The Dark Frontier (27 page)

The going was better here, although Carruthers had to exercise a certain amount of care in avoiding the small boulders which littered the road in places, from the slopes above.

The sky had paled noticeably by the time we had rounded the hill. Before us lay a deep pass running between two enormous peaks on which the snow was just visible by the light of a small pale moon that had oozed from behind a bank of cloud. The road to the pass zigzagged down the precipice below us. About halfway down was the Mercedes, nosing slowly round a bend, its headlamps swinging like searchlights into space. We commenced the descent.

Going up a mountain, whether you travel on foot or by car, is always easier than going down. For the next quarter of an hour I lived in constant expectation of death. Standing in front of the wrong end of a gun was, I told myself, an infinitely preferable situation to that in which I now found myself. Carruthers let the car run down the slopes, braked violently as we approached the bends and slid round them almost broadside on. Once our near-side rear wheel seemed to hang right over the precipice at the side of the road and we swayed horribly. Carruthers, however, jerked us back on to the road somehow and we dashed on. As we approached the bottom I could see that we were now only two bends behind the Countess who was taking fewer risks than Carruthers. After another sickening two minutes the lead was reduced to one bend and I could
plainly hear the snarl of the Mercedes’ exhaust. Then we began to close in.

The noise of her sports motor probably prevented her hearing our approach, but she must have seen our car for she put on speed. I understood the reason for Carruthers’ haste. If she got on to the straight dry road to the pass we would never catch her. Groom’s car, fast though it was, would be no match for the Mercedes on a clear run. There were only two bends to go before the bottom. At the first of these we were not more than twenty metres behind her. She took the corner beautifully, but Carruthers with his brake-and-slither tactics gained a few more metres. As we tore down the straight towards the last bend, Carruthers produced Marassin’s gun.

“As soon as she’s round the bend,” he said grimly, “I’m going to burst the rear tyres.”

The two cars shot down towards the last bend. It was a sharp right turn and a shelf of rock overhung the road. I heard the squeal of the Mercedes’ brakes and felt Carruthers bracing himself against the cushions as he braked in his turn. I saw the Mercedes slide out and get halfway round the hairpin, then the Countess seemed to lose control. She was going too fast and instead of completing the turn the Mercedes swerved suddenly and shot straight out over the edge of the road. A moment or two after there was a crash as it hit the ground below.

We pulled up with locked wheels just beyond the bend, jumped out and ran to the side of the road.

For several seconds we could see nothing, then a flame shot up from about eighteen metres below us. By the time we had scrambled down to the bottom of the slope the Mercedes was a blazing mass. It lay on its side, wedged between two rocks. The heat was intense, but we got near enough to see that the Countess was not inside. We found her a short distance away.

Carruthers dropped on his knees beside her and raised her
head. The light from the burning car shed a terrible light on the scene. She had, I thought, been killed instantly. Slowly, Carruthers drew a wad of papers from the pocket of her travelling-coat and held them up to me.

“Burn them, Casey,” he said in a curious voice.

I took them and started towards the car. Something made me look back when I was halfway. Still on his knees, Carruthers was raising Marassin’s gun to his head. A few strides brought me back to him. Snatching the gun from his hand, I flung it away into the shadows.

“Coming back?” I said.

He raised a face stained with tears and contorted with misery. He looked at me for a moment. Then he climbed painfully to his feet. I handed him the papers. He looked at them in a dazed fashion.

“Better burn them yourself,” I said.

His shoulders hunched, he stumbled towards the blaze and threw them into the heart of the flames. He did not stay to see them burn, but started to climb back towards the road. As I saw his face again in the flickering light I realised for the first time that he was a middle-aged man.

The sun had not yet risen when I was awakened by the car stopping at the barricade outside Zovgorod. Carruthers looked ill and drawn in the morning light as he talked to the guard while a way was cleared for us. From the city came a rattle of machine-gun fire. The guard went away and returned with some meal cakes which we munched as we drove.

