The Steel Tsar Read online

  The Japanese were all making for the camp. As a result we were lucky. They weren't looking for escaped prisoners just yet. Even when we were spotted, we were taken for enemy soldiers. We were shot at, but we were not pursued.

  We reached the outskirts of the town. Getting through the streets unobserved was going to be the difficult part.

  Again we were lucky in that whatever was going on behind us was diverting all troops, all attention. It was Birchington crying: 'I say, you fellows, wait for me!' that brought us the greatest danger. A small detachment of Japanese infantry heard his voice and immediately began to fire along the alley we had entered. Greaves went down, together with a couple of others.

  I kneeled beside Greaves. I tested his pulse. He had been shot in the back of the head and was quite dead. Another chap was dead, also, but the survivor was only slightly wounded. He got his arm over my shoulder and we continued to make for the harbor. By this time we were fairly hysterical and were yelling wildly at Birchington as Japanese soldiers opened fire again behind us. 'Shut up, you damned fool! Greaves is dead!'

  'Dead? He should have been more careful . . .'

  'Shut up, Birchington!'

  We got to the quayside and went straight into the water, as planned, swimming for the nearest boat, a white and red blur in the misty electric light from the harbor. I heard Birchington behind me.

  'I say, you chaps. I say! Didn't your realize I couldn't swim?'

  This intelligence seemed to lend me greater energy. Supporting the wounded man, I swam slowly towards the MTB. Some of the seamen were already climbing its sides. I was relieved to hear no further gunshots. Perhaps we had managed to surprise them, after all.

  By the time I eventually got to the MTB a rope ladder had been thrown down for me. I lifted the wounded man on to it, holding it while he ascended. I think I could still hear Birchington's dreadful cries from the harbor:

  'I say, chaps. Hang on a minute. Can somebody send a boat to fetch me?'

  I hardened my heart. At that moment I must admit I didn't give a fig for Birchington's life.

  By the time I reached the deck I was gasping with exhaustion. I looked around me, expecting to see captured Japanese sailors. Instead I saw the white uniforms of Russian Navy personnel. A young lieutenant, his cap on the side of his head, his tunic unbuttoned, a revolver and a saber in his hands, saluted me with his sword. 'Welcome aboard, sir,' he said in perfect English. He grinned at me with that wild, careless grin which only Russians have. 'We both appear to have had the same idea,' he said. 'I am Lieutenant Pyatnitski, at your service. We took this boat only twenty minutes before you arrived.'

  'And the airships back there?'

  'Russian. We are rescuing the prisoners, I hope, at this very moment.'

  'You're using an awful lot of stuff for a few prisoners,' I said.

  'While the prisoners are on the island,' said Pyatnitski pragmatically, 'we cannot bomb the fuelling station.'

  One of the English seamen said. 'Poor bloody Greaves. He died for absolutely nothing.'

  I leaned on the rail. From the quayside I could still hear Birchington's awful voice, pleading and desperate: the wailing of a frightened child.

  2.

  Back in Service

  If someone had told me, before I ever entered the Temple of Teku Benga, that I should one day be glad to join the Russian Service, I should not only have laughed at them I should, if they had persisted, probably have punched them on the nose. In those days Russia was the greatest menace to our frontiers in India. There was often the threat of open war, for it was. Well-known that they had territorial ambitions in Afghanistan, if nowhere else. The fact that the Japanese Empire and the Russian Empire had clashed over which parts of South-East Asia and China came under their control was probably fortunate for the British. The War might well have taken a different turn, with Japan and Britain as allies, if Russian ambitions had not, in this world, been diverted towards the crumbling remains of the Chinese Empire. A great deal of the reason for this, of course; was Kerensky himself.

