AN American army transport came lurching out of the Japanese sea, and, following the lead of a gray and gaunt destroyer which had come out to meet the troopship, she swung slowly into the Gulf of Peter the Great.
The cliffs of the shore line of Siberia looked bleak and wind-whipped, desolate and snow-slashed. The first blasts of winter had swept the land. Brown and dull it looked, sullenly waiting the onset of northern winds with smothering cold from the Pole.
The transport seemed reluctant to approach the shore of such an inhospitable land. Her gray war-painted sides were festooned with sea-grime from the Pacific. Her pace was slow, as if she mistrusted the hills overhanging Vladivostok. She was all for caution, though the tumbling destroyer drove ahead of her like a terrier leading the way for a suspicious mastiff.
Among the officers crowding the upper deck of the transport was a young man wearing single silver bars on the shoulders of his khaki tunic. On his collar were little circles of bronze enclosing eagles fashioned from the same metal. To those who understood such things, they proclaimed him to be a First Lieutenant of the Intelligence Division of the General Staff of the United States Army.
Lieutenant Gordon was a sturdy chap, of good height. His cleanly shaven face was inclined to ruddiness. His chin was generously molded, his jaw had a squat squareness to it which gave the lower half of his face a suggestion of grimness, but the good-natured twinkle of his blue eyes belied this grimness. Still, he was reserved—perhaps too serious for one of his age, too moodily self-contained.
He had kept to himself a good deal on the passage of the transport from San Francisco. While others of his age had been romping the decks and singing and making gay, he had clung to his cabin. He said that he was studying Russian.
When the transport began to draw near to the coast of Siberia, Gordon had stood nearly all day alone in a sheltered nook at the head of the upper deck where the shrouds came down to the rail and prevented more than one person’s getting into the corner. He seemed always to gravitate to spots in the ship which would insure his being alone or cut off in some way from the crowds. Then he would stand motionless, gazing out over the bows to the horizon ahead, busy with his own thoughts.
Yet for all his aloofness, Lieutenant Gordon was an affable chap. And he was keenly interested in all things Russian—showed a most laudable ambition to learn all he possibly could about the country in which he was to serve. There was a captain at Gordon’s table who had a cabin full of books about Russia, and Gordon listened most attentively to the informal lectures by the well-read captain.
And there was a major who had been military attaché in Petrograd. He spoke Russian well, and gave lessons in the language to the other officers. Gordon attended some of the lessons, but his progress in learning the language was distressingly slow. Still, Gordon did extremely well at times. One day the major had asked the class to repeat a Russian sentence. Gordon was the only one to repeat the words with anything approaching correctness.
“Splendid!” exclaimed the major enthusiastically.
“You are getting a good accent. That’s really excellent, Mr. Gordon. And somehow you resemble Russians—if it were not for your uniform, you might easily be taken for a Russian.”
The class laughed. Gordon reddened. When he was asked to repeat another sentence in Russian, he rather bungled it. And that day he quit the Russian class, saying that he could learn faster alone with his grammar. And he kept more to himself after that.
So no one thought it strange that Lieutenant Gordon preferred to stand by himself at the head of the upper deck as the transport was nosing into the harbor of Vladivostok. He scanned the islands sliding past, and he watched the boat which came out flying the white and blue flag of the Czar’s navy—the old Cross of St. Andrew. He watched the shattered hulks of the navy of the Second Nicholas, lying in on the beach like the bones of dead sea birds. And he saw the warships of Britain, of France, of Japan, of the United States, all spick and span at anchor below the city.
Many strange flags flew from the tops of buildings on the terraced streets over the bay. The green spires of churches glistened in the afternoon sun. Soon the gashes running down to the water were seen to be streets with people moving in them—carriages, motor cars, and hurrying throngs of civilians and soldiers.
On the hills above the city was a queer fringe of flat white piles, some of them sheeted with canvas. These were vast stores of things gathered to the port from all the world for the war against Germany—acres of goods and metals, all idle and wasting because the throne of the Romanoffs had toppled and the Czar himself was dead in a well.
The transport moved up to a dock at the end of the bay, past the city. Gordon stood in his nook, watching Vladivostok pass in review before him, and listening to the comments of the other officers who crowded the upper deck for their first sight of this far port of a shattered dynasty.
