Part 26

The old gentleman their father, and their charming mother, had dirty hands. There was no soap in Russia, and in those rooms no chance of hot water, except for tea. I marveled at their courage (though the old man wept a little), and at the courage of all those people of the old régime, who were living in direst poverty, in perpetual fear of prison, or worse than that. They saw the ruin of Russia, but still had hope that out of all that agony, and all their tears, some new hope would dawn for the country they loved. So many people told me, and among them one bedridden lady, near to death, I think, who said that there would be a new and nobler Russia born out of all this terror and tribulation.

Moscow was not starving to death, though many in it were always hungry. When the American Relief Administration opened a soup kitchen in the famous old restaurant, The Hermitage, thousands of children came to be fed, but, on the whole, they were not famine-stricken--only underfed and uncertain of the next day’s meal.

With its dilapidated houses, many of them wrecked by gunfire in the first days of the revolution, Moscow had a melancholy look, and few of its people, outside the Commissar and Soviet official class had any margin beyond the barest needs of life. But the people in the mass looked healthy, and they were not deprived of all light and beauty in life. The opera, and two or three theaters were open, crowded every night by the “proletariat” in working clothes. In the Imperial box of the opera, with its eagles covered under the Red Flag, sat a group of mechanics with their wives, and between the acts the foyer was crowded with what looked like the “lower middle class,” as we should see them in some music hall on the Surrey side of London. The opera and the ballet were as beautiful as in the old days, maintaining their historic traditions, though all else had gone in Russia, and it was strange to see this stage splendor in a Republic of ruin.... But not yet had I seen the famine.

I came closer to the effects of famine in Petrograd. That city, grim but magnificent as I saw it under heavy snow, had a sinister and tragic look. During the war its population had been 3,000,000 and more. When Spray and I walked along the Nevski Prospekt, where all the shops but six or seven were barricaded with wooden planks, there were only 750,000 people in the whole of this great city. Palaces, Government offices, great banks, city offices, huge blocks of buildings, were uninhabited and unlighted. Many of those who had been government officials, rich merchants, factory owners, were shoveling snow upon the streets, or dragging loads of wood on sledges over the slippery roads. They wore bowler hats, black coats with ragged collars of astrachan, the clothes of a “genteel” world that had gone down into the great gulfs of revolution.

At every street corner were men and women selling cigarettes. Some of those women, and one I especially remember, were thinly clad, shivering in the biting wind, and obviously starved. The very look of them made me shiver in my soul.

In Petrograd I went to a home for refugees from the famine region. All round the city were great camps of these people, who had come in a tide of flight--hundreds of thousands--when the harvest of 1921 was burnt as black as that of 1920 in the awful drought. Four thousand or so were in one of the old Imperial barracks, and they had come three thousand miles to reach this refuge at the end of their journey. Outside, in Petrograd, there was a hard, grim frost. In these bare whitewashed rooms there was no heat, for lack of fuel, and men, women and children lay about in heaps, huddled together in their sheepskins for human warmth, tormented by vermin, fever-stricken, weak. Too weak to stand, some of them, even to take their place in line for the daily ration of potato soup. A doctor there took us round. He pointed to those with typhus, and said, “There’s no hope for them. They’ll be dead to-morrow or next day.”

When we crossed a courtyard, he stopped a moment to thrust back a heavy door. “Our morgue,” he said. “Three-days’ dead.” Inside was a pile of dead bodies, men, women and children, flung one on top of the other like rubbish for the refuse heap. Hands and legs obtruded from the mass of corruption. It was the end of their journey.

But the opera was very brilliant in Petrograd, some distance from that heap of mud-colored corpses. I went to the Marinsky theater and heard “Carmen.” It was marvelously staged, admirably sung, and there was a packed audience of “trade unionists,” as I was told, on free tickets, but as everybody in Russia had to belong to a trade union or die, it did not specify the character of the people closely. I think most of them were of the clerical class, with a few mechanics. On the way back we followed a party of young men and women walking in snow boots and wrapped to their ears in ragged furs or woollen shawls. They were laughing gayly. Their voices rang out on the still frosty air under the steely glint of stars.... So there were still people who could laugh and make love in Russia!

How did they live, these people? I never could find out in actual detail. Russian money meant nothing to me. When I changed ten pounds in Moscow, I received four big bundles of notes, containing three million roubles. My first experience with the purchasing power of this money was when I wanted to buy a pair of boots in the market place. They were good top boots, splendid looking for snow and mud, but when I was asked one million roubles, I was abashed. Yet, after all, it was not much in English money. But what did it mean to those Russians?

