When Captain Martel visited us in our railway carriage a few days after our capture, and before any of us had yet been in the town, he told us that Krasnoyarsk was en fête. “It’s hung all over with red flags,” he said, “and everybody is laughing and jubilant. The local people all look as if they had wakened up from a nightmare, as if they had just thrown off an oppressive weight. There is universal rejoicing.”

As Captain Martel is, as I have already pointed out, very anti-Bolshevik, these words surprised us, but when we visited the town ourselves we found that they were true.

The whole town seemed to have gone red, literally as well as metaphorically. The red flag of the revolution hung out of every house, and red ribbons flew from most of the soldiers’ caps. That “riband in the cap of youth” was also to be found very often in the buttonhole of youth, and frequently cheek-by-jowl with a brass button bearing the British arms, for many of the Red soldiers wore British military overcoats. Some of them had even dressed themselves from head to foot in flaming crimson, as if they meant to personate Satan at a fancy dress ball. The Bolsheviks seem, verily, to have gone mad over the colour and the word “red.” At least one newspaper in every town used that sanguinary adjective as part of its title: The Red Tocsin, The Red Road (a technical railway periodical, but nevertheless furiously Bolshevik), The Red Flag, The Red Workman, etc., while every triumphal arch spoke the same language: “Hail! the Red Urals!” “Red Krasnoyarsk,” “Red Ekaterinburg,” “Red Moscow,” “Red Petrograd,” etc. This frenzied preference for a particular colour reminded me of Belfast on “the Twelfth,” only that in Belfast it is a different colour that drives men insane with hate.

The happiness of the people at Krasnoyarsk may have been due to a natural reaction after a period of anxiety when they feared that, between them, the Poles and the Reds would make their town the scene of a sanguinary battle in the course of which half the houses would be burned and half the inhabitants killed. It may have been due to the fact that the unstable and temporary Government of Shitinkin had given place to a Government which, whatever its faults, was Russian, from Moscow, and apparently strong. It may have been due to the unexpected pleasure of finding that the Red Army was certainly well disciplined and that it held the town in sufficient force to ensure the preservation of order. Or it may simply have been due to the fact that the inhabitants were all Bolsheviks and heartily glad to see the last of Kolchak.

Next to the happiness expressed on every face, two great facts struck us at every step: first, the extraordinary number of ownerless horses, and, secondly, the extraordinary number of Red soldiers who wore English uniform. The many thousands of horses that wandered loose about the streets and all over the surrounding country constituted one of the strangest sights that I had ever seen. They were part of the débris of the White Army. Some of them were cavalry horses, some transport horses, but most of them were the horses of poor Siberian farmers, and had been taken by force from their owners during the retreat. They wandered into courtyards, out of which they were invariably driven with hoots and contumely. They tried to follow other horses which had bridles and masters and a recognized place in society, but the stable door was always shut in their faces. They were as tame as pet dogs, but nobody had time to stroke their noses. They stood in the streets ruminating over the remarkable change that had suddenly taken place in their circumstances. They tried in vain to ingratiate themselves with men who looked like horse-fanciers. They walked into cafés. They wandered wearily through the deep snow. Droves of them blackened the distant hills.

Many of them, alas! were lame, but a good many were sound, and the first question we asked ourselves was—“Why does nobody take some of them?” The answer was that nobody had any fodder for them. If a man had a horse of his own, he had only enough fodder to feed it through the winter and could not feed an extra animal. Besides, Bolshevism said: “These horses are all the property of the State,” and that terrible image of the Socialist State, formerly a monstrous figure drawn by anti-Socialist writers, now a living and stupendous reality, made people as chary of touching those animals as they would be of touching a tiger. They were taboo. The red mark of Communism was on them. People violently resented friendly attentions from them as a respectable man would resent improper advances, threw stones at them, cursed at them in order to show that they contemplated no breach of Lenin’s law.

At the same time the Bolsheviks took no care of them, and this showed me the first rent in the Bolshevik armour. The Reds had centralized everything, stifled all private initiative, abolished the municipality, squelched all popular organizations, and would have squelched even the R.S.P.C.A. if there had been a branch of it in Krasnoyarsk. They themselves were too busy to attend to this matter of the horses, and so thousands of those unfortunate beasts died. They stood in the streets and drooped their heads miserably. Then they lay down, their eyes grew filmy, and in a few weeks the roads and the hills were dotted with their frozen carcasses.

Before this last stage had been reached, townswomen with kind hearts but no knowledge of horses took pity on them as they lay gloomily with noses touching the snow, and offered them bread and other unsuitable delicacies. No man ever summoned up sufficient courage to make this generous but belated effort. By and by, when all the horses were dead, the great Bolshevik machine began to move in the matter, and some of the carcasses were transported to a big field near the railway station, where they were piled one on top of another. It was a ghastly sight, but it became ghastlier when the horses were all skinned and had their tails cut off. The large quantity of bad leather thus obtained probably figures to-day in the stock of raw material ready for export by the Bolsheviks to England. But the injury inflicted on the Siberian farmers by the loss of all these horses will not soon be made good.

