Читаем Byzantium Endures полностью

The train started up again. The soup had been a half-way decent shtshyi, with good meat. Brodmann had gone to sleep. The others read or scribbled in notebooks. That was how they fought our Civil War. Yet every man in that carriage probably had more blood on his hands than a dozen Cossacks. Sometimes cavalry trotted alongside the train. The riders gave Red salutes and waved. If we moved slowly they would exchange shouts with the troops. We were carrying guns and soldiers. Every coach was armoured. Sometimes, as in our own, they had been fitted with a hotchpotch of sheet-metal riveted at random. The windows were largely unprotected. In the event of an attack we were supposed to throw ourselves to the floor and hope for the best. But there were no attacks. Hrihorieff and the Bolsheviks between them had brought a kind of peace to the area. It would not be long before they fell out amongst themselves. In common with the Whites, they all had a hatred of the Nationalists. But the Devil was amongst us. Never had Russia been so divided. Only now are the wounds healing, but Islam and Zion still threaten the Slavic race.

I was to see Hrihorieff the next day. Following his usual habit he had taken over a good-sized town. Mounted on a white Arab, like Skoropadskya’s, he was reviewing his troops: motley, swaggering Cossacks in a thousand varieties of clothing, armed with good carbines. Their ponies, as always, were lovingly groomed. The Zaporizhian Ataman was fairly short, his head was shaven, he had grey, Mongolian features, but he was no play-actor. He handled his horse well. His uniform was ‘pure’ Cossack, without any stupid antique adornments. He drew his strength from his troops as Constantine did when he returned from England to claim the Roman Empire. He was a true soldier. He had served bravely in the War. He laughed, he gesticulated, but his horse was always firmly controlled, never allowed to skip or rear. Thus he displayed the intelligence and the will lying beneath the braggadocio. This was why the Cossacks allowed him to be their master: to lead them on their daring attacks on great Ukrainian cities. I understood why Yermeloff had planned to become indispensable to the Ataman, why Grishenko was so useful. If Lenin or Trotsky had possessed half Hrihorieff’s manliness we should never have suffered the disasters and consequences of War Communism. There is none, in all that frightful crew, I would have served more willingly than Hrihorieff, yet I continued to be nervous of his followers. Pretending to disapprove of the pogromchik bandits, he nonetheless used them for his own ends, as Queen Elizabeth had used her pirates. Ultimately they might, in spite of Yermeloff’s guess, be eliminated, as Lafitte was cast out after serving his turn in the American Revolution. Trotsky would cheerfully have killed most of his allies by 1921. He invited them for peace-talks or political meetings and had them shot. Trotsky learned bandit ruthlessness but not bandit courage. I am a child in such matters.