I found out that the average wage for a mechanic, or Soviet official, or University professor, was 150,000 roubles a month. That sounded well until I came up against those boots, and later discovered that in Petrograd a pound of bread cost 80,000 roubles, a pound of tea 120,000 roubles, ten cigarettes 60,000 roubles. How, then, could any human soul live on 150,000 roubles a month? I asked many of them, and some said, “We don’t live. We die,” but others said, “We supplement our wages by speculation.” For some time I was puzzled by that word speculation, until I found that it meant bartering. Secretly, and at risk of imprisonment or death, until the “New Economic Laws,” there was a general system of exchange in goods. A man with a second pair of boots exchanged them for a sack of potatoes, kept some and bartered the others for tea, or bread, or meat, kept some of that, and bartered the rest for a woollen vest, a fur waistcoat, or a tin of sardines, smuggled in from Riga. And so on, in a highly complicated, difficult and dangerous system of “underground trade.” But in spite of “speculation,” life was hard, and almost impossible for elderly folk, and the sick, and frail women. For years hundreds of thousands of them had lived on bread and tea and small rations of soused herrings and millet seed. Now there were no rations, but still bread and tea, for those who had the money.

“What do you think of Bolshevism?” asked Spray one night in the Sugar king’s palace. We lay in bed, with only our mouths and noses out.

I asked him three questions in return. Was there liberty in Russia? Was there equality? Was there a higher type of civilization and human happiness here than in Western Europe, or any chance of it? I asked the questions without prejudice, and we discussed them between the low divan and the four-poster bed, in that great gilded salon opposite the Kremlin, where, in some secret room, Lenin sat that night scheming out some way of saving Russia from the fate into which he had led it, to test his theory of the Communistic state.

We could find no liberty. The two chief papers published--_Pravda_, and _Izvestia_--were propaganda sheets under Government control. There was no freedom of speech or opinion. There was no equality, even of misery--surely the first test of the Communistic state. Between the Soviet Commissars, even the “trade-union” audience of the Marinsky theater, and the peasants, the workers, the underfed masses, there was a gulf as wide as between the profiteers and unemployed of England, wide though lower down the scale of life on both sides. Civilization, human happiness? Well, there was the Marinsky theater, and those laughing boys and girls. Human nature adapted itself marvelously to the hardest conditions of life. Perhaps there were happy people in Russia, but for the most part, Spray and I had met only those who told us tragic tales, of imprisonings, executions, deaths, misery.

When we left Moscow and traveled across Russia to Kazan, and took a boat down the Volga, and sledges across the snow fields to the villages where Famine dwelt, we left human happiness behind us and saw nothing but suffering and despair, hunger and pestilence.

It was again due to the American Relief Administration that we were able to make that journey. Colonel Haskell, chief of the A.R.A., and a man of indomitable energy, iron will power, and exquisite courtesy, invited Spray and myself to join his own party which was going to Kazan on a tour of inspection under his command, and after that he would provide us with a ship for the Volga voyage. Without that immense help of the A.R.A., all-powerful in Russia because it was the one source of hope in the famine region, I should have seen nothing outside Moscow. It was they who controlled the railways, got the trains to move, and forced officials to work.

It was a four-days’ journey to Kazan. The carriages were verminous, and Spray was tortured again--and we crawled slowly through the dreary woods and plains. Colonel Haskell and his staff carried good rations which they shared with us, and at night, when our darkness was illumined by candlelight, we played poker for Russian roubles, gambling wildly, as it seemed, in thousands of roubles, but losing or winning no more than a few shillings.

One man on board impressed me beyond words. It was Governor Goodrich of Indiana, who had come to report to Washington on the agricultural conditions and prospects of Russia, and the truth about the Famine. He was an elderly man with the fresh complexion of a new-born babe, and a powerful clear-cut face, wonderfully softened by the look of benevolence in his eyes and the whimsical smile about his lips. “Governor Jem” he used to be called in Indiana, and he must have been a gallant fellow in his youth, before he became lame in one leg. Now he had come as a knight-errant to Russia, for the rescue of a stricken people. I think no man of greater quality ever went into Russia, or ever came out of it, and it was due not a little to his report (which he allowed me to read) that the Government of the United States, acting through the American Relief Association, fed ten million Russians every day in the famine regions, and saved that number from certain death by hunger or disease.

Kazan lay under a heavy mantle of snow. It was now the capital of the “Tartar Republic,” a province of Soviet Russia, on the edge of the richest grain-growing districts of the Volga valley, where now there was no grain. It was a garden city, with many great houses where the nobles of Imperial Russia had taken their pleasure in summer months, now inhabited by misery, hunger, and disease.

