Part 15

I remember one officer who sat at the head of a great table and represented the Ataman while Semenoff was out of the city. He was in a drunken stupor, with his head resting on his chest, when the Cossack band in the next room broke out into a loud and rattly patriotic air. The host roused himself and got to his feet. He showed every sign of being inspired to utter profound thoughts. He put up a swaying arm, as a signal for somebody to stop the band, and when a young officer ran out into the next room, the tune did stop abruptly. Meanwhile, the presiding officer hung in stays for a full five minutes like a ship waiting to come up into the wind. Suddenly the bandsmen, evidently feeling that the silence in the next room should be covered, broke out again in music. It was checked none too politely.

Once more the officer gathered himself, and managed to blurt out the single word: “Russians!” Then he lapsed into silence. The band exploded, so to speak, beginning on the very bar on which they had left off. Somebody hurled an empty vodka bottle into the next room, and demanded silence. The band stopped. This intermittent playing sounded for all the world like a gigantic phonograph being stopped and started while somebody tinkered with its machinery.

Our officer uttered a sentence in Russian, swayed and sat down heavily in his chair. He was asleep by the time he touched the seat. Another officer felt that he must fill the breach and cover the failure of his superior. He was not quite so drunk as his chief. He strode to the balustrade of a balcony, dragging behind him his heavy saber, which had become unhooked. He raised his arm to command attention, and the sudden readjustment of his center of gravity threw him heavily against the balustrade. He lost his balance and fell off the balcony, a distance of some ten feet to the floor.

But the floor was merely a landing at the head of a long stairway. In getting up he missed his footing, and tumbled the length of the stairs, his descent being accompanied by the musical rattle of his saber. The cooks in the kitchen picked him up, and somebody ordered the band to resume playing, which it did, at the very note where it had last left off. No one dared to laugh.

In itself, this incident may appear trifling. Yet it must be borne in mind that at the table was the governing body of Chita, less the Ataman himself. But the Ataman’s brother was there, a distinguished-looking man wearing a Japanese order. And he was not drunk. Mr. Tashkin, the head of the “civil government” of the province, was also present--sober, quiet, dignified. I wondered what he was thinking while this orgy was going on.

And Japanese officers were present, jolly but self-contained, spending most of their time explaining to some insistent Russian officer that they could not drink any more champagne. And all the Russian speeches were of a most patriotic character, and told of the wonderful things in store for Russia under the flags of Ataman Semenoff.

Marvels were to be accomplished by all those present to restore Holy Russia to her greatness before the world. The soldiers serving the tables were quiet and sober. It did not take gigantic brain power to understand that Russia would never regain any great powers with Semenoffs set in the saddle.

And I managed, quite by mistake, to get into the kitchen in the basement when I went down for my coat and cap. There I found at an early hour in the morning, a group of poor old men and women in dirty rags mechanically going about their work of cleaning dishes and mopping the floors. And they looked at the Americansky officer with inquiring eyes. Somewhere in their brains I suspect they wondered if the Americans were upholding Semenoff’s régime. It looked that way. Was I not a guest at the banquet?

This exposition of what was going on in Chita may appear to be bad form on the part of one who was a guest. But in effect I was the United States at that banquet, and the people of the United States were paying me as an officer to learn as much about Siberia as I could, and the people of the United States have a right to know what I learned.

My hosts knew I was an official guest, and their hospitality was not really hospitality to me in the proper sense, but an attempt to gain my esteem by proving to me that they were good fellows. They thought that champagne would gain for them a favorable report from me. But the future of Russia, and more particularly future relations and understandings between the United States and Russia, should not rest on the good-fellowship of wine. I can report on the splendid hospitality of the Siberians, as dispensed on their own understanding of hospitality. I cannot say I would commend Semenoff’s officers as suitable administrators. It is quite likely that while the band was playing, they were having several persons executed in a grove. Festivity has been known to be used as a cover for firing squads.

Semenoff and others had lost hope that the United States would coöperate with them against the Bolshevists, and had turned to other agencies from which they might expect financial aid and moral support.

We demanded that an ideal government be formed before we would recognize any. If an actual honest and competent government had been formed I doubt if we would have recognized it, because no government could, or will be formed, which will not be criticized by some Russian faction. And all some Russian had to do in order to discredit with us any government or leader that rose, was to whisper that such was “monarchists,” or “not representative,” or “reactionary.” And all of those charges would be true, for the simple reason that in any group of Russians which can be gathered together there are bound to be among them some who are monarchists, or not representative of all Russia, or reactionary.

