In the spring of 1921 I lay on the deck of the steamshipGratz, 7,000 tons, once Austrian and now flying the Italian flag, bound from Brindisi to Constantinople. With me as a comrade was my young son.
Our fellow passengers were a strange company, mostly Jews from America, Germany, and Greece, going to sell surplus stocks, if they could, to merchants in Pera. They talked interminably in terms of international exchange, dollars, pounds, marks, lire, drachmas, and kronen, and raised their hands to the God of Abraham, because of the stagnation of the world’s markets. There was also a sprinkling of dark-complexioned, somber-eyed men of uncertain nationality until we came in sight of Constantinople, when they changed their bowler hats or cloth caps for the red fez of Islam. One of them was very handsome and elegant, with a distinguished but arrogant manner. I tried to get into conversation with him, but he answered coldly and in monosyllables until we passed the narrows of the Dardanelles when his eyes glowed with a sudden passion, and he told me he had fought against the British there, below the hill of Achi Baba. It had been a great victory, he said, for Turkish arms.
There were some queer women aboard, international in character, given to loud, shrill laughter and amorous ogling. One of them, a buxom creature of middle age, drank champagne at night in the smoking saloon with one of the American Jews, enormously fat, foul in conversation, free with his money, who seemed to covet her favor, and was jealous of a young Turk who, unlikeothers of his race aboard, was as noisy as a schoolboy and played pranks all day long up and down the ship.
A young British officer, now “demobbed,” was resuming his career as a commercial traveler in woollen vests and socks. He showed me his diary. Before the war he had made as much as £3,000 in one year, as commission on business with Turkish merchants in Constantinople, Stamboul, Smyrna. He spoke well of the Turks’ commercial honesty. Their word was good. They had always paid for orders. A simple soul, this young man who had been a temporary officer in the Great War, believed that trade was reviving and that Europe would recover quickly from the effects of war.
There were others on board who did not think so. “After Austria—Germany,” said the fat American Jew. Lying on the sun-baked decks I listened to conversations by these students of international business, as, for two years and more, since the war, I had been listening to the talk of men and women in Belgium, France, Italy, Austria-Germany, Canada, and the United States. It was always the same. They had no certainty of peace, no sense of security, but rather an apprehension of new conflicts in Europe and outside Europe, a fear of revolution, anarchy, and upheaval of forces beyond the control of men like themselves of international mind, business common sense. But here, on this boat, there was talk of peoples and forces not generally discussed in these other conversations to which I had listened, in wayside taverns, in railway trains, in wooden huts on the old battlefields, in the drawing-rooms of London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, and New York.
“The Angora Turks have got to be reckoned with.” ... “Greece is out for a big gamble.” ... “The Armenians have not all been massacred.” ... “The East is seething like a cauldron.” ... “It’s the oil that will put all the fat in the fire.” ... “The Bolshies have gotBatoum.” ... “Mesopotamia means oil.” ... “Russia is not dead yet, and make no mistake!” ... “My God! This peace is just a breathing space before another bloody war.” ... “It’s a world gone mad.” ... “What we want is business.”
Then back again to dollars, pounds, lire, marks, drachmas, kronen, roubles.
They ate enormously at meal times, and took snacks between meals. The fat American Jew at my table ate greedily, forgetting his fork sometimes, and mopping his plate with bits of bread. He bullied the stewards for bigger or tenderer helpings. He spoke Russian, German, and American with equal fluency, but an international accent. At night there was card playing, outbursts of song, gusts of laughter, popping of champagne corks, whisperings and chasings along the dark decks, a reek of cigar smoke, no silence or wonderment because of the beauty through which our boat was passing.
The Ionian Sea, merging into the Adriatic, was so calm that when our ship divided its waters, leaving behind a long furrow, the side of each wave was like a polished jewel, and reflected the patches of snow still on the mountain crests (though it was May, and hot) and the fissures in the rocks. It was unbroken by any ripple, except where the boat stirred its quietude by a long ruffle of feathers, and it was so blue that it seemed as though one’s hand would be dyed, like a potter’s, to the same color, if one dipped it in. With this sea, and the sky above, we went on traveling through a blue world, except where our eyes wandered into the gorges of those mountains along the coast of old Illyria, where the barren rocks are scarred and gleam white, or when they were touched by the sun’s rays at dawn and sunset and glittered in a golden way, or became washed with rose water, or all drenched in mist as purple as the Imperial mantle which once fell across them. All day long theship was followed by a flight of sea gulls skimming on quiet wings and calling plaintively so that we heard again the sirens who cried to Ulysses as he sailed this way through the Enchanted Seas.
We steamed slowly through the Gulf of Corinth, so narrow that if any boulder had fallen from its high walls it would have smashed a hole in our ship. Small Greek boys ran along a foot path, clamoring for pennies like gutter urchins beside an English char-à-banc. Then we lay off Athens, but in spite of a special Greekvisafrom the consulate in London for which I had paid a fee, I was not allowed to land. Through my glasses I saw, with a thrill of emotion, the tall columns of the Parthenon. At our ship’s side was a crowd of small craft rowed by brown-skinned boatmen who kept up a chant ofKyrie! Kyrie!(Lord! Lord!) like theKyrie eleison(Lord have mercy!) of the Catholic Mass, touting for the custom of passengers, as they did three thousand years ago, with those same shouts and waving of brown arms, and curses to each other, and raising of oars, when ships came in from Crete and Mediterranean ports with merchandise and travelers.
So we passed into the Ægean Sea, and saw on our port side, like low-lying clouds, the Greek islands in which the Gods once dwelt, and the old heroes. We drew close to Gallipoli, and I thought of heroes more modern, lying there in graves that were not old, who had done deeds needing more courage than that of Ulysses and his men, and who had faced monsters of human machine guns more dreadful than dragons and many-headed dogs, and the Medusa head. The trenches were plainly visible—British and Turkish—and the old gun-emplacements, and the Lone Tree, and the barren slopes of Achi Baba where the flower of Australian and New Zealand youth had fallen, and many Irish and English boys.
“Quite a good landing place,” said one of thepassengers by my side. I looked at him, suspecting irony, and remembering the landing of the Twenty-Ninth Division, and the Australian troops, under destroying fire. But this elderly Jew said again, in a cheerful way, “A nice cove for a boat to land.”
We went on slowly through the narrow channel, until in the morning sunlight we saw the glory of the Golden Horn and the minarets of Constantinople. It was then that half the passengers put on the red fez of Islam, and paced the deck restlessly, with their eyes strained toward the city of the Sultan.
The fat American Jew touched me on the arm and spoke solemnly, with a kind of warning. “For those who don’t wear a fez Constantinople won’t be a safe place, I guess. They say there are bodies floating every morning at the Golden Horn—stabbed in the back. I’m keeping close to Pera.”
The first view of the Golden Horn was as beautiful as I had hoped, more than I had imagined, as we rounded the old Seraglio Point and saw in the early sunlight of a May morning the glittering panorama of Constantinople.
The domes of San Sophia lay like rose-colored clouds above the cypress trees. Beyond was the great mosque of Suleyman, its minarets, white and slender, cutting the blue sky like lances. Further back, rising above a huddle of brown old houses, was the mosque of Mohammad, the conqueror who, five hundred years ago, rode into San Sophia on a day of victory, over the corpses there, and left the imprint of a bloody hand on one of the pillars where it is now sculptured in marble. White in the sun on the water’s edge were the long walls of the Sultan’s palace. One could see Galata, and the old bridge which crosses from Stamboul, and above, on the hill, Pera, with its Grand’ Rue, its night clubs, its cabarets, its Christian churches, and haunts of vice.