  The old President of Russia (and the chief power in the so-called Union of Slavic Republics -fundamentally the countries conquered by Imperial Russia before the socialist Revolution) was anxious to keep the friendship of Europe and America and this meant that he had become extremely cautious about offending us. Russia needed to import a great many manufactured goods even now, and she needed markets for her agricultural produce. Moreover she required as much foreign investment as she could get and was especially interested in attracting" British and American capital. She had taken huge steps forward since the successful - and almost bloodless - Revolution of 1905, which had occurred at a time when another war between Russia and Japan was brewing. Her brand of humanist socialism had produced almost universal literacy and her medical facilities were amongst the best in the world. She had produced a thriving and liberal middle class and it was very rare, these days, to encounter the kind of poverty for which Russia, when I was a boy, was famous. AH in all, even amongst the most conservative people, there was no doubt that Russia and her dominions were much improved for Kerensky and his socialists.

  Whatever the historical reasons, there was nothing dishonorable in joining the Russians against our common enemy. When sub aquatic liner, took us, first to Vladivostok and then, by airship, to Khabarovsk, I wondered how long it would be before I could begin doing something again. The imprisonment alone had left me frustrated. When news came through that any British citizens with airship experience were needed for the aerial arm of the Russian Volunteer Fleet and that

  Whitehall was actively encouraging us to join up, I put my name down immediately, and as did most of the chaps I was with. Those few of us, like myself, with military experience were given the choice of serving on armed merchantmen, flying in convoys, or on the escorting aerial frigates and cruisers themselves. I elected to join the frigates. I had no particular urge to kill my fellow men but something in me felt it wanted to take something less than a passive role through the rest of this particular War. I have learned from my experiences that the politicians of any one country against any other can manufacture hatred and racial antagonism, so I was no longer the patriot I had been. Personally, however, and I know now that this was an infantile impulse, I felt that I had been put to a great deal of trouble by the Japanese and I might as well fight them as anyone else. I also, I must admit, rather hoped there would not be too much conflict. I wanted to fly good, fast ships. And here, at last, was my chance.

  We had a two-week training program in and around Samara, in which We learned the specifics of the Russian ships, which were mainly built and equipped according to the designs of the great engineer Sikorski and at that time were amongst the most modern in the world; then we were assigned to various ships to get general experience. I joined the aerial cruiser Vassarion Belinsky. She was a fine, easily handled ship, sailing out of the great Lermontov Airpark a few miles to the north of Odessa, that marvelous cosmopolitan seaport from which have come so many fine Russian-speaking poets, novelists, painters, and intellectuals. I had a few days’ leave in Odessa before we sailed and I enjoyed those days to the full. Being on the Black Sea the port was relatively untouched by the War and there was more merchant shipping in her harbors than there was naval. Her streets were crowded with people of every color and nation. She smelled of spices, of the food of the five continents, and there was a merry, carefree quality about her, even in wartime, which seemed to me to exemplify the very best of the Slavic soul.

  Odessa has a large Jewish population (for it is the capital of Russian Jewry beyond the pale, even though the pale itself, together with all anti-Semitic laws, has been abolished in Kerensky’s Russia) and so is full of music, intelligent commercial enterprise, and romance. I fell in love with her immediately. I know of no other city quite like her and often wish that I could have spent longer exploring her winding streets, her avenues and promenades, her resorts and watering places. She is not strictly speakin
g a Russian city. She is Ukrainian, and the Ukrainians will insist that the ‘goat-beards’ (their word for great Russians) are interlopers, that Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, is the true center of Slavic culture, that the Muscovites are upstarts, parvenus, johnny-come-latelies, tyrants, imperialists, thieves, carpet-baggers, and almost anything else of the kind you care to think of. It is true that the Central Government of Moscow has most power over the Ukraine, but there is a spirit about Odessa, which, I think, denies any of its denizens’ allegations.

  In Odessa I learned a great deal about the progress of the war. On land the Japanese had made many early gains, but were now being beaten back by Russian and British infantry – indeed they had held less territory than before the war. They were still pretty powerful in the air and at sea, and were masters of strategy, but all in all we were optimistic about the way the conflict was turning, for the Dutch and Portuguese were also on out side and although their navies were not large, they were extremely capable.

