Pride had told the driver to stop the engine and set off on a treasure hunt.
“We didn’t have any firewood,” Eddie explained to his rescuers, “so Klim burned broken furniture in the stove. This man saved my life. He made an Argentinean hunting weapon, a bolas, out of stones and rope and used it to hit the hares that came into the garden.”
The captain shook Klim firmly by the hand. “How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know,” said Klim. “We lost track of time long ago.”
The soldiers knocked the cast-iron stove out of its place, took it to the railroad by tank, and put it into their car.
“Now, we’ll be warm as toast in here,” Pride said. “And those machine-gun instructors will be freezing their arses off outside. After all, they wouldn’t help us get the stove, would they? Now, we won’t let them in our sleeping carriage to warm up.”
Then Captain Pride summoned Klim. “Where did you learn English?” he asked.
“I had an English tutor when I was a child. Later, I worked at the British mission in Tehran and then in Shanghai.”
“How would you like to interpret for us?”
Pride told Klim that at the previous stop, he had had to court-martial the unit’s orderlies and interpreters after he had discovered that they were stealing anything from the train that wasn’t nailed down—from officers’ boots to the new Ricardo engine—in order to sell it.
“It’s a nightmare trying to find interpreters,” Pride told Klim. “We’ve tried to hire Russians, but they’re either thieves or their English isn’t good enough. Then we had some Jewish immigrants from the East End of London sent out, but that only made things worse. The Russians hated them so much that they refused to talk to them. They even shot one interpreter in front of our eyes. Some of our men know French from learning it at school, and they can make themselves understood when they speak to the Russian aristocrats, lucky beggars. But I’m not one of them. The only French phrase I’ve learned since the war started is ‘Ça coûte combien?’—‘How much?’ If I want to find a girl for the night—”
“I don’t know much military vocabulary,” Klim admitted.
“That doesn’t matter,” Pride said. “It’s the machine-gun instructors who need to talk to Russians about their equipment. All we need is to find washerwomen to do our laundry now that we’ve lost our orderlies.”
Klim agreed to sign a contract and was taken on to the payroll with the unit.
Klim translated cable after cable for Captain Pride—reports of General Yudenich’s defeat in the north and Admiral Kolchak’s retreat from Omsk. In mid-November, the Red Army seized an important railroad station, Kastornoye, and after that, it became clear that the Whites would never make it to Moscow.
They never stayed long anywhere, so they soon received the nickname “tourists.” They had stormed a locality, killed the Red garrison, and gathered the citizens in the central square.
“Now, you and Russia are saved,” they had proclaimed. Then they had left, taking with them whatever they had managed to get from the “grateful people.”
Many times, Klim had witnessed epic scenes of looting. Soldiers had run from boxcar to boxcar smashing locks with their rifle butts and tearing off seals.
“There’s underwear in here, lads. Real underpants!”
“And artillery parts.”
“Hey, quick, this one’s full of saddles!”
The army priest had beaten at the looters with his umbrella. “Take your hands off! That’s a sin! Don’t you dare!”
But the soldiers had shoved him down in the mud.
The Whites forced the peasants to carry their loot and refused to let them go, taking them farther and farther away from their native villages. The army neither paid civilians for their services nor gave them hay for their horses. Many times, a peasant willingly gave up a good horse for an injured one simply for a chance to get back home. And when he reached his village, he found a new man in charge there, a Red commissar who had been dispatched to take the place of a predecessor who had been hanged.
“Citizens,” the commissar exhorted the frightened villagers, “you have been freed from your chains. A new day is dawning.”
The White army kept losing soldiers and gaining refugees. Hordes of people trudged alongside, carried their belongings, and drove herds of animals along the roads.
“I just don’t get it,” Pride said with a shrug. “Why the hell have we stopped our offensive against Moscow?”
For Klim, it was quite clear what was happening. The White Army had simply gone bankrupt. It hadn’t enough resources—neither material nor human.
The White Army retreated because it was impossible for them to wage war without reinforcements. The soldiers had been fighting for months until they were numb and almost dead with exhaustion. All they had by way of rations was moldy hardtack; all other food had to be procured from the locals. The volunteers knew that there was nobody to come to relieve them, and gradually, they gave in to a despair close to indifference.
When your lungs are racked by chronic bronchitis, all your comrades have died, and your stomach is aching with hunger, the only thing you feel is a fierce hatred of all those who stayed away from the front and survived at your expense.
Most of the time, the British troop train stood idle on railroad sidings. The tanks were no longer being taken down from their trucks because there was no more fuel. There was an air of nervous merriment among the British soldiers very similar to the atmosphere Klim had observed in the gamblers’ den. Rather than fighting the Bolsheviks, the tank crews were more interested in waging their own brand of guerrilla warfare against the machine-gun and artillery instructors. The tank crews called the instructors “schoolmistresses” while they themselves proudly bore the name of “canned meat.”
“Look out! It’s the tinned stew!” the instructors yelled, catching sight of their adversaries.
The tank crew curtseyed facetiously. “Good afternoon, ladies! How are your lessons?”
The instructors were sitting around with nothing to do too. In the first months of the war, they had played an important role as advisors to the Russians, instructing them in the use of British weapons, but now, nobody had any need of them.
The tank crews and instructors competed against each other in every possible way from bottle-shooting competitions to friendly boxing matches. They agreed to a truce only when an express train brought them French magazines, L’Illustration and La Vie Parisienne. Then a frantic trade started up involving pictures of girls, especially glamorous pin-ups showing off cleavage or bare legs.
But deep down, everyone was tormented by the same question: “What are we doing here? What’s it all for?”
The British had plenty of food from condensed milk to canned beef, and soon, Klim felt far better and stronger than he had before. However, all this time, he felt not as if he were living but merely enduring life.
His duty was to translate the news releases, manage the newly hired orderlies, and assist the British in their short-lived love affairs. The instructors were extremely jealous of the tank boys for having Klim to help them, and now and then, Captain Pride would “rent out” their interpreter, overcharging the instructors shamelessly for Klim’s services.
“I suppose a crate of whiskey will just about do it, but you can bring me a new samovar as well.”
While on his Russian mission, Captain Pride had assembled a magnificent collection of samovars and kept it in the ammunition car under the strict surveillance by the guards.