Kolchak's Gold by Brian Garfield

there would be no hope for a rebirth of the White movement. With this rationale as his justification he ordered the tracks cleared ahead of him so that his trains could pass through to the front of the line of march.
    It was not easy. That it was done at all is flabbergasting. Kolchak’s officers had to threaten to shoot stationmasters dead on the spot before they could get the seven trains shunted through. The sidings in every hamlet became jammed chaotically with refugee and hospital trains that had been pushed off the main line to allow passage for Kolchak and his gold. Nevertheless, traffic jams held them up for days in some places. The confusion was augmented by the Allied Expeditionary Forces which were scrambling for transport ahead of him, so that Kolchak kept being held up by them—mainly by the Czechs, who were passing their own trains down the line ahead of Kolchak’s. Meanwhile on the sidings, in the stalled trains, hundreds lay dead—starved or frozen or diseased.
    Kolchak had taken a decision to retreat as far as Irkutsk and set up a new capital there. Irkutsk was the midway point along the Siberian Railway—approximately equidistant between Omsk and Vladivostok. It lay at the head of the great inland sea of Lake Baikal on the Mongolian border. Here he would reorganize his forces, he said; he would prepare for a long war. The Reds could not take Irkutsk because if they marched that far they would be at the precarious end of a supply line so easily interdicted that they wouldn’t dare try an attack. At the same time the move would put Kolchak that much nearer his own principal base of supply at Vladivostok; and the gold treasury would be dipped into in order to keep the flow of incoming supply alive. Once the Allies saw him stabilize the White government at Irkutsk they would climb back onto the bandwagon; he was confident of that, the Allies hated the Bolsheviks.
    But two thousand miles of Siberian winter lay between Omsk and Irkutsk. And Kolchak’s trains were making a bare fifteen miles a day.
    In the chaos of Kolchak’s wake any man who could command a few followers, a machine gun and a handful of rifles was a government to himself. In every town and village there were lawlessness and riots, looting, marauding, fires, massacres.
    Through the month of November the temperatures kept dropping until it became so cold that vodka froze solid in its bottles.
    It was the coldest Siberian winter in fifty years. By December the thermometer had dropped to minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit and Cossacks were found frozen to death in the saddle. Thousands lost limbs and even genitals to frostbite. Corpses froze solid in less than thirty minutes (and for sanitary reasons it was desirable that there be no thaw in the weather). To fall asleep was to freeze to death.
    In their initial flight from Omsk or points west these refugees had put on as many clothes as possible, one on top of another, and this saved some of them; the rest stuffed their shirts with moss and hay to ward off frost. Many had rags tied around their feet. The sick died, untended where they fell; cholera and smallpox epidemics raged; thousands of people broke out with the livid red pellets of the spotted fever, typhus.
    Along the trakt the dead were stripped of their boots and coats. The corpses were heaped in patternless mounds—human bodies treated less carefully than cordwood; but then they were of less value. Everywhere the dying writhed, chrysalis-like, ignored by the hundreds of thousands who went past them in empty-eyed hopelessness. Driven beyond human endurance this mass of doomed souls trudged endlessly through Siberia with their frozen wounds and starving bellies, slipping on the ram-packed dry snow that squeaked under their boots, maggots in their wounds, lice in their clothes and hair. The infinite featureless horizon daunted whatever spirits they had left; their legs shuffled and flopped in a loose unintended