  It is certain that the War would have been as good as over if it had not been for Russia's domestic problems. These tended, amongst Odessa's population, to be a more important topic than the War itself. Perhaps because of the War, there was a threat of revolution in several parts of the USSR. Indeed whole parts of the Ukraine were currently in the hands of large armies calling themselves Free Cossacks -many of them deserters from various cavalry regiments. I gathered that they were intense Slavophils, opposed to Kerensky's 'Europeanisation' of their lands, were 'national­ists' in that they argued for the independence of all territories currently making up the Russian Empire - Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria and so on. Their policies and demands seemed vague, though socialistic in terminology, even when I heard them discussed from all aspects, but if it was possible to argue forever about the interpretation of their ideology, all agreed to a degree of fascination with the leading personality amongst the revolutionists, the mysterious man known popularly as The Steel Tsar. He was believed to have come originally from Georgia and his real name was thought to be Josef" Vissarionovich Djugashvili, an ex-priest with a record of messianism. He was known as the Steel Tsar because he tended to wear an ancient metal helmet covering most of his face. There were many explanations of this; some thought him disfigured in battle, others thought that his features had been hideously deformed since birth. He was supposed to have a withered arm, be a hunchback, have artificial legs, and to be not a human being at all, but some sort of automaton.

  Because of the atmosphere surrounding Djugashvili, I myself became quite as curious about him as the natives. I followed the news of the Free Cossacks as eagerly as I followed news of the British airship battles in the skies of the Pacific.

  In Odessa I met one of the chaps with whom I had been imprisoned. He was about to join a British merchantman. He told me that Birchington, too, was working for the Russians, but he wasn't sure where. 'Some sort of engineering job, I gather.' Olmeijer was in Yalta, managing a State-owned hotel.

  The worst news, however, concerned Dempsey. 'I heard he jumped it before we ever got to Japan. Seemed so scared of what they'd do to him that, wounded as he was, he preferred to dive out. God knows why they hated him so. Do you have any idea, Bastable?'

  I shook my head. But again I experienced that peculiar frisson; a sort of recognition, as if somewhere within me I actually knew what Dempsey had done.

  My experience of Odessa was as intense as it was brief and I missed it, when I left for the airpark on the train, as if I had lived there for years.

  The Vassarion Belinsky was a joy. She used liquid ballast, which could, like her gas, be heated or cooled to alter her weight, and her ascent acceleration was, if we needed it, rocket-like in its speed. She had a top-speed of 200 mph but could be pushed quite a bit faster than that with a good wind behind her. She could turn and dive like a porpoise and there was almost nothing you couldn't do with her.

  All the crew, except me, was Russian. Captain L. V. Leonov was a thoroughly experienced airshipman with an excellent grasp of English. My own Russian was, naturally, limited, but enough to receive and convey the appropriate orders. England had for many years maintained herself as success­fully in the air as she had on the sea, so that most airshipmen tended to use English as their first language while aloft.

  As we left Lermontov Airpark on a cool, sunny dawn, gaining height through a slow, gentle curve which revealed more and more of the steppe through our observation ports, Captain Leonov broke open his orders on the control deck and, standing with his back to our helmsman, informed his officers of the Belinsky's mission.

  I was not the only one both surprised and disappointed. It seemed that we were victims of a typical piece of Muscovite bureaucratic muddle, and there I was (since I had signed up for a minimum of a year) with absolutely nothing I could do about it.

  Leonov's heavy Russian face was sober and his voice sonorous as he began to read the orders. With typical Russian courtesy, he spoke English for my benefit.

  'We are to proceed at all fastest speed to Yekaterinaslav which is currently sustaining heavy attack from rebel forces. We are to join other ships under the command of Air Admi­ral Krassnov.' He pinched his eyebrows together. It was obvious that he had no taste for the commission, which would involve him in giving orders, which would inevitably lead to the death of other Russians.