“How long have I been asleep?” I asked.

He grinned faintly. “Ever since the car started.”

“Do they know what’s happened in the city?”

“Toumachin’s people have installed themselves in the Palace and the Chamber. All the outside forces of peasants
have entered the city and are patrolling the streets. Everything has gone well. The only place where they’re having trouble is at the barracks. Most of the troops left there and many officers went over to the peasants when the Minister of the Interior ordered them to shoot the rebels down. A few, led by some of the Red Gauntlet officers, are being besieged in the barracks. You’ll want to send a cable. Better let me have it.”

I did as he suggested. After that I remember walking into my room at the Bucharesti and sitting on my bed. Then, for the next eight hours, I slept.

T
he events that constituted the
coup d’état
of the Ixanian Peasants’ Party and of their formation of a Government are too well known to need more than a brief recapitulation here.

To make the situation clear, it is necessary to go back to the time when Carruthers and I were floundering through the mud of the south-east road from Zovgorod in the wake of the Countess Magda Schverzinski. Many things took place in Zovgorod during the early hours of that morning—most of them in silence. The majority of the citizens of Zovgorod went uneasily to sleep under one Government and woke up no less apprehensively under a new one.

The entire
coup
was carried out with great aplomb and efficiency and the only shots were fired in the region of the barracks before the surrender of the republican officers and their few adherents, and in a street near the Cathedral where a body of police came into conflict with an armed picket.

Communications were severed promptly at 1
A.M
.

An hour later, Toumachin and his council occupied the Chamber of Deputies. This manoeuvre met with no resistance. Toumachin had taken the precaution of commandeering a number of official automobiles for the occasion, and the company that had been posted to guard the place presented arms punctiliously as the invaders swept into the courtyard. These troops remained aggressively on guard for five hours before their commanders discovered the facts of the situation. By that time a company of pro-peasant infantry had been ordered from the barracks to relieve them. Their officers, a sergeant and four men were the only members of the cavalry to refuse their allegiance to the new Government.

By 3
A.M
. the Presidential Palace, the railroad yards, the airfield, the radio station, the telegraph offices, the telephone exchanges and the newspaper offices and printing works were held by the peasants from the east and west provinces who had poured silently into the city on the stroke of two. Machine-guns were mounted at all strategic points by the outpost picket and a “protective” cordon was thrown round the presidential residence. That was at three-thirty.

At this point the situation became critical. The police who, so far as their sympathies were concerned, were an unknown quantity, had massed near the Cathedral under the leadership of the Minister of the Interior, hastily summoned from his bed. They had already had a brush with a picket and things looked ugly. What happened subsequently is not very clear, but it appears that, thoroughly unnerved and unable to communicate with the barracks by telephone, the Minister had hurried off personally to call out the military. It seems, however, that on presenting his request for military support to the commandant, that worthy had refused to take orders from anyone except the Minister of War. Meanwhile, Toumachin and his henchmen had visited the houses of the Cabinet Ministers, roused them and, while the dazed politicians were still rubbing the sleep
from their eyes, announced the fall of the Government and demanded their resignation under pain of property confiscation. All except the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose fortunes were for the most part safely invested in foreign stocks and bonds, complied when the situation was explained to them. The two who refused were placed under close arrest. Among the compliants was the Minister of War, whose interest in shares, fair and unfair, had been confined, more tenuously, but no less profitably, to the perquisites of his office. Three minutes after he had signed his resignation, a messenger arrived from the commandant of the barracks asking for instructions. The ex-minister was about to climb back into bed at the time. He sent the only possible reply: that, as he was no longer Minister of War, he could give no instructions.

