when i arrived at st. petersburg, the situation was regarded as grave, but people still did not believe in war. sir charles scott, our ambassador, had just left, or was just leaving; and cecil spring rice was in charge at the embassy. the large court functions which were held at the winter palace at st. petersburg, just after christmas, were to take place: the court concert and the state ball. the concert was held, and chaliapine sang at it, but the state ball was put off. and never again was a state ball given in st. petersburg. i had never seen st. petersburg before. i was staying in the fontanka, at countess shuvaloff’s house, and i was delighted by the crystal atmosphere, and the drives in open carriages; there was a little snow on the ground, but not enough for sledging.
people said there would be no war, and then we woke up one morning and heard the japanese had attacked the russian fleet at port arthur, and torpedoed the retvizan. constantine benckendorff, count benckendorff’s eldest son, was on board the retvizan when this happened; and i was told afterwards, that no orders had been given by the port authorities, that is to say, by alexeieff, the viceroy, to put out torpedo-nets, or to take any precautions, although the viceroy had been warned that day of the probability of an attack. the morning we heard that war had been declared i remember seeing a cabman driving by himself down the quays and nodding his head and repeating to himself: “war! war!” (“voinà! voinà!”). it was like, on a smaller scale, the days of august 1914. the crowds in the street were enthusiastic. officers were carried in triumph in the streets by the students, the same officers that a year later were hooted and stoned in the same streets.
i only stayed a short time in st. petersburg, and then i went to moscow, to the house of marie karlovna von kotz, a lady[264] who took in english pupils, mostly officers in the british army, to teach them russian. she lived in an out-of-the-way street, on the second story of a small house, and gave one or two lessons every day. she was a fine teacher, and a brilliant musician; an energetic and extremely competent woman, and an example of the best type of the intelligentsia.
one day, a friend of hers, a young married lady, came in and said she was starting for the far east, as a hospital nurse. she seemed to be full of enthusiasm. she was a young and charming person, bristling with energy and intelligence. the sequel of this story was a strange one. a year later, she reappeared at marie karlovna’s house—i think she had been to the war in the meantime—and said: “i am now going to the far west,” and she went to paris. she stayed there a short time, and then came back to moscow and went to the play every night, bought jewels, went to hear the gipsies, and then quite suddenly shot herself on tchekov’s tomb. the explanation of her act being her disgust with public events and her wish to give her land to the peasants. she left her estate to them in her will. in the normal course of things it would go to her brother, but her brother was a fanatical reactionary, and she killed herself rather than he should have it. but, as it turned out, she had reckoned without russian law, which said that the wills and bequests of those who committed suicide in russia were null and void, and so the property went to her brother after all. suicides at the tomb of tchekov became so frequent that a barrier was put round it, and people were forbidden to visit it.
there were one or more other pupils living in marie karlovna’s house besides the english consul, who used to board there. we used to have dinner at two o’clock in the afternoon, and a late supper, ending in tea, which used to go on till far into the night. it was there i made my first acquaintance with the peculiar comfortless comfort of russian life among the intelligentsia. nothing could seemingly and theoretically be more uncomfortable; the hours irregular; no door to any room ever being shut; no fireplaces, only a stove lit once every twenty-four hours; visitors drifting in, and sitting and talking for hours; but nothing in practice was more comfortable. there was an indescribable ease about the life, a complete absence of fuss, a fluid intimacy without any of the formalities, any of the small conventions and minute ritual that distinguish german[265] bourgeois life and, indeed, are a part of its charm. in russia, everybody seemed to take everybody and everything for granted. there were no barriers, no rules, no obstacles. no explanations were ever thought necessary or were either ever asked for or given. time, too, had no meaning. one long conversation succeeded another, into which different people drifted, and from which people departed without anyone asking why or whence or whither. moscow in winter was a comfortable city. the snow was deep; sometimes in the evening we would go to the montagnes russes and toboggan down a steep chute, and more often i would go to the play.
at that time the art theatre at moscow, the hudozhestvenii teater, was at the height of its glory and of its excellence. this theatre had been started about four years previously by a company of well-to-do amateurs under the direction of m. stanislavsky. i believe, although i am not quite sure, they began by acting the mikado for fun, continued acting for pleasure, and determined to spare neither trouble nor expense in making their performances as perfect as possible. they took a theatre, and gave performances almost for nothing, but the success of these performances was so great, the public so affluent, that they were obliged to take a new theatre and charge high prices. gradually the art theatre became a public institution. in 1904 they possessed the best all-round theatre in russia, if not in europe.
the rise of such a theatre in russia was not the same thing as that of an art theatre would be in london. for in moscow and st. petersburg there were large state-paid theatres where ancient and modern drama was performed by highly trained and excellent artists; but it stood in relation to these theatres as the théatre antoine to the comédie fran?aise, the vaudeville, and the gymnase in paris: with this difference, that the acting, though equally finished, was more natural, and the quality of the plays performed unique on the european stage. the art theatre made the reputation of tchekov as a dramatist. his first serious play, ivanov, was performed at one of the minor theatres at moscow, and we can read in his letters what he thought of that performance. another of his important plays, the seagull (chaika), was performed at one of the big state-paid theatres at st. petersburg, and well performed, but on conventional lines. it is not surprising the play failed. when[266] this same play was performed by the art theatre at moscow, it was triumphantly and instantly successful. the reason is that tchekov’s plays demand a peculiar treatment on the stage to make their subtle points tell, and cross the footlights. in them the clash of events is subservient to the human figure; and the human figure itself to the atmosphere in which it is plunged. later, i saw the seagull played at a state theatre at st. petersburg, long after tchekov’s reputation was firmly established. it was well played, but the effect of the play was ruined, or rather non-existent. in london, i saw the cherry orchard and another play of his done, where the company had not even realised the meaning of the action, besides being costumed in the most grotesquely impossible clothes, as grotesque and impossible as it would be to put on the english stage a member of parliament returning from the house of commons in a kilt, or dressed as a harlequin. one of the most dramatic situations in one of these plays had simply escaped the notice of the producer, and was allowed not only to fall flat, but was not rendered at all. it was this: a man, who has been wounded in the head and has a bandage, has a quarrel with his mother, and in a passion of rage, he tears his bandage from his head, with the object of reopening his wound, and killing himself. the company had, i suppose, read the stage direction, which says: “man removes bandage,” and the words of the scene were spoken without any emotion or emphasis, and at one moment, the man quietly removed his bandage, and dropped it on the floor, as though it were in the way, or as if he were throwing down a cigarette which he has done with.
