VII FROM KHABAROVSK TO USHUMUN

A glance at the map shows that a wedge of Manchuria runs up into Siberia. Khabarovsk is at the northern point. The Amur, flowing in a general westerly direction, bending southerly along the northern boundary of the Manchurian province of Tsitsihar, and then turning to the north sharply as it comes in contact with the province of Kirin, runs up the westerly side of the wedge, and from Khabarovsk flows almost due north, where it empties into Amur Gulf, near the Siberian port of Nikolaievsk, opposite the northern end of Saghalien Island.

The Amur branch of the trans-Siberian railroad crosses the Amur River a little to the north of Khabarovsk, and almost parallels the river, but at a considerable distance to the north of it, crossing many tributaries of the Amur flowing from the north. The red line marking the railroad, superimposed on a standard wall map, shows no railroad stations till Kerak, some fifteen hundred versts west of Khabarovsk. And the sectional Intelligence map which I had, was little better, for the spelling of the towns was so radically different, that except for the larger places of simple spelling, I gave up using it except to orient myself by identifying the various small rivers.

Where the name of the town was transformed into English by our Russian map-makers, and then the station-sign in Russian betrayed no special affinity for the Anglicized version, I found many towns which were apparently astray. Like the navigator who having made a landfall was told that the port he was approaching was Karaka, said: “Impossible! Karaka is two hundred miles to the south of here on my chart!” when my interpreter told me that we were arriving in Poperoffka, I looked at my map and said: “Impossible! Unless the Bolshevists have brought Poperoffka here and tied it till they want it.”

There was a company of the Twenty-seventh at Ushumun, our farthest north. I had a limited time in which to reach this company, and with one train a day running, on uncertain schedule, I must needs leave Khabarovsk to complete my itinerary in time.

But there was talk at Khabarovsk that this company would draw down the line, though the time of its departure was uncertain, and its destination unknown. At headquarters of the Twenty-seventh I could get no definite information, a fact which puzzled me, until I learned that the movement was to be directed by the Japanese commander, General Otani, and that Colonel Styer, in command of the regiment, was waiting for orders as to the movement.

I decided to proceed in accordance with my orders, and from detachments of our troops seek news of the force supposed to be at Ushumun, and either catch it, or go to where it was.

So with my interpreter, I embarked on a passenger train, late at night. We got a “coupé” or compartment, fitted with berths for four persons. It was a so-called “sanitary car” of the second class, and clean and comfortable. The car appeared to be empty except for us, till morning, when we found a Japanese captain and his orderly in the next compartment.

At Nikolsk, on the way to Khabarovsk, and at Vladivostok, there were American officers in the stations, members of the so-called Russian Railway Service, known at home as the Stevens Commission. All were expert railroad men, and telegraph operators, and their presence in stations made travel simple enough. But after leaving Khabarovsk, I found the stations in charge of the regular Russian staffs, and a Japanese staff, the latter with their own telegraphic service. I had been under the impression that every station had officers of our corps, and as I found them missing over the Amur branch, I was puzzled, in addition to being hampered for news and a means of keeping in touch with my own headquarters. At that time this corps was serving only on the Chinese Eastern line, but I did not know it.

An instance of my helplessness may be shown by the fact that the conductor of the train told my interpreter that our car was going through to Ushumun, and that we did not need to make any change at Botchkereva, the junction point for the branch running south to Blagoveschensk. We arrived at Botchkereva about daylight, and I hustled out to the station, leaving my bedding and baggage in the car, as we had been informed that we would have a stop of an hour to wait for a train coming from the south.

I had so far received no information concerning the expected movement of the force at Ushumun. I now resolved to telegraph in Russian to Major Miller, the commander, to learn of his plans. We translated into Russian this message: “Please advise if you will be at Ushumun to-morrow, as I am on my way to see you.”

My interpreter and the Russian telegraph operator now engaged in a long debate, and as I was about to inquire into the reasons for it, the interpreter turned to me in consternation and told me that we must get our baggage out of the car as promptly as possible.

