Part 25

The house was furnished like that, except for some bearskins and hunting trophies, and the two old ladies and one old gentleman who gave us tea might have been transported on a magic carpet from a tea party in the time of the Newcomes. We had toasted muffins, and the stouter of the two old ladies (who wore a little lace cap and sat stiffly against an antimacassar, in a chintz-covered chair) asked whether we would take one or two lumps of sugar with our tea. Tony, who was beginning to feel an exile from civilization, beamed with happiness at this English life again.

The old gentleman had been the greatest trader in Asia Minor, and in his younger days had hunted with Turkish peasants in the mountains. He loved the Turk still, though he deplored the cruelties they had done to the Christian populations in the war. For the Greeks he had pity, and dreadful forebodings. He knew something of what was happening behind the Turkish lines, with Mustapha Kemal. There would be no peace until they had Smyrna back again. The Greeks had claimed too much. Venizelos had lost his head. Lloyd George--The old man sighed, and fell into a gloomy silence. “I’m afraid of the future,” he said, presently. “Nobody will listen to my advice. The Greeks think I am pro-Turk. What I want is a just peace, and above all peace. This is only an armed truce.” He told me many things about the situation which filled me with uneasiness. I promised to see him again, but after a few days we left Smyrna for Athens.

We traveled in a little steam yacht which had once been Vanderbilt’s and now was a Greek passenger ship, called _Polikos_. It was crowded with Greek officers, in elegant uniforms, and very martial-looking until a certain hour of the evening. The passage began in a wonderful calm, and after darkness there were groups of singing folk of different nationalities, as on that other ship, but presently a terrific storm broke upon us, and the singing ceased, and the _Polikos_ was a ship of sick and sorry people.

Tony and I crept to our bunks in a big crowded cabin, and the Greek officers in the other bunks were frightfully and outrageously ill. Early next morning their martial appearance had gone and they were the disheveled wrecks of men. Tony, with extreme heroism, staggered to the saloon and ordered ham and eggs, but thought better of it before they came, and took to his bunk again, below mine which I, less brave, had never left. We were glad to reach Athens without shipwreck.

We had a week of joy there, in dazzling sunshine, and wandered about the ruins of the Acropolis and touched old stones with reverence, and sipped rose-tinted ices in the King’s Gardens, and saw Greek boys throwing the discus in the very arena where the games were played in the Golden Age, and tried to remember odd scraps of classical knowledge, to recall the beauty of the Gods and the wisdom of the poets. All that need not be told, but it was as pro-Greeks that we returned to England, and with memories which made us understand more sharply the tragedy of that defeat when the Cross went down before the Crescent, and the horror happened in Smyrna, and all the world held its breath when Constantinople was threatened with the same fate.

XXIV

In October of 1921 I went to Russia for the purpose of making a report on the Famine to the Imperial Relief Fund.

Much as I disliked the idea of seeing the grisly vision of Famine after so many experiences of war and its effects, I felt that it was an inescapable duty to accept the invitation made to me. I was also drawn by a strong desire to see the conditions of Russia, outside as well as inside the famine area, and to get first-hand knowledge of the system of Bolshevism which was a terror to the majority in Europe, with some secret attraction, holy or unholy, among men and women of revolutionary or “advanced” views.

It was impossible to know the truth from newspaper reading. Stories of Russian atrocities and horrors arrived from Riga, Helsingfors and other cities on the border of the Soviet Republic, and were denied by other correspondents. Knowing the way in which “atrocities” had been manufactured in time of war, by every nation, I disbelieved all I read about Russia circulated by the “White” propaganda department, while doubting everything which came from “Red” sources. I think that was a general attitude of mind among unprejudiced people.