in moscow, in the art theatre, every effect was made to tell, and the acting was so natural that on one occasion i remember a man in the stage-box joining in the conversation and contradicting one of the actors. although the ensemble of the troupe was superlative, they had no actor or actress of outstanding genius, no duse, no sarah bernhardt, no irving, no chaliapine; on the other hand, there was not one small part which was not more than adequately played.
in 1904, they had just produced the cherry orchard by tchekov, and soon afterwards, tchekov died. that winter, i saw the cherry orchard and uncle vania, shakespeare’s julius c?sar, and hauptmann’s lonely lives.
the end of uncle vania was unforgettable. the subject[267] and action of that play can be summed up in a few words. the play is called scenes from country life. a professor, not unlike casaubon, in middlemarch, marries a young and beautiful wife. his estate is managed by his first wife’s brother, uncle vania, assisted by his niece, a good girl ill-favoured in looks. astroff, a doctor, is called in to minister to the professor. uncle vania is in love with the professor’s wife. his niece, sonia, is in love with astroff. the professor’s wife, a non-moral, well-meaning circe, is interested, but not more than interested, in the doctor, and flirts with him enough to prevent his marrying the girl. the nerves of these various characters, under the stress of the situation, are worked up to such a pitch, that uncle vania actually tries to kill the professor, and shoots at him twice, but misses him. then the professor and his wife go away; the doctor goes back to his practice, and uncle vania and his niece are left behind to resume the tenor of their way. you see the good-byes: a half-passionate, half-cynical good-bye, between the professor’s wife and the doctor—the professor says good-bye to uncle vania, and to uncle vania’s old mother. you hear the bells of the horses outside, in the autumn evening. one after another, uncle vania’s mother, his niece, and the old servant of the house come in and say: “they have gone!”
when i first saw the play, this is what i wrote about it, and i have nothing to add, nor could i put it differently:
“described, this appears insignificant; seen, acted as it is with incomparable naturalness, it is indescribably effective. in this scene a particular mood, which we have all felt, is captured and rendered; a certain chord is struck which exists in all of us; that kind of ‘toothache at heart’ which we feel when a sudden parting takes place and we are left behind. the parting need not necessarily be a sad one. but the tenor of our life is interrupted. as a rule the leaves of life are turned over so quickly and noiselessly by time that we are not aware of the process. in the case of a sudden parting we hear the leaf of life turn over and fall back into the great blurred book of the past—read, finished, and irrevocable. it is this hearing of the turning leaf which tchekov has rendered merely by three people coming into a room one after another and saying: ‘they’ve gone!’
“the intonation with which the old servant said: ‘they’ve gone’—an intonation of peculiar cheerfulness with which servants love to underline what is melancholy—was marvellous. the lamp is brought in. lastly the doctor goes. the old[268] mother reads a magazine by the lamplight; the clatter of the horses’ hoofs and the jingling of bells are heard dying away in the distance; and uncle vania and his niece set to work at their accounts … you hear the abacus—always used in russian banks—making a clicking noise … and the infinite monotony of their life begins once more.”
the first performances of the cherry orchard were equally impressive. i saw it acted many times later, but nothing touched the perfection of its original cast. the cherry orchard is the most symbolic play ever written. it summed up the whole of pre-revolutionary russia. the charming, feckless class of landowners; the pushing, common, self-made man, who with his millions buys the estate with the cherry orchard that the owners have at last to sell, because they cannot consent to let it to cut their losses; the careless student; the grotesque governess; all of them dancing on the top of a volcano which is heaving and already rumbling with the faint noise of the coming convulsion. the russo-japanese war and its consequences were the beginning of these convulsions; and, as count benckendorff prophesied to me in 1903, as soon as war came to russia, there was a revolution.
pierre benckendorff, count benckendorff’s second son, who was an officer in the gardes-à-cheval, started for manchuria soon after the war began. he exchanged into a cossack regiment for the purpose, as the guards did not go to the front. he looked so radiantly young and adventurous, when he started, that we were all of us afraid he would never come back. he passed through moscow on his way to the front, and i spent the day with him. he asked me why i did not try to go to the war as a newspaper correspondent, as i could speak russian, and his father would be able to give me letters of recommendation to the military authorities. his words sank deep, and i determined to try and do this. i at once wrote to his father.
count benckendorff thought the idea was an excellent one; and just before easter i went to london to try and get a newspaper to send me out. i went to the morning post, where i knew oliver borthwick, the son of the proprietor, lord glenesk. at first the matter seemed to be fraught with every kind of difficulty, but in the end things were arranged, and towards the end of april i started for st. petersburg, on my way to manchuria, laden with a saddle, a bridle, a camp bed, and innumerable[269] cooking utensils. i knew nothing about journalism, and still less about war, and i felt exactly as if i were going back to a private school again.
