by James Hilton
A.J. left for Siberia at the beginning of April. Sir Henry declined either to approve or to disapprove of the arrangement; all he made clear was that A.J. could not expect any more chances, and that, if he wanted the hundred pounds, he must go abroad as one of the prime conditions. Siberia was undoubtedly abroad; its prospects for the emigrant were A.J.’s affair entirely. During the last week of hectic preparation that preceded the departure A.J. saw rather little of the old man, and the final good-byes both with him and with Philippa were very formal.
No one saw him off at Charing Cross, and he felt positive relief when, a couple of hours later, the boat swung out of Dover Harbour and he saw England fading into the mist of a spring morning. Two days afterwards he was in Berlin; and two days after that in Moscow. There he caught the Trans-Siberian express and began the ten-days’ train journey to Irkutsk.
The train was comfortable but crowded, and most of the way he studied a Russian grammar and phrase-book. Every mile that increased his distance from London added to a certain bitter zest that he felt; whatever was to happen, success or failure, was sure to be preferable to book-reviewing in Bloomsbury. His trouble had always been to know what to write about, and surely a war must solve such a problem for him. It was an adventure, anyway, to be rolling eastward over the Siberian plains. He met no fellow-countryman till he reached Irkutsk, where several other newspaper-correspondents were waiting to cross Lake Baikal. They were all much older men than he was, and most of them spoke Russian fluently. They seemed surprised and somewhat amused that such a youngster had been sent out by the Comet, and A.J., scenting the attitude of superiority, preferred the companionship of a young Italian who represented a Milan news agency. The two conversed together in bad French almost throughout the crossing of the lake in the ice-breaker. It was an impressive journey; the mountains loomed up on all sides like steel-grey phantoms, and the clear atmosphere was full of a queer other-world melancholy. Barellini, the Italian, gave A.J. his full life-history, which included a passionate love-affair with a wealthy Russian woman in Rome. A.J. listened tranquilly, watching the ice spurt from the bow of the ship and shiver into glittering fragments; the sun was going down; already there was an Arctic chill in the air. Barellini then talked of Russian women in general, and of that touch of the East which mingled with their Western blood and made them, he said, beyond doubt’ the most fascinating women in the world. He quoted Shakespeare—’Other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where she most satisfies’—Cleopatra, that was—Shakespeare could never have said such a thing about any Western woman. “But I suppose you prefer your English women?” he queried, with an inquisitiveness far too childlike to be resented. A.J. answered that his acquaintance with the sex was far too small for him to attempt comparisons. “Perhaps, then, you do not care for any women very much?” persisted Barellini, and quoted Anatole France—’De toutes les aberrations sexuelles, la plus singuličre, c’est la chasteté.’ “For thousands of years,” he added, “people have been trying to say the really brilliant and final thing about sex—and there it is!”
Barellini was very useful when they reached the train at the further side of the lake. There was a curious and rather likeable spontaneity about him that enabled him to do things without a thought of personal dignity (which, in fact, he neither needed nor possessed), and when he found the train already full of a shouting and screaming mob, he merely flung himself into the midst of it, shouted and screamed like the rest, and managed in the end to secure two seats in a third-class coach. He had no concealments and no embarrassments; his excitableness, his determination, his inquisitiveness, his everlasting talk about women, were all purified, some-how, by the essential naturalness that lay behind them all. The train was full of soldiers, with whom he soon became friendly, playing cards with them sometimes and telling stories, probably very gross, that convulsed them with laughter. The soldiers were very polite and gave up the best places to A.J. and the Italian; they also made tea for them and brought them food from the station buffets. When A.J. saw the English correspondents bawling from first-class compartments to station officials who took little notice of them, he realised how much more fortunate he had been himself The hours slipped by very pleasantly; as he sat silent in his corner- seat listening to continual chatter which he did not understand and watching the strange monotonous landscape through the window, he began to feel a patient and rather comfortable resignation such as a grown-up feels with a party of children. The soldiers laughed and were noisy in just the sharp, instant way that children have; they had also the child’s unwavering heartlessness. One of them in the next coach fell on to the line as he was larking about, and all his companions roared with laughter, even though they could see he was badly injured.
Harbin was reached after a week’s slow travelling from Irkutsk. At first sight it seemed the unpleasantest town in the world; its streets were deep in mud; its best hotel (in which Barellini obtained accommodation) was both villainous and expensive; and its inhabitants seemed to consist of all the worst ruffians of China and Siberia. Many of them were, in fact, ex-convicts. A.J. was glad to set out the next day for Mukden, in which he expected to have to make his headquarters for some time. The thirty-six hours’ journey involved another scrimmage for places on the train, but he was getting used to such things now, and Barellini’s company continued to make all things easy. He was beginning to like the talkative Italian, despite the too- frequently amorous themes of his conversation, and when he suggested that they should join forces in whatever adventures were available, A.J. gladly agreed.