We fled down the tracks, and while the car was already moving out, dumped through the window without waiting to roll it, my bedding, grips, and supplies of sugar and tea and other groceries, along with the interpreter’s blankets and kit.

While we were thus distributing our property along the railroad, the interpreter told me that the car was going on the train to Blagoveschensk. He also said that he had learned of this sudden shift of the car by overhearing the Japanese commandant’s interpreter at the station order the Russian station-master to so switch the car, because the Japanese captain in it desired to go to Blagoveschensk. If that order had not been overheard, our kits, so vitally necessary to us, would have been whisked away, locked in the compartment. And our conductor had assured us, by all the saints in the Russian calendar, that the car was bound for Ushumun!

While we jettisoned our property from the car-window, the Japanese captain and his orderly looked on in mild surprise, probably sure that we were wholly mad. In a sense we were. I refrain from including our comprehensive and utterly complete remarks on all things pertaining to the Russians, from the time of the first Michael Romanoff up to the present and into the future.

Having rolled up a fine supply of particularly sharp cinders into my bedding-roll, and placed it on the station platform, a Chinese took a liking to it, and I discovered him making off with it. I doubt if he understood English, but he did get the drift of my remarks, for he dropped the roll.

Once more my interpreter resumed the debate with the Russian operator, and the latter decided to send my message. We had a wait of ten hours for the next train, and I expected to hear from Major Miller in time to know whether to proceed aboard that train for Ushumun.

The station waiting-room, crowded with poor people either waiting for trains, or simply killing time and talking politics, was a most filthy place. According to our standards, they were in dire poverty, but men, women and children were most contented and good-natured, and carried on their primitive housekeeping on the floor, and the mothers performed most intimate services for their children in full view of the assemblage with a carelessness for the senses of their neighbors which appalled me.

Yet no one seemed to mind. Barbaric-looking Mongols, in fur boots and garments smelling of fish and raw fur, came and sprawled at the long table, and demanded tea and cabbage soup, which they disposed of like wild animals come to the kill; great hulking Russian peasants, their heads and faces half-hidden in jungles of long, matted hair, sat crouched on primitive stools, and ate the kernels of sunflower seeds by the hour, throwing a handful of the seeds into their mouths, chewing meditatively, and then ejecting the seeds in a wide semi-circle before them on the floor.

From the window I could see the rude troikas of the farmers drive up, with three horses abreast. They sat in their seats, while their women disembarked from the rude carts, crawling out of the loose straw upon which they had ridden, to unload bottles of milk, cabbage, and potatoes.

While their lords stomped about the station, drinking vodka in secret places, from which they emerged wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands, the women set up the farm products on boxes near the station, and the market was open.

The mothers in the station crowds sought the milk eagerly. Such milk, and in such bottles! The latter had evidently never seen water, but were grimy with old and sticky milk down their sides. The wads of paper and rudely whittled stoppers used as corks were loose, and milk oozed up through them, to become a feeding place for millions of flies.

In some cases the milk appeared to be sold by the drink, a few kopecks giving a man or woman the privilege of drinking from the bottle, while the seller of the milk carefully watched the throat of the buyer and counted the swallows. And I observed that the last swallow taken, consisted of all the cheeks of the buyer would hold.

I saw a bottle snatched from a man, who was attempting to get more than his money’s worth. Everybody laughed, including the bottle-snatcher, and just to show that he was honest, and willing to pay for his little joke, the man threw a few extra postage-stamp kopecks to the woman, and went on his way, his shoulders heaving with mirth over his fun.

Those long hours of waiting at Botchkereva will always stick in my memory as a period in my life when I was reduced to peasantry in Siberia. It was cold and drear enough to make the sugarless tea from the steaming samovar taste like nectar; I acquired a taste for greasy cabbage soup which revealed formless chunks of meat concealed in its foliage.

I shared with a giant Tartar my packet of Moscow biscuits, and marvelled at the amount of nourishment he could still pick from his teeth after he had finished his meal.