i stopped two nights in st. petersburg, and engaged a russian servant. he was a gigantic creature, who had served in a cavalry regiment of the guards. at moscow, i met brooke, who was going out as correspondent for reuter, and we settled to travel together.
the journey was not uneventful. as far as irkutsk, we travelled in the ordinary express train, which had comfortable first-and second-class carriages, a dining-room, a pianoforte, a bathroom, and a small bookcase full of russian books. the journey from moscow to irkutsk lasted nine nights and eight days. guy brooke and i shared a first-class compartment. i made friends with the official who looked after the train, and gave him my pocket-knife; and he undertook to post a letter for me when he got back to moscow. he kept his promise, and my first dispatch to the morning post, the first dispatch from our batch of correspondents, got through without being censored. there was not much war news in it. in fact, it contained a long and detailed account of a performance of tchekov’s uncle vania at the art theatre at moscow.
on board the train, there was a french correspondent, m. georges la salle, and a danish naval attaché, and another english correspondent, hamilton; several russian officers, and a russian man of business, who lived at vladivostok. this man gave us a good deal of trouble; he thought we were english spies, and told us we would never be allowed to reach our destination. he did his best to prevent our doing so. he told the officers we were spies, and their manner, which at first had been friendly, underwent a change, and became at first suspicious, and finally openly hostile. the passenger trains ran from irkutsk to baikal station, and it was at baikal that the real interest of the journey began. lake baikal was frozen, and was crossed daily by two large ice-breakers, which ploughed through three feet of half-melted ice. the passage lasted four hours. the spectacle when we started was marvellous. it had been a glorious day. the sun in the pure frozen sky was like a fiery, red, arctic ball. before us stretched an immense sheet of ice, powdered with snow and spotless, except for a long brown track which had been made by the sledges. on the[270] far-off horizon a low range of mountains disappeared in a veil of snow made by the low-hanging clouds. the mountains were intensely blue; they glinted like gems in the cold air, and we seemed to be making for some mysterious island, some miraculous reef of sapphires. towards the west there was another and more distant range, where the intense deep blue faded into a delicate and transparent sea-green—the colour of the seas round the greek islands—and these hills were like a phantom continuation of the larger range, as unearthly and filmy as a mirage.
as we moved, the steamer ploughed the ice into flakes, which leapt and were scattered into fantastic, spiral shapes, and flowers of ice and snow. as the sun sank lower, the strangeness and the beauty increased. a pink halo crept over the sky round the sun, which became more fiery and metallic. some lines from coleridge’s “ancient mariner” came into my head which exactly fitted the scene:
“and now there came both mist and snow
and it grew wondrous cold:
and ice, mast-high, came floating by
as green as emerald.”
as the sun set the whole sky became pink, and the distant mountains were like ghostly caverns of ice.
we arrived at eight. it was dark, and the other ice-breaker was starting on its return journey to the sound of military music.
about eleven o’clock we resumed our journey. the train was so full that it was impossible not only to get a seat in the first-or second-class, but at first it seemed doubtful whether we should obtain a place of any kind in the train. i jumped into a third-class carriage, which was at once invaded by a crowd of muzhik women and children. an official screamed ineffectually that the carriage was reserved for the military; upon which an angry muzhik, waving a huge loaf of bread (like an enormous truncheon), cried out, pointing to the seething, heterogeneous crowd: “are we not military also—one and all of us reservists?” and they refused to move.
the confusion was incredible, and one man, by the vehement way in which he flung himself and his property on his wooden seat, broke it, and fell with a crash to the ground. the third-class[271] carriages were formed in this way: the carriage was not divided into separate compartments, but was like a corridor carriage, with no partition and no doors between the carriage proper and the corridor. it was divided into three sections, each section consisting of six plank beds, three on each side of the window, and one placed above the other, forming three stories. there was besides this one tier of seats against and over the windows in the passage at right-angles to the regular seats. the occupant of each place had a right to the whole length of the seat, so that he could lie down at full length. i gave up my seat in the first carriage, as i had lost sight of my luggage and my servant, and i went in search of the guard. the guard found places for brooke and myself in a carriage occupied mostly by soldiers. he told them to make room for us. it seemed difficult, but it was done. i was encamped on a plank at the top of the corridor part of the carriage. i remember being awakened the next morning by a scuffle. a party of chinese coolies had invaded the train. they were drunk and they slobbered. the soldiers shouted: “get out, chinese.” they were bundled backwards and forwards, and rolled on to the platform outside the train, where they were allowed to settle. it was now, in this railway carriage, that i for the first time came into intimate contact with the russian people, for in a third-class railway carriage the artificial barriers of life are broken down, and everyone treats everyone else as an equal. i was immensely interested. the soldiers began to get up. one of them, dressed in a scarlet shirt, stood against the window and said his prayers to the rising sun, crossing himself many times. a little later a stowaway arrived; he had no ticket, and the under-guard advised him to get under the seat during the visit of the ticket collector. this he did, and he stayed there until the visit of the ticket collector was over, and whenever a new visit was threatened, he hid again.
after the first day, i was offered a seat on the ground floor in the central division of the carriage, because i had a bad foot, and the fact was noticed. my immediate neighbours were little russians. they asked many questions: whether the english were orthodox; the price of food and live stock; the rate of wages in england; and they discussed foreign countries and foreign languages in general. one of them said french was the most difficult language, and russian the easiest. the[272] french were a clever people. “as clever as you?” i asked. “no,” they answered; “but when we say clever we mean nice.”