Before we anchored, our ship was surrounded by aswarm of boats, as at Athens, but these were the narrow caïques of the Golden Horn, rowed by Turks, who hung on by thrusting grapnel hooks through our portholes and by clinging on to ropes. They were old sun-baked Turks, with white beards, and young Turks with only down on their faces and roving eyes for the unveiled women on our decks, and together they raised a wild chant as they called “Effendi! Effendi!” and invited us to go ashore. Other ships passed us—a steamer crowded with Russian refugees fleeing from the Bolshevik pursuit of Wrangel, a British destroyer, sailing boats with leg-o’-mutton sails, billowing white above the blue water, and many of the littlecaïqueswhere, on Turkish rugs, sat Turkish ladies like bundles of black silk, deeply veiled, so that one had no glimpse of a face.
My young son and I, with light baggage, secured acaïquewith the fat American Jew, who had enormous cases of samples which nearly sank the boat when they were dumped in by the Turkish porters. We were rowed across the Golden Horn to the Customs office by two Kurdish boatmen, and there were seized upon by a crowd of Turks who fought each other for our baggage. In the customs office the Turkish officials were highly arrogant young men in uniform, who smoked innumerable cigarettes and refused to pass the American’s samples of boots and shoes until he had bribed them with some of his very best pairs. After that long delay we took a carriage and two horses and drove at a smart trot to the Pera Palace Hotel where I found my comrade of the war, Percival Phillips, and a bevy of English and American correspondents watching the secret progress of a drama which might result in another European war and set the whole East aflame. It was Phillips, as well as the High Commissioner, Admiral Webber, and various Intelligence officers, who “put me wise,” as the Americans say, to thesituation which had its secret plot in Constantinople, but its fighting center in Angora. Here in “Constant” there was a mask of peaceful obedience to the decrees of the International Occupation. It was called “International,” and there were French and Italian troops and police on both side of the Galata Bridge, but the real command was in the hands of the British High Commissioner and the real power in the hands of the British fleet. The French were “huffy” because of that, and General Franchet de l’Esperay had left in a temper because he would not take orders from the British, and was up to his eyes in political intrigue. The Sultan was a puppet in the hands of the British, ready to sign any document they put before him, provided his personal safety was assured. But every Turk in his palace, and in the back streets of Galata and Stamboul, were rebels against his submission, and spies and agents on behalf of the Nationalist Turks in Angora. Those were the real fellows. They refused to recognize the Allied terms of peace, or any peace. They were contemptuous of the Sultan’s enforced decrees. They even denied his religious authority. They had raised the old flag of Islam and were stirring up fanaticism through the whole Mohammadan world as far as India. But they were modern in their ideas and methods, “Nationalist” and not religious in their faith, like the Irish Sinn Feiners who put national liberty before Catholic dogma. They were raising levies of Turkish peasants, drilling them, arming them (with French weapons!), teaching them that if they wanted to keep their land they must fight for it. There was a fellow named Mustapha Kemal. He would be heard of later in history as a great leader. He was raiding up the coast as far as Ismid, and little companies of British Tommies had had to fall back before his irregulars. Not good for our prestige! But what could we do on the Asiatic side, with only a few battalions of boys?Meanwhile, the Turks in Constantinople were sending money, men and munitions to the Nationalists, and there was precious little we could do to stop them, in spite of our troops and police. Why, there was gun-running under the Galata Bridge, almost as open as daylight! Mustapha Kemal’s strength was growing—nobody knew how strong. Perhaps it was underestimated. Perhaps one day the Greeks, holding a long line across Asia Minor for the protection of Smyrna, would get a nasty surprise. Who could trust a Greek Army, anyhow? And what was the British Government—that beggar Lloyd George!—doing with all their pro-Greek policy? It was doing us no good in the Mohammadan world. Even India was getting restless because their political agitators were pretending the Sultan was a prisoner and the Prophet insulted! Not that the Indian Mohammadans cared a curse about the Sultan really, belonging to a different sect. But it was all propaganda, and dangerous. The whole situation was full of danger, and Constantinople was a very interesting city in this time of history.
That was the gist of the conversation I heard from Phillips, and British Intelligence officers, and naval lieutenants, and travelers from the Near or Far East, in the smoking room of the Pera Hotel, which looked out to the Grand’ Rue with its ceaseless procession of Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Israelites, French and Italian officers, Persians, Arabs, Negroes, Gypsies, American “drummers,” British soldiers, and Russian refugees—the queerest High Street in the world, the meeting place between the East and the West, the unsafe sanctuary of those in flight from the greatest tragedy in the world, which was in Russia.
For one scene in this drama the dining room of the Pera Palace Hotel—a thieves’ kitchen in the way of fleecing the visitor—was an entertaining prologue. Rich Turks came here to listen to incautious conversations byforeign journalists, or irresponsible young middies from the British fleet lying in the Bosphorus, or to act as liaison officers between Mustapha Kemal and his political supporters in the sacred city. There was one Turkish family who dined here every day, the women unveiled as a sign of their modernism, and one of them so beautiful with her dark liquid eyes touched by kohl, that she had to sustain the gaze of young Christian dogs in naval uniform—and did not seem to mind. Greek and Armenian merchants brought their ladies here, dressed in Paris fashions by way of the Grand’ Rue de Pera, and light in their way of behavior, despite the glowering eyes of old Turks who watched them sullenly. Cossack officers who had lost their command, and all but their pride, came in full uniform, with black tunics crossed by cartridge belts, high, black boots, and astrachan caps. One of them was a giant with a close-cropped head like a Prussian officer, and a powerful, brutal face, but elegant drawing-room manners, as when he bent over the hands of lady friends and kissed their rings. These last fugitives from the last expedition against Bolshevik Russia lived gayly for a time on the diamonds they had hidden in their boots. Their motto was the old one: “Let’s eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die!” They gave banquets to each other while they had any means of paying the bill. That was easy while they had a few jewels, for in a private room at the Pera Palace were Jew dealers who would value a diamond ring with expert knowledge and pay in Turkish pounds. One general paid for his dinner party in a different way. At the end of the meal he took his wife’s fur tippet from her shoulders, handed it to the waiter, and said, “Bring me the change!”
Their own paper money was almost worthless in purchasing value, whether Czarist roubles, or Denikin roubles, or Soviet roubles. One of the Cossack officersordered a cocktail, and paid 100,000 roubles for the little nip of stimulant.
Once or twice a week there was a dance after dinner at this hotel patronized by the younger officers of the British and American fleets and the society of Pera. Some of the women there were beautiful, though mostly too plump, which is the way of Greek ladies and Armenian, after a certain age. Their shoulders rose above their low-cut dresses. Young naval lieutenants winked at each other, sometimes danced with each other and said, “Hot stuff, dear child! Beware!”
In such a place, at such a time, there was no sense of the East, near or far, no reminder of the tragedies within a stone’s throw of the windows, no reminder of great menace creeping across the clock of Time to this city and its mixed inhabitants, no fear of massacre. Yet, when I went outside that hotel, by day, and often by night, I was aware of those things, smelt something evil here, beyond the noxious stench of the narrow streets. The Turks who slouched up the Grand’ Rue, or crowded the bazaars of Stamboul and Galata, had no love for the Christian inhabitants, civil or military. I saw them spit now and then, when British Tommies passed giving the glad eye to young Turkish women who let down their veils like window blinds hurriedly drawn.
