Free Kolchak's Gold by Brian Garfield Page B

Czech Legionnaires and a handful of American soldiers provided sentry cadres for the protection of the towns and the railroad itself, the prime umbilical: the only source of supply, and the only escape to the East.
    Past the Urals the track extends four thousand miles east across the steppes to Vladivostok. In many places the rails dwindle away in both directions in a perfectly straight line as far as a man can see. For many long stretches there is but a single line of tracks; opposing traffic must pull off on sidings and await the passage of a priority train. Part of the line—mostly in the west, from Irkutsk through Omsk—had been double-tracked in substantial sections but was still insufficient for the traffic engendered by modern warfare and the support it required.
    The Trans-Siberian had a poor roadbed; the ballast tended to spread and sag, and the tracks with it. Workmen had to be constantly at work with spiking hammers to tighten loose rails against the floating ties. The spring thaw almost always meant the line had to be closed down for more than a month for repairs.
    Stopping the transport of an entire continent was merely a matter of blowing up a few yards of track or putting a torch to one of the thousands of small wooden bridges that dotted the line. Guarding the track against such depredations by partisans and bandits was the job of the Czech Legion; repairing the tracks was the job of labor battalions of conscripts—old men, women, adolescents too small or too young to bear rifles. These unfortunates were herded at gunpoint along the length of the Trans-Siberian to work until they dropped, keeping the roadbed in fragile repair.
    The long Siberian winters were hell for railroad men. Sometimes the big 2-8-2 snowplow locomotives were not sufficient to clear the track of blizzard falls of drifted snow. Locked switches had to be thawed with pitch fires and torches. To get started from a standing stop each engine was equipped with a sandbox that could be opened to scatter sand under the driving wheels. At all times the engine fireboxes had to be kept alight and the boilers had to be kept in water; if the fire went out the pipes would burst from freezing and if the water ran out the mechanism would melt.
    That the railway kept operating as long as it did was nearly miraculous. In the end, inevitably, it was destined to collapse.
    â€œIt was a war that divorced men from the restraints of decency. Massacres, tortures, rapes and atrocities were the rule and it soon became tiresome to object to these things on moral grounds because that would be like objecting to the force of gravity. They were simply the conditions of life, and life was the cheapest thing in Russia.
    â€œNevertheless the depravity of the Siberian Atamans stood out. These Atamans were Tatar Khans with little private armies of rural Cossacks. They were independent bandits, like the Mexican road agents of fifty years ago, but the war in Siberia made great opportunities for them and they became very powerful in their little fiefdoms. In a way they were the inbred dregs of the descendants of the Mongol hordes, the last of the petty heirs to the empire of Genghis Khan. They had been allowed to run wild in Siberia for centuries, beyond the reach of civilization.
    â€œI remember one of them. Ataman [Grigory M.] Semenev [warlord of the Trans-Baikal Cossacks]. He operated west of Lake Baikal, mainly as a bandit but at least he professed to be an anti-Bolshevik bandit and therefore he received support from both the British and the Japanese, who apparently felt he could be useful in helping them get control of Manchuria and eastern Siberia. The Japanese were terribly ambitious out there.
    â€œThese Atamans and their Cossacks would loot towns and trains. That was their occupation, looting. They found ready markets for their spoils in places like Harbin and Chita.
    â€œEarly on, when the Admiral signed an order that was supposed to force the