CHAPTER XIIIINTERLUDE
Take your atlas, find Siberia, locate Vladivostok in the northwest corner of the Japan Sea and trace your finger inland. Follow the Trans-Siberian railroad. One branch will travel upward along the Amur River, as though in the United States the traveler started from Boston, went northward and down the St. Lawrence, to reach Buffalo. Another branch of the Trans-Siberian drops in a southwesterly direction toward Harbin, Manchuria, then up to Chita, away across the steppes to Lake Baikal and beyond, thousands of miles beyond, almost in a straight line into European Russia. Transposing Vladivostok for Boston, Harbin would be Binghamton, Chita would be Buffalo, Lake Baikal would be Lake Michigan, Irkutsk would be Chicago. Further west Omsk would be Lincoln, Nebraska, Ekaterinburg would be Denver, the Urals would be the Rockies, Petrograd would be San Francisco, Moscow would be Los Angeles. The geographical similarity of the two countries is extraordinary. Only Siberian distances are three times as great and Siberian populations one-thirtieth as large.
If any lasting gain is totaled from the great Russian bedlam, emphasized in it prominently must be the opening of Siberia to the world. As boys and girls, and even as grown men and women, we thought of Siberia as an arctic waste of snow and ice, ravaged by man-hunting wolves, dotted with world-lost exile mines, peopled by a strange semi-barbaric race in fur and lambskin and dwelling in half-real dusk beneath the bondage of the knout.
It is only the winter picture which has come to us; then only such a picture as a Russian traveler in America might carry home by describing conditions around a Hudson Bay trading post in late January.
Siberia is a pleasant, smiling land, a land of sunshine and blue distances, of green fields and wild flowers. It is a land of bowered forests, baked prairies, heat-soaked deserts, babbling brooks, plashing, purling rivers.
And the eye of mortal man since Eden has never gazed upon such sunsets!
It has great cities with paved streets, electric car lines, pretentious stores, massive theaters, imposing mansions. And a high-caste Siberian Tartar knows how to make his residence imposing. Many of the great railroad stations, when lighted and viewed at a distance by night, resemble the marble halls which come to us in dreams. But alas, Siberia has its little earth-lost country villages—its “small towns” too—its Podunk Corners and its Gilberts Mills, its East Gileads and its Hastings Crossings. Russian writers have dwelt unduly upon peasant life in these earth-lost villages—as though an American Tolstoi drew a picture of contemporaneous American life solely from Rupert Hughes’s “Carthage” or Sinclair Lewis’s “Gopher Prairie”, eliminating and ignoring entirely Boston, New York, Palm Beach, New Orleans, San Francisco. There are many intermediate steps in Russian living between six log huts clustered on a prairie where half-wild males and females rear families like animals, and the Imperial Ballet at St. Petersburg or the Grand Mosque at Moscow, as both existed before the cataclysm.
In the heart of Eastern Siberia is Great Baikal, a lake sixty miles long and twenty to thirty miles wide. On the northwest corner of this lake, back on the Irkut River, lies the city of Irkutsk. In size it compares with Springfield, Massachusetts, or Cincinnati, Ohio. The river flows through the metropolis. The railroad station and freight yards are set upon the western bank, the main part of the city upon the eastern. Connecting the two is a dilapidated floating bridge of gray, weather-beaten, flood-racked timbers.
Irkutsk was the farthest western point reached by Japanese or Yankee troops in the recent Intervention. From Irkutsk westward to the Urals, the Germans were checkmated from shipping submarines in sections across the Trans-Siberian for submersion in the Japan Sea and “unrestricted” warfare in the Pacific, by a stout little army of pro-Ally Slavs who should have a place in history with Ulysses on his Odyssey and Leonidas at the Pass.
From Russian internment camps under Kerensky “the Talker”, the Czecho-slovaks—pronounced “Checko-slow-vacks”—started for France, via Siberia, Japan, America, the Atlantic. The Germans, through Lenine, heard and said they should not go. France said they should go and supplied the money. The Czechs were willing, eager, to go. So they fought their way forward, holding the Trans-Siberian as they moved, to journey no farther than Vladivostok.