Often I went down to the Galata Bridge with my young son, glancing often over my shoulder when there was any crush, because I did not want his young life ended by a stab in the back which happened sometimes, I was told, to soldier boys of ours. Beyond that bridge, where two Turks stood receiving toll from all who passed, was the beginning of the East, stretching away and away to that great swarming East which was held back from Europe by a few battleships, a few British regiments, and the last prestige of the European peoples, weakened by its internecine warfare. Could we hold backthe East forever, or even the Turkish nationalists from this city on the Bosphorus? Across the bridge came Turkish porters carrying great loads at the nape of the neck, Persians in high fur caps, Kurds, Lazis, Arabs, Soudanese, negroes, Gypsy queens in tattered robes, smart young Turks in black coats and the red fez, Turkish women in blue silk gowns, deeply veiled. In the bazaars near by there were swarms of Turks, Armenians, and Jews, selling German and American goods, Oriental spices, Turkish and Persian carpets, dried fruits, shell oil. Around the mosques of Stamboul sat groups of Turks smoking their narghili and talking, between the hours when they washed their feet according to the law of the Prophet. Camel caravans, with mangy, tired beasts, heavily laden, plodded down narrow streets, and their drivers had news to tell, exciting to little groups of Turks who gathered round. What news? What excitement?... There were hidden emotions, passions, secrets, among these people, at which I could only guess, or fail to guess.
I thought of a story I had heard of the Reverend Mother in a Catholic convent here in Constantinople. She had a Turkish porter at the convent gate, an old man who had been a faithful servant. She asked him if he thought there would be any rising in the city among the Turks, and, if so, whether her convent school would be respected. “Do not be afraid,” he said. “When the massacre begins I myself will kill you without any pain.” He promised her an easy death.
There was, I thought, only one safeguard against massacre in this city seething with racial hatred. It was the fear of those young British soldiers, with their French comrades, and sailor cousins, who kept order in Constantinople. It was a fear inspired mainly by British prestige. We had no great strength at that time, as far as I could see, less than two full Divisions of infantry—mostlyboys who had been too young to fight in the Great War—and some Indian cavalry, Mohammadans like the Turks. In the Bosphorus, it was true, there was a considerable fleet, led by the Iron Duke, and some American warships, but a rising in Constantinople, an attack on the European quarters, would lead to dirty work. There would be many Christian throats cut.
The British troops did not seem nervous. They are never nervous, but take things as they come. At the upper end of the Rue de Pera there were numbers of wine shops and dancing halls where they gathered in the evenings. As I passed them I saw groups like those with which I had been familiar in the estaminets on the Western front. They were singing the same old songs. Through the swing doors came gusts of laughter and those choruses roared by lusty voices. In Constantinople as in Flanders! The Y.M.C.A. was doing good work in keeping them out of temptation’s way, down back alleys, where Greek girls waited for them, or where Turkish ladies hid in the dark courtyards. On the whole they gave no great trouble to the “red caps” who rounded them up at night. The American Jacks gave more. Coming from “dry” ships, they drew a bee line for the booze shops, and were mad drunk rapidly. The British A.P.M. with whom I went round the city one night, had the genial permission from the American Admiral to have them knocked on the head by the naval police as quickly and smartly as possible. It was safer for them.
I shall never forget one of those young American sailors whom I encountered at a music hall close to the Pera Palace, known as the “Petits Champs.” A variety show was given there nightly, by Russian singers and dancers with a Russian orchestra, and it was crowded with all the races of the world which met in Constantinople. Some of the dancing girls had been ladies ofquality in Russia. Now they showed their bodies to this assembly of wine-drinking men and evil women, of East and West, for the wages of life. The orchestra played Russian music with a wild lilt in it—the rhythm of the primitive soul of the old Slav race. It worked madness in the brain of the young American Jack, who sat next to me, with one of his petty officers. He was a nice, sweet-faced fellow, but with too much beer in him to withstand this music. For a time he contented himself with dangling his watch in his glass of beer, but presently his body swayed to the rhythm, and he waved his handkerchief to the ladies on the stage. Then he seized a great tin tray from a passing waiter and danced the hula-hula with it, with frightful crashes and bangs. No one took much notice of him. The petty officer smiled, as at a pleasant jest. Our own sailors were merry and bright, and there was a great noise in the cabaret of the Petits Champs.
There was no noise, but a kind of warm silence, if such a thing may be, in a Turkish house on the hillside overlooking the Bosphorus, where my son and I took dinner with a young English merchant and his wife. It was an old wooden house called a “palace,” with a broad balcony above a little tangled garden. Down there among the trees with a little old mosque with one minaret, and far below the British fleet lay at anchor, mirrored in the glasslike water. The spearheads of black cypress trees in our garden pointed to the first stars of evening in a turquoise sky, faintly flushed by the rose tints of sunset. Beyond, the Asiatic shore stretched away, with the lights of Scutari clustered at the water’s edge below the slopes of Bulgaria, and clear-cut against the sky rose the tall white minarets of Buyak Djami, the great mosque built in honor of Mirimah, the daughter of Suleyman the Magnificent. A band was playing on one of our warships, and its music came faintly up to us.When it ceased, there was a great silence around us, except for the flutter of bats skimming along our balcony.
The young English merchant—the head of the greatest trading house in the Near East—sat back in a cane chair, talking somberly of the stagnation of his business owing to the effects of war and the failure of peace. He was anxious about the Nationalists in Angora. That fellow Mustapha Kemal—The Greeks might not have the strength to hold Smyrna! Every Turk had vowed to get back Smyrna at all costs. It was the worst wound to their pride. The future was very uncertain. Damned bad for trade. What was going to happen in Europe with all these race hatreds, political intrigues, jealousies between French and British, Italian and French, Greeks and all others. Venizelos had claimed too much. More than Greece could hold....
He was newly married, this young merchant of the Near East, and his wife was beautiful and restless, and rather bored. She liked dancing better than anything in the world, and had enjoyed it on the Iron Duke with young British officers. Her merchant husband was not keen on it—especially when his wife danced with those young naval officers, I thought. He was a little annoyed now when she brought a gramaphone on to the balcony and set it going to a dance tune and offered her arms to a boy who had brought the latest steps from London—my son. While they moved about to the rhythm of a rag-time melody, the young merchant continued his analysis of a situation ugly with many perils and troubles, and then was silent over his pipe. From the garden came another kind of music as the rose flush faded from the sky and the cypress trees were blacker against a paler blue. A white-robed figure stood in the little turret of the minaret and turned eastward and raised his voice in a long-drawn chant, rising and falling in the Oriental scale of half-tones. It was the imam, calling to the Faithfulof the Prophet in the city of Mohammad. It was the voice of the East as it has called through the centuries to desert and city and camel tracks, to the soul of Eastern peoples under this sky and stars. It rose above the music of a gramaphone playing rag-time melody, and called across the waters of the Bosphorus where Western battleships were lying, with their long guns, like insects with their legs outstretched, as we looked down on them. Faintly from the shadow world, and through this warm-scented air of an evening in Constantinople, came answering voices, wailing, as the imams in each minaret of the city of mosques, gave praise to God, and to Mohammad his Prophet.