There were forty homes here for abandoned children--abandoned not by the cruelty of their parents but by their love, because they could not bear to see their little ones wailing over empty platters. I went into a number of them, and they were all alike in general character. In one of them were fifteen hundred children, naked, or merely clothed in little ragged shirts. Their clothes had been burnt because of the lice in them, which spread typhus fever. There were no other clothes to replace their ragged old sheepskins and woollen garments. There was no heat in the rooms, for lack of fuel. There was no furniture. On the bare boards they huddled together, these little wizened things, with deep, sunken eyes, and tight-drawn skin, like little bald-headed monkeys. There were many homes like that, and worse than that, because many of the children were dying, and the rooms reeked with their fever, and the very doorposts crawled with lice.

I went into the hospitals, and they were dreadful. Because there was no fuel for heat, these people, stricken with typhus, dysentery, all manner of hunger diseases, were huddled together in unventilated wards for human warmth. Many of the beds had been burnt for fuel and most of them lay on mattresses or the bare boards. Those who had beds lay four together, two one way and two the other. There were no medicines, no anaesthetics, no soap, no dressings. The nurses were starving, and dying of the diseases they could not cure. They came clamoring round the doctor of the A.R.A. with whom I went, begging for food in a wild animal way which made his heart go sick.

But there was an opera, even in Kazan! It was true that the stench of it was pretty bad, and that its audience tightened their belts from time to time in lieu of supper, but Madam Butterfly delighted them, they thrilled to the “Carmen” of a Persian prima donna.

One night the ladies and gentlemen of the opera invaded the headquarters of the A.R.A. after midnight. They were hungry, and made no secret about it. So the young Americans of the Kazan headquarters brewed cocoa in a saucepan, with the help of one of the ladies, and scraped up some bully beef and beans and a loaf or two and some apples, and odds and ends. Not much for a banquet! Spray and I whispered together! I fetched out the last hunk of our round red cheese. It was received with a chorus of approval. It died a sacrificial death in the cause of art and beauty. The Persian prima donna had an insatiable appetite.... Out in the streets of Kazan were starving wanderers, and in the station lay the latest of the abandoned children.

The last boat to go down the Volga before the ice came was put under command of the press representative of the A.R.A., my good friend Murphy, a most kind and generous-hearted soul. Spray and I were the only passengers. We three explored the ship before she left the quayside. She had been a rescue ship for the fugitives from famine, and was in a noisome state. We dared not linger in the sleeping cabins. The very washbasins were crawling. That night Murphy and I slept on the table in the dining saloon--the safest place. Spray gave himself up for lost and curled up on the floor, where he tossed all night. I was cook on that voyage, and did rather well with boiled beans and a mess of pottage. We went down to Tetiushi, and found ourselves among the people of famine....

After two droughts in successive years, there was no harvest of any account. The Red soldiers had requisitioned the peasants’ reserves of grain for rationing the cities. Without reserves they had no means of life. The Soviet Government had supplied them with seed grain for the next harvest, and they had sown it, not expecting to reap it. They had also sent, lately, some barges of potatoes, but they lay there rotting. To carry them to the villages, horses were needed for the sledges, but there was no fodder, and the horses were dying, or dead. So we discovered the State of Tetiushi.

By a message from the Prime Minister of the Tartar Republic, four horses were found for us, and two sledges, after many hours of waiting, and we set out across the snow to the villages. They were very silent when we entered. They seemed abandoned. But we saw in one or two of their timbered houses little wizened faces staring at us from the windows. They were faces like those I had seen in the homes for abandoned children, monkeylike. We went into the cottages and found there peasant families waiting for a visitor who tarried, which was Death.

They showed us the last food they had--if they had any left. It was a brownish powder, made of leaves ground up and mixed with the husks of grain. Others showed us bits of hard stuff like lead. It was a bluish clay dug from a hillside called Bitarjisk. It had some nutritive value, but it swelled when eaten, and was the cause of dreadful agony to children. Peasant women, weeping very quietly, showed us their naked children, with distended stomachs, the sign of starvation in its last stage. From other cottages they came to where we stood, crossing themselves at the doorways, in the Russian way, and then lamenting.

Handsome Russian peasants, with blue eyes and straw-colored beards, struck their breasts with a gesture of absolute despair, and said--we had a Russian with us who spoke English--that death could not be long delayed, for all of them. The last cows had been killed for lack of fodder. There was no milk for the children, as for a long time there had been no bread. Here and there a woman wailed loudly, or grasped my wrist with her skinny hand and spoke fiercely, as though I denied her food. I remember one cottage in which a whole family lay dying, and nearly dead. It was the Famine....

I will not write more about the horrors here. In many articles, and in my novel “The Middle of the Road” I have given the picture of it, and the agony of it.

It is said that two million of these people died. That is Nansen’s figures. That twenty million did not die is due to the magnificent work of the A.R.A. and the Save the Children Fund who, against all political prejudice and for humanity’s sake, achieved a great rescue of these stricken folk. As I have said, the A.R.A. alone fed ten million people a day in the famine area, and I pay a tribute here to the courage and efficiency and devotion of those young Americans whose work I saw, and of whose friendship I am proud. Our people did less, having less means, but it was work well and nobly done in the spirit of Christianity kept alight in a dark and cruel world, which is this jungle of Europe.

