V BOLSHEVISTS AND BATHS

The slow progress of our train gave me many opportunities to talk with Siberians who had been to the United States. Compared to the natives who had never left home, they were highly intelligent, but much of their mental agility put them in the class of people described by Artemas Ward as “folks who know a lot that ain’t so.”

All those who had been to the United States with whom I talked, said the United States was “No good—a capitalistic country.”

I frankly asked them why they thought so. They had worked in the steel mills, the packing-houses and in the factories, and instead of becoming “Americanized”, as we at home so proudly boast about our immigrants, they had apparently lived, worked and talked with groups of their own countrymen, and outside of picking up enough English to get along with, had become no more American than if they had remained in the heart of Siberia.

They had all the patter of the agitators against the “capitalistic classes”, for which they can hardly be blamed, for from the time they landed on our shores till they left, they were exploited in various ways, every advantage being taken of their ignorance and helplessness in a strange country.

And when they came to explain why they thought the United States to be no good, invariably they backed their original statement with tales of hard labor for poor pay, and then informed me that the newspapers of the United States admitted that we had no democracy, that we were a nation of “wage slaves,” and that revolution was coming soon in my country.

One of these men had pamphlets issued by a strike-leader in Lawrence, urging violence against the mill-owners; clippings from a Chicago paper which told of deplorable conditions in the districts inhabited by steel-workers of Pittsburgh and outlining a plan for improvement. But in reading the clipping, the Siberian overlooked entirely the fact that bad conditions were described for the purpose of guarding against reproducing them, and to take some action to correct the evils. He read with understanding only those paragraphs which stated that conditions were deplorable, and were soon to be eradicated.

And this paper, fighting editorially against exploitation, he described as part of our “capitalistic press.” He interpreted its printed protests as mutterings before a coming revolution. The editor, undoubtedly striving to aid and uplift the working men, perhaps never dreamed that what he printed would be used as propaganda to prove his paper part of a “capitalistic press.”

Another clipping from a radical sheet printed in the middle west, described the mounted constabulary of Pennsylvania, as “Cossacks, organized and supported by capitalists, to cut down the workers.” This man did not know that this state police force is maintained and supported by the state—he read the caption literally and believed that it was a private punitive force in the hire of the mill-owners. He also believed they were Cossacks!

Freedom of the press, and freedom of speech, are two of our greatest liberties. But when Russians who have been to the United States, can return to Siberia and tell the population that we are worse than Russia, and that we are going to have a revolution, and read to the people sensational statements and half-baked and distorted information, at the same time that we are in that country trying to prove our friendship for them and asserting that the United States is a free country, something is wrong. That is the state of affairs which confronted us from the first in Siberia.

I do not maintain that our systems are perfect. I have much sympathy for the “working classes,” having begun life as a boy in a factory, served in the ranks of the army and before the mast in ships.

“Ah!” said a Siberian to my interpreter, waving his hand in the direction of vacant ground near a small river, “If the Americans would only build a factory here for us, and make jobs.”

“But you are opposed to capitalism,” I said.

“Yes,” he nodded. “We are fighting it.”

“If an American built a factory here, it would take money-capital.”

“Oh, yes,” he said.

“The Russians have burned a lot of factories.”

“Yes.”

“If a factory were built here would you burn it?”

“Maybe we would.”

“Then how can you expect a man with money, which is capital, to come here and build a factory, if it is likely it would be burned?”

He pondered this. “We might only take it away from him,” he decided.

“But Americans do not go round building factories if they are going to be burned, or taken away by the workers.”

“Why not,” he asked. “All Americans are rich. They ought to build factories for the poor people, to give them work. You do it in America.”

“But a factory to keep running, must make a profit.”

“We do not believe in profits,” he said, his face lighting up at the happy thought that he had met my arguments.

“I do not believe you need worry much about them,” I retorted, and left him scratching his head.

As we proceeded north, stopping occasionally at vast wood-piles to replenish our engine, we crossed limitless plains.