“The Turks aren’t finished yet,” said the young English merchant. “And behind the Turk is Russia—and the East.”
A chill made me shiver a little.... The sun had gone down.
With Percival Phillips, sometimes, we visited the mosques and explored Turkish street life on the Stamboul side of Constantinople, and went up to Eyoub and the Sweet Waters of Europe, and wandered among the charred ruins of a quarter of the city where a great fire had raged. Once, with the young commercial traveler in vests and pants—three years before an officer in the Great War—we walked to lonely districts where the Indian cavalry had pitched their camps beyond the city and when in a little Turkish coffee shop, remote and solitary, some wild Gypsy women in tattered robes of many colors, through which could be seen their bare brown limbs, danced and sang. No need to ask the origin of the Gypsy folk after seeing these. They were people of the Far East, and their songs had the harsh and ancient melody of Oriental nomads.
“Not particularly safe to wander far afield like this,” said the young commercial traveler. He told stories ofTurkish robbers and assassins in the outskirts of the city. But no harm befell us.
In narrow streets off the Grand’ Rue de Pera, we came into touch with another aspect of life in Constantinople—the heart of the Russian tragedy among the Royalist refugees. Those people had arrived in successive waves of flight following the defeat and rout of the “White” expedition under Denikin, Wrangel, and others. The luckiest among them, who had jewels to sell and a business instinct, had set up little restaurants and wine shops in Pera. Somehow or other many of them were able to get enough money to eat and drink in these places, and they were always filled with Russian officers in uniform, with their ladies. Those who served were often of higher rank than those who dined, and a score of times I saw an officer rise, bow profoundly, and kiss the hand of the waiting girl before he ordered hisbortsch. Probably she was a Princess. One could hardly order a cup of tea in Constantinople without receiving it from a Russian princess or at least a lady of quality in the old régime. I had a pork chop handed to me by a bald-headed man with an apron round his waist whom I knew afterward as the Admiral of the late Czar’s yacht. His fellow serving men were aristocrats and intellectuals, wearing white linen jackets and doing their job as waiters with dignity as well as skill. Poor devils! In spite of their courage and their gayety, they were having a rough life in Constantinople with no hope ahead, except the fading dreams that Soviet Russia would be overthrown by some internal plot or foreign intervention. In spite of all the millions lent to Russia by Great Britain, and all the arms and ammunition supplied by us to Koltchak, Denikin, and all the “White” Armies, they regarded England as the chief cause of their repeated failures, and as a nation which had not helped their cause with proper loyalty. It was the one-time Admiral of the Czar’s yacht whomade this complaint to me, and said, “England has betrayed us!”
That evening I sat with a young British naval officer in the Pera Palace hotel and heard the other side of the story. He had been looking angrily at some Cossack officers and their ladies, laughing over their coffee cups.
“I’m not bloodthirsty,” he said, “but it would give me the greatest pleasure in the world to cut one of those fellow’s throats.”
He told me the cause of his bitterness—the inefficiency, the corruption, the vanity, the damned selfishness, the jealousy of those White officers. We had sent out vast stores of arms and ammunition, but they never got to the front. Crowds of these fellows, swaggering about in uniform, never went near their wretched men in the trenches, and were hundreds of miles behind, gambling, drinking, indulging in amorous adventure. The women were just as bad, many of them. Worse, if anything! We had sent out consignments of clothes for the Russian nurses, who were in rags at the front where they were looking after the wounded. That underclothing, those stockings, and boots, and raincoats never reached the nurses. They had been seized and worn by the female harpies hundreds of miles behind the line. He had more respect for the Reds than for this White rabble. One day the British taxpayer would want to know why we were keeping thousands of them in the island of Prinkipo and elsewhere....
I went out to Prinkipo, and did not feel the bitterness of that young officer who had no patience with our charity. A boatload of refugees, with a crowd of women and children, had just arrived and were sitting among their bundles and boxes on the quayside, forlorn, melancholy, sick after a long voyage across the Black Sea, and after the horror of flight from the Red Terror. We could not let them starve to death without a helping hand.
Certainly we were doing them rather well on Prinkipo, and it seemed to me an island of delight where I, for one, would gladly have stayed a month or two, or a year or two, if my own folk had been there. These Russian exiles made the best of it. Their laughter rang out in a wooden restaurant where a party of them dined to the music of a little orchestra which played mad and merry music. Some of those Russian girls were amazingly beautiful, patrician in manner and grace.
Along a road leading through green woods to a golden shore lapped by little frothing waves, came a cavalcade of Russians on donkeys, which they raced with each other, screaming with laughter. Further on, where the woods ended, there was a smooth greensward on which a crowd of Russian folk were dancing to the music of a hurdy-gurdy. Hand in hand young Russian men and women, once great people in Moscow and Odessa, wandered playing the pleasant game of love-in-idleness. Not too bad to be a refugee at Prinkipo, until they awakened from their lotus eating to the hopelessness of their state, to the raggedness of their clothes, to their life without purpose and prospect, and, later on, to a new menace of death from bloodthirsty Turks in alliance with Red Russia. There would not be much good will to Russian Royalists living here on Prinkipo in the wooden villas and palaces built by Turkish pashas for their summer pleasure.
When the last wave of flight came, after Wrangel’s downfall, Prinkipo became overcrowded and fever-stricken, and the Russians in Constantinople, tens of thousands of poverty-stricken folk of peasant class, would have starved to death but for the charity of British and American relief work. They were panic-stricken as well as poverty-stricken, after the burning of Smyrna.
So in Constantinople I saw the drama of a city in whichthe East met the West—across the Galata Bridge—and where the strife and agony of many races upheaved by war and revolution, seethed as in a human cauldron. In this city of the Mohammadan world, and of Russia in exile, and of French, German, Italian, and Greek intrigue, the peace of the world did not seem secure and lasting. It filled me with sinister forebodings.
It was a British ship which took me from Constantinople to Smyrna, and it gave me a thrill of patriotic pleasure to get porridge for breakfast, and ham and eggs with buttered toast.
Apart from the officers and crew, there were few English folk aboard. I can only remember one—a good-looking and good-humored major, who was bound for Alexandria in company with a pretty Greek woman who seemed to be under his chivalrous protection. The other first-class passengers were Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. On the lower deck were groups of Italian soldiers who sang and danced continuously, a few Turks, an old Arab woman in a dirty white robe, who gazed all day long over the side of the ship as though reading some spell of fate in the lace work patterns of froth woven by our passage through the dead calm sea, and families of Israelites lying among their bundles.
It was good to lie on the boat deck in the direct glare of the sun, pouring its warmth down from a cloudless sky, and to watch with half-shut eyes the golden glitter of the sea and its change of color and light from deepest blue to palest green, as the currents crossed our track and white clouds passed overhead and the sun sank low, as evening came. Fairy islands, dreamlike and unsubstantial, appeared on the far horizon, and then seemed to sink below its golden bar. At night the sky was crowded with stars, shining with a piercing brightness, and it seemed no wonder then that to each of them the Greeks had given a name and godlike attributes. They seemed closer to the world than in an English sky,heaven’s brilliant train, and on this ship in a lonely sea—no other boat passed us—the company of the stars was friendly and benign.
