The Bloody White Baron (13 page)

Not everyone was as enthusiastic about the war as Ungern, least of all the civilians caught up in it. While the Western Front was becoming an enclosed killing-field, the horror mainly limited to the combatants of both sides, the relative openness and vast scale of the Eastern Front inevitably meant that the violence spilled into civilian life. On the German side a relentless programme of cultural colonisation began, bringing Kultur to the new citizens of the German Empire whether they liked it or not. It was matched by the imposition of German military law, with draconian penalties for anyone suspected of aiding the enemy. In the Russian borderlands the military authorities cleared the area of any elements they deemed politically or culturally unreliable. Russian Jews, suspect both for their religion and for their German-derived Yiddish language, were the most obvious target. Tens of thousands were forcibly deported from the border areas, rounded up with casual violence by the army, sometimes on as little as a day's notice, and bundled on to east-bound trains. Ungern presumably approved; at the same time, though, his Lutheran co-religionists were suffering similar treatment, paying the price for following a ‘foreign' religion by being shipped off from the borderlands in trainloads. Russian and German soldiers alike ‘requisitioned' goods with worthless credit notes, dismissing complaints
with the offhand comment ‘War is war.' Bandit groups, hiding in dense forests, impenetrable to the regular army, thrived, as locals fled to avoid deportation or labour battalions, and were joined by deserting soldiers.

This absence of people added to the eeriness of the war in the east. Three million men fought over an empty landscape, nothingness behind them and death ahead. The vast spaces, like the Mongolian steppe, dwarfed the troops moving over them, making them feel as though the landscape itself was swallowing them up. Faced with the elemental weather, the primeval forests, humanity became an irrelevance. The land seemed untouched by human hand; bison, long extinct in the rest of Europe, still roamed in the forests. In battle the enemy was a ghost, barely glimpsed among the fires and smoke. As a German soldier put it during one encounter, ‘Countless farms and entire villages are in flames. One sees not a single human creature in the wide plain, spreading up to most distant eastern heights. And yet, in this frightful vacuum which is only filled with the noise of rumbling artillery and the rattle of machine guns, thousands lie in battle.'
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Ungern was a born horse soldier, but this was the war in which the obsolescence of cavalry was brutally driven home to all except the most pig-headed of generals. On a battlefield of wire and machine-guns, a cavalry charge was suicidal. Horses were as fragile as men, and the Russians lost half or more of their painstakingly trained mounts in the first three months of the war; one of the grimmest duties of the cavalry was to go round after a battle and shoot their former steeds, lying on the ground with broken legs or stumbling over their own torn-out guts, snorting and whinnying in pain. In practice, the Russian cavalry was reduced to fighting as dragoons; riding to battle and then dismounting. Even their much-vaunted mobility was belittled by the sheer scale of the war theatre; a train could outrun any horse, but it took four times as much space and effort to transport a cavalry regiment and their horses as the same number of infantry.

Nevertheless Ungern remained convinced to the end of his life of the virtues of cavalry. Perhaps this was because he discovered one of the few remaining practical uses for horsemen: as guerrilla fighters. He was often assigned to special raiding parties, striking deep inside enemy lines. This sometimes required cunning as well as speed; if need be, he had no trouble posing as a German officer. Such raids were commonplace on the Eastern Front, where the shape of battle was
more flexible and there were often openings in enemy lines. During such operations there was no time to take prisoners, and little distinction was made between enemy civilians and soldiers. Ungern would always favour this kind of warfare: swift, precise and brutal. He developed an expert eye for exploiting the terrain, and learnt how to lead a party of horsemen on little-used paths to evade an overwhelming army.

In trench battles, Ungern was known for leading parties into no-man's-land to scout and sabotage the enemy's trenches. He won the Cross of St George, one of the most prestigious Russian military medals - although his was only fourth class - for scouting enemy positions on 22 September, 1914 ‘only four or five hundred steps from the enemy positions, under fierce rifle and artillery fire'.
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He would sit in trees above the enemy, watching the German soldiers and spotting for the Russian artillery. He earned four other lesser medals in his first two years of war, including the St Anne's Cross, but the Cross of St George had a special place for him. After he received it, he wore it almost always.

For millions of Germans and Russians alike the war was a brutalising experience, creating the hard generation of the Freikorps, the right-wing militia groups of post-war Germany, and the fighters of the Russian Civil War.
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The old values of peacetime no longer applied. On the haunted battlefields, they learnt cruelty, contempt for ordinary life, casual violence. Ungern was already brutal, but the war undoubtedly worsened him. There was always something fractured in him; the war just widened the breaches. It refined and affirmed his tendencies to violence, even legitimised them as heroic. In military-controlled territory on both sides he saw his dismissive attitude towards his inferiors confirmed, watched the rounding-up of the undesirable Jews and learnt that the civilian world existed merely to provide the resources for war.

From 1914 to 1916 he again fought in East Prussia, and then in Galicia and the Carpathian mountains. It was in the Carpathians that, it was often claimed, he received one of the most visible of his wounds, his long forehead scar. More probably this was a legacy of the pre-war duel referred to earlier, but he was certainly wounded while at the front. Five times in two years, in fact, but his injuries barely seem to have slowed him down, and he was absent from active service for only
brief periods. He sent home a coat riddled with bullet holes and stained with blood; an odd present, but one that demonstrated his sacrifices for his country and king. For once, his family had reason to be proud of him.