XXV

In the spring of 1919, while the Peace Conference was sitting in Paris, I made my first visit to the United States, and lectured in many American cities. I went there again in 1920 and 1921, and on the third visit traveled from New York to San Francisco.

I regard these American visits as the greatest experience of my life, apart from the War, and they added enormously to the knowledge of world forces and the human problem which I had been studying among the peoples of Europe. I was, and still remain, convinced that the United States will shape, for good or ill--and I believe for good--the future destiny of the world, for these people, in the mass, have a dynamic energy, a clear-cut quality of character, and a power not only of material wealth, but of practical idealism, from which an enormous impetus may be given to human progress, in the direction of the common well-being, international peace, liberty, decency, and average prosperity of individual life.

During those three visits, when I talked with innumerable men and women of great intelligence and honesty of thought, I was “made wise,” as they call it, to many of the darker aspects of American life. I was not unconscious of a strong strain of intolerance; a dangerous gulf between the very rich and--not the very poor, there are few of those--but well-paid, speeded-up, ugly-living, dissatisfied labor; something rather hysterical in mass emotion when worked up by the wire-pullers and the spellbinders; and the noisy, blatant, loud-mouthed boasting vulgarity of the mob. I saw the unloveliness of “Main Street,” I met “Babbitt” in his club, parlor car, and private house. But though I did not shut my eyes to all that, and much more than that--a good deal of it belongs to civilization as well as to the United States--I saw also the qualities that outweigh these defects, and, in my judgment, contain a great hope for the world. I met, everywhere, numbers of men and women who have what seems to me a clean, sane, level-headed outlook on life and its problems. They believe in peace, in a good chance for the individual, in a decent standard of life for all people, in honesty and truth. They are impatient of dirt, however picturesque, of ruin, however romantic, of hampering tradition, however ancient. They are, in the mass, common-sense, practical, and good-natured folk, who, in the business of life, cut formalities and get down to the job.

But behind all that common sense and their practicality, they are deeply sentimental, simply and sincerely emotional, quick to respond to any call upon their pity or their charity, and when stirred that way, enormously generous. I agree with General Swinton, the inventor of the “Tanks” who, after a tour in the United States, told me, with a touch of exaggeration, that he thought the Americans, as a nation, were the only idealists left in the world. Europe is cynical, remembering too much history, and suffering too much disillusionment. The United States, looking always to the future, and not much backward to the past, is hopeful, confident of human progress, and strangely and wonderfully eager to find a philosopher’s stone of human happiness, for which we, in Europe, have almost abandoned search.

I think that, as a people, they are more ready than any other to do some great work of rescue for humanity (I have told how they fed ten million people a day in Russia), and to adopt and carry out an ideal on behalf of humanity in the way of peace and reconstruction, at some personal sacrifice to themselves. That is possible at least in the United States, and it may almost be said that it is impossible in any other nation.

As a personal experience, my first visit to the United States was exciting and rather overwhelming, in an extremely pleasant way, except for my extreme nervousness. For the first time in my life I was made to believe (except for secret doubts and a sense of humor) that I was a person of some importance. By good fortune, of which I was not aware until my arrival in New York, I had gained the good opinion, and almost personal popularity, of an immense American public from coast to coast. I do not minimize the pleasure of that, the real joy of it, for there is no reward in the world so good to a man who for years has been an obscure writer, as to realize at last that his words have been read and remembered, with emotion, by millions of fellow mortals, almost by a whole nation--and this had happened to me. It happened by the great luck that since the entry of the United States into the War my daily dispatches from the Western front had been published in _The New York Times_, and a syndicate of newspapers covering the whole country. Day after day during those years of enormous history, I appeared with the grape fruit and the cereal at millions of American breakfast tables, and because of the things I had to tell, and perhaps, a little, the way in which I told them (I tried to give the picture and the pity of the things I saw), I got home to the bosom and business (to use Francis Bacon’s words) of the American merchant, lawyer, and city man, to the lady whom he provides with a Packard or a Ford (according to his rung on the social ladder) and to the bright young thing who is beginning to take an interest in the drama of life outside her dancing school or her college rooms. My articles were read on lonely farms, in tenement houses, by Irish servant girls, Slav foundry workers, German metal workers, clerks and telephone girls, as well as by all manner of folk in Fifth Avenue, Riverside Drive, and the Main Street of many towns. I am not making a boast of that, for if I had written like an archangel instead of like a war correspondent (there’s a difference), I should not have secured those readers unless _The New York Times_ and its syndicate had stepped in where angels fear to tread--in Chicago, and other American cities. But it was my luck, and, as I say, pleasant and encouraging.