I EXILED TO SIBERIA

“Let me see your palm!”

A smiling major thus accosted me in the offices of the Military Intelligence Division of the General Staff of the army in Washington the latter part of July, 1918.

The weather was hot as Billy-be Hanged—hotter than I had ever known it in the Philippines, or so it seemed. It was hotter than the roadstead of Singapore, hotter than the mud-baked streets of Suez City, hotter than Malacca Strait.

In former times of tropical soldiering, I had seen commanding generals working in their undershirts. But a new discipline pervaded our new army, and we were imitating the Prussian system, and doing our best to look and work as secretly as possible in uniform coats with high stiff collars. We realized that the more uncomfortable we might feel, the quicker the war would be won in France.

I gave my limp and perspiring hand to the smiling major. I suspected that his pleasantry meant that I had been selected to pay for the dinner that night of our own particular little group of plotters against the Imperial German Government and its agents in the United States.

“You are going to take a long journey,” said the major, as he examined the corns on my fingers, which were the result of soldiering with a pencil. For having been a cavalryman, the powers that be in Washington had given me a flat-top desk covered with a blue sheet of blotting paper, and a swivel chair as a buffer for my spurs. What I wanted to do was to cross sabers with the Death Head Hussars, and maybe get a thrust at the Crown Prince himself. But when I looked at that blue blotter every morning, I realized what a terrible war it was, after all—for old cavalrymen.

My smiling major sobered suddenly.

“You are going to take a long journey,” he said.

I caught a serious glint in his eyes, and holding my breath for an instant before I dared speak, I asked as casually as I could: “Will it be a sea trip?”

Another serious examination of the lines in my palm.

“Yes.”

“Do you,” I asked, “see in the delicate hand you hold any indication that I am to be thrown among rude and rough soldiers, where a man may swear with a gentle forbearance without being overheard by a stenographer who chews gum?”

“I do,” said the amateur seer, more serious than ever.

“Glory be!” I breathed. “I have been in your beautiful city just eight days, and the chef at the hotel cooks well, but he does not know how to growl, not being an army cook. Also, this blue blotter is making me color blind. Have I been ordered to where bombs are bursting in air?”

“You have. There are a lot of bums in the direction you are going. Plans have been made to establish a new front against Germany in Russia. I suggest that you make your will and go out and buy some fur mittens. Your orders are to report to Vladivostok, for duty in Siberia.”

I sat down and turned the electric fan in such a way that I got its full effect in my face, and tried to shiver. Siberia! How many times had that word been heard with feelings of terror by Russians doomed to exile! Fancy my impressions in mid-summer in Washington, on being told that I was going to Siberia! Cold, ice, snow, steppes, wolves, whiskers, prisons, Cossacks, wild horses, ski’s and ovitches! All these things passed in review before my mind’s eye against a background of heat waves rising out of F Street, where the coolest thing in sight was a traffic policeman near the Treasury Building, standing on melting asphalt under a white umbrella which displayed an advertisement of a nearby soda fountain.

I reached for my blue desk-blotter, tore it in bits, and hurled the pieces into the waste basket.

The smiling major wandered away to the nether regions, where they wrote orders which sent American soldiers into exile in Siberia, as calmly as they wrote orders which insisted that all officers keep their blouses buttoned to their chins in tropical Washington.