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Knight Without Armour, by James Hilton.
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This is one of those rare books we, as a couple, both read almost simultaneously, enjoyed, loved and remembered, and it was soon after we married - within a couple of years or so - but well over a decade, nearly two decades, after I had read and loved most works of Hilton.
Most serious intellectuals and authors of the era were not only unable to ignore events in Russia but fascinated with them, and mostly sympathetic with the revolution. One finds a mention in their work, however oblique or slight, and this work of Hilton is his acknowledgement, to say the least, of the events.
Largely, it was the extensive descriptions of Siberia that fascinated us, remaining thereafter as a longing to traverse the land. But it was just as strongly off-putting, to put it extremely mildly, to go through some of the descriptions, not limited to Siberia.
Beginning it a second time, one notices Hilton mentions Carigole again, but this time he's set it in county Cork, not near Galway uphill beset by Atlantic gales as it was in his So Well Remembered.
No such name exists on Google maps. Why was Carigole such a favourite name for him to give an Irish town?
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Hilton has a - by now well recognised by a reader - prototype of Englishman for a protagonist, usually, with few rare exceptions. Its someone who went through a not too closeknit family life, with a - middling level - public school and a Cambridge graduation before a middling career as a diplomat or something thereabouts, serving the empire faithfully. He manages to dress this protagonist in different enough careers, in different works of his, so that not only the very different lives but the huge variety of adventures seems not incredible , despite being so. It all fits in the nineteenth century and twentieth with British empire straddling the globe, and the men pieces of the vast puzzle.
But with all his deep sympathy that brings his characters alive to the reader, he still retains his - or rather the West brand - racism, whereby he sympthises with the Russian workers but is superciliously aloof in excluding India and anything related from his sphere of consideration, and explicitly so, while retaining a modest to high regard for most other cultures far more alien - Chinese, Japanese, (but not Tibetan!), and more.
He seems to despise Asian contingent of Russia, too, and - rather surprisingly - blames not only the revolution but much more on Jews, with most small unpleasant characters depicted in this work explicitly labelled "Jew". Dangerous ones, however, are Ukrainian - and in this, most memoirs of WWII holocaust concur.
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"Briefly, Stanfield's suggestion was that A.J. should become attached to the British Secret Service. That sounded simple enough, but an examination of all that it implied revealed a network of complication and detail."
""The danger, my friend, would be twofold, and I'm not going to try to minimise it in the least. There would be, of course, the danger you mention, but there would be the even greater danger that the Russian police would take you for a genuine revolutionary and deal with you accordingly. And you know what 'accordingly' means."
""But in that case I suppose I should have to tell them the real truth?"
""Not at all—that is just what you would not have to do. You would have to keep up your pretence and accept whatever punishment they gave you. If you did tell them the truth, the British authorities would merely arch their eyebrows with great loftiness and disown you. I want you to be quite clear about that. We should, in the beginning, provide you with passport and papers proving you to be a Russian subject, and after that, if anything ever went wrong, you would have to become that Russian subject—completely. Do you see? We could not risk trouble with the Russian Government by having anything to do with you.""
"Stanfield smiled. "Forrester's a thorough fellow," he commented. "He doesn't intend to have the Russian police wondering what's happened to you. To–night, my friend, though it may startle you to know it, Mr. A.J. Fothergill will leave Russia. He will collect his luggage at the Warsaw station, he will board the night express for Germany, his passport will be stamped in the usual way at Wierjbolovo and Eydkuhnen, but in Berlin, curiously enough if anyone bothered to make enquiries, all trace of him would be lost. How fortunate that your height and features are reasonably normal and that passport photographs are always so dreadfully bad!""