In 1916 he was assigned to the command of General Petr Nikolaievich Vrangel, a tall, aristocratic man also from a Baltic German family, who had come to soldiering late in life. He would become one of the last White leaders in the Russian Civil War, holding the Crimea to the end and denigrated by the Bolsheviks as the ‘Black Baron'. He had met Ungern socially on occasion, and his opinion of him was distinctly mixed:

Vrangel's doubts concerning Ungern's refinement might perhaps account for his rather slow rate of promotion. Despite his medals, the loyalty of his men and his undoubted skill in battle, it was not until September 1916 that he was promoted to
pod'esaul
, junior captain, with command over a
sotnia
, a group of a hundred men. Sadly his behaviour did not improve with his rank. On 22 October, 1916 Ungern and another officer, who was named Artamonov, were on regimental leave in the city of Chernivtsi, in the Ukraine. They spent the afternoon getting drunk and then went to the Black Eagle hotel, where Ungern demanded a room. Wartime procedure required that Ungern have a certificate from the commander of the city to do so, which he didn't have, and the desk clerk told him so. Ungern tried to take a swipe at the desk clerk. He missed, breaking some glass instead, and Artamonov and he made their unsteady way to the office
of Commandant Treshev, the city's governor. Once there they confronted his junior aide-de-camp, a man named Zagorsk. According to Zagorsk's report, Artamonov insisted that Zagorsk telephone Treshev and attempt to get the two of them permission to stay in the hotel, but Treshev refused. At this point Ungern ran into the room and began to make trouble, shouting, ‘Whose face do I have to mess up?!'
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Stymied by bureaucracy, his instinct was to find somebody to beat up. Zagorsk explained that no permit was available and attempted to pacify Ungern, at which point Ungern called him a swine - one of his favourite insults - and swiped at him with his sabre, giving him a nasty cut to the head. The terrified Zagorsk ran to get help; eventually the senior aide-de-camp appeared, found Ungern dozing drunkenly in an armchair and arrested him.

This was not the first time Ungern had been drunk on duty, and Wrangel is reported to have disciplined him frequently for the offence. The incident at Chernivtsi sounds plausible, though others may have been embellished in the telling; for example it was later alleged by the Soviets that he entered a café and drunkenly fired into the ceiling, killed fellow officers during drinking bouts and so on. Even the Russian army was not sufficiently desperate to keep a drunken murderer on its staff. (Another unproven Soviet claim was that Ungern had been imprisoned for beating up a lower-ranking officer and was released only as a result of the Revolution.)

Following the Chernivtsi episode, Ungern was able to escape serious punishment, sentenced to only two months' imprisonment by the 8th Army's Staff Court. His superb record on the battlefield made a good impression upon the military authorities, as did the intervention of Wrangel and other former commanders. Ungern probably couldn't understand what all the fuss was about.

After his release from military prison in January 1917, Ungern was transferred to the army reserves. Being away from the front was not to his taste, and he soon negiotiated a transfer to Vladivostok, from where he managed to return to the fighting on a different front: the Caucasus. Here Ungern linked up with the man who was to shape the rest of his life. Captain Grigori Michaelovich Semenov was half-Buriat,
half-Cossack, like Ungern a product of the fringes of the tsarist empire. Clever and charming, he was a voracious reader and fluent in several languages, including Buriat, Mongolian and Kalmyk. He was

It was unusual for an officer in a Cossack regiment to be a Cossack himself, let alone have ‘Asiatic' ancestry, and Semenov suffered a certain amount of snubbing from his peers. Undeterred, he had already earned a considerable reputation as an up-and-coming officer.

Like Ungern, he had spent time in Mongolia, but he had achieved rather more while he was there. He surveyed the country from end to end after the declaration of independence in 1911, and was then sent to Urga as part of the consular guard, where, thanks to his fluent Mongolian, he was able to befriend the Bogd Khan and other prominent leaders. He rescued the Chinese
amban
(the former colonial administrator) from an enraged mob and disarmed, on his own initiative, the Chinese garrison to prevent the situation worsening. These qualities - bravery, decisiveness, leadership - would remain constant, and so would another side of him that showed itself for the first time in Urga: corruptibility. Various politicians showered him with gifts, as did the directors of a Chinese bank after he foiled an armed robbery there. By his own account he donated the gifts to his unit; if this is true he showed scruples then that were absent in later life.

Recalled from Mongolia for exceeding the limits of his command, he rode the 232 miles from Urga to Kiatkha, on the Russian-Mongolian border, in twenty-six hours, setting a new record. Desperate to get back to Mongolia, where he had been offered a high rank in the national army by his political friends, he instead found himself on the fringe of the empire, hunting bandits and rebels. When the Great War broke out he showed the same courage as Ungern, raiding the enemy's rear and penetrating deep into German-held territory. He won the Cross of St George twice (fourth class, the same as Ungern's), and these exploits
built up his reputation as a daring and cunning leader. He was as skilled at throwing grenades or leading charges as he was at inspiring his men, although by Vrangel's cynical account, he ‘knew how to make himself popular with Cossacks and officers alike, but he had his weaknesses - a love of intrigue and indifference to the means by which he achieved his ends'.
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