They had taken a long journey by sea to the dirty port of Novorossiysk and then on by train to Ekaterinodar where the British mission was based. They didn’t, of course, meet any duchesses, but still, the White Russians doted on the British. The representative for the United Kingdom, Major General Poole, vowed to do everything possible to get his government to send troops to help Denikin. It was rumored that in return for petitioning the British government, Poole had been given a large share in an oil company exploiting reserves on the north-eastern coast of the Caspian Sea.
“He got one hundred and fifty thousand pounds in shares from the Russians,” Bolt told Eddie in confidence, “just for writing a fifty-five-page report.”
But the British government was skeptical about Poole’s proposal and soon replaced him with Lieutenant General Briggs. Briggs was put in charge of military supplies for the White Army.
Every now and then, Eddie was sent to Novo—as they called Novorossiysk. He delivered packages or watched British tanks, rusty-gray monsters that thrilled everyone who saw them being unloaded at the port. According to the newspapers, these “self-propelled armored vehicles” had arrived at the front in wooden containers labeled “tank” to conceal their actual purpose, and the name had stuck.
The British staged a demonstration battle on the outskirts of Novo. The tanks drove down into a steep ravine one after another, clattering and thundering, and then moving heavily on their tracks crawled up the opposite slope. The spectators watched in awe.
“We need to explain to the Russians that the Mark V tanks come in two types: ‘males’ and ‘females,’” said Captain Pride, chief commander of the armored unit. “Males are armed with six-pounder guns and machine guns, and females have machine guns only.”
However, there was no one to translate his words. Some Russian officers knew basic English, but when it came to “transmissions” or “air-intake systems,” they were struck dumb. There were no dictionaries, and the allies had to learn from each other by pointing at things and naming them.
There was food in Southern Russia but no industry. The White commissaries made endless lists of what was needed at the front, but there was no one to translate them. The British looked at the dense Cyrillic letters, shrugged, and sent whatever military supplies happened to be left after the Great War.
They sent bayonets that didn’t fit the Russian rifles, cartridge belts incompatible with Russian machine guns, and shells the wrong size for Russian cannons. Studebaker field ambulances were too heavy for the Russian roads, and the British horseshoes were too big for Cossack horses—while the White cavalry was given a hundred and sixteen thousand of them. A hundred thousand steel helmets gathered dust in warehouses because the Russian soldiers never used them. Huge shipments of goods flowed in from the Mediterranean military bases without the slightest understanding of for whom or for what they were intended.
The Russians were driven to protesting angrily, shouting and waving their arms.
“They say that the British are mocking them deliberately,” the interpreter explained dispassionately. “They think the objective of the United Kingdom is not to get Russia back on its feet but to destroy it.”
Needless to say, sentences such as this were easy enough to translate.
While General Denikin blamed the Allies for the chaos at the rear, the Allies blamed thieving supplies officers. Everything that was brought into the military warehouses appeared immediately on sale at local markets—at exorbitant prices, of course.
Six months later, Briggs was called home.
London bided its time. No one could predict whether or not it was worth taking a bet on Denikin. On the one hand, Bolshevism was a threat to world order, and the United Kingdom was itself subject to debilitating strikes. On the other hand, Lenin’s government had ravaged his country to such an extent that Russia no longer posed a threat to the interests of the English king. This, of course, was a relief.
Eddie didn’t care much about politics. His job was straightforward enough, British currency was highly valued at the Ekaterinodar market, and Novo was full of restaurants and beautiful girls (although he had still to meet any duchesses).
Eddie was pleased when the next man put in charge of the British mission, General Holman, kept sending him off to deliver packages to military observers. After all, that meant he had the chance to fly.
Whereas before he had sent his brother photographs on which he had written, “Here I am with a Mark V tank,” now he sent more impressive pictures on which he wrote, “This is me with the Bomber DH.9” and a detailed description of what it was like to fly in a plane.
He sent postcards home saying, “Greetings from Rostov” and “We’re on the advance” and so on. But now it looked to Eddie Moss as though he would end his life in a ruined mansion in the middle of nowhere.
Eddie clutched Klim’s hand. “Don’t leave me! There’s no one here besides you who understands English—I’ll die without your help.”
Klim looked at Eddie’s face caked with grime and soot. The young man had a short nose thickly covered with freckles and shining blue eyes with matted eyelashes.
“I’m sorry, but I have to find my wife,” said Klim.
He asked Leech how to get to the nearest railroad station. The girl looked doubtfully at his bandage, now stiff with dried blood, and at his bare scratched feet. “You won’t get that far,” she murmured.
And she was right. Klim got no farther than the porch before he fell down unconscious. The children dragged him back to the room with the pink wallpaper, and there he and Eddie spent more than a month.
Klim floated in and out a feverish delirium. Sometimes the image of Nina swam before him, and he would think, I’ll never see her again, and feel fear and pain burn him up inside. If it weren’t for the black infected wound in his chest and this nausea that made it impossible to stand, he felt he might have been able to find her, to save her. But now it was too late anyway. The worst had probably already happened.
Lubochka had cursed Klim, and it had turned out as she had wished. We should have stayed in Nizhny Novgorod, he thought again and again. So what if we were freeloaders in somebody else’s house there? So what if we were serfs of the Bolshevik state?
Klim’s only memento of Nina was the knotted leather cord that she had given him—to remind him that no matter what, he had to survive. But would he?
Eddie was tormented more by this uncertainty than by his burns.
“Where’s the frontline?” he kept pestering Klim. “Why can’t we hear guns? What are the children saying?”
The children had no idea where the frontline was. There was nobody in charge at all in the surrounding villages—neither Reds nor Whites.
“If the Reds find us, will they kill us immediately?” Eddie asked Klim.
“Most likely.”
“What about the Whites? Could you explain to them that I’m in the service of His Majesty?”
“I could.”
When Eddie felt better, he told Klim about the British mission in Ekaterinodar.
“There is a whole crowd of us. A hundred officers and a hundred and thirty soldiers, all volunteers. One fellow came because he heard Churchill’s appeal about military aid to Russia on the radio, and he joined the British Military Mission because Churchill is his idol. Another fellow thought he heard God’s voice in his head telling him to go to Russia. Yet another spent the Great War as a prisoner of the Germans, came out without a single medal, and decided to catch up with all his friends. And our machine-gun instructor openly admits that he escaped from the police. Russia might be a god-forsaken hole, but it’s still better than Scotland Yard.”