CHAPTER I

ST. PETERSBURG TO GODZIADAN

_August 8, 1905._

I left St. Petersburg this evening for Manchuria. The one absorbing discussion in St. Petersburg is the question of the peace negotiations. Will there be peace or not?

IN THE TRAIN ON THE WAY TO IRKUTSK,

_August 11th_.

I started for Irkutsk on the 9th from Moscow. The train is crowded with people—officers going to the war, men of business going to Siberia, women and children. It is exceedingly hot. The last time I travelled in this Trans-Siberian express the winter had just given way to the leafless and bare aspect of early spring. Now we travel through great stretches of green plains, past huge fir-woods which are burnt and browned by the heat. The topic of the peace negotiations continues to prevail above all other topics. I am constantly asked my opinion. We have just received the latest telegrams from Portsmouth. A man of business asked me if I thought there would be peace. I said “Yes.” “There won’t be,” he replied. The railway line is fringed all the way with pink flowers, which, not being a botanist, I take to be ragged robin. At night the full moon shines spectral and large over the dark trees and marshes, and every now and then over stretches of shining water. The officers discuss the war from morning till night. They abuse their generals mercilessly. They say that it is impossible for Russians to look foreigners in the face. In my compartment there is an army doctor. He assisted at the battle of Mukden and is now returning for the second time to the war. He tells me that he wrote a diary of his experiences during the battle and that he is unable to re-read it now, so poignantly painful is the record. He trusts there will not be peace. He is sanguine as to the future. He loathes the liberal tendencies in Russia and detests Maxim Gorki. Yet he is no Jingo.

A gentleman from Moscow, and his wife, on the contrary, inveigh bitterly against the Government and the war. (I saw these same people again at Moscow after the December rising. Their house was situated in a street where the firing had been heavy and abundant. They had had enough of revolution and blamed the revolutionaries as severely then as they now blamed the Government.) We constantly pass trains full of troops going to the war. The men all ask the same question: “When is peace going to be?” They ask for newspapers and cigarettes. I gave some of them some bottles of whisky, which they drank off then and there out of the bottle. An amusing incident happened last evening. We had stopped at a siding. Everybody had got out of the train. I was walking up and down the platform with one of the passengers. We saw a soldier throwing big stones at the window of the washing compartment.

“What are you doing that for?” we asked.

“I want to speak to his Honour,” the soldier said; “he is washing his face in the washing-room.” And through the window of the compartment, lit by electric light, we could see the silhouette of an officer washing his face.

“Why don’t you go and knock at the door?” we asked.

“They are” (to speak of a person in the third person plural is respectful in Russian, and is always done by inferiors of their superiors)—“they are ‘having taken drink’ (_Oni Vipimshi_),” he replied, and then he added, lest we should receive a false impression, “His Honour is very good.”

As we passed train after train of troops I reflected on the rashness of prophecy. How often I had heard it said in London, when the war broke out, that the line would break down immediately. Even when I reached Mukden I heard people say that the line could not possibly last through the summer, and here it is supporting gaily train after train in the second year of the war.

ON THE WAY TO CHITA, _August 20th_.

We arrived at Irkutsk on the morning of the 17th and took the train for Baikal. At Irkutsk station there was a train of sick soldiers returning from the war. They begged for newspapers. The tedium of their long journey is, they say, intolerable. They say there has been a good deal of typhus in Manchuria.

We crossed the lake in the steamer. Its summer aspect is far less striking than the strange glory which it wears when it is frozen, and the distant mountains seem like “a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.” In summer the waters are blue, the nearer hills grey and the distant mountains blue, but with nothing strange or unreal about them. Yet when the sunset silvered the grey tints and spread a ragged golden banner in the sky, the lake was extremely beautiful in another way. At Baikal station there was the usual struggle for places in the train. How well I remembered the desperate struggle I had gone through to get a seat in a third-class carriage at this same place last year! This time it was in the first-class carriage that the conflict took place. An engineer got into the same carriage as I did. He occupied one of the lower berths and I the other. Presently a lady arrived, bound for Chita, and looking for a place. She came into our carriage and asked to be allowed to have one of the lower berths. The engineer flatly refused and said that he had occupied his seat and had a right to keep it. I told her I would let her have mine with pleasure. She occupied it and went out. I moved my things into the upper berth. “Why on earth did you give up your seat?” the engineer asked. “You had a _right_ to keep it.” When the lady came back she said to me: “Ah! you are evidently not a Russian; no Russian would have given up his place.” The engineer turned out to be quite a good-natured sort of person, but there is something about trains which makes people who are by nature mild and good-natured turn into savages, and instils into them a passionate determination to cleave to their rights. The next morning another man arrived in our carriage, with a large basket and a second-class ticket. This upset the engineer, who complained to the “Controller” of the train, and the poor man was turned out. The engineer snorted and said: “There’s an insolent fellow for you.” The lady was the wife of an engineer who was employed at Chita; and she told me much about life in Chita: how hard times were, owing to the war, how scarce food was getting—

“Und wie so teuer der Kaffee, Und wie so rar das Geld!”