i gradually made the acquaintance of all the occupants of the compartment. they divided the day into what they called “occupation” and “relaxation.” occupation meant doing something definite like reading or making a musical instrument—one man was making a violin—relaxation meant playing cards, doing card tricks, telling stories, or singing songs. in the evening a bearded soldier, a native of tomsk, asked me to write down my name on a piece of paper, as he wished to mention in a letter home that he had seen an englishman. he had never seen one before, but sailors had told him that englishmen were easy to get on with, and clean—much cleaner than russians. he told me his story, which was an extremely melancholy one. he had fallen asleep on sentry-go and had served a term of imprisonment, and had been deprived of civil rights. for the first time i came across the aching sadness one sometimes met with among russians, an unutterable despair, a desperate, mute anguish. the conversation ended with an exchange of stories among the soldiers. one of them told me a story about a priest. he wondered whether i knew what a priest meant, and to make it plain he said: “a priest, you know, is a man who always lies.”
i asked the bearded man if he knew any stories. he at once sat down and began a fairy-tale called the merchant’s son. it took an hour and a half in the telling. very often the men who in russia told such stories could neither read nor write, but this man could read, though he had never read the story he told me in a book. it had been handed down to him by his parents, and to them by his grandparents, and so on, word for word, with no changes. this is probably how the iliad was handed down to one generation after another. later on i was told stories like this one by men who could neither read nor write. the story was full of dialogue and reiteration, and every character in it had its own epithet which recurred throughout the story, every time the character was mentioned, just as in homer. when he had finished his story, he began another called ivan the little fool. it began in this kind of way: “once upon a time in a certain country, in a certain kingdom, there lived a king and a queen, who had three sons, all braver and brighter than pen can write or story can tell, and the[273] third was called ivan the fool. the king spoke to them thus: ‘take each of you an arrow, pull your bow-string taut, and shoot in different directions, and where the arrow falls there shall you find a wife.’ the eldest brother shot an arrow, and it fell on a palace just opposite the king’s daughters’ quarters; and the second son shot an arrow, and it fell opposite the red gate of the house where lived the lovely merchant’s daughter; and the third brother shot an arrow, and it fell in a muddy swamp and a frog caught it. and ivan said: ‘how can i marry a frog? she is too small for me.’ and the king said to him: ‘take her.’” and then the story went on for a long time, and in it ivan the fool was, of course, far more successful than his two elder brothers. another soldier told me a version of the story of king john and the abbot of canterbury.
the ballad says that king john asked the abbot three questions. the first one was how much he was worth; the second one how soon he could ride round the world; and the third question the abbot had to answer was, what the king was thinking of. and the abbot answered the third question by saying: “you think i’m the abbot of canterbury, but i am really only his shepherd in disguise.” the soldier told it in exactly the same way, except that the abbot became a patriarch, and king john the tsar of moscow, and the shepherd a miller. and when he had finished, he said: “the miller lives at moscow and i have seen him.”
the soldiers spoke little of the war. one of them said the japanese were a savage race, upon which the sailor who had been to nagasaki, cut him short by saying: “they are a charming, clean people, much more cultivated than you or i.” one of the soldiers said it would have been a more sensible arrangement if the dispute had been settled by a single combat between marquis ito and count lamsdorff.
the night before we arrived at manchuria station the passengers sang songs. four singers sang some magnificent folk-songs, and among others the song of the siberian exiles: “glorious sea of holy baikal,” one singing the melody and the others joining in by repeating or imitating it. but the song which was the most popular was a ballad sung by a sailor, who was taking part in the concert. he had composed it himself. it was quite modern in tune and intensely sentimental. it was about a fallen maiden, who had left the palaces[274] of the rich and died in hospital. it was exactly like the kind of song i heard bluejackets sing on board an english man-of-war years later. at manchuria station we had a lot of bother owing to the commercial gentleman, and i annoyed him greatly by talking in front of him to a greek merchant, who was at the buffet, in greek—a language with which he was imperfectly acquainted. the commercial gentleman tried to prevent us going farther, but he did not succeed, as our papers were in perfect order. but he succeeded in having us put under arrest, and two cossacks were told to keep watch over us during the remainder of the journey. in the meantime the officers had telegraphed for information about us to kharbin, and the next morning they received a satisfactory answer, and their whole demeanour changed. from manchuria station to kharbin the journey lasted three days and two nights, and we arrived at kharbin after a journey of seventeen days from st. petersburg.
i have forgotten the latter part of that journey, but i recorded at the time that a crowd of chinese officers boarded the train at one station and filled up the spare seats, especially top seats, whence they spat without ceasing on the occupants of the lower seats, much to the annoyance of a french lady, who said: “les chinois sont impossibles.”
kharbin was a large, straggling place, part of which consisted of a chinese quarter, an “old” russian quarter which was like a slice of a small russian provincial town, and a modern quarter: government offices, an hotel, restaurants, a church, and the russo-chinese bank.
the sight of kharbin when i arrived—the mud, the absence of vehicles, the squalor, the railway station, a huge art nouveau edifice, the long vistas of muddy roads or swampy trails, the absence of any traces of civilisation, and then the hotel, which was dearer than any hotel i have ever stayed at before or since, with its damp, dirty room and suspicious bedstead, and its convict squinting waiters still redolent of jail life, and its millions of flies—filled me with despair. at the beginning of the war kharbin was the centre of everything that was undesirable in the russian army and in the civilian populations of the whole world. later on, kuropatkin forbade officers to go there except under special circumstances. when we arrived, there were a certain number of officers on their way to the front, and of officers who had escaped from the front for a few days’[275] leave. the restaurants were full of noisy, shouting crowds, and nondescript ladies in cheap finery, about which everything was doubtful except their profession.
