Our journey from Taiga to Krasnoyarsk was a repetition of our journey from Omsk to Taiga, only worse. There were numerous railway accidents with considerable loss of life, and at one station we came across a deserted train which was being looted. Most ominous symptom of all, many of the Polish soldiers, who had hitherto formed an unbroken rearguard, had now fled in a body from their echelons, and were marching in complete disorder on foot. There was nothing, therefore, between us and the enemy. Insurgent bands were operating on the line to the east of us, and held for a short time one of the stations. The telegraph wires had all been cut, but the presence of guerillas on the railway was signalled by means of rockets at night. Everything indicated that we were running into a catastrophe. The curtain had in fact risen on the last act of the tragedy, but it proved to be a very short act with a rather tame and unexpected climax.

After passing Bogotol we learned that Krasnoyarsk was in the hands of an insurgent band under a well-known guerilla leader called Shitinkin, who was, however, allowing all Polish echelons and foreign officers to pass. Consequently we were not surprised or alarmed when, on January 6, we were stopped at Bugatch, six versts from Krasnoyarsk, by three men whom we took to represent Shitinkin’s Government. These three men were calmly disarming the large number of Russian soldiers on foot, on horseback, and in sleighs, who had been moving eastwards on both sides of the railway and on the line itself all the way from Omsk. This interminable stream of soldiers riding in the darkness and the snow was one of the many things which made this journey seem to me at times a fantastic romance or a feverish dream. I used to drop off to sleep at dusk while watching the busbies of the Cossacks bobbing endlessly past the window; every time I went out to “snow” the engine at night they were still passing; and sometimes for a fraction of a second after I woke up from dreams of happier lands, I was uncertain whether the dream was not reality and this incredible, infinite procession the dream.

But now this long trail had come to an end, both for the Cossacks and for us. In obedience to the orders of the mysterious Three, the Russians surrendered their arms with the peaceful unconcern of railway travellers surrendering their tickets to the ticket-collector at the end of their journey, or of sheep surrendering their wool to the shearer; and soon a huge pile of rifles, swords, and revolvers arose in the snow outside our carriage. In obedience to further orders the officers tore off their epaulettes and threw them on the ground. When I visited Krasnoyarsk a few days later I found some parts of the streets so thickly littered with epaulettes as to suggest the idea of fallen leaves in autumn.

None of the White officers offered the least objection to these proceedings. Those who had been disarmed were allowed to drift into Krasnoyarsk and there shift for themselves. We saw thousands of weaponless men pass in the space of a few hours. Korff, the Russian officer attached to our Mission, said, “These three men should be shot,” but a few weeks later he himself was an officer in the Red Army. We felt sure that the Three were not alone, and we afterwards discovered that, behind a hill some 600 yards off, was a small detachment of Reds with several machine-guns.

Being under the impression that this Trio represented Shitinkin and the S.Rs. (Social-Revolutionaries), and that they would soon allow us to pass, we were only amused at first by this extraordinary scene; but we were rudely disillusioned when one of the Three, a soldier with a red ribbon in his busby, entered our carriage and announced that he was the representative of the Soviet Government (Sovietsky Vlast).

This first envoy of Bolshevism was a simple man, very polite, and very sincere in his beliefs. He could tell us nothing more, however, than that we could not go further. He could not even say if we were prisoners of war or not, and had no directions to give us. As to the general situation, civil and military, he was, however, frank and indiscreet. He said that an anti-Kolchak Government had been formed at Krasnoyarsk, and that there was a “partisan” army under Shitinkin in that town. Two regular regiments of the Reds had arrived and were on their way into Krasnoyarsk, where the local Government, which he described as being practically Bolshevik, was expected to dissolve voluntarily after handing over its power to the representatives of the Soviet Republic. One Red regiment was between us and Krasnoyarsk. He said that these Red troops had come by sleigh from Tomsk, sometimes travelling at the rate of seventy versts a day, and that some of them had even come on our own echelons.

Commissars and Red officers continued to visit us during the rest of the day, and were all of them courteous. Some of them had been officers in the old army, and one had been a trusted subordinate of General Sakharov, Kolchak’s Commander-in-Chief. The Colonel of a Red regiment told us that we might retain our arms, but he insisted on the disarmament of all the Poles. Next day, however, a civilian functionary of some kind visited us and made us surrender all our weapons. The military Reds were, as a rule, friendly; the civilian Reds were fanatical and unfriendly; but the friendlies were, unfortunately, afraid of the fanatics. The soldiers at the Front were kind and courteous, as military people at the Front nearly always are.

Those soldiers constituted in fact the flaming vanguard of the Reds, the young heralds of universal revolt, who preach the Gospel of Lenin in conquered lands, and who certainly made a good impression in Siberia by their noble phrases and their scrupulousness in paying for everything. By their swords and their enthusiasm Bolshevism is maintained, but by their swords Bolshevism will fall. For their present ignorance and fanaticism can only last so long as they are at a distance from their homes, are misinformed about conditions in Russia by Propagandist newspapers, and are daily worked up into a state of almost religious fervour by what is called the political department of the army. When they return to Russia and see how things actually are, their enthusiasm may take a very different direction; and already, indeed, they are beginning to doubt. Several of them confessed to us that they hate the military Commissars who always keep well to the rear, and who sometimes live in great luxury. “We shall kill them some day,” said one of the Red soldiers; “they are no better than bourgeois.” This slaughter will begin once the Bolsheviks have made treaties with their external enemies, and have turned their attention from war, about which they know a good deal, to peace, about which they know nothing.

