Kolchak's Gold by Brian Garfield Page A

mockery of drunken dances.
    In this hard-lying snow the fugitive line moved slowly and without end and the frozen air created a clear separation of sounds, the crunch of frosted boots and the crisp rattle of horse gear, the grind of cartwheels and squeak of frozen leather. Pots clattered and hoofs thudded the packed snow as if wrapped in muffling cloths, but there were no voices—none—and along the hundreds of miles of march a million exhalations of breath hung clouded in the air, freezing quickly and visibly into brittle puffs of mist that shattered and shifted and clouded their clothing like tiny hailstones.
    Even among the still-organized units there was no military supply service left. The soldiers requisitioned food at gunpoint. On the trains the passengers burned anything flammable: candles were worth the price of a life—for their heat, not their light.
    Every few days the booran —the high wind that came with the Siberian blizzard—whipped across the steppes and blew dry fine powder-snow which could choke a man and blind him. The deep winter slaughtered them by thousands: by hundreds of thousands. They marched obliviously through the snow, sliding on the slippery flesh of corpses underfoot. The trakt was a macabre putrefaction of rubble and derelict human remains.
    By mid-December Kolchak’s seven trains had passed down most of the length of the column and he had left some three hundred evacuation trains behind him. Nearly all of them froze, broke down, or were derailed by partisans. Each had to be pried off the tracks so that following trains could proceed.
    The dead capsized trains became shelters for refugees who lived in them and burnt all their wood and then moved on again, clinging to passing sledges and carts or walking.
    At rare intervals a passing train would toss food to the refugees. But hundreds were trampled to death in the rush to claim it.
    The news reached Kolchak that Red cavalry had interdicted the track only a few hundred miles behind him. Trains back there were cut off and the Communists were methodically butchering the passengers, burning the hospital trains with the sick and injured still inside them. Thousands of passengers were clubbed to death because the Reds wanted to save ammunition.
    Toward the end of December the Red Army behind them was capturing a dozen trains a day and those who could escape the trains took to the mountains south of the railway to avoid capture. By now less than one tenth of the railway’s rolling stock was usable. Kolchak forced his staff officers out into the gales to gather snow for his engine boilers because the pumps of railway water towers had congealed in the cold. Morphine and all other medical supplies ran out. Axes would not cut frozen trees; farmhouses and barns were chopped down to fuel the Admiral’s locomotives. Each depot was stripped and razed for food and fuel but there was not enough; each of the old convict stations became a graveyard and the unburied dead lay along the tracks in mountains. On December 14 the Reds entered Novonikolayevsk and found in the buildings and streets of the city the corpses of thirty-five thousand men, women and children. * At Taiga they counted more then fifty thousand dead.
    Because of the war—still being fought in the Ukraine and elsewhere throughout Russia—the harvest had been minimal (despite the informal harvest-season truce) and in this horrible winter of 1919–1920 millions—literally millions—died of disease, famine and cold. They were not battlefield casualties but nevertheless it was the war that killed them.
    In the meantime the retreat stumbled on. Beyond the frozen Ob and Yenisey rivers the terrain began to crumple and heave. It was the boundary of the central Siberian uplands; the Sayan Mountains formed a high barrier along the Mongolian borders and long ridges shouldered out far into the steppes. The Kuznets, Siberia’s rich iron and coal region, was