From the lower deck came the singing of the Italian soldiers, with their liquid words and open notes, in which I heard something very old in the melody of life. The Greeks were singing, too, in a separate group, softly, to themselves, and with a melancholy cadence. Tiny sparks of fire, like glow-worms, flitted to and fro on the lower deck. It was the glow of cigarette ends, as the Italian soldiers danced the fox trot and the one step. Now and then a match was lighted, and one saw it held in the hollow of brown hands, illumining a dark Italian face.
My son and I sat on coils of rope, up on the boat deck, with a Greek girl with whom we had made friends. She talked and talked, and held us spellbound by her philosophy of life, her gayety, her bitter wisdom, her fearlessness and wit. It was a short voyage, and we have never seen her again, but we shall not forget that laughing Greek girl who spoke half the languages of Europe, and English perfectly, and American with such intimate acquaintance that she could sing little old nigger songs with perfect accent, as it seemed to us. Yet she had never been in England or America, and had spent nearly all her life in Constantinople, with brief visits to Greece, and two frightful years in Russia. She had learnt English, and her negro songs, in the American College at Constantinople, to which she looked back with adoration, though she had been a naughty rebel against all its discipline.
As a governess to a German family in Russia, she had learnt another language—besides Russian, Greek, French, Turkish and English—and had been thoroughly amused with life, until the Red Revolution broke in Moscow. Her Germans fled, leaving her alone in their empty flat, and then she learnt more than ever she had guessed aboutthe cruelties of life. Her life was saved by her gayety and “cheek,” as she called it. When a crowd of Red soldiers threatened to slit her throat, she jeered at them, and then made them roar with laughter by playing comic songs on the piano and singing them with merry pantomime. That was all right, but she starved and went in expectation of death month after month. Her Russian friends, students and intellectuals, were mostly shot or hanged. She recognized some of them as they hung from lamp-posts in the streets, and gave us a vivid imitation of how they looked, with their necks cricked and their tongues hanging out. She became used to that sort of thing.... After wandering adventures, abominable hardships, in dirt and rags, she got through at last to Constantinople, and lived for a time on a Greek gunboat, as one of the crew, wearing one of their caps and a sailor’s jersey. They saved her from starving to death, until she was able to get in touch with her family. Now she was going to Alexandria, as a typist in an English office.
She was tremendously amused with all this experience. She wouldn’t have missed it for the world. It was the adventure of life, and the great game. There was nothing in life but that—and what did death matter after this adventure whenever it came! We spoke of war, and the chance of world peace, and she scoffed at the chance. War was inevitable—the greatest adventure of all. Cruelty?—Yes, that was part of the adventure. Men were heartless, but amusing, even in their cruelties. It was no good looking at life seriously, breaking one’s heart over impossible ideals. It was best to laugh and take things as they came, and shrug one’s shoulders, whatever happened. It was Life!... So we talked under the stars.
There was another girl on board who talked to us. She belonged to a different type and race—a tragic type,and Armenian. She had some frightful photographs in a satchel which she wore always round her waist. They were photographs of Turkish atrocities in Asia Minor. There was one of a Turkish officer sitting on a pile of skulls and smoking a cigarette. Those skulls had once held the living brains of this girl’s family and townsfolk at Samsun. She told me of the death march of the Armenians when the Turks drove them from the coast into the interior. The women and children had been separated from their men folk, who were then massacred. Her father and brother had been killed like that. They passed their bodies on the roadsides. The women and children had been driven forward until many dropped and died, until all were barefoot and exhausted to the point of death. Kurdish brigands had robbed them of the little money they had, and their rings. Some of the younger girls were carried off. Their screams were heard for a long way. There were not many who reached the journey’s end.... A terrible tale, told with a white passion of hate against the Turk, but without tears, and coldly, so that it made me shiver.
In that ship, sailing under the stars in the Ægean Sea, I learnt more than I had known about the infernal history of mankind during war and revolution. I had seen it in the West. These were stories of the East, unknown and unrecorded, as primitive in their horror as when Assyrians fought Egyptians, or the Israelites were put to the sword in the time of Judas Maccabæus.
Our ship put in at Mitylene, and with the Greek girl we explored the port and walked up the hillside to an old fort built by the Venetians in the great days when Venice was the strongest sea power in that part of the world. On the way, the Greek girl chatted to shopkeepers and peasants in their own tongue, and hers, and then climbed to the top of the fort, sitting fearlessly on the edge of the wall and looking back to the sea over which we hadtraveled, and down to our ship, so small as we saw it from this height.
In the valley, Greek peasants of better type and stock than those at Athens, and true descendants of the people whose tools and gods and jewels they turn up sometimes with their spades, were leading their sheep and goats. Some of them were singing and the sound rose clear up the hillside with a tinkling of goat bells and the baaing of the sheep. Wild flowers were growing in the old walls of the fort, and the hillside was silvered with daisies. We seemed very close to the blue canopy of the sky above us, as we sat on the edge of the wall, and in the warm sunshine, and above that calm, crystal-clear sea, mirroring our ship, we seemed to be touched by the immortality of the gods, and to be invested with the beauty of the springtime of the world.
“It would be good to stay here,” said the Greek girl. “We could keep goats and sing old Greek songs.”
However, presently she was hungry, and scrambled off the wall and said, “The ship—and supper!”
So we went down to the little port again and rowed away from Mitylene to the ship which was sounding its siren for our return.
We reached Smyrna next morning, and I, for one, was astonished by the modern aspect of its sea frontage, upon which the sun poured down. Beyond the broad quays it swept round the gulf in a wide curve of white houses, faced with marble and very handsome along the side inhabited, I was told, by rich Armenian merchants.
“The Turks will never rest till they get Smyrna back,” said the English major by my side, and his words came as a sharp reminder of the lines away beyond the hills, where a Greek army lay entrenched against the Turkish nationalists and Mustapha Kemal. But no shadow of doom crept through the sunlight that lay glittering upon those white-fronted houses, nor did I guess that one day,not far ahead, Englishmen, like myself, looking over the side of this ship, would see the beauty of that city devoured by an infernal fury of flame, and listen to the screams of panic-stricken crowds on those broad quaysides, hidden behind rolling clouds of smoke....
When we landed, in the harbor-master’s pinnace, we found that we had come on a day of festival among the Greek army of occupation and the Greek inhabitants of Smyrna. All the ships in the harbor—among them the very gunboat in which our Greek lady had lived as one of the crew—were dressed in bunting, and flags were flying from many buildings. Greek officers, very dandified, in much decorated uniforms, with highly polished boots, drove along the esplanade in open carriages, carrying great bouquets, on their way to a review by the Commander-in-Chief outside the city. Smyrniote girls, Greek and Armenian, were in fancy frocks and high-heeled shoes tripping gayly along with young Greek soldiers. Bands were playing as they marched, and all the air thrilled with the music of trumpets and military pomp. Few Turks were visible among those Christian inhabitants. They were mostly dockside laborers and porters, wearing the red fez of Islam.
