Free The Dangerous Years by Max Hennessy Page B

seemed to have much enthusiasm for it.
    A British Mission officer met them apologetically. ‘We’re sending you on tomorrow,’ he said. ‘There’s a particularly awkward Bolshie bronevik comes down from Ryazanka and stands off just beyond the River Vilyuj and hammers everything that moves. I think we can knock him out now, though, because he’s only got four-inch guns and thanks to the Navy, we’ve got a six-incher. We’ve arranged for infantry to advance alongside you in carts and for cavalry to spread out to right and left to make sure the area’s clear. There’s a loop line up there that runs behind a low hill and I thought we might shove you in there to wait for them to arrive.’
    ‘What about our rear?’
    ‘We have a train to follow you up and watch the track at the junction. Can you man it?’
    Only too well aware of Kimister’s nervousness, Kelly decided that the job was made for him.
     
    Leading the procession was a light engine pulling a truck, followed by the main unit, consisting of the truck carrying the naval six-incher from Queen Elizabeth , the first armoured wagon, and a machine gun flat car, pushed by the big locomotive whose boiler in Kelly’s eyes appeared to be surprisingly badly protected. Two more armoured wagons were hitched on behind the engine and another open truck full of breakdown equipment brought up the rear. A cord had been strung from a bell in the driver’s cabin over the trucks and run through ringbolts.
    ‘To start, we pull the rope,’ Galt explained. ‘As on a tram. One ting and we stop. Two tings and off we go again.’
    There were already alarms in Tsaritsyn as they set off. The Kuban Cossacks had not only failed to take Saratov but had been thrown back as far south as Kamyshin, which only a determined attack by Cossack cavalry had wrested from the Red Army. Despite Wrangel’s objections, his orders were to continue pressing towards Saratov.
    ‘There isn’t a chance,’ the British Mission officer said. ‘That bloody armoured train knocks out anything that goes up the line. I think you’d better get moving.’
    Leaving the outskirts of the city, they picked up a string of country carts filled with infantry, which jolted and rattled across the steppe on each side of the train. Out in the distance horsemen in long looping lines rode along the crests of low hills. At a village called Sarovkina, as they halted outside the town to eat, barefooted girls harvesting sunflower seeds stopped work to watch them. Bearded men were working little patches of soil along the sandy ground round the village orchards but the burning wind had scorched the earth, putting huge cracks across the dried ruts that stretched across a rolling prairie empty of everything but the shrivelled tawny grass and the clumps of birch and alder. As the afternoon drew to a suffocating close, the girls vanished to the river where they proceeded to bathe mother-naked, to the great delight of the men on the train.
    They spent the night at Sarovkina and left the following morning before daylight to pass through the front line, mere groups of badly-equipped men waiting in hollows, mostly without boots or a single machine gun. Their faces, under the covering of wind-blown dust, were blank and haggard and Kelly could see knees and elbows sticking through threadbare uniforms. Some were without shirts and wore only woollen vests, and one or two actually wore the spiked pickelhaubes the German army had left behind at the end of the war.
    There was a strange fatalism in their eyes as the train steamed past and one of their officers called out that Wrangel was falling back again towards Tsaritsyn. Just ahead there was another line of men and they could hear rifle and occasional machine gun fire.
    ‘Armoured trains over on our left somewhere, too,’ Galt said. ‘Indulging in a long-range duel by the method of “chuck and catch it.” ‘
    The Whites were holding a hill beyond the far end of the wooden bridge that