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Carpathian Reveille

Page history last edited by Michael 9 years, 8 months ago

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Sunday, August 7th, 1932 

 

     Soviet Russia announced a law on the protection of state property;

citizens could be shot for taking so much as a single ear of wheat from a collective farm.

 

Sunday, August 14th, 1932

 

Closing ceremonies of the Summer Olympic Games, in Los Angeles.

 

Monday, August 15th, 1932

 

     Frederick Willoughby arrived at Bucharest, Romania to take up the position of Third Secretary at the British Legation.

 

The Feast of the Assumption of Mary, a national holiday in Romania.

 

Monday, August 22nd, 1932

 

The first experimental television broadcasts by the BBC.

 

Thursday, August 25th, 1932

 

     A letter arrived at the British legation, in the diplomatic pouch, from the staff of the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office. It gave Willoughby a new set of duties -- finding information about the two trains which went missing during the Great War. He began arrangements to travel about looking for the missing trains, and conducted some basic research in the legation's archives and at the University.

     Seeking a guide or interpreter, he discovered that Mrs. Victoria May, a secretary/clerk/typist on the legation staff, spoke passable Romanian, and was willing and available to travel. Her supervisor, Second Secretary Harecourt, assented to the trip.

 

Saturday, August 27th, 1932

 

     Mrs. May and Mr. Willoughby traveled to Iași by train, and began investigating the background of the missing trains.

 

Monday, August 29th, 1932

 

     Clive White arrived in Bucharest. May and Worthington returned to Bucharest from Iași. White met Qua Lin Worthington, Bill Davis, and Nora Cullen at the Hotel Lido; Willoughby and May joined them, introductions all around. Willoughby filled them in on the "missing train" investigation, and they all agreed to participate in the search. Nora Cullen was to find an aeroplane, for an aerial survey.

 

the Hotel Lido, the newest and most modern in Bucharest

 

there seem to have been automobile dealerships ...

 

Tuesday, August 30th, 1932

 

     Nora was able to persuade a Romanian Air Force pilot, Lieutenant Alin Dragos (unless Kevin and Sheri had already determined a name), to loan a couple of old biplanes for our search. "It's for Romania, and glory, and ... for me."

 

Hermann Göring was elected as Speaker of the German Reichstag.

 

Wednesday, August 31st, 1932

 

     The two airplanes, with Romanian pilots, flew over the Carpathian Alps, while the group scanned the ground with binoculars and cameras. Nothing notable was found, except the fact that the planes were not in good shape. We spent the night at the airfield near Botoșani, refuelling and repairing.

 

     BOTOSHANI (Botoșani), the capital of the department of Botoshani, Rumania; on a small tributary of the river Jijia, and in one of the richest agricultural and pastoral regions of the north Moldavian hills. Pop. (1900) 32,193. Botoshani is commercially important as the town through which goods from Poland and Galicia pass in transit for the south; being situated on a branch railway between Dorohoi and on the main line from Czernowitz to Galatz. It has extensive starch and flour mills; and Botoshani flour is highly prized in Rumania, besides being largely exported to Turkey and the United Kingdom. Botoshani owes its name to a Tatar chief, Batus or Batu Khan, grandson of Jenghiz Khan, who occupied the country in the 13th century. There are large colonies of Armenians and Jews.  -- from the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911 edition

     Note that on the map at the bottom of the page this city is about halfway between Iasi and Czernowitz.

 

Thursday, September 1st, 1932

 

     More flying. At one point during the day, a Soviet plane approached and then flew off. Some interesting sites were spotted and marked on our various maps.

     We refueled at Botoșani and flew back to Bucharest. Alas, one of the planes landed poorly, ground looped, and was destroyed. The pilot was killed instantly, Mrs. May was injured (mostly her knee), Bill Davis and Frederick Willoughby were somewhat bruised. Victoria May was sent to the hospital, where they expected to perform knee surgery the next day.

 

Germany walked out of the World Disarmament Conference.

 

Friday, September 2nd, 1932

 

     During the night, Mrs. May's knee healed mysteriously ... actually, due to Qua Lin Worthington's esoteric abilities. All the members of the search party were invited to a royal ball, to be held on Sunday. In the meantime, more research was conducted on the circumstances of the trains' disappearances.