Kolchak formed a government at Omsk in November, 1918. He has not been recognized yet by the United States. Some say he is a monarchist in his sympathies. A former officer of the Czar’s fleet, his training and sympathies are bound to be monarchistic in tendency. He feels that a firm hand is necessary in dealing with the Russian situation. If we had recognized him promptly, and backed him up, Semenoff and Kalmikoff and other lesser lights would have had to adhere to him at once. All power for the regeneration of Russia would have been coördinated, and all ambitions of Cossack chiefs to become local princes, would have been swept away. They would have had to join the parade, and the other Allies would have been willing enough to follow our lead. And a lot of bickering and killing would have been stopped.

For that matter, to give Semenoff and Kalmikoff their due, if they had been recognized, with limitations of their authority, those leaders would have given up much of their petty intriguing from the first, and swung into line behind the United States. They would have listened to our advice.

The whole question when our expedition first landed, was “What will the United States do?” The answer in a couple of months was: “The United States will do nothing--let us start something ourselves, which will repay us for the trouble we have had fighting the Bolshevists.”

So the secret trading began, the forcing of loans from banks got bolder, there was aid which we deprecated from certain quarters to these Cossack chiefs. We played a dog-in-the-manger game, with Christmas-Tree decorations in the form of Red Cross aid, and Y. M. C. A., and Committee on Public Information, and Trade Boards. We conferred and commissioned and sent official representatives in military uniform to various places to make friends, while Bolshevists killed off a vast population, and Cossack chiefs, under the plea of exterminating Bolshevists, executed personal enemies.

We sent two or three hundred railroad engineers into the country, they all thinking that they would be in the army. When they applied for government insurance, they were told they were not in the army. But they wore the uniforms and insignia of our army officers, and when some of them wanted to get out of the country and go home, they were not allowed to quit their jobs. Members of this organization told me that they had been given to understand that if they insisted upon resigning, they could do so, but that they need never again expect to hold a job with an American railroad. And the Russians said that Russian money was paying the salaries of these men--and that these Americans were there to steal the railroad from the Russians. That may sound absurd. But such absurdities thrust at men in Siberia are not pleasant. They reveal to some slight extent the difficult environments in which Americans found themselves in Siberia.

So while in January the temperature hung around seventy degrees below zero, the social atmosphere was about as cold. Some weeks before, having replied to a request that I class myself for discharge or for permanent commission in the army, I had requested discharge.

On January twenty-sixth, in reply to my classification request, I got orders to return to Vladivostok as soon as an officer who was to relieve me, arrived in Chita. I had offered my services for the war, and the war was over.

I immediately informed my friends that I was leaving soon for the United States. General Oba’s chief of staff gave a Japanese dinner at headquarters, and invited the British officers and me. We had a most enjoyable time, free from the drunkenness which marked Siberian affairs. In fact, it was my most enjoyable official function in Chita.

I made my official call on Oba the day of my departure, and he came to my room to say farewell. I was sincerely sorry to say good-bye to him.

Captain B---- and Mrs. B---- had planned to go to Vladivostok before I was relieved. They delayed their departure in order to go with me. And we went in the private car of a Russian colonel who was going to Harbin. He was in Semenoff’s service, but I surmised that he was too high a type of officer and gentleman ever to get very far in the councils of the Ataman. I did not remember having met him before in Chita--a rougher element held the front of the stage most of the time.

As the colonel’s car was in the yards, we did not have to sit in the station and wait for the train which was due to arrive from Irkutsk at nine o’clock in the evening of January 31st.

It seemed to be the coldest weather I had ever experienced when with Captain B----, Mrs. B----, and Werkstein, I set out from the Hotel Select. There was a gentle breeze blowing--a barely perceptible movement of the air--which intensified the seventy-below temperature. In the five minutes we were crossing the square before the station, walking against the pressure of a zephyr barely strong enough to stir a feather, the tears ran out of my eyes and froze on my cheeks, and my nose was frost-bitten before I could get the fur band of my cap across it.

I looked back at the line of shops and restaurants. The lights were shining through a gray haze of frozen fog, the doors were shrouded with arches of icicles like entrances to fairy grottoes.

We plunged into the dark labyrinth of lines of cars in the yards. A private train of Semenoff, with the palatial coaches of the old days, protected by a few stamping sentries. Nearby was the Ataman’s armored cars, with the muzzles of field-pieces and machine-guns jutting out over the steel sides which were gleaming white with hoar frost in the pale light of the chilled stars. A dim light spilling from our private car, revealed letters a yard high painted on the end of an armored box-car, in Russian “Cemehobr,” or Semenoff.

