THE REAL SIBERIA
John Foster Fraser
A Considerate Cossack - Cheerfulness under Difficulties - Cossack Characteristics - Harbin - Its Café Chantant - The Manchurian Railway - The Sungari River
IRON rails do not make the best bedding, and a coil of telegraph wire is not to be recommended as a pillow. Further, sleeping in the open on the top of a railway truck is more uncomfortable than adventurous.
So, when rain threatened on the second afternoon out of Vladivostok, I made ardent friendship with a Cossack oflicer. He discovered that in the goods van in which he was travelling with brother soldiers room might be found for a wandering Britisher.
It was a dingy place, half filled with boxes of iron bolts and bags of American flour, but almost luxurious compared with an open platform. Everybody was unshaven and rather grimy.
We were eight in that van, cramped and huddled. Yet from the pleasantries that prevailed you might have thought we were on a picnic instead of going through a disturbed country and open to attack at any hour. Provisions were shared in common - bread, tea, tinned meats, cigarettes. There was scarsity of knives, forks, plates, and cups. But no time was wasted in having these articles washed. A wipe with a bit of newspaper was all they got.
The whole country-side swarmed with pheasants. A Chinese boy coming along with a bunch swung at either end of a pole, somebody bought ten for a rouble (two shillings), and soon the soldiers had them plucked, cleansed, and in a stewpot.
For five hours we were at a standstill. The sky was low and sullen, and as soon as night set in down went the thermometer. For exercise I took a few sharp turns the length of the train, and felt sorry for the poor moudjiks and Chinese closely crouching on the platforms to get the warmth of one another's bodies.
The Cossack soldiers do not mind the cold. They had large felt cloaks swathing them, and big bundles of hay to lie upon. Much of their tiine was spent in singing - and who that has heard a Slav song, crooning, pathetic, weird, sung by a Cossack at night in the middle of a plain silent as death, can forget it? From the chinks in the doorways of the covered vans came rapier thrusts of light and the low mumble of talk. When the night was at its blackest rain fell, and the drops rattled on the vans like shot.
Once more we went on, jerking and jolting, and often we lurched and banged as though we had run into a wall. Suddenly there was a shaking and a clatter. We were almost knocked to pieces. Then quietness.
Our van had jumped the rails. I was the only one who seemed surprised. Everyone else took it as a matter of course, turned over, and went to sleep again. There was a good deal of shouting and lamp-flashing, but in an hour the van was back in its place. Once more we went on.
Just at dawn, as we were running past a siding, the points did not work. This time it was the engine that jumped the rails. Again, nobody minded. We might be stopped a couple of hours or a couple of days.
But Nitchevo - most blessed of Russian words in the hour of possible vexation!
Indeed, there was a general evidence of gladness. So long as the train was moving there was no opportunity of a fire, and hot water and tea. A breakdown, however, meant great fires, with people roaming round for wood and water, and consequent tea drinking by the gallon. This break turned everybody out: Russian officials, officers, soldiers, engineers, telegraph workers, traders, moudjiks, Chinese, Manchus, Koreans, and one British journalist.
It was like a camp. There was the roasting of fowls, boiling of rice, frying of fish.
A way back from the line was a Cossack post, a long, low-roofed, white-washed house, like a Scotch clay biggin', with a rude stockade, and the hardy little ponies tethered at long wooden troughs in the open. On one side was a high scaffold-like tower, and on the top was a Cossack on duty, letting his eye roam over the country on the watch for the coming of the Hung-hos, marauding bands of Manchus, who raid native villages and Russian settlements indiscriminately.
Along the whole stretch of the railway across Manchuria are Cossack posts, planted, as it were, in the midst of a wilderness.
They are not Hyde Park-looking warriors, these Cossacks. They are semi-savages, black-eyed, fierce-brewed, the finest horsemen in the world, caring little for your life, little for their own, absolutely fearless, of the dashing, reckless, break-neck sort of bravery, ever impetuous. For a charge there are no troops that could equal them. But Russian officers told me that for modern operations they are not much good, that they have not the patience to seek the shelter of sand banks, nor mike strategic moves, nor remain quiet for hours in the hollow of a hill ready for a particular manoeuvre at a particular moment.
The Cossack soldier, in return for the land the government gives him, provides his own horse and equipment. A Cossack, therefore, with all the independence of his wild race, thinks himself more than the equal of a Russian officer. There is no servility about him. It is difficult to make him obey orders. When there is fighting he must get amongst it at once with his bare sword.
From Russia's point of view these Cossacks are the best possible guards to place along the Manchurian line.
First and foremost, the object of that line is to carry troops to the shores of the Pacific, and the phenomenal haste with which the building of it was being pushed on was - as I gathered from many Russian sources - a fear that Japan intended to precipitate a conflict for the possession of Korea. From this very line between Grodikoff and Harbin, a branch is made to the Korean frontier. Its purpose is obvious.