there were a number of greek traders in the town; and wherever there is a war, in whatever part of the world, greek traders seem to rise from the ground as if by magic, with sponges and other necessaries, for sale. at harbin, there was also a local population of engineers and soldiers, who had jobs there, but these i only got to know a year later. i made the acquaintance of colonel potapoff at kharbin. he was one of the press censors who had to look after the correspondents. he had been to south africa. we became friends with him at once, and i saw him frequently during the next ten years.
i only stayed a week at kharbin. i travelled to mukden in great luxury in a first-class carriage reserved by general kholodovsky. the general entertained me like a prince. he was extremely cultivated, courteous, and well read; a collector of china; an admirer of tolstoy; a big game shooter. i stayed in his carriage a week after we had arrived at mukden.
at mukden we were plunged in china proper. it was as chinese, so i was told, as pekin—even more chinese. the town was a long way from the station, and one drove to it in a rickshaw pulled along by a chinese coolie. the drive took nearly an hour. but i made this interesting discovery, that if everyone goes by rickshaw it is just the same as if everyone travels by motor-car. you are not conscious of life being slower. the day after i arrived, i called at a house where some of the other war correspondents were living. there was charles hands of the daily mail, and there i made the acquaintance of m. de jessen, a danish correspondent. at the station i had already been met and welcomed by whigham, who was also correspondent for the morning post. he had rooms in mukden, and he asked me to come and share them. i did so. i moved into the town, and arrived at the der-lung-den (the inn of the dragon), a large courtyard surrounded by a series of rooms that had no second story. i was shown one of these rooms and was told it could be mine. it seemed suitable, but it had no floor but earth, and no paper on the walls; in fact, it was not more like a room than the stall of a stable. but the chinese hotel-keeper said that would be all right. an architect, a builder, and an upholsterer were sent for, and that very day the stall[276] was converted into a comfortable and elegant bedroom, with a floor carpeted with matting and an elegant wall-paper, and was ready for use. apparently the chinese did not make a room inhabitable in an hotel until they knew someone was going to inhabit it. the next thing was to get a servant. i had brought a servant from russia, but he had complained of the hard work. in fact, he had said he was not used to work at all. as he had been a trooper in a cavalry regiment this seemed a little strange, but he explained that the work had always been done for him. he was not one of the world’s workers. he showed signs of grumbling, but colonel potapoff made short work of his grievance and packed him off home by the next train. i engaged a chinese servant, called afoo, who came from southern china.
the next thing was to buy a pony and engage a groom, a mafoo. when it became known i wanted a pony, the whole yard seemed to swarm with ponies. i bought one with the assistance of the hotel-keeper. it seemed to be a fairly amenable animal, but the mafoo, whom i engaged afterwards, at once pointed out to me that it was almost blind in one eye. i soon made the acquaintance of all the other correspondents: ludovic naudeau, who was writing for the journal; recouly, who was writing for the temps; archibald, who was photographing for i don’t know how many american newspapers; millard, who wrote for the new york world; simpson, who was the daily telegraph correspondent; colonel gaedke, the representative of the berliner tageblatt, and premier lieutenant von schwartz, who wrote for the lokal anzeiger.
m. de jessen has written a chapter of sketches on all these characters, and the life we lived at mukden, in a book called men i have met, published in copenhagen in 1909. the best writer of all these was probably ludovic naudeau. charles hands could have rivalled him, but he wisely never, or hardly ever, put pen to paper.
colonel gaedke stood aloof in his military technical knowledge. he was stiff in opinions, and, as it happened, always in the wrong. he was one of those people who are wrong from the right reasons. he saw at once that people talked nonsense about the russian army, and this led him rashly to prophesy they would win the war. he was indignant with the strategy of the higher command. he used to arrive in a great state of excitement and say: “kuropatkin has again made a mistake.”[277] and on one occasion he told me that if the russian generals went on waging war in such a fashion, he would go home, he simply could not look on at so many glaring errors in tactics and strategy.
of the correspondents the most extraordinary character was archibald. he wore about four rows of medals on his tunic. in fact, he went to war to collect medals, and he had been with the boers and with the english during the south african war. he was the despair of the press censors. he wanted to go home after he had been at mukden a certain time and had taken a number of photographs; but he wanted to go home via japan and not across the trans-siberian railway. this correspondents had promised not to do, but archibald had determined to do it. he took one of the press censors with him to pekin, and arranged for his party to be kidnapped and subsequently rescued. when he came back, he used the adventure as a lever, and obtained the permission he wished. his imagination was unlimited, and his power of statement unrivalled. when he came back from pekin he said he had interviewed the emperor of china and the empress, and he had been made a mandarin of the highest class. during the european war, i believe he got into trouble by bringing austrian papers into england.
m. de jessen was the most amiable of danes, a shrewd observer and a vivid writer. but the most interesting of all the correspondents i knew was a russian i met later, called nicholas popoff, who was destined to be one of the pioneers of flying in russia, and one of the first pilots to accomplish daring feats in the air. alas! he paid for his temerity with a bad crash, which disabled him for life.
we led a restless but amusing life. everyone wanted to go to the front, and nobody was allowed to go.