But there were noLusitaniahorrors in the Pacific.
Far down the southern end of the Irkutsk railroad yards on a muddy night in September, 1918, three men in khaki sat in a caboose freight car around a small sheet-iron stove. Upon a near-by shelf-table, a lone candle burned in an empty bottle.
The interior of the car was warm but sordid. Living utensils and army paraphernalia were strewn around, with scraps of food. In an alcove behind, two rumpled bunks showed indistinctly. Outside the wind was blowing, bringing down the febrile, incessant tootings of locomotive switchers up the yards, where swarthy engineers in lambskin hats signaled their yardmen with maximum of noise and blunder.
They were lean-jawed, copper-faced men with khaki shirts torn open roughly at their throats. One had the insignia of the United States Engineering Corps (officially known as the “Stevens Mission”) on his pocket. The others were Red Triangle “secretaries.” And the air was blue with their pipe smoke. They talked horrors which will never be written in books.
A pause came in their conversation. The locomotive blasts died down. For a time the silence was so deep the only sound was the crackle of the flames in the stove or a meditative tapping of a briar-stem against the smaller man’s teeth. The deepness of that silence was suddenly disturbed by a noise. It was a noise like a cry. It was followed by a thud. Some one had fallen on the outside steps.
A burly young fellow from Scranton, Pennsylvania, incharge of the Y. train at the moment, leapt up and opened the door. “What do you want?” he cried irritably into the dark. Some drunken trainman was probably after “pappyroose”—Russian cigarettes—again.
“Give me a hand, will you? This is the Y. car, isn’t it? I’m—all—in!”
“My God!” cried the Y. man. “It’s a Yank!”
They helped the stranger into the car. The door was closed, shutting out the murky night. The stranger sank on an inverted box by the wall shelf and for a minute leaned his forehead over on his wrist. Then he raised a gaunt, haggard face and looked at each man in turn.
The three saw a fellow countryman of twenty-eight or thirty who might have come through the well-known Inferno as amanuensis for the late Mr. Dante. His uniform was foul with grease, dried mud, stains of origin beyond explanation. His eyes were deep-sunken. Hair fell an inch over his collar. His thin beard was stringy and ragged. He wore an old Russian hat with a great chunk of the lamb-wool missing in front.
“I just got in,” he said, “train pulled in a few minutes ago—haven’t eaten anything for two days—rode for the past forty-eight hours packed away in a dark berth behind two stinking Chinamen. Who’s got a—cigarette?”
Three pairs of hands began frantically fumbling in six pairs of pockets.
“What’s your name, ’bo? Where’ve you come from—now?”
“Forge is my name—Nat Forge. I’ve just come through from—from—Moscow.”
Crack!One of the briars had fallen to the floor and the hard-rubber stem had broken in two pieces.
“Forge? Nat Forge? God in heaven! Are you—the fellow—that started in toward Moscow with Dick Wiley a year ago? Where’s Wiley?”
“Dead,” responded Nat simply. “They shot him. Let me have that cigarette.”
They got him his cigarette. They got him many cigarettes. They rolled them for him as fast as he could smoke them, meeting each other’s eyes blankly. The fellow from Scranton dug around in his boxes and cartons for food. The fire was poked in thick silence. A battered pot was setthereon. Coffee was sifted in from a scoop of open fingers down in a bag.
They finally set food before him. They had sense enough not to prod the famished, emaciated man with damfool questions until he had partially recovered his strength.
“War? Gad, boys—I’ve seen enough war! You guys at this end of the country don’t know anything about it. This is the first square meal I’ve eaten in seven months. I mean it. Seven months. Since last February when we left Omsk, going east.”
It was pathetic, the way he ate that food. A square meal!
“You been in Moscow—ever since?”
“No. We reached Moscow, turned right round and walked right out again. I’ve been with the Czechs at Kolybelsk. I’m on my way out—to Harbin or Vladivostok—to see if I can’t hustle along some supplies. Medical supplies. They’re chopping off arms and legs down there with butcher knives and no anesthetics.”