When all the horses had perished, some Red Government Department acted just as a Government Department in a non-Bolshevik country would have acted under the circumstances. It promptly turned a number of experts on to the matter, and they compiled statistics which I was able to obtain. According to these statistics more than 5,000 horses had perished of cold and hunger in the streets and in the fields around the town, and 15 per cent. of all the horses in Siberia of an age capable to work were lost during Kolchak’s retreat. In thirty-one parishes near Krasnoyarsk, all the villages, cattle, and agricultural implements had been destroyed. In five counties near Krasnoyarsk, 8,365 families had been ruined; 18,149 horses seized and lost; 20,415 head of cattle taken. This refers only to the damage done along a small portion of the line, for Siberia is a huge country, and some of its minor provinces are as large as France and Germany put together. The Bolsheviks have voted 500 million roubles for the purpose of making good all this loss, but twice that sum would not repair half the material damage that has been done even in the comparatively small area referred to, while the ravages of typhus, the loss of children, the breaking up of homes, and the reduction of large cultivated areas to the condition of a desert are calamities from which Siberia will take a long time to recover.

The next great sight in Krasnoyarsk, after the horses, was the number of English uniforms which one saw on the Reds. We sent in all 200,000 sets of equipment to Kolchak, but they all seemed to pass through Kolchak’s hands as water goes through a sieve, and the Reds got most of them. They told me that in Perm they had captured enough uniforms to clothe a whole division. They had found them unpacked in a storehouse, where they had probably been forgotten by the Whites, though at that time Kolchak’s soldiers were very badly clad and his Generals were pressing us to send them more uniforms.

More frequently the uniforms walked over to the Reds, thousands at a time, with the Whites inside them. A Red General was nearly scared out of his wits once, during the fighting in the Urals, by seeing what he took to be the whole British Army bearing down on him; but the alarming manifestation turned out to be only a detachment of Whites in British uniforms anxious to surrender. Such phenomena became so frequent, later on, that the Reds got quite used to it; and, by the time Krasnoyarsk had been lost, about one-fourth of the Red soldiers wore the khaki of King George.

The misunderstandings that sometimes occurred through this similarity in the uniform worn on both sides were generally tragic, but sometimes humorous. In a tavern situated in the ample no-man’s-land between the opposing armies, a number of White and Red horsemen drank together amicably for hours, one night, before they discovered that they belonged to different sides. On another occasion a Cossack entrusted with a message to H.Q. of a White regiment was so misled by the dress of the sentries standing outside a farmhouse that he delivered his message there, though it was really a Red H.Q. His own appearance excited no suspicion, but he gave himself away by the first words he spoke. “Is the Gospodin Polkovnik (Monsieur le Colonel) here?” he asked; and this respectful title, for which the Reds have substituted the words “Comrade Commander,” led to his instant apprehension. About the same time a White officer made the same mistake, and betrayed himself in the same way. The Bolshevik who told the story concluded grimly by saying that the officer in question saw the Colonel.

Some of the simple peasants serving in the Red Army had got the idea that England had supplied them direct with all this excellent equipment, and shortly after our capture a small but grateful deputation of Red soldiers who had heard that we were English came to thank us for the splendid uniforms we had supplied to them. And I must say that they were splendid, and that all the web equipment, haversacks, water-bottles, etc., were there, though not always fastened in a way that a British sergeant-major would have quite approved of. Many of the Reds had even got our first-aid bandages, which I had never seen with Kolchak’s troops at all.

A great quantity of British Red Cross supplies—woollen comforters, Balaklava helmets, etc.—had also found its way somehow or other into the hands of the Bolsheviks. Care had, I understand, been taken in the distribution of this stuff at Omsk; nevertheless supplies issued there in the morning were sometimes on sale in the Bazaar before evening. If the day was warm, the thoughtless Russian soldier parted for a glass of vodka or a few roubles with all the underclothing he had just received; and a week later, when it was cold, he wanted more underclothing; and his officers, who never, never held any kit inspection, complained bitterly of the English neglecting to supply the new levies with clothes.

Even when the complete British uniform was wanting, there was nearly always some little token to remind one of home—a pair of British army boots, a Canadian overcoat, British putties, a “British warm,” a Tommy’s fur cap, a British water-bottle, and, above all, British haversacks and web belts. British haversacks and belts I have seen very often as far west as Moscow, and when I met Trotsky in the Kremlin he was looking quite neat in what seemed like a pair of Fox’s spiral putties which he had probably picked up at Ekaterinburg. The fact that the buttons on these uniforms bore the British coat of arms never seemed to worry any of the Bolsheviks in the least, but I must say that they never kept those buttons polished.

The assistance we have rendered to the Bolshevik cause by these generous gifts is beyond calculation, and it proved also to be of some use both to Horrocks and myself. Once when Horrocks was being lectured truculently on the supplies his country had sent to Kolchak he disarmed the wrath of the lecturer, a Commissar, and transformed his dark scowl into a pleasant smile by simply remarking, “Well, it seems that you have got most of it!”

As for myself, when I began to pose as a civilian, the military uniform (shorn of all badges) which I still brought with me excited not the faintest suspicion, even when I was arrested by the Extraordinary Commission at Moscow. I thought it well, however, to exchange my military overcoat for a peasant’s sheepskin, but I think that I was rather a fool for doing this, and so probably did the Bolshevik official with whom I made the exchange, for he carefully kept out of my way ever after, lest I should ask to have my overcoat back again.