mukden would have been an ideal spot to spend the summer in, if there had been no war going on. the climate was warm; the air fresh; the place full of colour, variety, and interest. mukden is a large, square town surrounded by a huge, thick, dilapidated, and mouldering wall, on the top of which you can go for a long walk. inside the wall, the closely packed one-storied houses are intersected by two or three main streets and innumerable small alleys. the shops in the main streets are gay and splendid with sign-boards: huge blue-and-red boots covered with gold stars hang in front of the bootmakers; golden and[278] many coloured shields and banners hang in front of other shops; gongs clang outside the theatres to attract the passers-by; every now and then a mandarin rides by, gorgeous in navy blue and canary-coloured satin, on a white fast-trotting pony, and behind him, at a respectful distance, his servant follows him on a less elegant piece of horse-flesh; or large carts lumber along with prehistoric wheels, and with the curtains of their closed hoods drawn, probably conveying some chinese ladies. add to all this, sunshine and the smell of life and brilliant colour. there is nothing modern in the town. it is the same as it was a thousand years ago, and at mukden you could live the same life as a contemporary of julius c?sar lived. one of the most curious features of mukden is the palace. it is deserted, but it still contains a collection of priceless art treasures, jewels, china, embroidery, and illuminated mss. these treasures are locked up in mouldering cupboards. its courtyards are carpeted with luxuriant grass, its fantastic dilapidated wooden walls are carven, painted, and twisted into strange shapes such as you see on an oriental vase. the planks are rotten, the walls eaten with rain and damp, and one thanks heaven that it is so, and that nothing has been restored.
in mukden no house had more than one story, and the houses of the well-to-do were divided into quadrangles like an oxford college. life at mukden, without the complicated machinery of european modern life, without any of the appliances that are devised for comfort and which so often are engines of unrest, had all the comforts one could wish. there were no bathrooms; on the other hand, if you wanted a hot bath, a chinaman would bring you an enormous tub, long and broad enough to lie down in, and fill it with boiling water from kettles. there was no question of the bath being tepid because something had gone wrong with the pipes or the tap.
mukden reminded me of a chinese fairy-tale by hans andersen. the buildings, the shops, the temples, the itinerant pedlars, the sounding gongs, the grotesque signs seemed to belong to the realm of childish trolldom or to some great pantomime. it was in the place of mukden, one felt, that the emperor of china, whom andersen tells of, sat and sighed for the song of the nightingale, when his artificial metallic singing bird suddenly snapped and ceased to sing. still more enchanting in the same way were the tombs of pai-ling and fu-ling.[279] here the delicate and gorgeous-coloured buildings, red as lacquer and curious in design, which protect the remains of the manchurian dynasty, are approached by wild wood-ways, paths of soft grass, and alleys of aromatic and slumber-scented trees.
the high, quaint towers and ramparts which surround the tombs are half dilapidated, the colours are faded, the staircases rotten and overgrown with moss and grass, and no profane hand is allowed to restore or repair them.
while i was at mukden i had an interview with the chinese viceroy, and one day i was invited to luncheon at the chinese foreign office. the meal was semi-european. it began with tea. large uncut green tea leaves floated in delicate cups; and over the cup and in it a second cup put upside down made a cover. there followed about seventeen courses of meat entrées, delicately cooked. i thought i would give one of the courses a miss, and refused a dish. the meal immediately ceased. the plan was evidently to go on feeding your guests till they had had enough, and then to stop. on the following day, the mandarins, who had been present, left large red slips of paper, covered with elegant characters, on us; these were visiting-cards to say they would call the same afternoon, and in the afternoon they paid us a visit in person.
here at mukden we lived, and here we fretted, and i fretted more than anyone, as i was so inexperienced in journalism that i thought it was impossible to write to the newspaper unless something startling happened. now i know better. had i had more experience then, i should have known that mukden was a mine of copy. one night we gave a dinner-party at the der-lung-den and invited all the correspondents and the press censors as well. we edited a newspaper for the occasion, of which one copy was written out by hand.
the mukden nichevo published articles in french and in english; notes, poems, a short story, and had an illustrated cover.
afoo and his fellow-servitors were in their glory when there was a dinner-party. their organisation was as sure as their service was swift and dexterous. they were quite imperturbable, and if one suddenly said a few moments before dinner: “there will be four extra to dinner to-night,” they would calmly say: “can do.” directly he came into my service afoo asked for a rise of wages. he thought soldiers and fighting in general,[280] and especially war, vulgar. once i told him he was stupid. “of course,” he said, “i am stupid. if i were not stupid i should not be your servant, but a mandarin.”
from mukden we went to liaoyang, where we arrived on the 22nd of june. liaoyang was a smaller town than mukden, and even dirtier and more picturesque. i lived at the h?tel international, which was kept by a greek. it was a chinese house converted into an hotel, and had about twenty rooms, as small as boxes, each containing a stool, a small basin, and the semblance of a bedstead. the building was incredibly dirty and squalid; the rooms opened on to a filthy yard; there was a noisy and dirty buffet, where one had food if one waited for hours; and also a hall open to the sky, which was covered by an awning of matting during the hotter hours of the day. the railway station was the general rendezvous and the centre of liaoyang life. there, too, was a buffet and its ceiling was black with flies, so black that you could not see a single white spot in it. i fell ill at this hotel and had a bad attack of dysentery. i spent the first day and night of my illness at the hotel, in the fly-haunted squalor of the h?tel international, in a high, delirious fever. my chinese servant disappeared for two days, as there was a feast going on, and when he returned i dismissed him. but i was rescued by dr. westwater, who had lived at liaoyang for years, and had a clean, comfortable house with a beautiful garden. in those clean surroundings and comforts i soon recovered, and in july, brooke and myself, with two montenegrin servants, left for tashichiao. we had been attached to a cavalry brigade of the first siberian army corps, which was commanded by general samsonoff. we went by train to tashichiao, with the two montenegrins, two mules, and five ponies, which it took twelve hours to entrain. the night i arrived at tashichiao i met count bobrinsky, a st. petersburg friend, and he took me into general kuropatkin’s train and gave me tea in his mess, and while i was there general kuropatkin came in himself and drank tea. brooke and i spent the night in the presbytery of the catholic church in the village.