Lest I should build up the idea that travel de luxe is all that I know, I wish to establish the fact that I know the forecastles of fishing boats, have lived below in cattle ships, and know intimately the foremast life of tramp steamers. I have lived among savages under most primitive conditions, and know something of the hardships of campaign. I spent eighty days ’tween-decks in a transport from New York to the Philippines by way of Suez in the days when a soldier was a hard-bitted being and knew nothing of Y. M. C. A. or Salvation Army aid. Three times I have made the circuit of the globe, bent on seeing and admiring and fighting, and have always felt more or less at home wherever my campaign hat happened to hang.

But in the Maritime Provinces of Siberia I got the impression of being on a new planet. This place seemed to me farther from civilization than any place I had ever been, despite the fact that a railroad passed the door of the station. The peasant of Siberia can create and endure the vilest conditions of life I have ever witnessed.

It is said that there are queer tribes to the north, on the Siberian littoral, who are more hidden from the world than the natives of Central Africa or the Eskimos of the Arctic—the blacks of Africa and the denizens of the regions near the poles have seen explorers and traders, but civilization has never penetrated portions of the mainland in behind Kamchatka. This territory would no doubt prove to be a rich field to the ethnologist.

I knew that the green minarets of a church not far from the station marked the position of the town, and I induced my orderly to take a walk. We scouted for a bath-house, and found one. It was a primitive structure of logs, floored with rotten adze-hewn planks which were full of splinters, mouldy and dangerously slippery. A girl of about twelve, clad in dirty rags, conducted us into the place. It looked as if it had been deserted for years.

A rude fireplace, built of rocks, held the stubs of charred logs. Above, was a sort of stone oven also made of rocks, but not mortared, so that there were interstices through which a hand could be thrust. It was into this oven-like place that water was thrown, once the rocks were glowing from the fire, and thus the steam was generated for the typical bath.

Merely out of curiosity to see what would happen, I gave the girl a ruble and asked her to prepare the fire and bring water. Kissing the dirty slip of paper money, she went out. In half an hour she had provided one bucket of water and one stick of wood. In time she had a sickly fire going. I judged that in about six hours she would have the rocks of the oven warm enough to turn water into steam.

We went wandering about the town, which consisted of probably a couple of hundred crude buildings, not counting the inevitable yellow buildings near the station, provided for railroad employees. The place seemed almost deserted, except for shivering Chinese at their open-air counters in little kiosks at some of the street-corners. They were huddled in these little huts, and were not at all eager to sell their cigarettes and other goods—they most reluctantly took their hands out of their ample sleeves, which they used as muffs. I believe they were engaged chiefly in selling vodka.

But for all the deserted-village aspect, the place must have been well inhabited. Under the ornately carved eaves of the buildings (which indicate long and boresome evenings spent in whittling) there were hanging long and deep fringes of brown salmon, which had been split and hung up to dry. These drying fish fill the village landscapes of Siberia in the Fall months.

The human being who craves beauty in his surroundings, even in the midst of desolation, is to be commended. Yet when the barbarian carves the house where he keeps his idol, or draws intricate designs on his canoe, or tattoos his body, we say that by these things he betrays his barbarism.

The Siberian can build a squat log house, and with strips of wood cut into the most delicate filigree work, make the ungainly structure dazzle your eyes in a manner only to be rivalled by a silicate Christmas card.

At home we still have houses which appear to be the products of the jig-saw, and look more like wedding cakes than places of residence. And all the time in Siberian villages I was being reminded of Yonkers and other suburban cities.

So I refrain from saying that the ornate eaves and window-trimming of Siberian homes prove the Siberians to be barbarians. It might be better to say that they outdo some of our own inhabitants when it comes to being decoratively-minded.

Barbarism? We are all barbaric still, but we use different methods of revealing it, and such things as are familiar to us, we assert go to prove our civilization. It is always the other fellow who is barbaric when the psychologist goes hunting for stigmata. If, for instance, I had found no decorations on Siberian homes, I might have berated Siberians for neglecting to beautify their surroundings. Those fretted eaves are symbolical of the fact that the Siberian peasant will aspire against all odds to better things, though he may be crushed to earth generation after generation.

