At the beginning of November, 1919, I was a member of the British Military Mission at Omsk, which was then, apparently, about to fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks. The British Military Mission and the British Railway Mission (which I shall hereafter designate the B.M.M. and the B.R.M. respectively) occupied a house in the town. General Sir Alfred Knox lived, as he had always done, in his special train, and intended to leave about a week before the end, bringing with him all the British civilians and all the B.M.M. officers save four. These four, of whom I was one, were instructed to stay behind as long as possible in order to obtain the latest information, and with us were a number of officers and other ranks belonging to the B.R.M.

General Knox left on November 7, and the situation rapidly darkened after his departure. The streets became filled, first with civilian refugees, and then with the retreating soldiers of the White Army; and there was a hopeless muddle at the railway station, which was blocked by hundreds of trains. Finally, on November 13, when the Reds had nearly reached the Irtysh River, on the east bank of which Omsk is situated, we transferred ourselves to railway carriages which the B.R.M. had prepared for us and for themselves. But even then there was some difficulty in getting away owing to the confusion and to several ominous instances of sabotage on the part of the Russian railwaymen. We were blocked some time, for example, by an engine in front of us being allowed to get “cold,” which means that the fire was allowed to die out, with the result that the water in the pipes got frozen, and the pipes themselves were damaged in such a way that, under the circumstances, repair was impossible. At length, on November 14, we managed to leave just in the nick of time, for the Reds reached the other side of the Irtysh the same day and captured Omsk on November 15.

Then began a stern pursuit across a thousand miles of frozen steppe, a pursuit which lasted till January 6, and which ended in our capture on that date at Krasnoyarsk. We should never have been captured, however, had we not been greatly handicapped by having to look after a number of Russian ladies and aged people of good family entrusted to our care by our own superior officers. The obstacles we encountered during that long race were of the most varied and formidable description. In the first place, the track soon became blocked by an interminable ribbon of trains which moved very slowly and made prolonged and frequent halts. In the second place, we found great difficulty in getting water and fuel for our engine owing to the fact that there was no firewood at the stations and that nearly all the water-towers had run dry or got frozen. Sometimes we watered our engine from a wayside well, but this was by no means easy, as the soldiers of other echelons were engaged in the same occupation and were always in an even greater hurry than we were. The well always looked like a hole made in a frozen river, for its sides were encased in a thick, waxy coating of highly polished ice, and no stone or earth was anywhere visible. Long lines of men always radiated from it towards their respective engines, and passed to one another buckets which had been lowered into the orifice by a long rope of ice, and were themselves, apparently, fantastic creations of the same material. This work was not only monotonous and endless, but also dangerous, for the sheets of ice around these wells were always slippery; most of us wore hobnailed army boots which were continually sliding from underneath us; the water was invariably far below the surface of the ground, and, as there was never any railing round the opening, the risk of our tumbling down was considerable. In case we did tumble down, there was little chance of our having a comparatively easy death by drowning, for we should be sure to get wedged, head downwards, in the narrow part near the water, where the overflow from the buckets had dashed against the sides and got frozen there.

But these wells were rare, and we had consequently to get up very often thrice in the course of a single night in order to fill the boilers with snow and the tender with wood. We were in all fifteen officers and men, and, though we did this unaccustomed work in a thoroughly sporting spirit, it was, nevertheless, very trying work owing to the intense cold, the deep snow, and our own physical weakness. We had to work in our heavy fur overcoats and fur gloves, and, so far, at least, as “snowing” the engine went, our labour seemed almost useless, for the snow, when melted, produced such a small quantity of water that in a few hours the engine came to a standstill, and we had to turn out again.

We should have been in better condition for this work if we had been able to sleep comfortably at night, but that we were unable to do owing to the overcrowding in our carriages. In order that the Russian women and children entrusted to our care should be more comfortable, we slept some of us two in a bunk, others on the floor, and still others in the corridor, and those at least who slept in the corridor were seldom able to get a good night’s rest. I might add that, though officers and privates necessarily mixed on terms of equality, perfect discipline prevailed amongst us, and we all worked cheerfully and harmoniously together. We even got up concerts, in which the star performers were our C.O., who had an inexhaustible collection of rag-time ballads; a polyglot Irish sergeant, who was in civil life the manager of an Opera Company; and an English officer, who sang Spanish songs to the accompaniment of a guitar which he had brought with him from South America.

