 Horrocks ' first task , along with a party of 13 British officers and 30 other ranks , was to guard a train delivering 27 carriages of shells to the White Army in Omsk , 3 @,@ 000 miles ( 4 @,@ 800 km ) away on the Trans @-@ Siberian Railway . The journey took more than a month , and as the only party member fluent in Russian , Horrocks had to deal with many of the difficulties encountered . At every station , he had to ward off station masters intent on acquiring the cars . While stopped in <unk> , the British officers ' presence provoked a duel between two Cossack officers . Horrocks accepted an invitation to act as a second , but the pair were arrested before the duel could take place . He managed to defuse the situation before it came to trial , by claiming his faulty Russian had been the cause of the misunderstanding . The train eventually arrived in Omsk on 20 May , with a full cargo . 