I had a paper from home. It contained an editorial on the menace of famine in Siberia. I read it. Then I looked out of the window—and tears came to my eyes. Famine! There it was! From horizon to horizon, on either side of the train, stretched vast plains dotted with shocks of wheat—unthreshed wheat.

The sight of that wheat made me shudder. It reminded me of the fact that the people at home, bless their Christmas-tree souls, were conserving wheat, and sending some to the starving proletariat of Siberia to cure them of Bolshevism. What the various governments struggling with the problem did not realize was that the Siberians were also conserving wheat! For the shocks I saw were not a one-year crop. On those plains were stacked up the crops of two years!

Some wheat had been threshed. Now and then, near stations, I saw it piled up in sacks—acres of sacks, ten high. The top sacks, as a rule, were rotten, having been there for months. “Nitchyvo! The Americanskys have come, and all will be well.” The drosky-drivers fed their horses freely from the piled grain. The field mice had established their winter homes in the piles, thus realizing some of the benefits of Bolshevism.

Why, you ask, was this wheat not moved? The station sidings were indeed full of freight cars. But refugees were living in those cars. In other cars Allied troops were quartered. Troops being moved required cars. Allied commissions travelling up and down for political or military reasons used any remaining engines. Naturally the wheat could not be moved!

Our train reached Khabarovsk about two o’clock in the morning, and we remained in the cars till mess. Then the troops were turned out in full kit, and carrying their bulky barrack-bags stuffed with all their belongings, we began the march to the Russian barracks some three miles distant.

It was a warm and sunny morning. The roofs of the city became visible as we tramped up toward the high ground, covered with the brick barracks built by the Russian army, and beyond the town shone the wide reaches of the Amur River. The city had been captured from Bolshevist forces but a month before, and the Twenty-seventh Infantry, under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Morrow had hastened to get into action with the Japanese, but arrived too late. The Bolshevist forces resisted up to a certain point, and then melted away. They became peasants working in the fields—and the Japanese asked these peasants where the Bolshevists were!

So although Khabarovsk was accustomed to a large Russian garrison in normal times, and had already become accustomed to the American doughboy, our column attracted considerable attention. And I was sorry that transportation had not been arranged for the men’s heavy bags, which they packed on their shoulders in addition to their regular marching kits, for six hundred men bent under baggage, struggling up the hilly roads, do not present an inspiring spectacle.

We Americans in foreign parts do not seem to care anything for the psychology of the land in which we are operating; we are intensely practical, and entirely too sure that the American way of doing things is the best way, and take no account of the effect we may create upon foreign peoples—overlooking the fact that first impressions are most vital.

Now Asia is a land in which the bearing of burdens marks one of the lowest caste. The Siberian is Asiatic in his viewpoint, being so closely in touch with China and Manchuria. And, as in China, to be seen carrying heavy burdens when there is no necessity for it, means that a man’s standing is ruined; no matter how smartly he may dress, or how decently he may comport himself, or what he may do to show his superiority after he has been seen at what is considered debasing toil, the Asiatic never forgets that this foreigner has been a bearer of burdens. He carries forever that impression in the back of his head, on occasion dares to be insolent, and judges by that standard all people of that race.

And to go into Siberia, with an army, claiming to be a democracy in which all men are free and equal, yet with men who are “conscripts” in the sense understood by Asia, and then display those “conscripts” doing the work of pack-animals, is most confusing to the Siberian, the Cossack, the Chinese, and Japanese. They cannot understand our assertion that all are equal, or that many men of the United States have willingly responded to a “draft,” and are willingly submitting themselves to the orders of their officers in order to maintain freedom and equality. We say one thing, and demonstrate another. I once tried to explain this phenomenon of all serving the common cause, some in the ranks and some as officers, to a keen Chinese servant who had been in Hong Kong and knew English well. When I had finished, he looked at me, and reaching for the skillet to fry some eggs, remarked, sagely: “You talk lie.”