Even with regard to the Famine it was impossible to get near the truth by newspaper accounts. _The Daily Mail_ said the tales of famine were vastly exaggerated. _The Daily Express_ said there was no famine at all. _The Morning Post_ suggested that it was a simple scheme for deluding Western nations in order to feed the Red Army. I wanted to know, and promised to find out and report impartially to the Imperial Relief Fund. _The Daily Chronicle_ agreed to publish a number of articles written after my return from Russia (in order to avoid censorship), and I arranged to send an account to _The Review of Reviews_, of which I was the rather nominal editor.

A journalist friend of mine named Leonard Spray was also under instructions from _The Daily Chronicle_ to go to Russia, for another line of inquiry, and much to my delight promised to wait for me in Berlin so that we could travel together. It would make a great difference having a companion on that adventure, for I confess that I hate the lonely trail.

It was a question of waiting for passports from the Soviet Foreign Office in Moscow. I had applied to the Russian Trade Mission in London and was recommended by an assistant to Krassin, an intelligent and well-educated young Russian who professed devoted adherence to Communism while doing himself remarkably well, I thought, with all the material pleasures of capitalistic luxury. After a couple of weeks my credentials arrived, my passport was indorsed with the stamp of the Soviet Republic, and I had in this way a talisman which would open the gate of Red Russia and let me enter the heart of its mystery. To some of my friends it seemed the free admission to a tiger’s cage.

In Berlin I was advised to buy blankets, cooking utensils, as much food as I could carry, and illimitable quantities of insect powder. I took this advice, and with Leonard Spray and a very useful lady who understood the German ways of shopping, we bought this outfit, remarkably cheap, reckoning in German marks which were then not quite 4,000 to the English pound.

Among other items we acquired an enormous Dutch cheese, round and red, which we wrapped up in a towel. It became our most precious possession, and, as I may tell later, came to an honorable and joyous end. A quantity of solid alcohol in tins somewhat in the style of the “Tommy’s Cooker” also bulged out our bags and were an immense boon by enabling us to heat up food and drink on our Russian journey.

Spray and I spent two solid days obtaining _visas_ in Berlin for all the countries through which we had to pass on our way to the Russian frontier by way of Riga--those new Baltic States created at Versailles.

Our journey to Riga was half a nightmare and half a farce, and Spray called our train the “Get in and Get out Express.” We generally arrived at a new frontier in the dead of night or in the early hours of dawn, after fitful sleep. Then we were awakened by armed guards demanding to see our visa for each side of the “Danzig corridor” for Lithuania, Esthonia, and Latvia.

At Eydtkühnen, in East Prussia, we had a six-hours’ wait and were able to see something of the Russian invasion and Germany’s “devastated region” which had been the greatest cause of terror to the German mind when the “Russian steam roller” first began to roll forward before its subsequent retreat. Russian cavalry had done a lot of damage--the Germans had plenty of atrocity stories to set beside those of Alost and Louvain--and we saw even at that late date, so long after those early days of war, the ruins of burnt-out farms and shell-wrecked houses. But not many. German industry had been quick at work, and Eydtkühnen was built up like a model town, with red-tiled roofs not yet toned down by weather, and shop windows just exhibiting their first stocks.

As we passed through the new Baltic States--Lithuania, Esthonia, Latvia--I had an impression that the old British Armies of khaki men had been transferred to those far countries. At every station there was a crowd of soldiers, all of them clad in unmistakable khaki from British stores, but made into misfits for bearded, or unshaven, portly or slouchy men who looked--many of them--like the old Contemptibles after years of foreign exile and moral degeneration. Yet it would be unfair to say they were all like that, for these Baltic peasants were sturdy fellows enough, and, I should say, hard fighting men.

In Riga we put up for three or four days, waiting for a train into Russia and permission from Soviet representatives in that city to cross the Russian frontier. In spite of our visas from headquarters, those Riga Bolsheviks were extremely insolent and put up a blank wall of indifference to our requests for railway facilities. There seemed to be no chance of a place in any train, and very little chance of a train.