i rode to a village a few miles south-west of tashichiao, and there i found the headquarters of the brigade established in the kitchen garden of a chinese house. this was the beginning of a new life in a new world.
[281]
that year in manchuria the rainy season, instead of coming at its proper times and lasting as long as it should have lasted, came in sections and by fits and starts. so the country was either a baked desert or a sea of mud. looking back on that time now, i see, on the horizon, a range of soft blue mountains. in the foreground, there is a chinese village built of mud and fenced with mud, and baked by the sun, yellow and hard. there is, perhaps, a little stream with stepping-stones in it; a delicate temple, one-storied and painted red like lacquer, on the water bank, and round it, as far as eye can see, fields of giant millet. the women, dressed in dark blue, the blue of blue china, stand at the doorsteps, smoking their long-stemmed pipes, and there is a crowd of brown, fat, naked children with budding pig-tails.
then i see the battlefield of tashichiao: a low range of soft blue hills in the distance; to the west a large expanse of the most brilliant vivid green, from which the cone of an isolated kopje arose; to the east some dark green hills, with patches of sand, and at their base a stretch of emerald-green giant millet; in the middle of the plain a hot, sandy road; blazing heat and a cloudless sky, and japanese shells bursting in puffs of brown and grey, as if someone was blowing rings of tobacco smoke across the mountains. this battle was a long artillery duel, which went on from early morning until nine in the evening. colonel gaedke, who was looking on, said the russians were shooting well. i wondered how he could tell.
in the evening, after that day’s battle, i rode back to tashichiao to the presbytery of the catholic church, where the french correspondents had been living.
it was nine o’clock in the evening when i got home. two chinamen had just arrived to rebuild the church. they had pulled down the altar, and at the top of the ladder were working quietly at a new frieze. my two montenegrin servants were quarrelling fiercely in the yard and throwing brushes and pans at each other. my chinese boy had prepared a hot bath in the middle of the yard. a russian gunner, grimy with dirt and sweat, and worn out with fighting, staggered into the yard and said a prayer, when he noticed the building was a church. the day after this, the first of many long retreats began, ending at haichen station, where the buffet was full of people and where i managed to do a difficult thing—difficult in manchuria,[282] that is to say, where the trains waited sometimes eighteen hours at a station—to miss the train, and i slept on the platform.
after that, i remember a train journey to liaoyang, and a soldier crying in the train because another soldier, after using strings of blood-curdling language and startling obscenities, which did not produce any effect, as they were like worn-out counters, called him a sheep; and another soldier dropping his rifle from the train, and jumping from the train to pick it up.
then, at the end of july, a ride back to haichen, a distance of thirty miles, carried out in two stages, and a night spent on the grass at a railway siding where soldiers who guarded the line lived. the soldiers entertained me and gave me soup and bread, and tea, some cucumber, and some sugar. i thought of byron’s example of something solemn:
“an arab with a stranger for a guest.”
my host had lived in this isolated land-lighthouse for four and a half years. he and the other soldiers talked of places, and one of them said the red sea lay between japan and china, near colombo. another said that the english had taken thibet. they made me a bed with some hay and a blanket, and i slept in the field. then came a start at dawn and a ride to haichen, where there was bustle and confusion, and a battle expected; and there, for the first time, i saw the ghastly sight of maimed soldiers being carried in with their fresh bandages, their recent wounds, their waxen faces, and their vague, wondering eyes. after that, a night in the village disturbed by a panic, and shouts that the japanese were upon us, followed by the discovery that it was a false alarm, and the further discovery that the expected battle would not happen. we rode back to liaoyang, after which i was laid up with sunstroke and again cured by dr. westwater.
at the end of the first week of august, i started once more to find the cavalry brigade to which i had been attached. this time i took with me dimitri, a dark-eyed caucasian with a black beard and a nose like a beak, dressed in a long brown skirt with silver trimmings, and armed with a scimitar and several revolvers. dimitri had lived in the saddle all his life, and when i complained of my pony stumbling, he said: “it’s not the pony; the truth is, little father, that just a little you don’t know how to ride.”