If the regimental band had been at the station that morning in Khabarovsk, and the heavy baggage left to be hauled by wagons, and the men had marched to the barracks under arms with swinging strides and heads up, it would have been worth several million dollars to the United States in Asia—and worth much to the men themselves. It would have raised our troops in the estimation of Japanese and Russians. Instead, our column toiled along, resting every few hundred yards, and resuming the march with a series of painful grunts and muttered curses.

As we climbed the last hill, a flock of geese swung in ahead of us, and marching in splendid style, led us to the entrance to the post. There the column remained in the road for an hour, while the regimental band came and played in honor of a party of Japanese statesmen who happened at that time to be calling on the commandant, Colonel Styer, and making an inspection of the city. This, of course, was a necessary and proper honor to pay the guests, and accounted in part for the fact that we had to arrive without music; but as the visitors were not long in the post, our departure from the station might have been deferred till the music was available. After eight days in crowded box-cars, that band was most inspiring when we did hear it, and the weary doughboys were soon chaffing merrily, glad to have found their new home.

In discussing these matters, I wish it understood that I am not criticizing any individual, but the people of the United States so eager to make a good showing abroad and to convince foreign peoples of our good motives and our army so careful not to offend, seem to need something in the way of a code to follow so as to learn to put the best foot forward when away from home.

The British, having had so much more experience with Asiatics, have learned the value of good impressions, and by observing what we may consider trifles, have held and administered the affairs of many lands in the East more by these trifles than by actual force of arms.

I know that our attitude has been in the Philippines, Cuba and elsewhere, “In time these people will learn that we mean all right.” In time they do. But we send an army into foreign countries in much the same manner as a man might attend a first formal dinner in boots, a fishing coat, and a woolen shirt, and on entering the dining-room, trip over a rug when preparing to bow to the hostess. In time, he might establish the fact that he was a man of some breeding. Most people, both for their own comfort, and the comfort of hosts, would prefer to display their breeding first, for some of the guests might leave before the uncouth one had a chance to prove that he was not a boor.

Once the details of turning over the reinforcements were accomplished, with the major who had commanded the train, I took a drosky, and sought the best bath-house in the city. How that vehicle ever held together was a mystery to both of us. The roads were both rutty and full of yielding mud, and as we galloped toward town, first one of us and then the other was in danger of being hurled out to the black pigs along the streets.

The cost of a “bolshoi” or grand bath, was two rubles each, and being provided with soap and towels, we were escorted to a room containing an old sofa and a dressing table weak in the legs. The attendant brought us a small tub of water, for what purpose I have not the slightest idea, as the room adjoining contained a bath-tub of Russian dimensions, a shower big enough for an elephant, and all the pipes full of blazing hot water. The Siberian does not bathe himself—he parboils himself.

The temperature of both rooms was exceedingly hot and humid, so that in a few minutes all our clothing was moist and clammy; and to make matters worse, the ambitious attendant came in and hurled buckets of water over the big marble slab, which was heated by pipes, filling both rooms with a stifling steam. I opened the windows promptly, to his great horror, and drove him away as gently as possible with the one Russian word I had to fit the occasion—“Scurrai,” and he scurried.

When I had laid my clothing out on the ancient sofa, I realized that the place had not been swept or dusted for a decade. I made a mental picture of the limitless number of people who had divested themselves of their garments in that very spot. It was not such as had gone on their way, clean and rosy, which worried me, but what they had left behind, to inhabit temporarily the crevices of the sofa. So I hastened my bathing under the shower, and dressed as rapidly as possible, after discreet shakings of all my wearing apparel.

The clerk below regarded me with surprise when I went down. He thought I had not bathed at all, but had come back to make some complaint. He did not realize that I had hurried to avoid complaints in the future, when he might not be present to get the benefit of my vocabulary. I am sure he thought me most tentative about my bath, and not a particularly clean man.

It takes the ordinary Siberian about an hour to get himself properly tender. For some strange reason, known only to the inscrutable American mind, I had failed to cook myself a full two rubles worth, and had surrendered my room to a Chinese who did not appear to be a regular client, judging from his lack of grooming.

The major had been as precipitate as myself, having been duly influenced by my active imagination. Once more we risked our lives in the drosky.