Spray and I kicked our heels about in the little old city, very German in its character, which seemed in a state of stagnation and creeping paralysis. In its once busy port we saw no ship but a vessel carrying a cargo of apples which it unloaded on the quayside. The restaurants were almost deserted, and we drank little glasses of Schnapps in solitary cafés. After midnight there was the awakening of a squalid night life and we watched the Riga manifestation of the fox-trot mania, and an imitation of the Friedrichstrasse _Wein Stube_, with a fair amount of amusement on my part because of the strange types here in a city filled with Russian exiles, Letts, Poles, Germans, Swedes, Lithuanians, and all variety of northern races. But it was not Russia, which we had come to see.

I doubt whether we should ever have set foot in Russia if it had not been for the American Relief Administration established in Riga and just beginning to send food supplies into the famine area. The chief of the Riga headquarters promised us two places on the next food train going to Moscow, and broke through all formalities by reckoning us as members of his staff.

“What about the Famine?” I asked, and he said, “There’s a Famine all right, with a capital F.”

It was a queer journey from Riga to Moscow--unforgotten by me. I have put the spirit of it, as indeed of all my experience in Russia, into my novel “The Middle of the Road,” under a thin guise of fiction, with some imaginary characters. The train started at night, and Spray and I, with our baggage carried by Lettish porters, stumbled along unlit rail tracks to a long train in absolute darkness, except in a few carriages where candles, stuck in their own grease, burned dimly on the window ledges. In the corridor was a seething mass of Lettish and Russian porters, laden with the enormous baggage of Russian, British, German, American, and other couriers, who shouted at them in various languages. A party of young American clerks and typists for the central headquarters in Moscow of the American Relief Administration (always known as the A.R.A., or even, shorter, as “Ara”) smoked cigarettes, cursed because of the darkness and filth and stench and lack of space for their baggage, and between their curses sang ragtime choruses.

Violent action and terrific language in the American accent, on the part of a large-sized man, cleared the corridor somewhat, and I met, for the first time, a cheery young giant whom I have put into my novel as “Cherry of Lynchburg, U.S.A.,” but who is really H. J. Fink, courier, at that time, to the A.R.A. He is known as “The Milk-fed Boy” by his fellow-travelers, and but for his enormous good nature, his mixture of ferocity and joviality with obstructive Bolsheviks, his genial command of the whole “outfit” from the “_provodniks_” or guards to the engine drivers, the journey would have been more intolerable than we found it. I take off my hat, metaphorically, to the “Milk-fed Boy.”

Our blankets were uncommonly valuable in the filthy carriage of bare boards with wooden bunks which I shared with Spray. By rigging up a “gadget” of straps strung across the carriage, we were able to use our solid alcohol for heating up soups and beans, with only a fifty-per-cent chance of setting the bunks on fire. We went easy on the red Dutch cheese, remembering that we might have greater need of it in times to come.

The insect powder was extraordinarily good, for the insects, which came out of their lairs as soon as the train warmed up. They throve on it. It sharpened their appetite for Leonard Spray, who suffered exceedingly. Afterward, all through Russia, he was a victim of these creatures who at the first sight of him leapt upon him joyously. By some thinness of blood, or anti-insect tincture--I strongly suspect the nicotine of innumerable “gaspers”--I was wonderfully immune, and Russian lice had no use for me, though I encountered them everywhere, for Russia is their stronghold as carriers of typhus, with which the people were stricken in every city and village.

We saw Red soldiers for the first time at Sebesh, the Russian frontier, anæmic-looking lads, wearing long gray overcoats and gray hoods, rising to a point like Assyrian helmets, with the Red Star of the Soviet Republic above the peak. Here at Sebesh also we saw the first trainload of refugees from the famine area, whom we met in hordes throughout our journey. They were Letts, and in a bad state, after being three months on the way, in closed cattle trucks. Many were typhus-stricken. All were weak and wan-looking, except some of the children, who had a sturdy look in their ragged sheepskins. A man spoke to me in English, with an American accent. He had come from Ufa, three thousand miles away, and spoke tragic words about the people there. They were starving, and near death.

