The Challenging Heights Read Online Free PDF Page B

– especially when they heard stories of men in America preparing to fly the Atlantic. Only a few short years before when aeroplanes had been little more than powered box kites such a thing had appeared impossible, but from the newspapers they received it now seemed that Harry Hawker, the famous test pilot, and a companion, with a huge specially-built Sopwith powered with a Rolls Royce Eagle engine, two other men with a converted Vickers Vimy bomber with two Rolls Royce Eagles, and a squadron of American naval men in flying boats were all virtually on their way.
    The uncertainty of the situation in the Baltic remained, however, and the White Russian forces were totally unreliable. The conscripted Russian peasants had had enough of autocracy to last them for ever and had no intention of supporting any move to restore the Romanovs. The Poles were working for an independent Poland and their interest was only in getting rid of their traditional enemies, the Russians, White or Red. The Letts wanted a free Latvia and were only too willing to fight with the British whose idea was to set up buffer states in Latvia, Esthonia and Lithuania to keep back the tide of Bolshevism. The German leaders were interested only in preserving their own estates by keeping East Prussia German and, if possible, adding to it while no one was looking.
    It was always difficult to get the separate forces to operate together, and the White Russian officers remained terrified of their men. When one of their battalions mutinied and shot their officers in the back on parade, the Russian generals responded by rounding up a whole host of wrongdoers for punishment, and everybody had to face the business of the execution of the ringleaders. The Russian officers clearly intended to make an example and the court martial was a hurried affair with only lip service paid to justice. There was no appeal and the sentence was to be carried out almost immediately.
    After a visit to a tent, where they were blessed by priests, the guilty men were sprinkled with holy water and kissed, then marched under escort to where Russian, German, Polish and British troops formed a hollow square. Some of them were weeping but one of them, a fine-looking sergeant, stood proudly erect as the stripes were torn from his sleeves. A small dog appeared and began to sniff the legs of the condemned men and for a while the affair seemed likely to descend into tragi-comedy because it refused to get out of the way. The officer in charge, a pale-faced young man wearing pince-nez and the enormous epaulettes of the Imperial Russian Army, timidly shooed it aside only for it to return again and again. In the end, a Russian colonel with an iron-grey board, stamped across and snarled at him to get on with it, lashing out with his boot at the dog which bolted, yelping, so that even the men waiting for execution managed a faint smile.
    As the machine guns chattered, the men tied to the posts stiffened and slumped but, as the smoke cleared, the sergeant was seen to be still alive. He had somehow shed his blindfold and, though his face and clothes were smeared with blood, he was shouting ‘Long Live Bolshevism’. As the officer in the pince-nez moved up to him to administer the coup de grâce with his pistol, the sergeant spat at him. As the officer hesitated, the sergeant went on shouting. In the end the colonel did the job and the young officer promptly turned aside and vomited up his breakfast.
    It was a depressing business and seemed to symbolise the uselessness and waste of the operations along the Baltic. However, the generals had finally decided that doing nothing was dangerous and a menace to morale and the following day news came that the army was to move forward. Several of the units passed the aerodrome, the Germans well-fed and well-equipped but the rest wearing only old torn uniforms without greatcoats, cast-offs from the war in France. Most of the fighting seemed to be left to them where