Kolchak's Gold

“In a way the ones who died had an advantage—at least they were spared the unavoidable torture of guilt that goes with the knowledge that through no virtue of your own you’ve lived through hell simply because you happen not to have died in it, and that your survival has been achieved at a cost of hundreds or thousands of the lives of your fellow men.

“I think the only thing that has prevented me from committing suicide many times since then has been the rationalization that they would have died whether or not I had survived. The Civil War and the awful winter were disasters as arbitrary as hurricanes; I had not caused them to happen. Yet so often this sounds to me like the echo of the voice of some SS beast from the Second War who answers all accusations with the cry that ‘I am not responsible!’ In some way, you see, I am responsible—I’m responsible to every human being who died as a result of my existence. I must be called to answer for them. But how in the sight of God does a man do this?

“To return to what we were talking about—the gold train, yes. When we stalled in the Kuznets.

“The burnt-out locomotive lay on its side at right angles to the tracks where we had pushed it over. There were trains stalled behind us, I suppose for hundreds of kilometers—I don’t know how many trains were left. There must have been at least forty or fifty. We were holding them all up. The track ahead of us was clear, however. There were perhaps two dozen trains ahead of us—the Czechs and some others. They were well on their way to Irkutsk by then.

“I ca

“The train behind ours was filled mainly with high-ranking officers and privileged civilians—wealthy people and civil government administrators and some of the gentry. Now and then you saw ladies tottering about on their high heels when the air inside their stalled coaches became so oppressively close that they simply had to get out for a two-minute respite. And there were two squadrons of Cossacks riding the horse wagons of that train. They were Don Cossacks as I recall.

“The Admiral gave some orders and this train of which I speak was brought forward to the rear of our own train. Then with the Admiral’s tandem locomotives pulling at the front, and the uncoupled engine of this following train pushing us from the rear, we were able to make very slow headway up the grade. After about two hours we had covered some three kilometers in that fashion, and we came to a fork in the tracks where a branch line fed off into one of the ravines that made a groin into the higher mountains to the south of us. It was one of the rail sidings that led off to an iron-mining district.

“The frontmost locomotive of the Admiral’s train was detached here and ballasted with tons of sandbags which my troops were employed to pack on board it. Then the engine was switched onto the branch siding and began to clear the rails. In many places the drifts were as high as the locomotive smokestack and our men had to dig by hand. You could see, as the track was cleared away, that the line had not been used for quite some time—the tops of the rails were rusty.

“We had a bit of luck. There were no storms just then. The sun had come out in the morning and the ice cracked like rifle fire. The air was frozen so still that it was too easy not to notice how cold it was. You had to remember to keep batting your hands together and thrusting them under your armpits—even our fur-lined gloves were insufficient protection.

“In thirty-six hours we must have cleared nine or ten kilometers with the aid of the Admiral’s plow engine. We had six or seven casualties during the effort—one man broke his leg in a crevasse and I had two soldiers make a stretcher for him by putting their rifles through the sleeves of two coats, but I think the man froze to death on his way back to the train. Two or three men fell asleep in the snow and we would find their still-breathing remains, but they were too far gone with frostbite to do anything for them. You developed a bovine indifference to all their sufferings.

“As for my brother, fatigue and pain had become so much a part of his face by now that they almost seemed to add to the glory of it. He was a bigger man than even I. Rather clumsy muscles but a splendid body and he would move among the men, wearing his white papakha fur hat and an ankle-length greatcoat trimmed with fur that he had taken off a stalled train somewhere back along the line; at least it had been ankle-length at first, but I seem to recall that he had cut off part of its skirt to keep the snow and mud from weighing it down. But he was a magnificent sight, looming among us. We were all so exhausted and yet he seemed to go on and on—I never discovered where his strength came from.

“Maxim and I had developed differences—we found we reacted to all this in different ways, and it began to draw us apart. We were very close in age—I was one year his elder—and we had always been as inseparable as twins. Of the two of us he had always been the more sober-minded, he had been a very deliberate and serious child where I tended more toward the pragmatic and expedient. I suppose it’s true he had a more profoundly developed moral sense than I, but the difference had never been very marked—as I’ve said, we had together made our pact to survive however we could. And regardless of all the horrors we experienced, I think we always felt our most unforgivable sin was our denial of our Semitism. From this grew all our other guilts, you see; it was the cause of everything.

“And as our days grew steadily more appalling we began to react differently, as I said. My own defense was to withdraw—I simply went into the kind of catatonic state you sometimes experience when you’ve gone too long without sleep and you see everything as if it were at a distance and without reality. I lost my initiative after a while; I just drifted with things. Fortunately by that time we were under the Admiral’s protection. Otherwise I surely should have died quickly. I had lost most of my will.

“Maxim on the other hand had toughened. This is hard to describe because I don’t mean to suggest he became ruthless or hard. It was a very moral kind of thing with him. It was as if he realized all this was punishment for his great sin, and he had decided to face up to it and accept the challenge because it was his obligation and responsibility. And so he not only endured the hardships, he became a leader among us.

“This change in him flowered visibly at this time when we were clearing the branch railway. For the first time you would see him organizing the entire effort, giving orders to the locomotive driver and all the colonels and majors among us. He was far beneath them in rank but he had this resolve, you know, and all the rest of us had lost our own wills as if a drain plug had been pulled. Maxim did that job alone, really. He carried it all on his shoulders. The rest obeyed him without question.

“One of the staff brigadiers had discovered on a map that there was an abandoned iron-mine shaft along the siding. That was what we were aiming for. When we reached it we went back to the train and spent the next twelve hours bringing the gold wagons along the siding to the point below the mouth of the shaft where they had dumped the ore carts in the old days. From here we had to manhandle the treasure up into the shaft. We did that with winches and block-and-tackle hoists which we powered from the steam locomotives.