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.

SOME AMERICAN RAILROAD MEN OF THE “RUSSIAN
RAILWAY SERVICE”

WASHING CLOTHES IN SIXTY-BELOW-ZERO WEATHER

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.

At one station down the line where we were to get coal for our engine, we were delayed several hours because there was no coal. The mine was not far away, but with typical Siberian procrastination, the coal was allowed to run short at the station. When a train arrived which needed coal, it was time enough to order an engine and a dozen coal cars to proceed to the mine, load up, and return with a supply. So we lay in the yards, and kept other trains at other stations waiting, till we had coaled and released traffic in both directions. The branch line running to the mine could have kept the coal yards full, with a switch engine and one coal-car, but that would require planning ahead, and doing something before it was actually necessary to do it.

At another station, we waited five hours to change a hot “brass” on a journal. This job at home takes some ten minutes. As I watched a poor Chinese mechanic scraping the bearing in forty-below weather, using a primitive tool, I realized that the “hordes of cheap labor in Asia” need not worry us at home. This mechanic would put the semi-cylindrical bearing into the journal-box and take it out. Where it showed oil stains, the metal had to be scraped away to get a good fit for the bearing. He always scraped too much off where the oil showed it to be ill-fitting, and of course, when he put it in again, oil revealed that the spots which he had not scraped, now stuck up. So he scraped these spots away and repeated the process.

We were held up one night at a tiny telegraph station on the plains. After six hours wait, Captain B—— and I attempted to ascertain when we might expect to go on. We learned that there was a wreck two versts ahead. There were two cars off the track—freight cars. It developed later that the reason we had to wait so long to get two freight cars off the track, was due to the fact that some cases containing books had been smashed in the wreck, and the books scattered along the line. Before that freight train would come in, these cases had to be repacked and renailed till they presented their original appearance as near as it was possible to make them, by Siberian railroad men working with a single old lantern which burned lard-oil. While they tinkered with cases of books in semi-darkness, the train for Vladivostok, and all other traffic for miles in both directions, were held nearly all night. Fancy an American passenger train held till smashed cases of freight could be rebuilt and repacked!

We got into Vladivostok three days late. The transport in which I should have sailed for home departed the day before I arrived. And a notice in headquarters warned me not to go near the Trans-Siberian station because there were many cases of typhus among the refugees sleeping in the corridors! It is needless to state that I calmly went there for my baggage without worrying about typhus after living so many days in trains and stations reeking with typhus and other diseases. But one gets very finicky living at headquarters. Incidentally, there was a lot of tiger hunting done on the stairs of headquarters at Vladivostok. The whole staff became inveterate tiger hunters, and remained so, till a big Siberian tiger came down near Vladivostok and killed a bull and ate it.

On the fifteenth of February, 1919, I was aboard the Russian steamer Simbirsk when it pushed out through the ice in the bay. But I was not yet out of Siberia. The stewards never cleaned our rooms or made up our berths, the ship still had the same old Siberian smell, the decks and carpets in salon and passage-ways remained consistently filthy, and we had to put to sea without an adequate supply of fresh water.

In two days I reached Tsuruga, Japan, went to Yokohama by train, and caught the Tenyo Maru for San Francisco. When ashore in Japan, I found once more that the world was going on in its old way—trunks could be checked, tickets purchased which insured the right to a seat in a train, beds were clean, food came soon after being ordered. I felt as if I had escaped from an insane asylum. I had had enough of Bolshevism to last me the rest of my life. And I suggest that when any men or women develop a leaning for Bolshevism in this country, that they be shipped to Siberia. The trip will kill or cure.