  Everyone was agitated by the news. They had been expect­ing to defend their country against the Japanese. Instead they were assigned to domestic policing duties of a kind which all the officers found distasteful and demeaning. I did not really mind missing a scrap with the Japanese, but I was bitterly sorry that I was unlikely to see any real aerial action. I had joined the Service out of a mixture of desperation and boredom. I appeared to be doomed to a continuation of those circumstances.

  Moreover I should sooner or later have blood on my hands, and it would be the blood of people I had absolutely nothing against. I had no idea of the issues. Socialists are always quarrelling amongst themselves, be­cause of the strong element of messianism in their creeds, and I could see little difference between Kerensky's brand or Djugashvili's. My only consolation was that at least I might have the opportunity of observing the Steel Tsar (or at any rate his works) at first hand.

  Pilniak, a 2nd Lieutenant of about my own age, with huge brown eyes and a rather girlish face (though he was in no way effeminate) grasped my uniformed shoulder (like him I wore the pale blue of the Russian Volunteer Air force) and laughed.

  'Well, Mr. Bastable, you're going to see some Cossacks, eh? A bit of the reality most Europeans miss.' He dropped his voice and became sympathetic. 'Does that bother you? The Steel Tsar rather than the Mikado?' 'Not a bit,' I said. After all, I thought wickedly, I had originally been trained to fight Russians. But I have never been able to find consolation in cynicism for long and this lasted a few seconds. 'Perhaps we'll find out if he's human or not.'

  Pilniak became serious. 'He's human. And he's cruel. This whole thing is essentially mediaeval in its overtones, for all they claim to be socialists and nationalists. They want to put the clock back to the days of Ivan the Terrible. They could destroy Russia and everything the Revolution achieved. There have even been instances of pogroms in one or two of the towns they've taken, and God alone knows what's going on in the rural districts. They should be stopped as quickly as possible. But they're gaining popular support all the time. War brings out these basic feelings. They are not always controllable. Our newspapers beat the drum of Slavophilia, of nationalism, in an effort to stir up patriotic feeling against the Japanese - and this happens.'

  'You seem to speak as if this uprising was inevitable.'

  'I think it was. Kerensky promised us Heaven on Earth many years ago. And now we find that not only have we not made Heaven, but also we are threatened with Hell, in the form of invasion. This War will leave many scars, Mr. Bastable. Our country will not be the same when it is over.'

  'The Steel Tsar is a genuine
threat?'

  'What he represents, Mr. Bastable, is a genuine threat.'

  3.

  Cossack Revolutionists

  Yekaterinaslav was soon below us and it was obvious that the city was undergoing attack. We could see smoke and flames everywhere, little groups of figures running hither and yonder in the suburbs, the occasional boom of cannon fire or the tiny snapping noises of rifle-shots.

  Yekaterinaslav was an old Russian-style city, with many of its buildings made of wood. Tall houses with elaborately carved decoration; the familiar onion-domes of churches; spires, steeples, several brick-built apartment blocks and shops near the center.

  On the nearby Dnieper River most of the boats were burn­ing or had been sunk. Occasionally a ship, its paddles foam­ing the water, would go by the city, and sometimes it would loose off a shell or two. Evidently these were naval ships commandeered by the revolutionists.

  Pilniak knew Yekaterinaslav pretty well. He stood beside me, naming streets and squares. Some distance from the city, amongst demolished farmhouses and ruined fields, we saw the main Cossack camp: a mixture of all kinds of tents and temporary shacks, including more than one railway car­riage, for the main railway line ran to Yekaterinaslav and much of its stock had been captured.

  'That's it,' said Pilniak in some excitement. 'The Free Cossack Host. Impressive, you must admit.' He raised bino­culars to his eyes. 'Most of their heavy artillery is further down the line, along with their armored vehicles. They're saving up the cavalry for the final charge. There must be ten thousand horses down there.'

  'Not much good against airships,' I said. 'They look a pretty unruly mob to me.'

  'Wait until you see them fight. Then you'll know what cavalry tactics are all about.'

  As a matter of fact it did my heart good to hear someone talking in those terms. The last time I had heard people discussing cavalry tactics had been in the mess in my own world of 1902.