It was the English major who told me of the horror that had happened here when the Greeks first landed. They had rowed off from their transports in boats, and a crowd of these Turkish porters had helped to draw the boats up to the quayside. All the Christian population was on the front, waving handkerchiefs from windows and balconies. Ladies of the American Red Cross were looking at the scene from the balcony of the Grand Hotel Splendid Palace—what a name! There was no sign of hostility from the Turks, but suddenly the Greek soldiers seemed to go mad, and started bayoneting the Turks who had helped them to land. In view of all the women and children who had assembled to greet themwith delirious joy, they murdered those defenseless men and flung their bodies into the sea. It was a crime for which many poor innocents were to pay when the Turkish irregulars came into Smyrna with the madness of victory after the destruction of the Greek army by Mustapha Kemal and his Nationalist troops. Well, that grim secret of fate lay hidden in the future when Tony and I booked rooms at the Grand Hotel Splendid Palace and entertained our little Greek lady to breakfast, and then at midday waved towels out of the bedroom window in answer to her signals from the ship which took her on her way to Alexandria and another adventure of life. The English major brought a bucket to the upper deck, as we could see distinctly and wrung a towel over it as a sign of tears. We made the countersign....
The sea front of Smyrna, with its modern marble-fronted houses, masked an older and more romantic city, as we found in many walks in all its quarters. It masked the Turkish squalor of little streets of wooden shops and booths where crowds of Turkish women, more closely veiled than those in Constantinople, bargained for silks and slippers and household goods. In the old markets at the end of Frank Street, now a heap of cindered ruins, we sauntered through the narrow passages with vaulted roofs where old Turks sat cross-legged in their alcoves, selling carpets from Ouchak and Angora, dried raisins and vegetables, strips of colored silk for Turkish dresses, Sofrali linen, Manissa cotton, German-made hardware, and all manner of rubbish from the East and West, drenched in the aroma of spices, moist sugar, oil, and camels.
I was anxious, as a journalist, to get the latest information about the military situation away to the back of Smyrna, and for that purpose called upon the British Military Mission, represented by a General Hamilton and his staff. A charming and courteous man, he wasobviously embarrassed by my visit, not knowing how much to tell me of a situation which was extremely delicate in a political as well as a military way. He decided to tell me nothing, and I did not press him, seeing his trouble.
I obtained all the information I wanted, and even more than I bargained for, from the Greek authorities. The fact that I representedThe Daily Chronicle, known for its pro-Greek sympathies and for its official connection with Lloyd George’s Government, gave me an almost embarrassing importance. No sooner had I revealed my journalistic mission than I received a visit from a Greek staff officer—Lieutenant Casimatis—who put the entire city of Smyrna at my feet, as it were, and as one small token of my right to fulfill the slightest wish, sent round a powerful military car with two tall soldiers, under orders to obey my commands. Tony was pleased with this attention and other courtesies that were showered upon us. It was he, rather than myself, who interviewed the Commander-in-Chief of the Greek army, and received the salutes of its soldiers as we drove up magnificently to General Headquarters.
A military band was playing outside—selections from “Patience,” by some strange chance—and in the antechamber of the General’s room Greek staff officers, waisted, highly polished, scented, swaggered in and out. The Commander-in-Chief was a very fat old gentleman, uncomfortable in his tight belt, and perspiring freely on that hot day. The windows of his room were open, and the merry music floated in, and the scent of flowers, and of the warm sea. “He received us most politely,” as poor Fragson used to sing in one of my brother’s plays, and with his fat fingers moving about a big map, explained the military situation. It was excellent, he said. The Greek army was splendid, in training andmorale, and longing to advance against the Turk, who was utterlydemoralized. Those poor Turkish peasants, forcibly enlisted by Mustapha Kemal, wanted nothing but leave to go home. The Greek advance would be a parade—the Commander-in-Chief, speaking in French, repeated his words with relish and pride—“a parade, sir!” Unfortunately, he said, Greece was hampered by differences among the Allies. The French were certainly intriguing with the Turkish Nationalists of Angora—supplying them with arms and ammunition! The Italians were no better, and very jealous of Greek claims in Asia Minor. Greece had trust, however, in the noble friendship of England, in the sympathy and aid of that great statesman, Mr. Lloyd George.... The Greek army would astonish the world.
So the old gentleman talked, and I listened politely, and asked questions, and kept my doubts to myself. There was not a British officer I had met anywhere, except General Hamilton in Smyrna, who had a good word to say for the fighting qualities of Greek soldiers. There was not one I had met who believed that they could hold Smyrna for more than a year or two, until the Turks reorganized.
It was Lieutenant Casimatis who introduced us to the Commander-in-Chief, and he devoted himself to the task of presenting us to all the people of importance in Smyrna, and taking us to schools, hospitals, museums, and other institutions which would prove to us the benevolence and high culture of Greek rulers in Asia Minor. He was a cheery, stout little man, speaking English, which he had learnt in India, and almost bursting with good nature and the desire to pump us with Greek propaganda.
He took us to the Greek Metropolitan at Smyrna, a black-bearded, broad-shouldered, loud-laughing, excitable Bishop of the Orthodox Church, wearing the high black hat and long black robe of his priestly office, but reminding us of one of those Princes of the Church inthe Middle Ages who led their armies to battle and sometimes wielded a battleax in the name of the Lord. “An old ruffian,” I heard him called by an English merchant of Bournabat, whose sympathies, however, were decidedly pro-Turk. A picture representing the martyrdom of St. Polycarp at Smyrna, in the early days of the Christian era, adorned the wall opposite his desk, and he waved his hand toward it and spoke of the martyrdom of the Christian people, not so long ago as that, but only a year or two ago, when they were driven from the coast, as that Armenian girl had told me. “The spirit of St. Polycarp,” he said, in barbarous French, “animates the Greek Christians to-day, and nothing would give me greater joy than to die for the faith as he did.” I have never heard whether this pious wish was fulfilled. It seems to me probable.
For a long time he talked of the sufferings of the Greeks and Armenians, calling upon various men in the room—his secretaries and priests—to bear witness to the truth of his tales. Presently, with some ceremony, servants came round with silver trays laden with glasses of iced water and some little plates containing a white glutinous substance. As the guest of ceremony, it was my privilege to be served first, which did not give me the chance of watching what others might do. I took a spoonful of the white substance, and swallowed it, hoping for the best. But it was the worst that I had done. I discovered afterward that it was a resinous stuff calledmastica, something in the nature of chewing gum. The mouthful I had swallowed had a most disturbing effect upon my system, and even the Metropolitan was alarmed. My son Tony, served second, was in the same trouble.
In the Greek schools of Smyrna all the scholars were kept in during the luncheon hour, while we went from class to class inspecting their work and making politebows and speeches to the teachers. The scholars, ranging from all ages of childhood, did not seem to bear us any grudge for their long wait for lunch, and we were much impressed by their discipline, their pretty manners, their beautiful eyes. Tony felt like the Prince of Wales, and was conscious of the “glad eyes” of the older girls.... When Smyrna was reported to be a city of fire and massacre, I thought with dreadful pity of those little ones.
We touched with our very hands the spirit of this ancient race in the time of its glory, when we went into the museum and handled the pottery, the gods, the household ornaments, the memorials—found by peasants with their picks not far below the soil—of that time when Homer was born (it is claimed) in this city of the Ægean, when the Ionians held it, when Lysimachus made it great and beautiful, until it was one of the most prosperous ports in the world, crowded with Greek and Roman and Syrian ships trading between the West and East.
Lieutenant Casimatis took us to his little home away on a lonely road beyond the Turkish quarter, and we spent an evening with his family, a handsome wife and three beautiful children who sang little songs to us in French and Greek. The poor lady was nervous. Some shadow of fear was upon her because of that Turkish army beyond the Greek trenches. I hope with all my heart she escaped from Smyrna with her babes before the horror happened.... I drank to the welfare of Greece in the sweet resinous wine which Lieutenant Casimatis poured out for us. It was a sincere wish, but at the back of my mind was some foreboding.