Yet if the time and energy represented by these exterior decorations could have been expended on their brains, the Siberians might have saved themselves from many of their past, present and future woes. Or if instead of satisfying the visual yearning for beauty, the people protected their other senses from the terrible and menacing smells which go with their lack of sanitation, they might well do without filigree work on their buildings. For if cleanliness be next to godliness, the Siberian has a long and hard road to travel before he approaches the divinity.

Late in the afternoon we heard a train puffing laboriously up the line, and hastened back to the station. There was no reply to my telegram to Major Miller. One of two things must be done—go on, or give up. The telegraph operator informed me that there was no answer from Ushumun. The Japanese captain in charge of the station came to tell me that if I were seeking Major Miller, that officer was still at Ushumun, as his Japanese operators had so informed him not an hour before.

The train arrived, and unloaded another throng of unkempt natives. Those in the station clambered aboard, fighting for places in the fourth-class cars, already over-crowded in spite of the human freight which had disembarked.

The usual scramble for hot water for tea-kettles took place; men bought double handfuls of red salmon-eggs, big as peas, and giving off an odour similar to a glue factory. Caviare? No, they have never heard of caviare. Eekrah, they call this vile mess.

The milk market did a lively business, while the engine loaded wood, in the leisurely manner with which all such work is done. The train crew abandoned the train, and made an onslaught on the cabbage soup and tea—and talk! such a flood of talk they produced with the Russian staff of the station!

With my baggage stowed in a crowded fourth-class car, holding some forty persons each determined to keep inviolate the few inches of seating space already pre-empted, I got into the open air again, and attracted by the clamor of the railroad men in the station, I got my interpreter to translate some of the conversation, which, by the vigor shown by the talkers, must indicate something afoot which would stand out in Russian history. Perhaps a new revolution, or the Czar had come back to the throne.

This was the burden of their excited discussion:

The engine is bad.

When will these accursed Japanese go away?

The weather is good.

I am very thirsty.

I have a lazy Chinese for a helper.

Ivan, who worked at Nikolsk, is sick.

Do you remember when Peter fell in the river?

The tea is good.

I will see my wife when I go back to First River.

My mother’s mother had a boil ten years ago—she cured it with ashes.

What time is it? Never mind, what does it matter?

My brother’s cow has a calf.

And the world shuddering about what would happen to the Russian people, groping amid the ruins of a shattered nation! Massacres in Petrograd and Moscow, in Samara and Perm, Vladivostok in control of Allied troops, wreck and ruin, refugees and desolation, unlimited numbers of factions quarreling to see who would pick the bones of the country, intrigue, murder and sudden death stalking through city and town, the very railroad on which they worked ready to lie down and die in its tracks, their wages six months overdue, and no telling what would happen to-morrow to themselves or their families—these people calmly discussed the birth of a relative’s calf!

And I, with several thousand other American citizens, had cast aside all the things we held dear, to come half way round the world and fight to save Russia! The American people poured men and money, to help these people, and for a long time will be paying the bills. But the Russian worried only about the temperature of his tea, and wondered why we should worry at all about him or his affairs. And the railroad men in Siberia represent the best type of working men, far above the simple peasant in mental advancement.

With a similar state of affairs at home, can we imagine the crew of one of our passenger trains finding nothing to discuss but trivial personal affairs? Yet we persisted in considering the Russian people on a par with our own in seeking enlightened government and an orderly condition of life, once they had rid themselves of the oppressing Czar and his bureaucrats.

In due time, our train moved out. The car windows were sealed tightly against any outside air. The three decks of sleeping shelves were filled with men, women and children, so completely that from floor to ceiling there was a solid block of humanity. I managed to secure a shelf for my blankets, by watching those who prepared to detrain at stations ahead, and taking the space before the new passengers got in.