By this time, Toumachin had left with his retinue to interview the Minister of Agriculture, and the guard that remained foolishly allowed the commandant’s messenger to return to the barracks with the Minister’s message. The result was that the commandant decided to risk acting on the advice of the Minister of the Interior and ordered his subordinates to clear the streets of the insurgent peasants. The consequences might have been disastrous for Toumachin’s party if the commandant had not been unwise enough to attempt to fire the hearts of his soldiers by parading them and delivering a speech. Most of the troops were recruited from peasant families, and when the commandant exhorted them to shoot down the peasant rabble without mercy there were murmurs. When, in the full flood of his peroration, the commandant referred to the rebels as “camels of peasants,” a highly uncomplimentary mode of address in Ixanian, the murmur became a roar. Led by their non-commissioned officers, the troops refused to obey orders and, after beating the commandant and two other officers to death, marched with enthusiastic cries out of the barracks in the direction of the Chamber of Deputies.

By this time, Beker was back in the city in charge of the street forces. Fortunately, for a few of the troops had decided by some curious logical process that the occasion was one for looting, he was able to intercept them before they reached the Kudbek, parley with their leaders and persuade them to split their force up into companies. Two of these companies were sent back to surround the barracks, one was dispatched to the Palace, and the remaining one to the Chamber of Deputies. It was a wise decision in an awkward situation, for the soldiers, free from the restraint of discipline, might have become a source of embarrassment to the Government.

No time was lost in conveying the news of the troops’ decision to the assembled police who, on hearing it, announced their intention of remaining neutral but vigilant. This suited Toumachin’s purpose admirably, and at four-forty-five he received the Chief of Police. This was a sensible man, and after assuring Toumachin that his sole anxiety was for the maintenance of order, he confessed that he, personally, was not unsympathetic towards the aims of the Young Peasants’ Party. With great tact Toumachin volunteered to withdraw some of the pickets from the streets and intimated that he would welcome their replacement by official police. The Chief departed an ally and the pickets were duly withdrawn from the main thoroughfare. This move probably saved a good deal of bloody conflict between the police, soldiery and peasants, and certainly contributed largely to the early consolidation of the peasants’ position.

Soon after five, Toumachin and the new Council waited upon the President with the resignations of the cabinet, excluding those of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Minister of the Interior, who was now a member of the beleaguered garrison in the barracks. They were received in the Presidential bedroom. The old man was in pitiable fear of his life and readily agreed to accept the tendered
resignations and to request the missing ones. Toumachin then presented two documents for his signature. The first declared Toumachin commander-in-chief of the army. The second was a proclamation of martial law. The President signed them both. Toumachin thus became constitutional head of a provisional government and
de facto
ruler of the country pending free elections and the subsequent repeal of martial law.

By 8:30
A.M.
, a special edition of the Zovgorod
Noviny
was on the streets. It proclaimed the change of government and probable date of the elections.

The populace was nervous and excited. As the morning wore on, there were one or two “incidents” and about thirty persons were arrested, but by noon things had quietened down. This process was hastened by the publication of a second edition of the
Noviny
in which a long list of the immediate reforms proposed by the provisional Government were announced, together with an assurance that there would be no persecution of political opponents.

All this was ancient history by the time I was awakened soon after one o’clock.

I was very angry with Carruthers, who had been sent by Toumachin to rouse me, and furious with myself. If there’s one thing worse than falling down on a story, that thing is sleeping on it. I had done both. The news that my cable, authorized by Toumachin personally, was the only press report that been allowed out did not wholly satisfy me. I should, I told myself, have been on the spot getting an eye-witness story. As it was, I had to rely on hearsay. The fact that there had actually been nothing remarkable to witness since our return to the city soon after 6
A.M
. did not strike me at the time.

Carruthers, who had treated himself to a bath and a shave at my hotel, looked clean but ghostly. He had not slept. He declared that my exhaustion was a natural reaction after the nervous stresses and strains of the previous night. He was probably
right. I have stayed on a story for three days and nights without sleep; but on that occasion I was not labouring under the hourly expectation of sudden death.