As the troopship warped in, Russians in belted blouses and great boots stood on the dock and stared up at the ship and its soldiers in khaki from a distant land. These Russians loafed and gossiped and ate sunflower seeds. Cossack soldiers in high woolly caps swaggered about with sabers jingling at their sides. German prisoners of war labored with heavy cases. These men were still clad in the dirty finery of gaudy uniforms, sorry-looking specimens of what had been once smart soldiers. Shaggy horses in rude wagons, driven by peasant girls with shawls over their heads and wearing men’s heavy boots, did the work of strong men with sacks and bales, loading the carts. The Russians could find nothing else to do but gossip.
Gordon watched the people on the dock with interest. When the hawsers were fast to the pier, he left the deck and went to his cabin. There, alone, he loaded his automatic pistol. He filled extra magazines with the blunt-nosed bullets, and distributed the magazines through his pockets in such way that they would not be noticeable through the fabric of his garments.
He looked at himself in the mirror on the bulkhead. His face had increased its grimness, and the blue of his eyes had taken on a steely sheen. He seemed to be angry about something. But he forced a smile at himself—a tight-lipped smile of satisfaction.
“Speed is good for nothing but catching fleas,” he whispered to his image in the glass.
Soon an orderly came to tell him that an automobile waited on the dock to take all officers who had to report direct to Headquarters to the building in the city where the Commanding General and his staff were housed. Gordon followed the orderly, and stepping from the end of the gangplank, saluted the land.
The car bumped away up the street with a group of officers. Gordon was silent, while the others chattered. The water-front streets were muddy and unpaved. Squalid buildings with crude signs in Russian announced that within many of the buildings might be had tea and food and liquors. Pigs were loose in the streets, scratching themselves amiably on house-corners. Old Russian songs were being bawled from lusty throats of roisterers inside the kabaks. Russians wandered about aimlessly, staring at all the strange things which had come to Siberia—the American army mules, the motor cycles whizzing about among the pigs and wagons, and the honking car with the party of American officers.
Everybody seemed on holiday but the Chinese. They trotted about with burdens on their backs, working like ants, apparently unaware that freedom had come to Russia and that no one need work. Military motors were shooting about in all directions, dilapidated trolley cars packed with humanity creaked over bad rails, droshkies careened crazily among the burden-bearing Chinese coolies.
The car carrying Gordon rolled into the Svetlanskaya, the main street of Vladivostok, and began to climb one of the many hills. There was a great stream of confused traffic, and mixed in it were strange men in uniforms—black Annamites in French blue, yellow Japanese in buff, bronzed Czechs in brown, Cossacks in natural gray; Canadians in brown short coats, and Americans in snuff-colored khaki. On them all were the musty odors and the ancient dust of Asia.
The city was a place of swarming tangles of people—beggars and princes, vagabonds and viceroys, generals and stragglers, friends and enemies, conquerors and conquered, all whirling about in mad antics and hurrying as if they expected the end of the world to come with sundown. Refugees from the interior carrying their few poor possessions in old blankets mingled with nobles of the old régime who still tried to keep up a semblance of importance; poor women in rags with frightened red eyes and crying children clustered about them stood on the curbs and stared at foreign-looking ladies lolling in carriages and clad in suspicious grandeur. The human parasites had gathered from all the ports of the Orient to this land where people were starving in the streets. Adventurers seeking command and harpies hoping to get their fingers into stolen jewels, pushed aside blind beggars to get into the cafés.
The crisp cold air of winter was seething with joy. There were flags everywhere. The restaurants were crowded with people who lacked lodgings, gabbling, whispering, gaming. But there was something sinister lurking in the background of the mad show, glimpsed now and then in a squad of soldiers with bayonets fixed to their rifles and marching from some mysterious place to some other mysterious place with an attitude of deadly earnestness. The temper of the people was fickle. They were ready to rally to any leader who presented some dramatic ideal, or to submit to any ruler who was strong enough to subdue them by force of arms. But just now they were occupied with having a grand celebration and believed that life from now on would be nothing but a carnival.
The car carrying Gordon and the other officers arrived at the big building overlooking the bay where flew the flag of the United States—American Staff Headquarters. Gordon found the Chief of Intelligence in a large room filled with map-makers, translators, clerks, officers, busy orderlies. But Gordon did not approach the desk of his chief at once. The grave-faced colonel with spectacles was busy just then, and Gordon lingered among the office workers. There was a great buzzing of conversation and a mighty clacking of typewriters.
