“Long live freedom!”
The railway station is flooded with light. There we find a new, vast crowd of several thousand people. And all this has merged in the general sea which rages and roars. With enormous difficulty we are brought through it under a hail of curses and of glances full of hatred. The railway carriage. An officer—Elsner’s son—sobbing hysterically and addressing impotent threats to the mob, and his soldier servant, lovingly soothing him, as he takes away his revolver; two women, dumb with horror—Kletsando’s wife and sister, who had thought to see him off....
We wait for an hour, for another. The train is not allowed to leave—a prisoner’s car is demanded. There were none at the station. The mob threatens to do for the Commissaries. Kostitsin is slightly buffeted. A goods car is brought, all defiled with horse-dung—what a trifle! We enter it without the assistance of a platform; poor Orlov is lifted in with difficulty; hundreds of hands are stretched towards us through the firm and steady ranks of the cadets.... It is already 10 p.m. The engine gives a jerk. The crowd booms out still louder. Two shots are heard. The train starts.
The noise dies away, the lights grow dimmer. Farewell Berdichev!
Kerensky shed a tear of delight over the self-abnegation of “our saviours”—as he called—not the cadets, but the Commissaries and the Committee members.
“What irony of fate! General Denikin, arrested as Kornilov’s accomplice, was saved from the rage of the frenzied soldiers by the members of the Executive Committee of the South-Western Front and by the Commissaries of the Provisional Government.”
“I remember with what agitation I and the never-to-be-forgotten Doukhonin read the account of how a handful of these brave men escorted the arrested generals through a crowd of thousands of soldiers who were thirsting for their blood....”[79] Why slander the dead? Certainly, Doukhonin was no less anxious for the fate of the prisoners than for ... the fate of their revolutionary escort....
That Roman citizen, Pontius Pilate, smiled mockingly through the gloom of the ages....