And what, anyway, was I guarding? I had seen it loaded as we prepared to leave Tobolsk, but then it was just boxes and bags, chests and parcels and cases. What lay inside? I decided to find out. And it was dazzling. Nicholas Romanov had been monarch of one-sixth of the earth, and Alexandra his queen. Their possessions were bound to be of the grandest. I found the carriages contained not only silks and velvets, china and crystal, not only a number of the most exquisite paintings and icons, but also a great many jewels. A great many? Boxes of them! Just how many I do not know, for I opened only a few of dozens of containers of various kinds. One was a chest of wood perhaps eighteen inches long by a foot wide and five to six inches deep: and it was full of gold coins in huge variety: Austrian thalers, English sovereigns, American 50-dollar pieces, Mexican, Spanish. It was too heavy for me even to lift from the floor.
In one suitcase lay a small leather-covered octagonal box which, when I opened it, proved to contain only jewellery of a religious nature: crucifixes, small enamelled icons and the like. But it was all of immense richness, with large precious stones used liberally for decoration. To find oneself responsible for such a treasure is, I can assure you, an extraordinary and unnerving experience. Soon I realized that something must be done: the treasure had to be hidden or buried or taken to a place of safety if such could be found.
I made haste to close everything up and lock the carriage doors. The first light of dawn was showing as I began to make my way forward towards the locomotive.
And it was at dawn that the ambush must have happened, for only a few minutes afterwards, as I stood beside the driver on the platform of the locomotive, looking ahead along its sleek, steel side as we rounded a bend, a battle came sweeping into view.
A train stood halted on the track ahead, perhaps half a mile away, and was clearly engaged in a furious fight with attacking troops. We had heard nothing of the firing, naturally, for the sound of our own locomotive was more than enough to drown out anything else. The driver's hand flew to the brake and I swung off along the handrails at the side of the tender to warn Koznov and his men. Before I had even reached the first carriage, a bullet clanged upon steel close by and went humming past me; turning my head, I saw horsemen riding hard towards us.
Koznov, it turned out, was already alert and his men stood in the corridor with rifles trained upon the approaching riders. Similar scenes are commonplace in these modern days in cinema films about the West in the United States of America. The difference here was that the attack was not by a tribe of painted savages, but by cavalrymen. Whose were they? I snatched a look through binoculars at them, and at the far larger group surrounding the train ahead. Suddenly I noticed a milk-white horse . . . Dutov!
'Don't shoot,' I told Koznov, but it was a useless instruction, for even as I spoke we ourselves were under fire, and Koznov's men were firing back.
'Hold your fire!' I shouted, and snatched up a white pillow from a compartment and waved it from the window. I had them drop their rifles then, and descend to the track with their hands raised. They were resentful, but this was the only thing to be done: it would have been slaughter otherwise. We were then made to sit by the track and wait as the battle raged farther ahead. But even at that stage it was clear enough that Dutov's troops must carry the day, for it was a couple of hundred against a thousand or more: revolutionary guards against highly-trained men. Determined resistance was certainly put up, but at last the red flags at either end of the Red train were torn down and the inevitable surrender occurred.
It was a full hour after that that I was prodded to my feet with a cavalry sabre and marched to where Dutov sat, on horseback still, beside the surrendered train.
He glared down at me, the big moustache bristling. 'Where is the Tsar?'
I told him straight: 'Imprisoned in Ekaterinburg.'
He struck angrily at his thigh with a gauntleted hand. 'I knew it! Bound to happen. He's alive still?'
'To the best of my knowledge."
'Alive but abandoned,' Dutov raged. 'You've left him to rot.'
'I was imprisoned, and then turned out of the city,' I protested. 'If I go back they'll arrest me.'
'Where are you bound now?'
I said, 'The other royal children are still at Tobolsk. I said I'd return.'
'Stay by your train,' said he. 'We'll talk when I've done here.' And he wheeled away. In the next hour or so he mopped up. The survivors from the attacked Bolshevik train were formed up, with their wounded, and set to marching due north, and a dishevelled-looking crew they were. Dutov's men then swarmed aboard the train and seemed to be taking for themselves anything that was both movable and useful. Then the white horse came cantering towards us and Dutov swung one leg forward over the horse's neck and slid to the ground.
'Got any vodka?' he demanded.
There was perhaps two inches of the lemon remaining. I handed the bottle to him and watched his head tilt back as he drained it. 'None on that damned Bolshevik train!' he said. 'Precious little of anything. All we got was a few rifles and some ammunition boxes. God knows what they live on!'
I told him we had a little food in tins, but he wasn't interested. 'It's arms we want. I could do with money, too-it's a while since my rascals were paid. Not -' and he laughed wickedly-'that they could spend it anywhere, eh! But it keeps a man loyal, money does, no matter what the Bolsheviks say! Now, tell me about Nicholas.'
So I told him what I knew: of the pressure for assassination, of the place where he was imprisoned. But not, of course, of the paper.
'What forces have the Bolsheviks?'
'Impossible to know. There are guards everywhere, men with weapons in the streets.'
'Rabble!' says he. 'You can give a man a gun, it doesn't make him a soldier.'
'You're thinking of attack?'
He gave me a glittering grin. 'No! I'm not thinking of anything of the kind. God, I had you for a lily-livered nothing running off with your tail curled down, and what is it you want of me? To attack Ekaterinburg with my little force, no less! But don't worry, it will be retaken before too long, that's a promise.'
'I hope it won't be too late,' I said soberly.
He regarded me for a moment, then fished in his tunic pocket, brought out a leather cigar case and lit one carefully. 'Upmann,' he said through wreathing, fragrant smoke, 'and I have seven left. The boy's where?'
'The Tsarevitch?'
'Yes, Alexei.'
'At Tobolsk. Why?'
Dutov drew on the cigar and looked hard at me. 'The succession, man!'
'Nicholas abdicated for himself and his son.'
Dutov nodded angrily. 'Damn fool. The boy would have been a rallying point.'
'Probably a dead one,' I said.
'Not necessarily. And he wouldn't be the first son to reclaim a father's throne. ' Dutov was tempted, he told me a moment later, to ride for Tobolsk, and secure the Romanov children; and he was angry when I shook my head.
'Why not?'
'There are extremists in Tobolstz who'll kill them at the first sign of an army. You'd never get near enough!'