[283]
i found the brigade. it was commanded by a new general, called sichkhov. he was sitting in the small and dirty room of a chinese cottage; a telegraph was ticking in the room next door, and everywhere flies were buzzing. “have you brought us any food?” said the general. “we have nothing here, no bread, no sugar.”
the general and the staff lived in the cottage in which there were two rooms. the rest of us lived in a garden. at the bottom of the garden there was a piece of trellis-work, over which a pumpkin twined and climbed. under it was my valise. this was my bedroom. this was in the village of davantientung. i stayed there six days. we used to get up very early at four or five. i would say “good morning” to the doctor. he would draw back his hand and say: “i beg your pardon, i have not washed.” the ceremony of washing was performed like this: you took off your shirt, and a cossack poured water from a pewter cup over your head and your hands, and you could use as much soap as you pleased. at noon we had our midday meal, then we drank tea and slept; later we went for a walk, perhaps, and had supper in the evening, and then bed. but torrents of rain fell, and this idyllic garden soon became a swamp. i moved to another neighbouring brigade, commanded by colonel gurko, and while i was there i dined with one of his batteries, a horse battery of trans-baikalian cossacks. they asked me to stay with them for good, and i did so. the night after i had dined with the battery, the doctor took me to a church where there was a chinese catholic priest. his presbytery was scrupulously clean, and the church was full of paper roses. in the presbytery sat an old bronzed chinaman reading his breviary. he talked french, with a somewhat limited vocabulary, but with a pure french intonation, and he gave us a glass of fine champagne. the day after this we were ordered to go to davantientung, the village i had just left. there we occupied a large chinese house with a dirty yard in front of it. here a new epoch began for me—life with a battery. the commander of the battery, colonel philemonov, was away in hospital. his place was taken by a fat, falstaffian, good-natured man, with a heart of gold, called malinovsky, who knew next to nothing about gunnery. the gunnery work was performed by a junior lieutenant, kislitsky. there were other younger officers, a doctor, and a veterinary surgeon. we[284] all lived in one room of the chinese house; our beds were stretched side by side along the k’ang—the natural platform of every chinese house. we got up at sunrise, and had dinner at noon. dinner consisted of huge chunks of meat, cut up and mixed with potatoes, and served in a pail. this dish the cook used to call b?uf strogonoff, and it was the only dish he knew. sometimes the officers struck and demanded something else, but the dish always ended by being b?uf strogonoff.
after dinner, we used to sleep on the k’ang, talk and sleep, and then go for a walk, talk, sleep once more, and go to bed. the weather was very hot; when it rained, which it did torrentially once every ten days, it was hotter. every house you saw was made of yellow-baked mud; on each side of you were endless immense stretches of giant millet fields, of an intense blinding green. there was an irresistible languor in the air.
in the yard outside, the horses munched green beans in the mud. inside the fangtse all the flies of the world seemed to have congregated. in spite of the heat, one took shelter under anything, even a fur rug. to eat and sleep was all one thought about; but sleep was difficult and the food was monotonous and scanty. insects of all kinds crawled from the dried walls on to one’s head. outside the window, two or three chinese used to argue in a high-pitched voice about the price of something. there was perhaps a fragment of a newspaper four months old which one had read and re-read. the military situation had been discussed until there was nothing more to be said. nowhere was there any ease for the body or rest for the eye—an endless monotony of green and yellow; a land where the rain brought no freshness and the trees afforded no shade. the brain refused to read; it circled round and round in some fretful occupation such as half inventing an acrostic.
when bron herbert read the account i wrote of life during this period of the war, he wrote and told me that it had vividly brought back to him his experiences of camp life in south africa.
“no fellow,” he wrote, “who hasn’t been through it can know what it’s like. the way that everyone says exactly the same things that they would say if they were in london, and all the time they’re doing most absurdly different things. the way that one drifts clean out of one’s little circle, of which one[285] has formed an integral part and in which one has been absorbingly interested, and instantaneously finds oneself in another quite new one in which one becomes in a few seconds a vastly important component part and equally absorbed. the way in which one really spends nine-tenths of one’s time sitting in some beastly place without shade, brushing flies off one’s face, and somehow one isn’t bored with it. the way in which all things which are most boring at home become most interesting out there. the way in which everything is rather a blur, nothing very distinct but all one’s sensations funny ones, quite new and different; only the isolated little incidents stand out clear like oases. there’s no general impression left. it’s like tops of mountains sticking up through a fog.”
these are the kind of incidents i remember. one night a man arrived at davantientung from moscow. we put him up. when he woke up in the morning he said: “i was dreaming that i was going to the art theatre in moscow. i had got tickets; they were doing a new play by tchekov. i wake up and find myself here.”
another time a translation of h. g. wells’s food of the gods appeared in a russian journal, and two officers fought for it, and rolled on the floor till the magazine was torn to bits; and they neither of them wanted it really.
the doctor of the battery and one of the young officers would argue about the war, about the absurdity of war; that if you go to war it is silly to look after the wounded. the gospel of frightfulness was advocated and rejected. endless discussions followed.
one evening, the cossacks bathed their horses in a lake hard by and swam about naked, like centaurs. it was a wonderful lake, full of pink lotus flowers, which in the twilight, with the rays of the new moon shining on the floating tangled mass of green leaf (the leaves by this time were grey and shimmering) and the broad pink petals of the flowers, made a harmony that seemed to call for the brush of some delicate french impressionist painter. but no painter could have reproduced the silvery magic of those greys and greens, the fantastic spectacle made by the moonlight, the twilight, the shining water, the dusky leaves, and the delicate lotus petals. those days at davantientung were long days. i suppose i was not really there a long time, but it seemed an eternity. i went[286] back to liaoyang in the middle of august, to post a letter, and then found my way back to the battery by a miracle, for they had moved, and i arrived at the very door of their new quarters. then the long dream of the sweltering entr’acte came to an end. we suddenly got orders to move at two o’clock in the morning. we marched to a large village, and in the afternoon we moved on to another place where, just as i had taken the saddle off my pony, and was lying down in a chinese temple, i heard a stir. the japanese were reported to be less than a mile from us, and had entered the end of the village we had just left, while the dragoons were going out of the other end of it. we marched till midnight and then rested, and at dawn we started by a circuitous route for liaoyang, which we reached about three o’clock in the afternoon.