The “Controller” of the train, an official in plain clothes, whose exact duties I was not able to determine, except that he was able to turn the second-class passenger out of our carriage, spent a day and a night with us. He and the engineer talked without ceasing of the meetings of the Zemstva all over the country; of the discontent of the public servants and of the imminence of a strike. They told me there would be a big railway strike, but I did not pay much attention to this, nor did I in the least realise the importance of what they were discussing. In one of the second-class carriages I made friends with two young officers who were going out to the war as volunteers, and two ladies, one the wife of an officer already out there, and the other a hospital nurse. With them also was the son of the officer’s wife, a student from Odessa, who told me many interesting things. He described to me in great detail the mutiny of the Black Sea Fleet, and he prophesied, if not a revolution, at least a great change in Russia in the immediate future. One of the carriages of the train was barred, and in it sat a political prisoner, a schoolmaster from Irkutsk. Some of my friends went to speak to him, but they came back in melancholy and disappointment, since they said this prisoner was hissing hatred and rage through the bars in an undignified and painful manner.

Soon after we left Baikal a young man joined us who said he was employed in a firm at Chita. He had brought with him some flowers from Irkutsk. These he carried in a large basket full of wet sand. They were a kind of pathetic stock but not “in fragrant blow”; poor, feeble, starved and rather dirty flowers they were. But in Transbaikalia flowers were rare, and he had paid 18 roubles, he said (£1 8s.), for this nosegay, and he was bringing them to Chita as a gift to the girl to whom he was engaged to be married. He looked after these flowers with the utmost care; the basket was put in my berth and, as it was full of water, a constant stream trickled down from it and made a small pond on the floor of the carriage.

_August 20th. Later._

We are nearing Chita; the husband of the lady to whom I gave my place has arrived to meet her and take her home. He is an engineer. They are deeply engaged in discussing local politics. The husband talks of a coming strike, and tells me that if I wish to see political meetings I had better stay in Chita. There are meetings every evening; some of them are dispersed by the police. I now realise the importance of flowers in this country; it is “a land of sand and ruin and gold.” The young clerk has produced two perforated bouquetholders (is there such a word?) and has carefully placed the flowers in them, with a sigh of relief. They have not quite faded, although they droop sadly. At Chita the lady and her husband get out. The engineer also. I am now alone in my carriage. Beyond Chita the country is mountainous and fledged with fir-trees.

_August 21st._

The hilly country has ceased and we have once more reached the flat plains. This morning the guard brought a man into my carriage and asked me if I minded his sitting there. I said I did not mind. I offered him some tea. The man made no answer, and looked at me with a vacant stare. Then the guard laid him down at full length, and said, “This man is the assistant station-master at Manchuria station. He is drunk, but you need not be alarmed; he will be quite quiet.” He was quiet; at Manchuria station he woke up from his stupor automatically, as though from frequent habit.

_August 22nd._

We arrived at Manchuria station last night. The chaos that always reigns there is terrific. I had the utmost difficulty in obtaining permission to continue my journey. The officials said I needed an extra paper, besides those I had with me, from the Chief of the Staff in Kharbin. The initial difficulty was to get one’s ticket, as the crowd was dense and long. What quantities of people seem to be drawn to Manchuria, like filings to a magnet! An officer got me my ticket, and just when I had utterly despaired of being able to travel further, the gendarme brought me my permission to proceed. Then came the struggle for a place in a third-class carriage. This was successfully got through. I obtained an upper berth across the window. The compartment is crammed with people.

_August 23rd._

We are travelling through the hills of northern Manchuria. News has arrived of the summoning of a new Duma. Now people say there will not be peace, and the war will become a national war because it will have the consent of the people. Others contest this; there are hot discussions. I have moved into a second-class carriage in which there is a photographer and a captain. I had my fortune told with cards by a lady in the train. She said I should soon meet a lot of friends and experience a change of fortune for the better.

_August 28th._

We arrived at Kharbin the day before yesterday. The town seems to have got much bigger than when I left it last year. The climate has not improved, nor have the prices at the hotel diminished. I have already met some old friends of last year at the bank and at the staff. There is a new restaurant opposite the bank, where a band plays the overture to “William Tell” without ceasing. Kharbin is empty. It appears that Linievitch does not allow officers to come here except on pressing errands. I dislike Kharbin more than any place I have ever seen in the world. The one topic is, of course, the peace negotiations. The matter is hotly discussed; some are in favour of peace, others vehemently against it. The news is contradictory. I have asked for leave to go to the front. I shall have to wait some days before I receive it.

_August 31st._

I am laid up in bed, and Mr. Ostrovski of the Russo-Chinese bank has just been to see me. He has come from the staff, where they told him that news had been received from St. Petersburg that there would not be peace. Orders had come to dispatch everything available to the front with all possible speed and to get ready for an offensive movement.

_September 1st._

Peace has been officially announced. Among the officers I have seen, opinions vary, but the men are delighted. They are tearing the telegrams from each other.

_September 7th._

I arrived at Gonchuling yesterday. Gonchuling is now what Mukden used to be before the battle of Mukden was fought. It consists of dozens and dozens of small grey brick houses, with slate roofs, on one side of the line, and on the other side of the line is a small Chinese town. The Military Attachés are here in their car. I am living with the Press Censors. People talk about peace as if it was not yet a fact. An officer, whose wife I met in the train coming out, has been sent to fortify positions. Kouropatkin’s army is said to have received orders to advance. People express doubts as to whether the peace will be ratified, and there is talk of a revolution in Japan.

I have the intention of joining the 2nd Transbaikal Cossack battery, with which I lived last year. I have telegraphed to them to send horses to meet me at Godziadan, the Head Quarters of the Staff.

_September 10th._

I have arrived at Godziadan. In the station is the train of the Commander-in-Chief. There is also a correspondents’ car, where I have been put up and hospitably entertained by Boris Nikolaievitch Demchinsky, correspondent of a Russian newspaper. The news has come of the first _pour-parlers_ which are to take place between the Russian and Japanese Commanders-in-Chief.

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