Hilton documents a common episode of the era:-
"One afternoon he was walking with Maronin through a factory district during a lock–out; crowds of factory workers—men, women, and girls—were strolling or loitering about quite peaceably. Suddenly, with loud shouts and the clatter of hoofs, a troop of Cossacks swept round the street–corner, their lithe bodies swaying rhythmically from side to side as they laid about them with their short, leaden–tipped whips. The crowd screamed and stampeded for safety, but most were hemmed in between the Cossacks and the closed factory–gates. A.J. and Maronin pressed themselves against the wall and trusted to luck; several horsemen flashed past; whips cracked and there were terrifying screams; then all was over, almost as sharply as it had begun. A girl standing next to Maronin had been struck; the whip had laid open her cheek from lip to ear. A.J. and Maronin helped to carry her into a neighbouring shop, which was already full of bleeding victims. Maronin said: "My mother was blinded like that—by a Cossack whip,"—and A.J. suddenly felt as he had done years before when he had decided to fight Smalljohn's system at Barrowhurst, and when he had seen the policeman in Trafalgar Square twisting the suffragette's arm—only a thousand times more intensely."
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The transformation comes with his arrest and exile to furthest corner of Siberia, close to Arctic Northeast, Arctic ocean easily arrived at by small boat in summer on river. There are only four Russians imprisoned there, and by the time a group of Cossacks arrived to inform them of freedom due to revolution, the four were dead.
"Two days later eight men set out for the south. There was need to hurry, as the warmer season was approaching and the streams would soon melt and overflow.
"As they covered mile after mile it was as if the earth warmed and blossomed to meet them; each day was longer and brighter than the one before; the stunted willows became taller, and at last there were trees with green buds on them; the sun shone higher in the sky, melting the snows and releasing every stream into bursting, bubbling life, till the ice in the rivers gave a thunderous shiver from bank to bank; and the soldiers threw off their fur jackets and shouted for joy and sang songs all the day long. At Verkhoiansk there was a junction with other parties of released exiles, and later on, when they had crossed the mountains, more exiles met them from Ust Viluisk, Kolymsk, and places that even the map ignores.
"Yakutsk, which was reached at the end of July, was already full of soldiers and exiles, as well as knee–deep in thick black mud and riddled with pestilence. Every day the exiles waited on the banks of the Lena for the boat that was to take them further south, and every hour fresh groups arrived from the north and north–east. ... every morning dead bodies were pushed quietly into the Lena and sent northwards on their icy journey. Yet beyond all the misery and famine and pestilence, Yakutsk was a city of hope."
"By August the exiles were in Irkutsk. The city was in chaos; its population had been increased threefold; it was the neck of the channel through which Siberia was emptying herself of the accumulated suffering of generations. From all directions poured in an unceasing flood of returning exiles and refugees—not only from Yakutsk and the Arctic, but from Chita and the Manchurian border, from the Baikal mines and the mountain–prisons of the Yablonoi. In addition, there were German, Austrian, and Hungarian war–prisoners, drifting slowly westward as the watch upon them dissolved under the distant rays of Petrograd revolution; and nomad traders from the Gobi, scraping profit out of the pains and desires of so many strangers; and Buriat farmers, rich after years of war–profiteering; and Cossack officers, still secretly loyal to the old régime: Irkutsk was a magnet drawing together the whole assortment, and drawing also influenza and dysentery, scurvy and typhus, so that the hospitals were choked with sick, and bodies were thrown, uncoffined and by scores, into huge open graves dug by patient Chinese."
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Descriptions here of the Russian civil war, of the madness of red and white armies and their proceedings and more, are quite vivid in bringing it home to a reader several decades or a century later, across thousands of miles and in very different cultures. Why it wasn't ranked with the far better known and most famous work of Pasternak can perhaps only be explained as bias of certain cliques.
Descriptions here of the Russian civil war, of the madness of red and white armies and their proceedings and more, are quite vivid in bringing it home to a reader several decades or a century later, across thousands of miles and in very different cultures. Why it wasn't ranked with the far better known and most famous work of Pasternak can perhaps only be explained as bias of certain cliques.
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"The most to be done is to make sure of what one loves and never to let it go."
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April 23, 2021 - April 26, 2021.
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