The most exciting of these unsuccessful efforts ended with shipwreck in a fishing boat in the gulf. At a house where I was staying there had been a search, the object of which was to discover the source of Allied intelligence, and I escaped by throwing a fit (previously rehearsed in anticipation of an emergency) which so terrified the searchers that they left me alone. But I was forced subsequently to fly out of the city and hide for some nights in a cemetery. Having got wind of my difficulties, the British Government sought to effect my rescue by sending U-boat chasers nearly up to the mouth of the Neva to fetch me away. These boats were able to run the gauntlet of the Kronstadt forts at a speed of over fifty knots. A message informed me of four nights on which a chaser would come, and I was to arrange to meet it at a certain point in the sea at a stipulated hour. The difficulties were almost insurmountable, but on the fourth night I and a Russian midshipman succeeded in procuring a fishing boat and setting out secretly from a secluded spot on the northern shore. But the weather had been bad, a squall arose, our boat was unwieldy and rode the waves badly. My companion behaved heroically and it was due to his excellent seamanship that the boat remained afloat as long as it did. It was finally completely overwhelmed, sinking beneath us, and we had to swim ashore. The rest of the night we spent in the woods, where we were fired on by a patrol but eluded their vigilance by scrambling into a scrubby bog and lying still till daylight.
Then one day my commander informed me that he had orders to move our regiment to the front. After a moment’s consideration I asked if he would be able to send some of his soldiers down in small detachments, say, of two or three, to which he replied, “Possibly.” This intelligence set me thinking very hard. In a minute I leaned over to him and in a low tone said something which set him, too, thinking very hard. A smile gradually began to flicker round his lips and he very slowly closed one eye and reopened it.
“All right,” he said, “I will see to it that you are duly ‘killed.’ ”
Thus it came to pass that on a Sunday evening two or three days before the regiment left Petrograd I set out with two companions, detailed off to join an artillery brigade at a distant point of the Latvian front near Dvinsk. The Baltic State of Latvia was still at war with Soviet Russia. My companions belonged to another regiment but were temporarily transferred. They were both fellows of sterling worth who had stood by me in many a scrape, and both wished to desert and serve the Allies, but feared they might be shot as Communists by the Whites. So I had promised to take them with me when I went. One was a giant over six feet high, a law student, prize boxer, expert marksman, a Hercules and sportsman in every sense and a picked companion on an adventure such as ours. The other was a youth, cultured, gentle, but intrepid, who luckily knew the strip of country to which we were being sent.
The first night we travelled for eleven hours in the lobby of a passenger car. The train was already packed when we got in, people were sitting on the buffers and roofs, but having some muscle between us we took the steps by storm and held on tight.
I was the fortunate one on top. The lobby might have contained four comfortably, but there were already nine people in it, all with sacks and baggage. About half an hour after the train started I succeeded in forcing the door open sufficiently to squeeze half in. My companions smashed the window and, to the horror of those within, clambered through it and wedged themselves downwards. Treating the thing, in Russian style, as a huge joke, they soon overcame the profanity of the opposition. Eventually I got the other half of myself through the door, it shut with a slam, and we breathed again.
Next day we slept out on the grass at a junction station. The second night’s journey was to take us to the destination mentioned on our order papers, and in the course of it we had a curious experience. About three in the morning we noticed that the train had been shunted on to a siding, while muffled cries in the stillness of the night showed that something unusual was happening. One of my companions, who reconnoitred, brought the most unwelcome intelligence that the train was surrounded and was going to be searched. On the previous day, while resting at the junction station, we had encountered a shady individual clearly belonging to the local Committee for Combating Desertion, who questioned us repeatedly regarding our duties and destination. The recollection of this incident gave rise in our minds to a fear that we might be the objects of the search, and this suspicion became intensified to the force of a terrible conviction