 

Sunday, September 4th, 1932

 

     A royal ball!

 

Wednesday, September 7th, 1932

 

     The searchers rode trains to the foot of the Carpathian Alps, and then proceeded into the mountains on horseback.

 

Friday, September 9th, 1932

 

The Chaco War began, between Paraguay and Bolivia.

 

Monday, September 12th, 1932

 

     The search party met a group of Soviet soldiers high in the Carpathian Alps; we chatted with them in a friendly way. That night, some bears were seen.

 

The very unpopular Papen government was defeated on a massive motion of no-confidence in the Reichstag.

With the exceptions of the German People's Party and the German National People's Party,

every party in the Reichstag voted for the no-confidence motion.

Papen had Hindenburg dissolve the Reichstag for new elections in November.

 

Tuesday, September 13th, 1932

 

     While eating lunch, the search party saw a glint, as of something metallic, several miles away (near one of the possible train sites). We proceeded there, to find an operational, and very mundane, mine. We spoke with the miners about the area, and any rumors they might have heard.

 

Wednesday, September 14th, 1932

 

Germany notified the President of the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments

of its decision to withdraw permanently from the Conference.

 

Thursday, September 15th, 1932

 

     After two days of rain, our group finally had a serious accident -- a mud slide, which carried away Willoughby's horse, and nearly carried him away, too. Clive White was able to toss a rope to Willoughby, and pull him from the deep, oozing mud. One of the group's tents was lost, along with most of Willoughby's equipment.

 

Friday, September 16th, 1932

 

     By morning, Willoughby's aches, sprains, cuts and bruises had all mysteriously vanished. "I have no idea why ... but I wasn't that fond of those injuries anyway."

     Under a grey sky, with light rains and cold mists dampening the party, we found a rusty old rail line, clearly unused for many years. Following it, we found a wood-and-fabric camouflage shelter which somewhat covered the hillside rail line; the rails led under this for nearly 300 yards, to a narrow cutting and soon after that into a tunnel. In the tunnel was the Lost Train! Most or all of the cars, and the locomotive, were from the Tsarist railways (broad gauge). From the front of the train, deep in the tunnel, to the rear (which we saw first), they were:

 

  • two Russian express steam locomotives, one crudely painted with red stars and Bolshevik slogans

  • the command car

  • twenty boxcars; half of them had been thoroughly looted, and one had been burned -- the remainder held (at first glance) items not easily or anonymously converted to cash value. Two of the looted boxcars held the dessicated corpses of dead Romanian soldiers.

  • a kitchen car

  • two troop cars; each could have held 40 men, but now they held nearly that many corpses. Russian hussars, Bolshevik soldiers, Romanian soldiers ...

  • a baggage car; broken into, looted and rummaged thoroughly

  • a private coach, possibly belonging to Prince Yusupov. There were three bodies in the coach, probably servants.

  • a guard van

  • three flatcars, with sandbagged edges; they contained a rusty machine gun, and a lot of corroded, empty brass and other signs of battle

 

 

     All of the bodies had been dead for about 14 years; the train showed no signs of having been disturbed since it had been left here in 1917. If all the cars except the private coach were 25' long, and the private coach and locomotive were 80' long each, the train was 900' long (300 yards).

     The party crept carefully and slowly along the train, deep into the darkness of the tunnel (fortunately Clive White had brought a carbide headlamp). Damp books, ancient icons, paintings, deteriorated fabric, statuary, valuable stoneware, antiquities and cultural relics still filled nine or ten of the boxcars. One of the cars had clearly held some of the crown jewels -- impressive steel chests had been riveted to the floor, but broken into anyhow. GM Note: The heavy padlocks apparently were either blown or struck off the 24 impressive steel chests, depending on which of them you may examine.

     Outside, the disused rail line ran for a mile or so along the alpine mountainside, past a pile of old, rusting cranes and jacks (for lifting the wagons and carriages onto different gauge wheels), and then abruptly ended at a collapsed section of hillside, several hundred yards long.

 

The tunnel is in the Carpathian Alps, generally speaking west of Radautzi, in the region known as Bucovina.

GM update: If you find the fork of the two rivers midway between Lapusna and Stoga, you are very close!

Hmm, very close to (or even under) the Romanian-Polish border! -- Michael

 

Onwards to Tunnel Trouble!

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