I could see in the distance, lights in the upper rooms of the Ataman’s residence. Probably a council of state was being held--or only an informal gathering of women who had recently been brought up from Harbin. Above the clamor of the crowds of refugees in the station, I heard the howling of wolves in the hills.

We got aboard the colonel’s car, and went to bed. The train which was due at nine that night to pick us up, did not pull us out of the city of convicts till nine in the morning of February 1, 1919.

I was started on my journey for New York, exactly on the other side of the world. I was content.

XXIII

CHITA TO VLADIVOSTOK

In about five days we reached Manchuria Station, also known as Mandchuli. At this station we had to change trains, for it was the end of the Baikal division of the railroad and trains for Vladivostok were made up there.

This line being the Chinese Eastern, all stations had our American officers on duty, these men being railroad men serving in the Russian Railway Service. Though we had come this far in the private car of the Russian colonel bound for Harbin, it was advisable to arrange for room in the Vladivostok train where the train was made up, for it would be next to impossible to get accommodations out of Harbin.

I had asked my telegraph operators at Chita to notify by wire the American officer on duty at Manchuria Station the time my train left Chita, and to have him hold for me a coupé, or sleeping compartment, in the proper Vladivostok train. But my operators gave the time I went aboard the private car as time of my departure, saying I had left on Number Four at nine in the evening of January thirty-first. But the Number Four which picked up our car did not leave till nine the following morning. And we made such slow progress, being five days in getting to Manchuria Station, that reservation had been made for me on the Vladivostok train departing the morning before I arrived.

As we pulled into Manchuria Station in the gray dawn of seven o’clock, I saw the frost-covered steel cars of the Vladivostok train lying alongside us. It was due to leave at nine o’clock.

We hastened out of our car with our numerous bags, boxes of food, and cooking utensils. Captain B---- stood guard over our property, Mrs. B---- went to the crowded station restaurant for hot tea, and I went to the telegraph office to find which compartment of the Vladivostok train had been reserved for me. I passed the train on the way to the station, and it was already packed full of people--in seats, aisles and on platforms.

Nobody in the telegraph office had ever heard of reserving anything for me. Neither had the sleepy men in the station-master’s office. I asked for the American officer to whom I had telegraphed--he had been sent to Harbin to hospital, ill. (He died there immediately.) Yes, there was another officer in his place--name unknown, whereabouts unknown. He generally appeared about nine o’clock.

Hastening back to Captain B---- with the bad news, we visited the Vladivostok train to see if we might secure some space. That is, we went near to it, and watched mobs fighting to get aboard every car. It was hopeless. The weather was fifty below zero. We saw the Vladivostok train pull out at nine, leaving us in a swarming station, high and dry on our baggage, to wait till nine o’clock the next morning.

The Chinese customs authorities demanded my lockers, and collected eighty-four rubles in customs duty. A long line of Russians and Chinese, which reached the entire length of the long and dark corridor in the station, waited before the closed ticket window--to buy tickets for the train leaving twenty-four hours later. Many of them had been camping there for days, having food brought to them from the restaurant, in order to buy tickets, which incidentally, gave them only the right to try and get aboard the train.

We breakfasted in the restaurant, it requiring two hours before we were served. And we waited more than an hour before we could get a seat, while Russians and Chinese held the seats and read newspapers over a single cup of tea.

Shortly after nine the American railway officer appeared, and told me that he had reserved space in the Vladivostok train the morning before. As we had not claimed it, he had come to the conclusion that we had not left Chita at all, so did not make any reservation in the next train.

In disgust Captain B---- suggested that we go to the local _sobrania_ and kill time eating. We walked there, some dozen blocks distant, in the face of a gentle breeze, which intensified the bitter cold.

On the way, Captain B---- chanced to look at me. Without warning he shoved me toward a small snow bank, and thrust a handful of snow into my face, rubbing it in hastily. My nose and cheeks were freezing, and I did not know it. But before we reached the _sobrania_ I was chilled to the marrow, and shook so hard after I had sat down at a table, that the dishes rattled. My teeth chattered for a couple of hours, and my shivers were so violent that I had difficulty in drinking the hot tea I ordered. In fact, I shivered violently for two days and nights, though I sat nearly all day in the _sobrania_ restaurant with my back against a slightly warm wall-stove.

We spent the night once more in the colonel’s car, but were up before daylight in order to begin our offensive for space in the next Vladivostok train. With Captain B---- and Werkstein, I ran down the whole length of the train as it arrived in the terribly cold morning with only the light from the frozen stars, seeking for the best cars. We identified the steel cars from the wooden ones by their coats of hoar frost.