As thefts of railway engines frequently occurred on this trip, and as engine-drivers of Bolshevik sympathies sometimes allowed their engines to “go cold,” we kept a British guard, sometimes composed of officers and sometimes of men, to watch ours, day and night, during stoppages. It had almost “gone cold” on one occasion when our sentry gave the alarm just in time. On another occasion, when we lent it for a few hours to the commander of a Polish echelon to manœuvre his train with, it was returned to us with the connecting-rod broken. This accident, which could not be made good in the repair shops, crippled our locomotive badly, without, however, rendering it completely useless. We bound up the connecting-rod in wooden splints, as if it were a broken arm, so that the machine could pull us along gently on the level, though it could not ascend a hill without the assistance of another engine, assistance which was not easy to get. A further difficulty was the quantity of snow on the line. Although the snowfall during the retreat was not unusually heavy, the rails were nearly always covered owing to the fact that soldiers and refugees in passing echelons had torn down most of the snow-sheds for firewood. Besides, as the horses and sleighs of the retreating troops used the railway line as well as the roads on each side of it, they sometimes forced much hard snow on to the rails, with the result that we all had to get out on several occasions to push our train.

While waiting in Novo-Nikolaevsk we were warned by General Sakharov that a mutiny was expected in that town, and consequently we “stood to” for several nights in succession. The mutiny broke out after we left, and, during one of our many stops, the disbanded soldiers of the mutinous regiments went past us eastwards, walking on the railway track, fully armed. None of our party, however, save myself, had the curiosity even to look at them, for all our English soldiers were absolutely “fed up” by this time with shocks of every kind. Shortly before we came into one station, Achinsk, it was wrecked by the accidental explosion of a train full of H.E., and 3,000 people were killed or wounded. When we passed through Achinsk, the line was strewn with dead bodies and with the wreckage of five trains, but the incident excited little comment amongst us. All our energies were concentrated on satisfying our locomotive’s insatiable cravings, and once or twice we were able to water at a station where a faint trickle still came from the pump. The struggle for water that took place on these occasions was a nightmare, as half a dozen engines sometimes contended for the privilege of filling their boilers first, and as the commandants of rival echelons almost came on several occasions to blows. These scenes were extraordinary, and I can claim to describe them with authority, if not with skill, inasmuch as my comrades and I had frequently to stay up all night, not only in order to work hard, but also in order to prevent our engine being stolen. All around stretched an illimitable waste of snow, gleaming cold beneath the starlight, and fringed on the left by dark forests which continued for thousands of miles to the northward, till they dwindled to stunted shrubs, and finally disappeared altogether in the ever-frozen tundras of the Polar Sea. High in the darkness loomed the tall, ice-plated water-tower, which always reminded me of a gigantic Paschal candle with streams of wax congealed on its sides, the candlestick being a massive, square block of ice which had formed over a brick platform three or four feet below. From the summit of this spectral pillar hung rigid, ice-clad ropes which clinked together with the sound of clinking glass, and at its foot stood a crowd of men covered to the eyes in skins and looking like Arctic necromancers awaiting a miracle. The Jews could not have waited with more anxiety for the living stream to gush from the rock than those Slavs waited for the most indispensable of all liquids to trickle from this magic tower. Meanwhile the busy and mischievous Spirits of the Snow played every conceivable prank. They whitened young men’s beards and eyebrows, they encased the rifles of the soldiers in glittering hoar-frost, they made the railway station look like an Eskimo snow-hut, they even capped the telegraph poles with snowy Phrygian bonnets several feet in height and sometimes cocked rakishly on one side.

The six or seven engines grouped around the water-tower were perfectly in keeping with that ghostly shape, bearing as they did as little resemblance to a respectable locomotive such as one sees in England as a Samoyede in winter costume bears to a London bank clerk. Snow was piled on the buffers, and on the platform in front, and on every projection at the sides; but the most startling item of the decoration scheme was the row of giant icicles, some of them thick and long as a man’s leg, which adorned the steaming flanks of the monster.

The carriages were similarly garbed in snow—fantastic wreaths of soft, unbroken snow on the roofs, deep drifts of snow on the steps, snow on the narrow window-sills, fluffy little balls of snow clinging pertinaciously to every rivet. The insides of these waggons were as unusual as the outsides, being most of them more like gipsies’ vans than anything else, as soldiers and their families had lived in them for years, children had been born in them, rude family portraits adorned the walls, cats and dogs looked on them as their ancestral mansions. One train carried the equivalent of forty-four million pounds sterling in gold roubles, Kolchak’s entire reserve and most of what was left of the fabulous wealth of the Tsars. Another train was laden with Kurgan butter to the value of five million roubles. A third was crammed with typhus patients, and was throwing out naked corpses at every stopping-place with as little ceremony as the stoker threw out ashes.

