral meant to insure that we stayed in good fighting health in case we had to defend the train against an attack. Then too there was the fact that our train wasn’t overcrowded. The gold weighed so much that it hadn’t been possible to jam people into every available space. There was elbow room-each of the goods wagons had only part of its space filled with treasure, there was a good deal of empty space because of the weight. And also everyone knew that if any train got through it would be ours, so that everyone wanted to be part of it. There were squadrons of Cossacks aboard the trains in front of us and behind us and their sole assignment was to prevent our own people from climbing on board this train. I have no idea how many were murdered by those Cossacks; it must have been hundreds at least.

“When we were stalled that final time in the Kuznets the Admiral called a conference-the ranking people on his staff. My brother and I were not privy to it of course, but afterward it was easy to see what they had decided. I don’t know whose idea it was-I doubt it was the Admiral’s, he was too jealous of the treasure, he wouldn’t have volunteered to part with it. But someone-or some group-must have convinced him that it simply wasn’t possible to go on carrying it with us. We were still a thousand kilometers short of Irkutsk.

“At this time we had progressed ahead of the vanguard of the refugee column on the trakt. I suppose it must have been two or three days behind us. We did not know then, of course, how many of them had perished.* But in spite of our special treatment we had lost several lives even among our own small privileged company and we couldn’t believe that those poor wretched beings had much chance of survival in the open.

“I don’t excuse our actions; it was a time when you chose between your charitable impulses and your need for personal survival. You can debate the philosophical consequences of such a decision endlessly in hindsight, and God has witnessed the guilt with which all of us who survived must have struggled without cease. But you didn’t think about such things then. You didn’t think at all. You existed from moment to moment, you armored yourself with indifference to everyone’s suffering but your own. If there was privilege or advantage to be had, you siezed it or you perished.

“In a way the ones who died had an advantage-at least they were spared the unavoidable torture of guilt that goes with the knowledge that through no virtue of your own you’ve lived through hell simply because you happen not to have died in it, and that your survival has been achieved at a cost of hundreds or thousands of the lives of your fellow men.

“I think the only thing that has prevented me from committing suicide many times since then has been the rationalization that they would have died whether or not I had survived. The Civil War and the awful winter were disasters as arbitrary as hurricanes; I had not caused them to happen. Yet so often this sounds to me like the echo of the voice of some SS beast from the Second War who answers all accusations with the cry that ‘I am not responsible!’ In some way, you see, I am responsible-I’m responsible to every human being who died as a result of my existence. I must be called to answer for them. But how in the sight of God does a man do this?

“To return to what we were talking about-the gold train, yes. When we stalled in the Kuznets.

“The burnt-out locomotive lay on its side at right angles to the tracks where we had pushed it over. There were trains stalled behind us, I suppose for hundreds of kilometers-I don’t know how many trains were left. There must have been at least forty or fifty. We were holding them all up. The track ahead of us was clear, however. There were perhaps two dozen trains ahead of us-the Czechs and some others. They were well on their way to Irkutsk by then.

“I cannot describe the ferocity of that winter. Of course I was not a native of Siberia but I was accustomed to the climate of the Ukraine which can be incredibly severe; but nothing like that. The tears would freeze to your eyelashes. Even inside their railway wagons the horses had great balls of ice on their hoofs. If you went outside the train for only a few minutes your coat would turn stiff as a board. If lubricating oil dripped from a locomotive it would form a strip you could pick up like a piece of stiff steel wire. And the blizzards, the gales … One simply cannot comprehend how any of the refugees afoot were able to survive at all. Yet thousands of them did, for a time at least.

“The train behind ours was filled mainly with high-ranking officers and privileged civilians-wealthy people and civil government administrators and some of the gentry. Now and then you saw ladies tottering about on their high heels when the air inside their stalled coaches became so oppressively close that they simply had to get out for a two-minute respite. And there were two squadrons of Cossacks riding the horse wagons of that train. They were Don Cossacks as I recall.

“The Admiral gave some orders and this train of which I speak was brought forward to the rear of our own train. Then with the Admiral’s tandem locomotives pulling at the front, and the uncoupled engine of this following train pushing us from the rear, we were able to make very slow headway up the grade. After about two hours we had covered some three kilometers in that fashion, and we came to a fork in the tracks where a branch line fed off into one of the ravines that made a groin into the higher mountains to the south of us. It was one of the rail sidings that led off to an iron-mining district.

“The frontmost locomotive of the Admiral’s train was detached here and ballasted with tons of sandbags which my troops were employed to pack on board it. Then the engine was switched onto the branch siding and began to clear the rails. In many places the drifts were as high as the locomotive smokestack and our men had to dig by hand. You could see, as the track was cleared away, that the line had not been used for quite some time-the tops of the rails were rusty.

“We had a bit of luck. There were no storms just then. The sun had come out in the morning and the ice cracked like rifle fire. The air was frozen so still that it was too easy not to notice how cold it was. You had to remember to keep batting your hands together and thrusting them under your armpits-even our fur-lined gloves were insufficient protection.

“In thirty-six hours we must have cleared nine or ten kilometers with the aid of the Admiral’s plow engine. We had six or seven casualties during the effort-one man broke his leg in a crevasse and I had two soldiers make a stretcher for him by putting their rifles through the sleeves of two coats, but I think the man froze to death on his way back to the train. Two or three men fell asleep in the snow and we would find their still-breathing remains, but they were too far gone with frostbite to do anything for them. You developed a bovine indifference to all their sufferings.

“As for my brother, fatigue and pain had become so much a part of his face by now that they almost seemed to add to the glory of it. He was a bigger man than even I. Rather clumsy muscles but a splendid body and he would move among the men, wearing his white papakha fur hat and an ankle-length greatcoat trimmed with fur that he had taken off a stalled train somewhere back along the line; at least it had been ankle- length at first, but I seem to recall that he had cut off part of its skirt to keep the snow and mud from weighing it down. But he was a magnificent sight, looming among us. We were all so exhausted and yet he seemed to go on and on-I never discovered where his strength came from.

“Maxim and I had developed differences-we found we reacted to all this in different ways, and it began to