The road goes never onward ….

I’ve been avoiding telling this part of the story for all sorts of reasons: not least because it’s probably the hardest part of the story for me to tell. Mostly that’s because I know what happens next and it gives me the shivers, but also because it’s so difficult to explain.

The train sat alone in the furthest and most isolated corner of the marshalling yards, as far away from the station and other trains as was possible: which in Dresden isn’t really that far at all. Certainly not out of hearing; it’s a small town. The engine had been removed. No heat. No lighting. No food or water. The doors were guarded and no movement allowed except to the toilets, always under guard. The only notice of civilisation which intruded as they huddled together to keep warm was the regular tolling of the Church Bells: in Dresden everything was within sound of those bells. The three churches beyond the station dominated the skyline and the sound scape even through the white frosted fogs that drifted in off the River. The churches dominated the bend in the river, as they were constructed to do. Three bells for the three ages of Dresden, three ages of history, from the early medieval slavonic and saxon trading post to the heart of the Wettin Duchy and then the Electoral capital, to the early modern of Imperial German. From pagan to staunch catholic to even fiercer protestant. From trading post to capital city to violated backwater. From cultural nonentity to home of some of the greatest art and architecture in Europe to lava-melted ruin. From a city of no consequence to the heart of the Roman Empire to nothing of any consequence. Except as an icon.

If any city in Germany can be said to encapsulate and display the contradictions that were Germany then Dresden might be that city. It was by the 1930s a decadent city in slow decline, left behind by the gross industrial revolutions of the 19th century that had swept many of the other towns and cities of a now united rampant Germany that, for the first time, truly began to feel its strength. Dresden took its tolls of passing commerce on river and road as it had for centuries, but nothing much of influence or worth seemed to stick in Dresden; news was always destined elsewhere, innovation was always going somewhere else. Dresden, having been at the heart of things, had become merely a way-port, a temporary safe-haven en route from or to somewhere else. Its citizens were happy to shut the door on the future, on anything uncomfortable or new, and look to the past. The tolling of the bells told them all was still well and history was undisturbed. Everything was ordentlich, as it should be.

Was everything in the marshalling yards well, that winter of 1939? Was everything ordentlich?

Outside, the Einsatzgruppen kept guard with their dogs, patrolling both sides of the train. In the cold of winter they dressed warmly and kept moving between lines of wood and coal-fired braziers, under the sputtering of temporary arc lights rigged to illuminate the yards – facing outwards from the train, designed to show movement anywhere beyond the guard’s perimeter.

Inside, conversation had died. People retreated within themselves. Panic simply wasn’t an issue! They were all too far beyond that point; emotionally drained and exhausted after four days of confinement, so that if feelings of panic had been felt it might have seemed like a luxury. As the hours passed one could have seen the vital force draining visibly from each face; flowing from them to their guards who seemed, with every passing hour, to become larger, more dominant, more alive and more threatening.

Such closely guarded captivity wasn’t a new experience for the three of them. All were veterans of the Czech Legions – Kerensky’s Legions. Like many thousands of others they had crossed the lines of the eastern front between July of 1917 and early 1918 in order to fight against the Austrians, and suffered brutally for that: some had already crossed to the Russian side in ones and twos from quite early in the war, sufficient in number that the Tsar agreed to form a Czech Regiment within the Imperial Army, in contravention of the Berne Convention. Later in the war whole platoons or regiments crossed together and, in one memorable instance in July 1917 the entire 19th “Czech” Division of the Austro-Hungarian Army crossed the line together to fight the hated Austrians. When Kerensky was finally deposed by the Bolshevik and the new Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany and withdrew from the war on the northern front, the Czech Legion lost their principal support. Lenin promised them safe passage and transport to France where they could continue to fight on the Allied side. Initially they were removed from the now quiet front south of St Petersburg and sent into exile in Siberia, nominally to await transport to France; they were supposed to travel to Vladivostok where Allied ships would collect them and take them to France. What happened instead is one of the wildest and least known stories of that war to end wars, and of the soviet revolution; those events also explain much of the brutal enforcement of Communism when the Soviet armies finally rolled into Prague in 1945. Russia was settling old scores. Paton knew what he was about when he argued for blocking the Soviet entry into Prague, but then he was a military historian, unlike most of the other Allied generals or politicians of his day.

The survivors of that Siberian exile, already long familiar with the faces of Austrian Imperial oppression, now came to know the face of another and very different kind of enemy – and in most cases they fought its brutality directly – often hand to hand when the bullets ran out.

As supreme military commander Trotsky reneged on Lenin’s safe conduct after the political and military commands of the Allies attempted to subvert the Czech Legion – then safely behind the Soviet Lines – in an effort to form a nucleus for a counter-revolution against the still shaky Soviet regime. In the course of the subsequent fiasco the Czech Legion – the only organised large military body east of the Caucasus – seized control of much of the trans-Siberian Railway, fought the poorly organised but vastly superior number of Soviet forces near enough to a standstill and had battled to within ten miles of Ekaterinburg and a rescue of the imprisoned Romanov family, before the push was rendered pointless when the Romanov’s were slaughtered in a panic over their imminent arrival. Having failed to rescue the royal family, and also failed to overthrow the Soviet military in the region, the Legion now fought its way up the rail line to Vladivostok where they waited for Allied rescue: along the way it seems they managed to seize a train transporting a part of the Romanov treasury, some £335 million in gold bullion.

What they got instead of rescue was an Allied Expeditionary Force of several thousand British Japanese French and US troops, allied with a variety of White Russians from all across the Ukraine and the Caucasus, all determined to destabilise and overthrow the Soviets. The campaign lasted a further three years and failed badly, with great slaughter on both sides, and gave rise to the huge animosity and distrust which the Soviet regime subsequently felt towards the Allies. During the subsequent negotiations with Lenin’s government to arrange safe passage it became clear that at least a third of the Romanov Treasury bullion had disappeared: nobody will ever know if this was Soviet propaganda or whether – as rumour has long held – the missing bullion was taken by the Legion, or by unscrupulous individuals through whose hands the treasury passed on its repatriation journey to Moscow.

The three of them were amongst those who survived that long and brutal indirect journey home to a country they didn’t know existed: sitting there on the train they must have recognised the signs and portents they now saw, and known also that, like everyone else on the train, they were there not because they were Jewish or Roman Catholic or Slav, left or right wing, but because they were considered in some way or other to be “political threats” earmarked for special attention. The seeds of Czech resistance. These were men who had once fought for national freedom and independence: these were men at the very heart of the nation’s identity.

When the train finally left the yards it was at late at night; two close-coupled shunting engines drew a much extended train. Nobody noticed their going, nobody waved them on their way. Even the church bells were silent. Their new guards closed all the windows and blinds and enforced a rigid policy of stillness, with only a few lights turned on. The train crawled out of Dresden heading, if they reckoned the turns and points correctly, in a south-westerly direction, travelling slowly, and mostly at night. Stopping during much of the short daylight periods outside small country stations to take on fuel and limited supplies for their guards. Toilet breaks were only permitted at regular hours, under guard at all times. At least two dogs were now inside each of the carriages, held on short leashes. No food other than dry black bread was served, no drinks other than plain water handed out, and the heating was minimal.

Behind them the bells were silent.