Russia wants no mishaps to the Manchurian railway in time of war. So it runs through a more or less desolate region, north-west, over the Hingan mountains, across a corner of the Mongolian desert, until it joins the Siberian line at Katiska Rasiez, near Chita, in trans-Baikalia.
All the towns on the route are new and Russian. Where there are Chinese towns they are contiguous to the Russian towns, which are also military centres. For twenty miles on each side the line the Chinese and Manchus have been driven back. I heard gruesome stories of what has taken place when there has been any show of resistance - the men slaughtered, the women violated, and then their throats cut.
There were some hundreds of thousands of Chinese coolies engaged on the railway, and near Harbin, and Hingan, and Hilar were also Chinese settlements. But I did not see any Chinese women. They had all been sent away for fear of the Cossacks.
Naturally I saw much of the Cossacks. Their attire, the sheepskin hats struggling over their eyes, made thein forbidding. But it did not take long to find a good deal of bluff animal kindness about them. They were rough and rude; they knew nothing of town life; their tastes were simple and very primitive. They made fires for us, lent us their pans, and gave us bread, and none of us dared insult them by offering money in payment.
A couple of Cossack patrols came along, swung themselves from the saddles, and throwing their carbines aside, lay on the ground by the fire, and were served with cups of hot tea by their own mates.
It was a damp, moansome day. The Cossacks on the train got a piece of canvas sheeting, and rigged themselves a tent on their open truck.
But in the dark the wind came shrieking and snapped the cords. We heard the engine snort and shriek. It was a sign all was well again. So we curled up and went to sleep, while all night the train cumbrously jogged on. We were running through scant forest.
There were no leaves, and the trees were skeleton, save when there was a brush of fir.
We stopped and we jerked, and then stopped again. It was dreary. The mists hung round the trees and blanketed the landscape from view. It was impossible to wander more than fifty yards away, for that would have provoked fate to send the train on without you.
First we stopped seventeen hours; then we crawled for two hours; next we stopped for five hours. That makes twenty-four hours, and tells how we spent Sunday, October 13th. We probably travelled ten miles.
On the Sunday we pulled up at a struggling hamlet of new houses.
"What is the name of this place?" I asked.
"It has not got a name yet," I got as a reply.
Besides Russians there were many Chinamen about. The policeman, porcine and pompous, with a willow-plate kind of design on his chest and back, and carrying a red-painted stick, was a Chinaman. He looked important. But standing near were grey-cloaked Cossacks with fixed bayonets.
Next we ran through a plain of sodden wilderness. It began to snow, followed by sleet and snow again.
Thus we reached the town of Harbin; not to be found on most maps except under the name of Hulan. It is a great junction. It came into prominence in 1900 because the Boxers destroyed the line here, and besieged the town for several weeks. The station itself is a paltry place, but there are eight tracks of rails. Huge stacks of stores for troops are guarded by soldiers.
Seven years ago there was not a single Russian in Harbin. Now there are nearly nine thousand. Old Harbin, or Hulan, where the Chinese live, is a distance away, and there are some ten thousand Celestials, a weak and puling lot of men.
But New Harbin, where the Russians are, is for all the world like a "boom" American town. It has sprung into existence in a few years. Big stores and hotels are being pushed up, and everywhere building is to be seen. Fortunes are made by men who have got patches of land centrally situated.
Theoretically this is Chinese territory, and therefore goods coming in from the sea at Dalny - Talienwan on our English maps - pay no duty.
But you do not buy them cheaper at Harbin because of that. Indeed, everything costs about double what it does at Vladivostok. Two hundred per cent. is the profit a trader must make, or he thinks he is doing bad business.
Harbin is now the principal town in Manchuria. It is a magnet to all the adventurers in Russia. There are two or three murders every week. Respectable folks who go out at night do so in bands, the men armed, and with a Cossack guard.
Russian officers, and the army of engineers engaged on the railway - they are all excellently paid to stimulate them to hurry the line to completion - make for Harbin when they get a few days' leave. A Russian's idea of good-fellowship, when in his cups, is to squander, to pour champagne on the floor, just to show he doesn't mind expense, to light his cigarette with a three-rouble note, and generally splash money round.
There is a café chantant at Harbin, which has the laxity of café chantants in other parts of the world. The night before I was at Harbin, an engineer arrived, his pockets bulging with roubles, and he showed his idea of money by making all the girls sit in a row while he poured champagne on hundred-rouble notes, and then stuck these notes (£10) on the foreheads of each of the eight girls. That is the Harbin idea of having a good time.
