These were our noble Red fighters. Most of them could not even read Hrihorieff’s proclamations. Those who could read were too insensible with vodka to focus on the words. Yet many were, indeed, true Cossacks, fighting for the freedoms eroded by the decrees of a dozen bungling Tsars. In the thirties they would become a source of terror to Stalin. He would disband all Cossack units. By the forties those units would be revived and their old glories recalled to give them the morale to fight Germans. Many went over immediately to the German side and continued to fight for their own needs. Stalin was enraged. He gave the order to shoot all returning Cossacks as traitors. It did not matter if they had been POWs or partisans or fighting with the Axis. The liberal British, the good-natured Americans, packed them into trains and ships and delivered them up to hideous and dishonourable death. Few escaped. Some are in Canada, where the weather and land (if not the eager MacDonalds and Campbells) are more to their taste. They escaped but they lost their Russian souls; that inner life so necessary to a Russian and such an irritating cargo to an American. Some, in Russia, sell their souls nightly, prancing and singing for tourists. Even Hrihorieff’s partisans were not drinking to lose consciousness, but to find their souls; to find God and seek His confirmation that what they did was just. It was not. And God did not tell them it was. So they continued to drink. At the time I was nervous of them. Looking back, I feel pity.
We entered a tent with two camp-beds of standard army design. Yermeloff scratched himself and frowned. ‘We’ll have to find you a palliasse.’
‘You share this tent?’
‘With my friend Grishenko.’
So I was to sleep with Yermeloff and his master. I was to be the slave of a slave. Yermeloff opened an ammunition box. It had not been locked. Anyone could have stolen from it. He took out a bottle of good vodka: a brand I recognised from my Odessa days. I accepted his offer and drank deep from the neck. Alcohol warms and blurs. Cocaine brings coldness and clarity. It was alcohol I needed. Yermeloff told me to wait. He closed the tent-flap behind him as he left, but I watched through a parting. He headed back towards the railway yards, laughing and joking with the soldiers, walking with a brutal swagger which made me suspect his ‘gentle’ manner might actually be the facade. I sat down on one of the beds. I tried to make sense of things. It was impossible. I had been captured by Cossacks. I was only alive because Grishenko thought I could help his prestige, his ambition, while Yermeloff wanted an audience for his sentimental drivel. I could be shot with impunity. I could be tortured. I took another drink and began to laugh. Here was a test of my wits. I would use the alcohol in order to sleep; then tomorrow I would make the best use of some cocaine. I had decided to follow Yermeloff’s lead. Until I could get to safety, I would be as hardened a partisan as the next man. I would elevate myself, not as Yermeloff intended to do, but through my intellect. I would make myself indispensable to these savages. I recalled stories by Conan Doyle and Haggard, where white men fell amongst natives and baffled them with simple scientific tricks. Not Grishenko or even Hrihorieff but
Yermeloff returned. He took the vodka from my hand. ‘That stuffs hard to come by. I had to trade a woman for three bottles.’ He stood aside as two filthy partisans with rime and spittle in their beards placed a straw mattress and a blanket on the ground. Dumped on top of these was a ragged greatcoat, a sheepskin hat with parts of the sheep still clinging to it, a pair of clumsy felt boots and some moth-eaten fur gloves. ‘Much-prized.’ Yermeloff corked the vodka. ‘Put them on.’
‘My own coat...’
‘We Cossacks are touchy about people who are too proud to dress like everyone else.’ He spoke insouciantly but with such a significant little gesture of the bottle that I followed his advice. My good coat was removed; the rags were donned. Lice were already crawling on my body. The felt boots were big enough to fit over my shoes. I almost immediately became warmer. ‘Let your beard grow if you can,’ said Yermeloff. I was resentful of this. I had tried to grow a beard. The result had made me look like a cankerous spaniel. It would be two or three years before a proper growth would come. By then, of course, beards were out of fashion, in reaction to those elders who had proven themselves so useless in allowing the War to begin. A small moustache would give character to my face by 1925.