Ten minutes had elapsed before more was spoken. The sudden introduction of food into the man’s weakened vitals distressed him. He drank cup after cup of the vile coffee. But it was hot. Heat was what counted. Then more cigarettes. Eleven of them.
“I know my clothes must smell like hell, boys, but if you’d seen what I’ve been thrown among, coming across from——”
“I’ve got an extra outfit you can change into,” offered the man from Scranton. “Jake, turn some fresh water into that kettle and put it on. Forge’ll want to shave.”
“Yes,” said Nat, with a choke of emotion at being among his countrymen again. “And which of you boys is a barber? Some one’s got to harvest this hair. Nothing fancy. Anything to get it off.”
Nat took a sponge bath, nude at one side before them, at the huge samovar. He changed into clean garments. He removed his stringy beard with scissors and shaved his face. His hair was sheared. He came back and sat down at the stove.
“When did they shoot Wiley? What for?”
“They shot him at Krasnoyek. We got there in the rainy dark. We were on our way back toward Ekaterinburg. Something was the matter with his papers—a ‘t’ wasn’tcrossed or an ‘i’ dotted somewhere. He was standing within three feet of me—without a word they asked him to step aside—an official pumped four bullets from an automatic into his chest and stomach before he knew what it was all about—he looked at me in surprise—sort of sickly—he just sank down to a sitting posture on the ground, holding himself up on a stiffened arm, his other hand at his stomach—then he laid his forehead down on his wrist—he never spoke a word—just died. God damn this bloody country and all the low-browed fiends in it! It’s getting just what it deserves—my papers happened to be all right—thank the Lord for tobacco—how long you fellows been here, anyhow—and for the love of Mike, tell me what’s happening in France?”
The Americans were “doing things” in France. The German steam-roller had smashed head-on into another steam-roller and the second steam-roller had not been the one reduced to pig iron.
“We’re givin’ ’em hell!” informed the Stevens man. “Consulate here got a long wire this morning. We’re hangin’ our dirty shirts on the Hindenburg line and pepperin’ Chinless Willy’s pants with buckshot so he looks like a country signboard.”
“Down where we were, not a word’s come through since the fuss at Château-Thierry. Won that, didn’t we?”
“Won it? Won it? Think the Yanks come across to hold a tea party, maybe? God! They’re only stoppin’ the slaughter o’ Huns when their rifles get hot and plug. This war’s goin’ to be over by Christmas, I’d almost be willin’ to bet by Thanksgiving. I hear there was one time they ordered the Yanks to retire but the order to retire couldn’t catch up with ’em fast enough so they used it to wipe German blood off their pants. And went out and killed a few thousand more before supper just to call it a day! You been out here since it first started, ain’t you?”
“Wiley and I came up a year ago last July. A year ago last July! Fellows, it seems like—it seems like—eighteen years!”
They were very sober. They understood.
“And what do you hear from America—home?”
They told him all they had heard from America and—home.
At eleven o’clock that night, Nathan was still talking.
“——in those get-away trains from Moscow the poor devils were even hanging to the locomotives—like flies—some standing on the red-hot piston boxes, gripping the cow-catchers. They slammed us into a freight car and locked us in—pitch dark!—men and women, Lord it didn’t make any difference who or what we were!—two hundred and twenty-one of us slammed in atepluska, crammed so tightly we couldn’t raise our hands to our shoulders—twenty-four hours of it—agony just standing up, and when we couldn’t stand up any longer we just sagged on those about us—they took out seventy-eight corpses when they finally unlocked the door and let us out—rode with a dead woman pushed so hard into my right side her cold body hurt my ribs—she was a well-dressed woman too; her fur boa kept tickling my ear—and the typhus down there! What do you hear from the Red Cross? Any trains come out this way?”
“Doc Seaver and Cleeve are headed this way with a train. The Consulate expects them some time the last of next week.”
Nathan leaned forward with his face in his hands.
“Thirty million dead in Russia since the bust started—think of it, fellows—thirty million! That’s an awful mass of dead bodies.”
“Yes,” said the Scranton man tersely. And the railroad man observed, “I’m natcherly a peaceable yap. But for once, if they’d lynch that dam’ Kaiser, believe me, I’d pull on the rope!”