Our train crawled forward through flat, desolate country. The people we saw at wayside stations looked wretched and gloomy. A light snow lay on the ground, and the woods were black against it, and grim. Many times our engine panted and then stopped for lack of fuel. We waited while fresh timber was piled on. The journey seemed interminable but for the laughter of the “Milk-fed Boy,” and tales of Russian tragedy by Mr. Wilton, the King’s messenger, who had a queer red glint in his eyes, and a suppressed passion beneath his quiet and charming grace of manner, when he spoke of all that agony in the country he loved. So at last we reached Moscow, and in a little while came to know its way of life.

The fantastic aspect of the city, and especially at its heart by the palace of the Kremlin, seemed to me as wild as an Oriental nightmare in a hasheesh dream, with golden pear-shaped domes, and tall towers, and high walls with fan-shaped battlements, and step flights of steps leading to walled walks, and old narrow gateways guarded by Red soldiers. There was something sinister as well as splendid in that vast fortress palace which is a city within a city. It seemed to tell of ancient barbarities. There was a spirit of evil about its very walls, I thought. Perhaps vague memories of Russian history were sharpened by the knowledge that somewhere within those walls was the brooding mind of Lenin, whose genius had drowned Russia in blood and tears, if all one heard, or a thousandth part of it, were true.

I entered the Kremlin one day on a visit to Radek--whose name means “scoundrel”--and was arrested three times at the guard posts before reaching the rooms where the chief propaganda agent of Soviet Russia lived with his wife and child, in simple domesticity, while he pulled wires in all parts of the world to stir up revolution, or any kind of trouble. Smiling through his spectacles, this man who looked a cross between an ancient mariner and a German poet, with a fringe of reddish beard round his face, was disarmingly frank and cynical on the subject of Anglo-Russian relations, and had a profound and intimate knowledge of foreign politics which startled me. He knew more than I did about the secret intrigues in England and France.

Leonard Spray and I were billeted in a house immediately opposite the Kremlin along an embankment of the river called the Sophieskaya. It was, indeed, more than a house, being the palace of a pre-war monopolist in sugar, and most handsomely furnished in the French Empire style, with elegant salons on whose walls hung some valuable pictures, among which I remember a Corot, and a Greuze.

We arrived in the dark, after a visit to the Soviet Foreign Office and an interview with a melancholy, soft-spoken, cross-eyed Jew, by name Weinstein, who was in charge of foreign visitors and correspondents. A pretty Lettish girl, shuffling along in bedroom slippers, opened the door to us, and locked us in afterward. Then the housekeeper, a tall Swede who spoke a little of all languages, conducted us up a noble stairway, richly carved, to our bedroom, which was an immense gilded salon without a bed. This lack of sleeping accommodation was remedied by four Red soldiers who came staggering in under bits of an enormous four-poster which they fixed up in a corner of the room. Spray took possession of it, and I slept on a broad divan.

It was bitterly cold, and we were almost frozen to death. I shall never forget how Spray used to wrap himself up in the blankets to the top of his head, like an Eskimo in his sleeping bag. That house was full of strange people whom we used to pass in the corridors, including a deputation of Chinese Mandarins from the Far Eastern Republic, and a mission of Turks from Angora. One evening while we were there, Tchicherin, the Foreign Minister, with whom I had a long interview, gave a banquet on the third anniversary of the Soviet Republic to all the missions represented in Moscow. It was a very handsome affair. All the leading Bolsheviks were in evening dress, the Chinese Mandarins wore cloth of gold, wine flowed copiously, and watching from the doorway of my bedroom, I wondered what had happened to Bolshevism and Communism, and what equality there was between those well-fed, elegantly dressed gentlemen, dining richly in their noble rooms, and those millions of starving peasants who were waiting for death, and dying, in the Volga valley, or even the population of Moscow itself, not starving altogether, but pinched, and half hungry in their ragged sheepskins.