We drove out one day to Boudja and Bournabat, past the slopes of Mount Pagus and away in the hills. Turkish peasants riding on donkeys or in ox wagons jogged along the dusty tracks. We passed Turkish cemeteries with tombstones leaning at every angle below tall, black cypress trees, and looking back, saw the brown roofsof Smyrna below, as in a panorama under the hot sun which made the gulf like molten metal.
In the country we lost touch with the Western world. It was Asia, with the smell and color and silence of the East. A camel caravan moved slowly in the valley, like a picture in “The Arabian Nights.” But at Boudja, and later at Bournabat, we were astonished to see English-looking girls in English summer frocks, carrying tennis racquets, and appearing as though they had just left Surbiton. These two villages were inhabited by British merchants who had been long settled there as traders in Oriental carpets, spices, raisins, dates, and the merchandise of the East. We called on one of them at Bournabat, and I rubbed my eyes when, with Asia Minor at the gate, we drove up to a house that might have been transplanted from Clapham Park in the early Victorian period, when Cubitt was building for a rich middle class.
The house was furnished like that, except for some bearskins and hunting trophies, and the two old ladies and one old gentleman who gave us tea might have been transported on a magic carpet from a tea party in the time of the Newcomes. We had toasted muffins, and the stouter of the two old ladies (who wore a little lace cap and sat stiffly against an antimacassar, in a chintz-covered chair) asked whether we would take one or two lumps of sugar with our tea. Tony, who was beginning to feel an exile from civilization, beamed with happiness at this English life again.
The old gentleman had been the greatest trader in Asia Minor, and in his younger days had hunted with Turkish peasants in the mountains. He loved the Turk still, though he deplored the cruelties they had done to the Christian populations in the war. For the Greeks he had pity, and dreadful forebodings. He knew something of what was happening behind the Turkish lines, with Mustapha Kemal. There would be no peace untilthey had Smyrna back again. The Greeks had claimed too much. Venizelos had lost his head. Lloyd George—The old man sighed, and fell into a gloomy silence. “I’m afraid of the future,” he said, presently. “Nobody will listen to my advice. The Greeks think I am pro-Turk. What I want is a just peace, and above all peace. This is only an armed truce.” He told me many things about the situation which filled me with uneasiness. I promised to see him again, but after a few days we left Smyrna for Athens.
We traveled in a little steam yacht which had once been Vanderbilt’s and now was a Greek passenger ship, calledPolikos. It was crowded with Greek officers, in elegant uniforms, and very martial-looking until a certain hour of the evening. The passage began in a wonderful calm, and after darkness there were groups of singing folk of different nationalities, as on that other ship, but presently a terrific storm broke upon us, and the singing ceased, and thePolikoswas a ship of sick and sorry people.
Tony and I crept to our bunks in a big crowded cabin, and the Greek officers in the other bunks were frightfully and outrageously ill. Early next morning their martial appearance had gone and they were the disheveled wrecks of men. Tony, with extreme heroism, staggered to the saloon and ordered ham and eggs, but thought better of it before they came, and took to his bunk again, below mine which I, less brave, had never left. We were glad to reach Athens without shipwreck.
We had a week of joy there, in dazzling sunshine, and wandered about the ruins of the Acropolis and touched old stones with reverence, and sipped rose-tinted ices in the King’s Gardens, and saw Greek boys throwing the discus in the very arena where the games were played in the Golden Age, and tried to remember odd scraps of classical knowledge, to recall the beauty of the Gods and thewisdom of the poets. All that need not be told, but it was as pro-Greeks that we returned to England, and with memories which made us understand more sharply the tragedy of that defeat when the Cross went down before the Crescent, and the horror happened in Smyrna, and all the world held its breath when Constantinople was threatened with the same fate.
In October of 1921 I went to Russia for the purpose of making a report on the Famine to the Imperial Relief Fund.
Much as I disliked the idea of seeing the grisly vision of Famine after so many experiences of war and its effects, I felt that it was an inescapable duty to accept the invitation made to me. I was also drawn by a strong desire to see the conditions of Russia, outside as well as inside the famine area, and to get first-hand knowledge of the system of Bolshevism which was a terror to the majority in Europe, with some secret attraction, holy or unholy, among men and women of revolutionary or “advanced” views.
It was impossible to know the truth from newspaper reading. Stories of Russian atrocities and horrors arrived from Riga, Helsingfors and other cities on the border of the Soviet Republic, and were denied by other correspondents. Knowing the way in which “atrocities” had been manufactured in time of war, by every nation, I disbelieved all I read about Russia circulated by the “White” propaganda department, while doubting everything which came from “Red” sources. I think that was a general attitude of mind among unprejudiced people.
Even with regard to the Famine it was impossible to get near the truth by newspaper accounts.The Daily Mailsaid the tales of famine were vastly exaggerated.The Daily Expresssaid there was no famine at all.The Morning Postsuggested that it was a simple scheme for deluding Western nations in order to feed the Red Army. I wanted to know, and promised to find out and reportimpartially to the Imperial Relief Fund.The Daily Chronicleagreed to publish a number of articles written after my return from Russia (in order to avoid censorship), and I arranged to send an account toThe Review of Reviews, of which I was the rather nominal editor.
A journalist friend of mine named Leonard Spray was also under instructions fromThe Daily Chronicleto go to Russia, for another line of inquiry, and much to my delight promised to wait for me in Berlin so that we could travel together. It would make a great difference having a companion on that adventure, for I confess that I hate the lonely trail.
It was a question of waiting for passports from the Soviet Foreign Office in Moscow. I had applied to the Russian Trade Mission in London and was recommended by an assistant to Krassin, an intelligent and well-educated young Russian who professed devoted adherence to Communism while doing himself remarkably well, I thought, with all the material pleasures of capitalistic luxury. After a couple of weeks my credentials arrived, my passport was indorsed with the stamp of the Soviet Republic, and I had in this way a talisman which would open the gate of Red Russia and let me enter the heart of its mystery. To some of my friends it seemed the free admission to a tiger’s cage.
In Berlin I was advised to buy blankets, cooking utensils, as much food as I could carry, and illimitable quantities of insect powder. I took this advice, and with Leonard Spray and a very useful lady who understood the German ways of shopping, we bought this outfit, remarkably cheap, reckoning in German marks which were then not quite 4,000 to the English pound.
Among other items we acquired an enormous Dutch cheese, round and red, which we wrapped up in a towel. It became our most precious possession, and, as I may tell later, came to an honorable and joyous end. Aquantity of solid alcohol in tins somewhat in the style of the “Tommy’s Cooker” also bulged out our bags and were an immense boon by enabling us to heat up food and drink on our Russian journey.
Spray and I spent two solid days obtainingvisasin Berlin for all the countries through which we had to pass on our way to the Russian frontier by way of Riga—those new Baltic States created at Versailles.
Our journey to Riga was half a nightmare and half a farce, and Spray called our train the “Get in and Get out Express.” We generally arrived at a new frontier in the dead of night or in the early hours of dawn, after fitful sleep. Then we were awakened by armed guards demanding to see our visa for each side of the “Danzig corridor” for Lithuania, Esthonia, and Latvia.