The commandants of all these trains contended furiously all night long in the station commandant’s office, not only for the privilege of being watered first, but also for the privilege of being put first on the west track, which was comparatively free. Two of those commandants were full-blown Generals, and we nicknamed one of them the “Butter General,” and the other the “Typhus General,” from the nature of their respective cargoes. The “Butter General” held forth oleaginously on the importance of his little load, and warned everybody of the stimulating effect which butter would have on the Bolshevik pursuit. He was probably thinking, however, of his own safety; and in the end he was captured, but without the butter, which he had encouraged the local population to loot. The “Typhus General” quoted Kolchak’s orders to prove that hospital trains should always have the precedence. But poor Kolchak had ceased to count: he might as well have cited one of the maxims of Mencius. The last we heard of the typhus train was that it had caught fire. The Reds saved some of the patients, but all the others had been burned to death.

The Poles maintained that at such a time everything must give way to military echelons; and, as both the station commandants and the military echelons were Polish, the Poles invariably had their way. But sometimes it looked as if the contest would end in bloodshed, for all the commanders went to these incredible conferences armed to the teeth and accompanied by soldiers who might be described, without much exaggeration, as walking arsenals, for, in addition to rifles, bayonets, swords, daggers, and revolvers, some of them even carried hand-grenades. A station-master in any other country would have gone mad if he had all these people in his office roaring at him simultaneously and handling their revolvers, while he was trying to converse with six people at once, and at the same time to carry on his ordinary business. And some of these station-masters nearly did go mad. On several occasions they flew into a rage, and ordered everybody who had no business in the office to leave it, but none of the intruders ever stirred a step, for they all claimed some right to be there. Even the soldiers said that they were in attendance on their officers; and, as it was no joke tackling men who carried Mills bombs, the station-master invariably subsided. Not to be out of the fashion, the British delegates at these debates were also armed; but, as we only numbered fifteen, were most of us ridiculously young, and had merely got rifles and revolvers, we failed somehow to inspire terror. For the contest was like one among a crowd of desperate men belonging to different nationalities, who had been shipwrecked on a desert island. Naturally, and as a matter of course, the nationality which had the most numerous and best-armed representatives took the first place without paying attention to the size or prestige of the Empires to which smaller groups belonged.

While the Whites palavered the Reds advanced, and we began to lose hope. “What can we expect,” asked the wit of our party with comic resignation, “after leaving Omsk town on the 13th of the month, and leaving Omsk station on a Friday in a group which originally numbered thirteen persons, among them two flagrant specimens of what the Chinese call ‘bad joss’ in the shape of one officer who was captured at Mons, and another officer who was twice captured in previous wars and has always brought bad luck to the army he joined?”

The last-named officer, myself, had served during the Great War in Gallipoli and Serbia. The Mons officer, an excellent fellow who worked harder than any of us, used to say from time to time with mournful humour: “It’s no bally good, boys. We shan’t get away. I’m with you. I’m the Jonah, all right. We’ll all get pinched.”

Nor could we forget that our G.O.C., General Sir Alfred Knox, had been in the habit of saying in a jocular way that he began his retreat in the year 1914 at Tannenberg, where he was military attaché with Samsonov’s Army, and had been more or less on the run ever since. But I do not think he ever imagined, even in the worst days of Rennenkampf’s rout, that his retreat would continue as far east as Vladivostock, and until the Year of Grace 1920.

Several of our civilian guests seriously regarded as “bad joss” the British flag which we had displayed in a prominent position on the outside of our carriage, and beneath which, to make sure (for we found that most of the Siberian peasants had never before seen the British flag), we had painted in Russian the words “British Detachment.”

They pointed out that we were now traversing intensely hostile country where savage repression of the insurgent peasantry had been going on for a whole year previously, and that, as the British flag had been indirectly associated with these repressions, the guerillas, who now swarmed along the line for a distance of a thousand miles, would be excited by that emblem to attack us for revenge or for loot or for both. They added, what I do not believe to be true, that a price of 50,000 roubles had been placed on the head of every British officer. Nevertheless, we refused to haul down our flag, and it was still flying over our carriage when we were captured at Krasnoyarsk. But what they said about the danger from insurgent bands was perfectly true. Those bands had derailed very many trains, and even captured stations at a time when Kolchak’s star was in the ascendant, and the line strongly guarded by the troops of six foreign countries. Now that the “Supreme Ruler” was a fugitive, and that all the foreign soldiers were gone, they could hardly be expected to refrain from attacking Kolchak’s broken rear. We therefore made elaborate plans for their reception.