“Amen!” said the small man who had not spoken.
“I wonder what the chances are for getting transportation through to Vladivostok? Lord, I’ve got to get through! Those poor devils off there at ‘Cold-belly’ as we called it, are dying like flies, just for bandages and disinfectant.”
“Better go over to the Consulate in the morning and ask Thompson. He’ll know. There’s a he-man.” This from the engineer.
“They run a string of ‘empties’ through to Harbin for supplies about once a week,” added the chap from Scranton.“There’s a consular courier named Roach going out when the next one starts. Maybe you could kick in with him.”
Hartshorn, the Scranton man, offered Nat the upper bunk in the caboose car that night. And Nathan crawled in between blankets for the first time in weeks.
It was very easy to think, lying awake there in the dark. But Nathan did not want to think. He wanted to forget—forget quickly.
Yet he did think.
One great, vital fact stood out white-hot above all other facts in his consciousness—he was alive!He wasn’t out of the mêlée yet. But to date he was alive! A year had passed—gone like a terrific nightmare. And he was alive. Alive, alive, alive! He couldn’t get over that stunning realization.
There were days and even weeks in that year which were blurred. His mind had been so filled with impressions that it had absolutely refused to absorb any more. Oh, how picayune all his introspection, his love affairs, his family troubles, his Golgotha of small-town life had been back home, compared with life stripped stark naked as he had seen it out here! He seemed to be living now in another incarnation. He was not—he couldn’t be—the same fellow who had once lived in the Pine Street house with Milly, who had read poetry with old Caleb Gridley, who had drummed the trade from Wilkes-Barre up to Syracuse for the Thorne Mills, selling dozens and grosses of ladies’ and misses’ “thirty-sixes” and “forty-fours” and “spring-needle union suits with reënforced seats.”
How different life would appear when he got back—if he ever did get back!
What was his mother doing at this moment, Edith with her increasing family, Ted Thorne, myself? The boy’s mind grew sluggish; vague thoughts trooped helter-skelter across the filmy playground of his brain: Main Street, Paris—the Élite Bakery and Lunch Room with smoky ham-and-eggs frying at the back—the rumbling roll of the door in the box-shop that opened out upon the shipping platform—shaking down the furnace the last thing before going to bedin the Preston Hill home—Milly’s bake-bean-flavored pantry of a Sunday morning and most of the beans burned in the pot on top—how the March wind washed through the bare tree limbs the night he had sat in the dark and caught Milly with Plumb—Bernie Gridley’s colorless face bathed in blue cigarette smoke as her forked eyes impaled him that night in Chicago—a girl raised just above him in a hotel window, a girl with a clear-cut profile and calm eyes—queer, indeed, the things that stick in a man’s mind across the months and years!
He fell asleep. But he was alive!
He was headed out toward Vladivostok and when the war was ended, he would go back to—what?
His disordered imagination, twisted and wracked by the horrors he had witnessed, bathed him in icy sweat all night.
Milly tied hand and foot to a rail fence, a big cavalry officer in front of her with a saber—little Mary crying across a vast space, tiny hands blood-smeared—his father crawling along railroad tracks with eyes seared out, holding to the ties in hope of some one picking him up—his mother sitting in the midst of multitudinous household goods and wanting him to listen while she told him what the Germans had done! All night long!—horrible specters! handless, headless! Then along toward morning the girl of the hotel window, the girl of the calm eyes, leaning out of that window, reaching a hand down toward him, telling him not to mind—the fellow who had been her escort had gone—she was not his wife! She had never been his wife! Wouldn’t he find his way in at the door and finish the meal with her——
He awoke with some one’s hand upon his shoulder. A bleary-eyed face was close to a candle beside the bunk.
“For Heaven’s sake, Forge, old man—what’s the trouble? You’ve been groaning horribly the last five hours. It’s almost more than a fellow can stand, to hear you.”
“It’s all that coffee I drank,” apologized Nat. “I shouldn’t have taken so much. I’m sorry!”
But it was not the coffee.