Spray and I explored the life of Moscow, freely, as I must admit, for never once were we aware of any deliberate espionage about us, though often there were watchful eyes.

We had arrived in time to witness a complete reversal of the Communistic system by what Lenin called the “New Economic Laws.” On October 17, 1921, while we were there, Lenin made an historic speech in which he admitted, with amazing frankness, the complete breakdown of the Communistic way of life which he had imposed upon the people. He explained, with a kind of vigorous brutality of speech, that owing to the hostility and ignorance of the peasants, who resisted the requisition of their food stuffs, and the failure of world revolution which prevented any international trade with Russia, industry had disintegrated, factories were abandoned, transport had broken down, and the system of rationing which had been in force in the cities, could no longer be maintained.

The cardinal theory of Communism was that in return for service to the State, every individual in the State received equal rations of food, clothes, education, and amusements. That was the ideal, but it could no longer be fulfilled, for the causes given.

“We have suffered a severe defeat on the economic front,” said Lenin. “Our only safety lies in a rapid retreat upon prepared positions.”

He then outlined the “New Economic Laws,” which abolished the rationing system, re-established the use of money, permitted “private trading” which had been the unpardonable crime, and even invited the introduction of foreign capital.

We saw the immediate, though gradual and tentative effect of this reversal of policy. It was visible in the market places of Moscow, where peasants freely sold the produce of their farms under the eyes of Red soldiers who previously would have seized and flung them into prison for trading in that way.

Among these peasants stood long lines of men and women who as I saw at a glance were people of the old régime--aristocrats and intellectuals. Shabby as most of them were, haggard and wan, unshaven and unwashed (how could they wash without soap?), their faces, and above all their eyes, betrayed them. They stood, those ladies and gentlemen of Imperial Russia, holding out little articles which they had saved or hidden during the time of revolution. The women carried their underclothing, or their fur coats, tippets, and caps, embroidered linen, old shoes and boots, their engagement rings, brooches, household ornaments. The men--mostly old fellows--held out woollen vests, socks, pipes, rugs, books, many odds and ends of their ancient life. Who bought these things I could never tell, though I saw peasant women and old soldiers fingering them, and asking the price, and generally shrugging their shoulders and walking away.

I spoke to some of the ladies there in French or German, and at first they were very much afraid and would not answer, or left the market place immediately, lest this were some police trap which would endanger their liberty or life. Almost all of them, as I found afterward, had been imprisoned for doing secretly the very thing which they now dared to do in the open market place, but with trembling fear at first.

In the same way, timidly, with nervous foreboding, little groups of families or friends opened a few shops in the Arbat, furnishing them with relics of their old homes, and stocking them with a strange assortment of goods.

Two restaurants opened, one called “The English Restaurant,” where Spray and I used to dine, almost alone, except for a Red Commissioner or two who came in for coffee and a secret inspection, and now and then a few ladies, furtively, for a plate of soup. The restaurant keepers were of good family and ancient rank. The lady spoke English and French, and told me many tales of her tragic life during the years of revolution. Behind the bar was a pretty, smiling girl of sixteen or so, amazed and delighted to see two English customers. Her father, dressed like a seafaring man, was charming in his courtesy to us, but always afraid.

Even now I dare not write too freely about the people we met by hazard, or by introduction, lest any words of mine should do them harm. There was one family, of noble blood, who lived in two squalid rooms divided by a curtain from a public corridor. The two daughters had one pair of decent boots between them. They took turns to go out “visiting” at the British Mission which gave Sunday afternoon receptions to a little group of ladies, and taught them the fox trot and two step and other dances which had become a mania in many Western nations, but were utterly unknown in Russia, cut off from all the world.