Free Kolchak's Gold by Brian Garfield Page A

thrown into complete panic.
    â€œBy the middle of June we had lost every foot of ground we’d taken during the past six months.”
    [At the same time Wrangel fell back in the south, Denikin couldn’t reinforce him sufficiently to prevent the retreat, and the Kuban fell to the Reds.]
    â€œWhen the Reds captured our officers they would nail their epaulets to their shoulders with six-centimeter spikes. It was an awful retreat. The Admiral’s slogan, ‘To Moscow!,’ disappeared from the posters and marquees, and I suppose that part of the world which had watched all this began to realize that those posters would never be displayed again.”
    [July 1919:] The Reds infiltrated the small high passes of the Urals and swung around behind the Whites to take them from the rear. A sudden thaw had turned the frozen canyons into quagmires but the Red drive continued, and the haphazard White defense was as fatuous in execution as it was in design.
    At this point the British ceased their deliveries of aid to Kolchak. They gave him up as a lost cause—which he was, of course, as soon as they gave up supporting him.
    Three rivers crossed the paths of the retreating Whites between the mountain battlefields and Kolchak’s capital at Omsk: the Tobol, the Ishim and the Irtysh. Within the next several weeks the White armies would make a stand at each of them.
    In military terms the falling back of Kolchak’s regiments could be called a retreat only with some serious abuse of that word. Desertions, disease and death by combat had squandered his front-line forces; Kolchak’s generals presided over a flimsy holding action with an army whose strength had been reduced to fifty thousand men and the only accurate term to describe their brief defense of the Tobol and their panic-stricken rush to get across it is “rout.”
    Everything had splintered. Kolchak, Supreme Ruler of All the Russias, was the leader of a “government” that was a mere cohesion of weakness and exhaustion and terror; no longer did it have the slightest hope of survival.
    â€œThe officers tried to encourage recruiting by publicizing Red atrocities on shop posters, but it only scared people off. You saw money lose value by the hour—goods were scarce and there was a rush to buy things —portable valuables. People moved through the dark alleys looking for black-market contacts. You saw the deserters crowd past with their sullen faces and muffled starving people huddling in the doorways.
    â€œFinally the Admiral gave orders to retrench the rear guard—many of them unwilling or unfit to fight—in defensive positions along the Ishim River, some one hundred miles west of Omsk. My brother and I went out with them. Somehow we held, we fought back the Third and Fifth Red armies.
    â€œIn the meantime we understood that the Admiral had pumped a little confidence into his people and they had ‘recruited’ enough replacements to start planning a counterattack, intended to drive the Bolsheviks right back into the mountains.
    â€œBut before that, we had a respite. There was no overt agreement that I ever heard of, but both sides suspended the fighting for the harvest season. Russia would starve without her crops. The soldiers went home to reap the harvest, and we held the lines with token forces.
    â€œWe lay in the trenches for nearly a month above the Ishim, waiting for them, and waiting for the Cossacks to herd our own armies back to us.”
    8.
    THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY AND THE ATAMANS
    By mid-1919 the Siberian railway towns had become training camps for Kolchak’s armies. Recruits and conscripts were assembled in them; the market squares were used for drilling and training, the storehouses for billeting them and equipping them with uniforms and arms. As soon as they had received a minimum of training and equipment these troops were thrown right into the lines in the Urals. In the meantime the