A.J. had no romantic illusions about warfare, and was fully prepared for horrors. He was hardly, however, prepared for the extraordinary confusion and futility of large-scale campaigning between modern armies. Nobody at Mukden seemed to have definite information about anything that was happening; the town was full of-preposterous rumours, and most of the inhabitants were rapidly growing rich out of the war business. All the foreign correspondents were quartered in a Chinese inn, forming a little international club, with a preponderance of English-speaking members. A.J. found the other Englishmen less stand-offish when he got to know them better; several became quite friendly, and gave him valuable tips about cabling his news, and so on. The trouble was that there was so little news to cable.
The ancient Chinese city wore an air of decay that contrasted queerly with the sudden mushroom vitality infused by the war. A.J. had plenty of time for wandering about among the picturesque sights of the place; indeed after a week, he knew Mukden very much better than he knew Paris or Berlin. Then came the sudden though long-awaited permission for war-correspondents to move towards the actual battle-front. Barellini and A.J. were both attached to a Cossack brigade, and after a tiresome journey of some sixty miles found themselves courteously but frigidly welcomed by General Kranazoff and his staff The general spoke French perfectly, as also did most of his officers. He obviously did not like the English, but he talked about English literature to A.J. with much learning and considerable shrewdness.
During that first week with the Cossacks nothing happened, though from time to time there came sounds of gun-fire in the distance. Then one morning, about five o’clock, a servant who had been detailed to attend on him woke A.J. to announce that a battle was beginning about four miles away and that if he climbed a hill near by he might perhaps see something of it. While he was hastily dressing, Barellini, who had been similarly wakened, joined him, and soon the two were trudging over the dusty plain in the fast-warming sunlight.
They climbed the low hill and lay down amongst the scrub. For several hours nothing was to be seen; then suddenly, about nine o’clock, a violent cannonade began over the next range of hills and little puffs of white smoke a couple of miles away showed where shells were bursting. A staff officer approached them and explained the position; the Russians were over here, the Japanese over there, and so on. It was all very confusing and not at all what A.J. had imagined. The sun rose higher an
d the cannonade grew in intensity; Russian batteries were replying. Barellini talked, as usual, about women; A.J. actually dozed a little until another staff officer ran to tell them to move off, as the Russian line was beginning to retreat. They obeyed, descending the hill and walking a mile or so to the rear. By this time they were dog-tired and thirsty. A Chinese trader on the road offered them some Shanghai beer at an extortionate figure; Barellini beat him down to half his price and bought four bottles, which they drank there and then with great relish.
And that, by pure mischance, was all that A.J. saw of the actual Russo- Japanese War, for the beer had been mixed with foul water, and that same evening, after sending a long cable to the Comet, he fell violently ill and had to be taken to the base hospital. There his case was at first neglected, for it was hardly to be expected’ that the doctors, in the after-battle rush of work, should pay much attention to a foreign war- correspondent with no visible ailment. Later, however, when his temperature was a hundred and four and he was in the most obvious agony, they changed their attitude and gave him good nursing and careful attention. For a fortnight his life was in danger; then he began to recover. The hospital was clean and well- managed, though there was a shortage of drugs and bandages. Barellini, on whom the bad beer had had no ill effects at all, visited him from time to time, as also did some of the other correspondents. It was universally agreed that he had met with the most atrocious luck. Afterwards, however, he looked back upon his period in hospital as the time when he really began to know Russia and the Russians. To begin with, he made great progress with the language. None of the nurses or patients could speak any English and after his third week in hospital he found himself beginning to converse with them fairly easily. What struck him most was the general eagerness to help him; he could not imagine a foreigner in a London hospital being so treated. Both men next to him were badly wounded (one in the stomach and the other with both legs amputated), yet both took a keen delight in teaching him new words. They were middle-aged, with wives and families thousands of miles west; they accepted their lot with a fatalism that was bewildered rather than stoic. One of them always screamed when his wounds were being dressed, and always apologised to A.J. afterwards for having disturbed him. Neither could read or write, yet when A.J. read to them, very haltingly and with very bad pronunciation, from a book by Gogol, they listened enthralled. They were devoutly religious and also very superstitious. They had not the slightest idea why their country was fighting Japan, but they assumed it must be God’s will. The one with the amputations did not seem to worry very much; his attitude seemed chiefly one of puzzlement. It had all happened so quickly, almost as soon as he had gone into battle; he had had no time to fight any of the enemy; indeed, it was as if he had travelled seven thousand miles merely to have his legs blown off. He could not get rid of a dim feeling that the Japanese must have been personally angry with him to have done such a thing. He felt no vindictiveness, however. There was a badly wounded Japanese in the ward; the men treated him very courteously and often spoke sympathetically to one another about him. As they did not know a word of his language nor he a word of theirs, it was all that could be done.