At Eydtkühnen, in East Prussia, we had a six-hours’ wait and were able to see something of the Russian invasion and Germany’s “devastated region” which had been the greatest cause of terror to the German mind when the “Russian steam roller” first began to roll forward before its subsequent retreat. Russian cavalry had done a lot of damage—the Germans had plenty of atrocity stories to set beside those of Alost and Louvain—and we saw even at that late date, so long after those early days of war, the ruins of burnt-out farms and shell-wrecked houses. But not many. German industry had been quick at work, and Eydtkühnen was built up like a model town, with red-tiled roofs not yet toned down by weather, and shop windows just exhibiting their first stocks.
As we passed through the new Baltic States—Lithuania, Esthonia, Latvia—I had an impression that the old British Armies of khaki men had been transferred to those far countries. At every station there was a crowd of soldiers, all of them clad in unmistakable khaki from British stores, but made into misfits for bearded, or unshaven, portly or slouchy men who looked—many ofthem—like the old Contemptibles after years of foreign exile and moral degeneration. Yet it would be unfair to say they were all like that, for these Baltic peasants were sturdy fellows enough, and, I should say, hard fighting men.
In Riga we put up for three or four days, waiting for a train into Russia and permission from Soviet representatives in that city to cross the Russian frontier. In spite of our visas from headquarters, those Riga Bolsheviks were extremely insolent and put up a blank wall of indifference to our requests for railway facilities. There seemed to be no chance of a place in any train, and very little chance of a train.
Spray and I kicked our heels about in the little old city, very German in its character, which seemed in a state of stagnation and creeping paralysis. In its once busy port we saw no ship but a vessel carrying a cargo of apples which it unloaded on the quayside. The restaurants were almost deserted, and we drank little glasses of Schnapps in solitary cafés. After midnight there was the awakening of a squalid night life and we watched the Riga manifestation of the fox-trot mania, and an imitation of the FriedrichstrasseWein Stube, with a fair amount of amusement on my part because of the strange types here in a city filled with Russian exiles, Letts, Poles, Germans, Swedes, Lithuanians, and all variety of northern races. But it was not Russia, which we had come to see.
I doubt whether we should ever have set foot in Russia if it had not been for the American Relief Administration established in Riga and just beginning to send food supplies into the famine area. The chief of the Riga headquarters promised us two places on the next food train going to Moscow, and broke through all formalities by reckoning us as members of his staff.
“What about the Famine?” I asked, and he said, “There’s a Famine all right, with a capital F.”
It was a queer journey from Riga to Moscow—unforgotten by me. I have put the spirit of it, as indeed of all my experience in Russia, into my novel “The Middle of the Road,” under a thin guise of fiction, with some imaginary characters. The train started at night, and Spray and I, with our baggage carried by Lettish porters, stumbled along unlit rail tracks to a long train in absolute darkness, except in a few carriages where candles, stuck in their own grease, burned dimly on the window ledges. In the corridor was a seething mass of Lettish and Russian porters, laden with the enormous baggage of Russian, British, German, American, and other couriers, who shouted at them in various languages. A party of young American clerks and typists for the central headquarters in Moscow of the American Relief Administration (always known as the A.R.A., or even, shorter, as “Ara”) smoked cigarettes, cursed because of the darkness and filth and stench and lack of space for their baggage, and between their curses sang ragtime choruses.
Violent action and terrific language in the American accent, on the part of a large-sized man, cleared the corridor somewhat, and I met, for the first time, a cheery young giant whom I have put into my novel as “Cherry of Lynchburg, U.S.A.,” but who is really H. J. Fink, courier, at that time, to the A.R.A. He is known as “The Milk-fed Boy” by his fellow-travelers, and but for his enormous good nature, his mixture of ferocity and joviality with obstructive Bolsheviks, his genial command of the whole “outfit” from the “provodniks” or guards to the engine drivers, the journey would have been more intolerable than we found it. I take off my hat, metaphorically, to the “Milk-fed Boy.”
Our blankets were uncommonly valuable in the filthy carriage of bare boards with wooden bunks which I shared with Spray. By rigging up a “gadget” of straps strung across the carriage, we were able to use our solidalcohol for heating up soups and beans, with only a fifty-per-cent chance of setting the bunks on fire. We went easy on the red Dutch cheese, remembering that we might have greater need of it in times to come.
The insect powder was extraordinarily good, for the insects, which came out of their lairs as soon as the train warmed up. They throve on it. It sharpened their appetite for Leonard Spray, who suffered exceedingly. Afterward, all through Russia, he was a victim of these creatures who at the first sight of him leapt upon him joyously. By some thinness of blood, or anti-insect tincture—I strongly suspect the nicotine of innumerable “gaspers”—I was wonderfully immune, and Russian lice had no use for me, though I encountered them everywhere, for Russia is their stronghold as carriers of typhus, with which the people were stricken in every city and village.
We saw Red soldiers for the first time at Sebesh, the Russian frontier, anæmic-looking lads, wearing long gray overcoats and gray hoods, rising to a point like Assyrian helmets, with the Red Star of the Soviet Republic above the peak. Here at Sebesh also we saw the first trainload of refugees from the famine area, whom we met in hordes throughout our journey. They were Letts, and in a bad state, after being three months on the way, in closed cattle trucks. Many were typhus-stricken. All were weak and wan-looking, except some of the children, who had a sturdy look in their ragged sheepskins. A man spoke to me in English, with an American accent. He had come from Ufa, three thousand miles away, and spoke tragic words about the people there. They were starving, and near death.
Our train crawled forward through flat, desolate country. The people we saw at wayside stations looked wretched and gloomy. A light snow lay on the ground, and the woods were black against it, and grim. Many times our engine panted and then stopped for lack offuel. We waited while fresh timber was piled on. The journey seemed interminable but for the laughter of the “Milk-fed Boy,” and tales of Russian tragedy by Mr. Wilton, the King’s messenger, who had a queer red glint in his eyes, and a suppressed passion beneath his quiet and charming grace of manner, when he spoke of all that agony in the country he loved. So at last we reached Moscow, and in a little while came to know its way of life.
The fantastic aspect of the city, and especially at its heart by the palace of the Kremlin, seemed to me as wild as an Oriental nightmare in a hasheesh dream, with golden pear-shaped domes, and tall towers, and high walls with fan-shaped battlements, and step flights of steps leading to walled walks, and old narrow gateways guarded by Red soldiers. There was something sinister as well as splendid in that vast fortress palace which is a city within a city. It seemed to tell of ancient barbarities. There was a spirit of evil about its very walls, I thought. Perhaps vague memories of Russian history were sharpened by the knowledge that somewhere within those walls was the brooding mind of Lenin, whose genius had drowned Russia in blood and tears, if all one heard, or a thousandth part of it, were true.
I entered the Kremlin one day on a visit to Radek—whose name means “scoundrel”—and was arrested three times at the guard posts before reaching the rooms where the chief propaganda agent of Soviet Russia lived with his wife and child, in simple domesticity, while he pulled wires in all parts of the world to stir up revolution, or any kind of trouble. Smiling through his spectacles, this man who looked a cross between an ancient mariner and a German poet, with a fringe of reddish beard round his face, was disarmingly frank and cynical on the subject of Anglo-Russian relations, and had a profound and intimate knowledge of foreign politics which startled me.He knew more than I did about the secret intrigues in England and France.