But at present these Janissaries of the Reds are still intoxicated themselves by revolutionary enthusiasm and capable of intoxicating others. How capable they are, I saw from the effect produced on the Russians in our party by their high revolutionary fervour. “We do not kill prisoners,” they said, “they lie who say so”; and told a harrowing story of a White officer at Taiga who shot his two daughters and himself sooner than surrender. “That man,” they said, “was misled by his own Propaganda.”

They told us, and I afterwards found that it was true, that, before evacuating Omsk, Kolchak’s Cossacks had massacred a number of workmen imprisoned there. “But,” they added, “we have blotted all that out of our minds. We will not take revenge.” I began to see that Bolshevism, like Puritanism, the Great Tai-P’ing Rebellion, and even Mohammedanism, owes all its explosive force to—the Bible. The Divine element in Christianity is of such tremendous and supernatural potency that, if mixed with the wrong ingredients, it is capable of blowing the world to pieces. A grain of primitive Christianity added to a mass of Marxian error has made Russian Communism the terrible and most dangerous compound that it is. “An Idealism gone wrong”; that description is true as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.

Ivan, our train conductor, an honest, hard-working civilian with no previous political views, was quite carried off his feet by the strong wind of the new doctrine, by the large and benevolent phrases, redolent of an austere republican justice, which the Red leaders continually rolled off their tongues, phrases such as are frequently met with in the oratory of the Cromwellian captains and the French Terrorists. He spent all his time drinking in these burning words, and brought us back, incidentally, useful information as to what was going on. He witnessed the arrival of a Red commander and heard the Poles ask that their lives should be spared and that they should have special treatment. “We never kill prisoners,” replied the Red General haughtily, “but after what I have heard of the conduct of the Poles in the villages through which I have just passed, they should be the last people in the world to ask for special treatment.” And, knowing how the Poles had behaved in those villages, Ivan marvelled greatly at that Red leader’s moderation.

Another Russian of our party was still more affected by the oratory. He was a young bluejacket, Makarov by name, who had been quartered on us by a Jaeger Colonel in order that he should attend to several of that officer’s lady relatives who had been placed in our charge. The Colonel had assured us that Makarov was absolutely Bolshevik-proof, and certainly he was a very handy and active youth. Unfortunately he became so mad-drunk on the Bolshevik oratory that he heard and on a considerable quantity of raw alcohol which he imbibed that he forthwith declared himself a Red, threatened to murder every officer in the carriage, and went roaring up and down the corridor with a revolver. He made our position to the last degree dangerous, for if he began shooting or we tried to defend ourselves, the Red Guards watching through the window would have massacred all of us. I put him to bed five times; but the mixture of bad doctrine and bad drink had excited his brain to such a degree of insane activity that sleep was out of the question, and on each occasion he rushed into the corridor after me, madder than ever. In the end I began to fear that it was a clear case of homicidal mania, and that nothing would save us.

While this uproar was going on, a number of White officers who had not yet surrendered or been disarmed were calmly planning an impossible anti-Bolshevik coup in the compartment of the Russian officers attached to our Mission. The whole incredible situation lacked only this finishing touch to make it perfectly unique. Here were armed officers of Kolchak’s Army holding a Council of War inside the Red lines, which they had entered by reason of the neglect by the Bolsheviks of the simplest military precautions. A few miles off, on the west, was a large force of Whites, which intended to advance on Krasnoyarsk that night. A few miles off on the east was a Red force, part of which had come to Krasnoyarsk on White echelons without anybody in those echelons having ever suspected them of being Red. Our train was surrounded by Bolshevik guards, who were apparently unable to distinguish between friend and foe. The Bolshevik officers who had visited us during the day had given away their military dispositions, or, rather, their lack of military dispositions, and our Russian interpreters were now communicating that valuable information to the White leaders who had casually dropped in for a chat and a smoke, without meeting any objection on the part of the Red soldiers supposed to be guarding us. The only member of our party who did justice to the situation was old Sergeant-Major Walters, who, after having had the position explained to him, sat down deliberately, and said: “It beats me.”

It was a farce, but a farce which might easily end in a tragedy; for if the Whites advanced we would find ourselves between two fires. I have passed more peaceful nights than the night of January 6, 1920, the Russian Christmas Eve, a festival for which, by the way, we had during the early part of the day been making elaborate preparations. We sat up till daybreak with our rifles loaded and ready, for we felt that if the Whites did come on it would be our duty to join them, though the most probable outcome of any fighting would be that, after having stirred up trouble, the Whites would run away and leave us to be wiped out.

The night passed, however, without incident, and we all thanked God when Christmas Day broke at length over the infinite waste of snow.