Both A.J.’s neighbours told him all about themselves and showed the frankest curiosity about his own life. They thought it very strange that people in England were so interested in the war that they would send out men especially to describe it for them, and they were amazed when A.J. told them how much his journey had cost, the price of his cables to the Comet, and so on. They listened with great interest to anything he told them about English life, English politics, and so on, though such matters were difficult to compress within the confines of his still limited Russian. They always showed their appreciation with the most childlike directness, often giving him articles of food which he really did not want, but which he could not refuse without risk of hurting their feelings.
The effect of his weeks in hospital was to give him an extraordinarily real and deep affection for these simple-hearted men as well as a bitter indignation against the scheme of things that had driven them from their homes to be maimed and shattered in a quarrel they did not even understand. The fact that they did not complain themselves made him all the more inclined to complain for them, and the constant ingress of fresh wounded to take the place of men who died had a poignantly cumulative effect upon his emotions. He had already cabled Aitchison about his illness, promising to resume his job as soon as he could; now he began to feel that his real message might be sent as appropriately from a bed in hospital as from a position near the lines. After all, it was the tragic cost of war that people needed to realise; they were in no danger of forgetting its excitements and occasional glories. In such a mood he began to compose cables which a friendly nurse despatched for him from the local telegraph-office. He described the pathos and heroism of the Russian wounded, their childlike patience and utter lack of hatred for the enemy, their willingness to endure what they could not understand. After his third cable on such lines a reply came from Aitchison—’Cannot use your stuff advise you return immediately sending out Ferguson.’ So there it was; he was cashiered, sacked; they were sending out Ferguson, the well-known traveller and war-correspondent who had made his name in South Africa. A.J. was acidly disappointed, of course, and also (when he came to think about it) rather worried about the future. There was nothing for it but to pack up and return to Europe as soon as he was fit to leave hospital—to Europe, but not to England. The thought of London, of the London streets, and of Fleet Street, especially, appalled him in a way he could not exactly analyse. He had a little money still left and began to think of living in France or Germany as long as it held out, and as the most obvious economy he would travel back third-class. He left hospital at the beginning of August and caught the first train west. The discomfort of sleeping night after night on a plank bed without undressing did not prevent him from enjoying the journey; the train itself was spacious and the halts at stations were long and frequent enough to give ample opportunity for rest and exercise. His companions were nearly all soldiers, most of them returning to their homes after sickness or wounds, and their company provided a constant pageant of interest and excitement. The long pauses at places he felt he would almost certainly never visit again and whose names he would almost certainly never remember, gave an atmosphere of epic endlessness to the journey; and there was the same atmosphere in his talks to fellow-travellers, with some of whom he became very intimate. Sometimes, especially when sunset fell upon the strange, empty plains, a queer feeling of tranquillity overspread him; he felt that he wanted never to go back to London at all; the thought of any life in the future like his old Fleet Street life filled his mind with inquietude. And then the train would swing into the dreaming rhythm of the night, and the soldiers in the compartment would light their candles and stick them into bottles on the window-ledges, and begin to sing, or to laugh, or to chatter. Siberia surprised him by being quite hot, and sometimes the night passed in a cloud of perfume, wafted from fields of flowers by the railside. Then, early in the morning, there would be a halt at some little sun-scorched station, where the soldiers would fetch hot water to make tea and where A.J. could get down and stretch his legs while the train-crew loaded wood into the tender. Often they waited for hours in sidings, until troop trains passed them going east, and for this reason the return journey took much longer than the eastward one.
At a station a few hundred miles from the European frontier A.J. got into conversation with a well-dressed civilian whom he found himself next to in the refreshment-room. The man was obviously well educated, and discussed the war and other topics in a way that might have been that of any other cultured European. He made the usual enquiries as to what A.J. was doing and who he was; then he congratulated him on his Russian, which he said was surprisingly good for one who had had to learn so quickly. The two got on excellently until the departure of the train; then they had to separate, since the Russian was travelling first-class.
At the next halt, three hours later, they met again in a similar way, and the Russian expressed surprise that A.J. should be travelling so humbly. A.J. answered, with a frankness he saw no reason to check, that he was doing things as cheaply as possible because he had so little money. This led to further questions and explanations, after which the Russian formally presented his card, which showed him to be a certain Doctor Hamarin, of Rostov-on-Don. He was, he said, the headmaster of a school there; his pupils came from the best families in the district. If A.J. wished to earn a little money and was not in any great hurry to return to England (for so much he had gathered), why not consider taking a temporary post in Russia? And there and then he offered him the job of English master in his school. A.J. thanked him and said he would think it over; he thought it over, and at the next station jumped eagerly to the platform, met Hamarin as before, and said he would accept.
