Page:Albert Beaumont - Heroic Story of the Czecho-Slovak Legions - 1919.djvu/69

 The order was anything but popular with our men. They succeeded in evading it to a large extent. They hid their rifles where they could, under the cars, and in partitions which they made inside the cars, where they stored any number of rifles, cartridges, and hand-grenades. The superfluous rifles and ammunition was then handed over to the Bolsheviks. The scheme, probably a diabolical one suggested by the Germans, who had now become the dictators at Petrograd and Moscow, was to leave us eventually at the mercy of the German, Austrian, and Magyar prisoners in Siberia, who, as we later discovered, were allowed freely to arm themselves and formed big armies to prevent our passage and to annihilate us in the wilds of Siberia.

It was lucky that our men did not entirely disarm, and, in fact, two whole regiments which had not yet reached Pensa remained fully armed and refused to surrender a gun or rifle. Two of our most forward regiments, on the other hand, which had already passed Pensa, got orders to proceed as quickly as possible to Vladivostok. They also retained their arms, and thus it happened that when the most critical moment came our two regiments at each extremity were well equipped and able to defend those in between. The two regiments that were allowed to proceed in advance travelled so fast, in fact, almost with the speed of express trains, that they got to Vladivostok about April 25.

Sacrifices were made to enable these troops to get away quickly. The other echelons began to be scattered over long distances, in about sixty or seventy trains, separated 40 and 50 kilometres from each other, and eventually even at greater distances. Days and weeks passed before our trains got a chance to move, and then they could only crawl along at a snail’s pace. There were mysterious entanglements and difficulties at every stage. The commanders of our echelons had to wait, to be patient, and discuss with the local Soviets and commanders. The month of April thus passed, and we had not yet been able to cover the whole of the 1,000 kilométres that separated us from the first stations of the Siberian border. There were frequent scufliesscuffles [sic] at various stations with Bolshevik troops. About the middle of April many of our echelons had trouble with local commanders, who insisted on further disarming, to which our officers and men would not consent.

Each unit now had to depend much upon its own resources, and each was ready to defend itself, and, if necessary, to make its passage by force of arms. No army was ever scattered over such a vast distance and harassed by so many difficulties. The Bolsheviks, without any strong union between themselves, were like swarms of wild wasps, stinging and worrying where they could. Their plan seemed to separate our