Now, though Harbin is in the "temporary occupation" of Russia, the Chinese have the administration of the country round. Chinese robbers, the Hunghos for instance, are tried by Chinese authority, and the beheading that takes place is by Chinese law, and not by Russians. All these robbers when caught are executed. They are made maudlin drunk on samshu, and are then pulled to their knees by a tug at the queue, and a swish of a sword takes off the head. These heads are stuck on poles, and planted on the wayside as a warning to evil-doers. I saw several.
Harbin and the country round provided the strongest possible evidence that, whatever diplomatic language may be used, Russia is in possession of Manchuria, and intends to stay. It is a very large plum drawn out of the Chinese pie.
Roughly, Manchuria has a population of some seventeen millions, comprises about one-tenth of China's entire area, is six times as large as England and Wales, and possesses a climate resembling that of Canada; its mountains are said to ooze gold, and its harbour, Port Arthur, is splendid, free from ice all the year round.
Though the railway does not run through a fertile region, the land is full of possibilities. And there is this thing to be said in favour of the Russian occupation: before the Russians came it was little more than a sterile waste; now money is being poured into the country, and another ten years will probably reveal wonders.
It is not, of course, so wealthy as the great western Chinese province of Sztcheum, contiguous to our Indian territory, and which the French are doing their best to slice off for themselves by running a railway to it from Tonquin, by way of Yunnan, but gold mines have already been worked, though only in a primitive way. Petroleum, copper, and tin have been found. Coal beds lie close to iron beds, and that means much. All that is wanted is machinery and enterprise.
Remember it is only five years since (1897) that a party of Cossack military surveyors, accompanied by Russian engineers, made a journey across Manchuria to spy the land for a railway. There were a couple of chains of mountains to be crossed, and on the plains the soil was unstable. The report of these surveyors was unfavourable. But political reasons pressed the importance. In 1898 the Czar said, "Let the line be laid!"
And there it is, 1,200 miles long, from Nikolsk to Katiska Rasiez, and 890 miles of it through Chinese territory. It is the seal to Russia's power in the Far East.
Nominally China conceded the right to build this railway to an anonymous company. Everybody, except people who frequent Downing Street, knows the line belongs to the Russian government. Shareholders must be either Russians or Chinese. But bonds can only be issued with the consent of Mr. De Witte, the Russian Minister of Finance. The president of the Eastern Chinese Company, as it is called, is a Chinaman. Mr. De Witte, however, appointed the vice-president, all the engineers and officials, and gives sanction to any improvements or modifications. Colloquially the Chinese president is in Mr. De Witte's pocket.
I spent part of my afternoon at Harbin shopping, buying another sheepskin, a big German sausage as hard as wood, and half a dozen tins of Singapore pineapples, exported by some patriotic Britisher, for they were of the "Jubilee Brand," had a picture of Queen Victoria, decorations of Royal Standards and Union Jacks, and displayed views of soldiers and battleships.
But nobody seemed to know when a train was to go northwards to Hingan and Hilar.
It would be easy enough to get down to Mukden and Port Arthur, and it took me an hour to make it clear I did not want to go either to Mukden or Port Arthur. Then I was informed that three miles away, on the other side of the river Sungari, it was possible I might find some goods waggons going north to-day, to-morrow, or next week. That was what I wanted.
It took me hours, however, to extract the simple fact that there was a bridge over the Sungari, and trains on the other side.
The station-master provided a trolley, and I piled my belongings on it. This was pushed along by four Russian workmen. Then I borrowed a couple of Cossack soldiers to act as guard, and I set off to walk.
The sleety tempest of the day had waned, and the late afternoon, with a watery sunlight playing over the country, was not without beauty. The railway bank was strong and well built; it had a double track, and led to a great eight-span iron bridge over the Sungari. This bridge had only been finished four days, and no train had yet passed over it. It was protected by Cossacks, but a word by my guard opened a way. So I walked over.
The Sungari here is about twice the width of the Thames at London Bridge, and as I was high perched I could see the waters of this mighty stream for far, flowing northwards until they join the mighty stream of the Amur. On one bank was the native town, a long, bedraggled street with the Chinese slithering in the mire. On the river were hundreds of pug-nosed, hump-backed Chinese junks with long venetian-blind kind of sails, dropping down stream, the men singing as they dipped the large oars, while in and out among them dodged noisy and perky little Russian government steam launches. The clouds broke, and a flush of crimson spread along the distant hills.
It was dark evening when I reached the station, a whitewashed hut with a dirty oil lamp by the door. The station-master was friendly. As far as he knew a train would be going on some time in the night. So with a lantern we went exploring and found an empty goods car. That was excellent.
Then, wrapping myself in my sheepskins and making a rough pillow, I lay down in a corner with a candle stuck in a bottle as light, smoked my pipe, fell asleep, and when I awoke in the darkness I was delighted to feel the jolting motion of making progress.
Chapter XX: Suspected and Arrested
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