The great mob in the station surged out and attacked the train before the sleepy passengers began to get off with their baggage. Immediately there was a terrific jam.

We fought our way into a car, inch by inch, shouldering through the disembarking passengers and clambering over their bundles and bales. The first compartment we could get into was still full of sleepily-protesting passengers, six being jammed into a compartment designed to hold four. The place was in a filthy condition, floors, berths, and window-ledges being covered with food refuse, cigarette stubs, dirty papers, candle-wax, mud which had melted out of ice tracked in at various stations. The single guttering candle revealed it to be in a condition worse than a pig-sty.

“We will hold this,” said Captain B----. “You remain here and I will see the provodnik and pay him to clean it, and see that it is locked. Then we will move our baggage in.”

He returned presently, having given the provodnik twenty rubles for cleaning, and surety of possession. I suggested that my orderly be left to hold it against the mob already swarming in and thrusting the door open as they passed to look in. Captain B---- said that it was safe enough, and that we would breakfast at the station while the coupé was being cleaned, when we would begin moving our baggage. I doubted the safety of this move, but as he was running things and asserted that the station master was a friend, I felt assured that he was right.

After breakfast, still before dawn, I sent my orderly to get our tickets. He came back saying that the line was so long that he could not get to the window. Inquiry developed the fact that I could get a military pass by seeing the Czech officer in charge of transportation. We found him far up the railroad yard in a third-class car, with a lot of his soldiers eating their breakfast. He sat on a shelf and scribbled a pass.

Now our baggage must be moved to the coupé we had set aside in the Vladivostok train. I left my orderly to look after the transfer with the aid of a hired porter, and hastened to the compartment we had chosen.

On the way through the crowd I met Captain B---- who went with me. We found the car a seething mass of humanity, struggling with their boxes in the corridor, and making a fight to gain entrance to every coupé which had been preëmpted by the earliest, luckiest and strongest of the travellers.

To our surprise we found the coupé which we had hired cleaned, full. There was a burly Russian soldier, a Japanese officer, and a pair of Russian civilian speculators lying in the berths, and the whole place was crammed with baggage. They protested wildly at supposed intrusion.

Captain B----, being in Russian uniform overcoat with gold shoulder straps, informed them all that they must get out, as he had reserved the coupé. This met with violent opposition as the party inside was well settled.

Captain B---- called for the provodnik, and as that worthy could or would not come, he seized the baggage nearest at hand and began pitching it out on the heads of those in the corridor.

I managed to get a window open, and he pitched bags and grips out on the mob outside. The effect was magical. Our squatters needed their personal effects more than they wanted the coupé, and they dashed out to salvage their things, expressing themselves in Russian and Japanese as not at all admirers of Captain B----.

I was left holding the fort. Captain B---- hunted up the provodnik, and with a few properly placed kicks, induced him to once more clean the coupé. He tearfully announced that there was no outside lock on the door.

Finally, we got our baggage in after a lot of labor and fighting, and never left that coupé unguarded for a minute the next three days on the way to Vladivostok.

Late one night the Russian conductor managed to get in on the plea that he wanted to see our tickets. He at once announced that he was going to put two more passengers in the coupé, and that the lower berths would have to be shared, despite the fact that it was plain there was barely room for us to get in or out, or to turn round once inside. Captain B---- referred him to me telling him that the coupé was reserved for an American officer, and that he himself had nothing to do with the matter. I lifted myself on one elbow, and reached for my pistol holster. The conductor and his two villainous passengers faded away, and presently we heard a rumpus in the next coupé, where the two men were installed over the protests of some women.

Of course, the conductor probably got a thousand rubles to provide quarters for the two men, whether they had tickets or not, as the speculators pay well for accommodation. They made themselves so obnoxious in the coupé which they got into that the women occupants were forced to get off the train at the next station and wait twenty-four hours for the next train.

At every station we were besieged by incoming passengers, who would thrust the door of the coupé open and insist that they be allowed to enter, and when we refused, they made insulting remarks. Then they camped on their baggage outside the door and sang ribald songs all night, or thrust burning cigarettes through the aperture we left for air by opening the door an inch and keeping the chain on. Or they took occasion to block us in the passage if we attempted to leave the coupé.

In order to allow Mrs. B---- to leave the coupé, I had to carry my pistol in my hand ahead of her, and wait for her to come back. And while the three of us got off at stations for tea, my orderly was left with his automatic in his hand to keep off all comers. We never pointed a gun at anybody, but having it in hand, it prevented burly Manchus, Russians and others from insisting that they had a right to come in.