The narrow aisle was so piled with cases and bags of merchandise and personal effects, that it was almost impossible to get in or out of the car. And there were battles royal at every station, as one mob tried to get out while the other mob fought its way inside. There were many Chinese, peddling with packs, carrying salt, tea, sugar and such necessities, and selling them at exorbitant prices. Instead of sugar, there was also a cheap, highly-colored candy, used to sweeten tea—and give it most outlandish flavors.

These speculating Chinese were most rude and insolent to the Siberians. I saw a pair of them drive a woman and her two children from a seat, and leave them standing, in order to get the seat for themselves. A young Cossack officer hove them out bodily, but they ran after the train and rescued their baggage. They who had been so overbearing with a helpless woman, gave a fine exhibition of cringing when they in turn found themselves in the presence of a strong and ruthless personality.

The provodnik distributed candles as darkness came on, and we rattled along through the night at about ten miles an hour, slowing down discreetly to cross temporary bridges, which had been built where the Bolshevists, as they fled before the Allies, had blown out the original structures.

The candles increased the richness of our air-mixture, and as they burned low and guttered smoking tallow over bare feet of sleepers, the odor of the salmon-roe, cached in tin cans about the car, almost lost its lusty pervasiveness. I awoke at about midnight, and though the candles were still glimmering faintly and producing a nut-flavored smoke, the salmon-roe still held its own, and asserted its presence unmistakably.

The cause of my waking was a burly Chinese, who mistaking me for a peasant as I lay on my shelf rolled in my blankets, took the liberty of heaving several of his heavy boxes in upon me, in an attempt to discourage me from occupying so much space. My reading of Darwin made me realize that it was a case of the survival of the fittest. I felt particularly fit, and when that Chinese had eliminated himself from the car, along with his baggage, I went back to sleep. I forgot in the meantime the necessity for maintaining cordial international relations with China, and made it a purely personal matter.

Incidentally, it must be the boldest spirits among the Chinese who dared travel in that part of Siberia with anything of value. I was awakened later that night by a great to-do in the car, when Cossacks at a station went through the train and looked all the passengers over, including baggage. They took two Chinese out of the car, with some bulky bundles. The bundles proved to be full of packets of paper rubles. The Cossacks debated among themselves as to whether so much wealth was not in itself evidence of criminality, and favored confiscating the money. How much was given up, I do not know, but once more the Chinese came back, settled themselves for sleep upon their shelf and we rolled merrily on.

Toward morning I was awakened once more by a big peasant who stepped upon my face, in order to climb to the top of the car. I watched him mount upward, till he was in reach of a ventilator, and I came to the conclusion that I had misjudged peasants when it came to desiring fresh air—it was obvious that this man desired to tamper with the ventilator in the ceiling so that it would provide a better opening to let out our bad odors.

But instead, before my horrified eyes, he closed it! And not satisfied with its natural tightness, he stuffed into it a Russian newspaper in which had been wrapped salmon-eggs! I roused myself, dressed, and went out on the car-platform in the crisp, cool air where I waited for the sun to rise over the bleak hills.

Before long, we came to a small yellow depot, with this signboard upon it, as near as I can reproduce with Roman letters: “YXXYMYH”—it was Ooshoomoon, or Ushumun, the y’s distributed through its system providing the oo sounds in Russian.

Not an American soldier in sight. We learned from the telegraph operator that Major Miller and his force had left the evening before in a troop-train, and had passed us during the night, going in the direction from which we came.

As for my telegram to Major Miller, the operators had never heard of it. I suppose the operator at Botchkereva had pocketed my rubles, and let it go at that. Anyhow, that is the most brilliant procedure I can ascribe to him. He was either a fool or a knave. With the people then operating the trans-Siberian railroad, the theory that they mask their knavery under stupidity has proven true with me, in the long run. By appearing stupid, and so making fools of the smart Americanskys, they prove their superiority to us, according to their Asiatic style of reasoning. They would rather pocket our money than to show to us something in the nature of human intelligence.

But my missing Major Miller was not vital, except in so far as I was concerned with the element of time. We got our baggage out of the car, and faced the prospect of spending the night and most of the next day in the primitive little station, waiting for the single train running daily, which would take us back toward Khabarovsk.