At frequent intervals on our journey we were overtaken by officers and other ranks of the B.R.M. who were engaged in a new form of sport which they called “train-jumping.” When they arrived in an echelon at a station they walked to that train at the head of the “ribbon” which was going off first, and generally managed to persuade the commandant to give them a “lift” to the next station, where they repeated the performance. Owing, however, to the extreme overcrowding in all the trains, no more than two persons could play this game simultaneously in the same echelon. All these players eventually succeeded in escaping; and if we had imitated them we might have escaped too, but, of course, we could not leave our refugees. The change that had taken place in the appearance of these train-jumpers was like the change which takes place in the appearance of domestic animals that have gone wild. Covered with dirty furs, unshaven, wild-eyed, and desperate, they would certainly have excited comment in Bond Street or on the Grand Stand at Ascot.

They told us stories that would fill a book, and make most books of adventure look tame. Three of them, for instance, had been in a train a few stations west of us, when it was rushed one night by a band of Reds who had come on sleighs from the north. They heard the raiders thunder on the doors of each waggon, at the same time summoning the occupants to come forth instantly on pain of death. The sound came closer; and when finally it shook the door behind which they crouched, a Russian interpreter rose in a panic to undo the fastening. But one of the British officers pressed the cold muzzle of a revolver against his head and warned him, in a fierce whisper, to keep still. Thinking that the waggon was empty, the Reds passed on; and, when the sentry whom they had left behind turned his back, the three officers slipped noiselessly from the carriage, waded through the deep snow, and gained the shelter of the forest. They afterwards commandeered sleighs and food at the point of the revolver, as, unfortunately, firearms were the only arguments that had weight in those days. Two British officers who were with Ataman Dutov in the south got across the Chinese frontier, and turned up, long afterwards, in Peking.

As the Reds were coming still nearer, we finally got attached to a Polish echelon on the West track; but, as that track was now as congested as the East track, we gained little by the transfer. Like an airship commander making for his base in a damaged condition, with the last drop of petrol in his tanks, and enemy aircraft in hot pursuit, the Commandant of this Polish echelon now began to shed waggon after waggon with the object of lightening his train. I do not know on what principle he went, but it seemed to me that, for every verst the Reds gained on us, the Commandant jettisoned a truck. An old Tsarist “dug-out” who had lost the good qualities of the Pole without acquiring those of the Russian, this Commandant showed little sympathy for us; and his officers, some of whom, being Poles from East Prussia, had served in the German Army until they became prisoners of war, were anything but friendly. We heard that they objected to the weight of our carriage, and would like to get rid of it; and, though they denied having any such intention, several ominous circumstances seemed to indicate that they had. We discovered, for example, that one of our couplings was broken and the other so damaged that a slight bump would be enough to make it snap. As our carriage was the hindmost, and as the bumps were sometimes so bad that they swept all our crockery off the table, this was a serious matter, for, if the coupling snapped at the top of a steep incline, we should go rushing backwards at a speed which would soon become terrific, and should probably get derailed or smashed to pieces against some other train. When we drew the attention of the Poles to this matter they said that they could not repair the coupling and had no spare ones. They may have really wanted to get rid of our carriage, either because it was too heavy or because it was contaminated by typhus, for one of the refugees entrusted to us had managed to contract that disease. Or perhaps they believed, like some of those refugees, that our Union Jack would draw the fire of guerillas, and decided that, since we refused to haul down our flag, they would leave it and us behind.

As we could not repair the coupling ourselves, we took turns as sentry over it day and night. Beside the sentry were several logs of wood, which he was to throw under the nearest wheel of our carriage immediately the coupling gave way, so as to prevent the carriage from rushing backwards. The result was that, every time we went up a slope, my heart was in my mouth, as it used to be when I heard the long-drawn wail of approaching Turkish shells in Gallipoli. Never till then had I realized that there were so many nasty inclines on that section of the Trans-Siberian which, when I traversed it formerly in swift and well-appointed trains, had always seemed to me as flat as a pancake.

In the end we bribed the Poles to place our carriage next the engine; and, when they did that, they suddenly discovered that they had couplings after all, and hastened to screw them on. We also bribed a Russian Red Cross doctor to take our typhus case into his hospital; and, realizing from the success of these experiments in corruption how eloquently money spoke, we began flinging it right and left. Our bribes must, in all, have run into hundreds of thousands of roubles; and, though this seemed a stupendous sum at the time, it ultimately proved as valueless to the recipients as so many hundreds of thousands of snowballs, owing to the subsequent action of the Soviet Government in abolishing Omsk money. In some parts of Russia banknotes are now sold by weight like waste-paper; in other parts, tons of notes are being thrown into pulping-machines for conversion into newsprint.