Gordon was keenly interested in everything. The walls were covered with maps of the Russian empire stuck full of tacks with colored heads—the fever spots of a sick nation, showing where the disease was most rampant and dangerous. And Gordon listened to the talk of the Russians, who discussed the Americans frankly, knowing that they were not understood by the strangers.
In time Gordon presented himself at the colonel’s desk, saluted, gave his name, and turned over certain papers. The colonel looked him over casually, not especially interested that another Intelligence officer had been added to his staff by Washington.
“You’ll want to look about the city, Mr. Gordon, after your month in a transport. You’ll be quartered in this building. Report to me again in the morning,” said the colonel.
So Lieutenant Gordon spent the afternoon in the teeming cafés along the Svetlanskaya. He mingled with the various factions scattered through the city—monarchists, anarchists, nihilists out of a job, German secret agents, and the adherents of new men and new parties intriguing for power with the next throw of the national dice. It was all a great orgy of talking and whispering and singing. Gordon could make neither head nor tail of it. But he watched the throngs closely. Every man got a scrutiny from the American lieutenant. An observer might think that Gordon was looking for some particular person in all that motley throng.
At the officers’ mess that evening Gordon overheard a conversation in which the necessity of sending an Intelligence officer to Irkutsk was discussed. And Gordon was on the alert at once. He said nothing, but he watched the Chief of Intelligence up at the head of the table and followed him from the mess-room to his desk upstairs.
“Sir,” began Gordon, “I understand that an officer will be sent up toward Lake Baikal—Irkutsk—to look into the situation there.”
The colonel looked at Gordon wonderingly. It struck the chief that this new arrival was dipping into things rather hastily. There was enough to learn around Vladivostok for a stranger, thought the colonel.
“Yes, it has been mentioned,” said the colonel. “We need an observing officer up there. That country is controlled now by Zorogoff, the Ataman of the Cossacks, and we don’t know any too much about Zorogoff. What do you know about him?”
“Nothing, sir. But I would like to—see the country.”
“You ought to have a little more time to get acquainted with the situation here before you go into the interior. The Baikal region is a long way from here.”
“Yes, sir,” said Gordon. “I don’t want to appear too confident of my own abilities, but it strikes me, sir, that the back country explains what is going on here, rather than what you see here explains the country.”
The colonel smiled. “You like to travel, young man.”
“Yes, sir. Frankly, I’d like to see all I can.”
“Have you been assigned to any duty here yet?”
“No, sir. Perhaps when I got back from the Baikal region I’d be more valuable—have a better understanding of the situation as a whole.”
“I’ll think it over,” said the colonel, and reached for his ringing telephone.
And the colonel evidently did think it over, for within an hour Lieutenant Gordon was handed his orders to leave at once for Irkutsk in a train carrying Czech soldiers and supplies toward Omsk and that place known so vaguely as “the front.” And an American soldier who was a native of Russia was detailed to accompany Lieutenant Gordon as an orderly and interpreter.
Gordon did not delay. He went at once to the Trans-Siberian station to find his train, leaving the Russian orderly to bring on baggage and bedding-roll. Gordon found the station filled to overflowing with refugees from the interior—sick and well, women and children, lame and blind, hungry and unclean. They lay on the floors, cooking and eating, begging and filching food wherever they could find it. They were like a dirty froth thrown up on a beach after a tidal wave, a pitiful human wreckage fighting for existence after having survived a typhoon which had destroyed a nation. The sights, the smells, the misery were appalling. It almost made Gordon ill. He longed to find some one person who could be blamed for it. A wrath began to grow in his soul.
He stumbled down the railroad yards in the growing dark, seeking the train among a labyrinth of box cars. Though he was already in his furs and his sheepskin-lined coat against the wolf of winter which was howling across the landscape, the wind from the bay chilled him to his bones.
Candles gleaming through the windows of an old fourth-class car drew him. He found soldiers within—Czechs cooking their supper of stew over crude heating stoves amid clouds of yellow sulphurous smoke from the awful Manchurian coal.
The interior of the car was so jammed with men that there seemed to be no more room. The shelves were full of soldiers, and the floor was littered with coal and wood and boxes and bundles. It was like a pen on wheels, that car. It was filthy, battered, and broken. But it belonged to the train leaving for the front, and Gordon was content.
Presently the orderly came, laden with baggage. He explained to the Czechs that the American officer was to travel in that car by order of the Czech commandant. The soldiers smiled and provided two shelves. And in a few minutes the train began to grind slowly away from Vladivostok, to carry Lieutenant Gordon and his orderly some two thousand versts away.
They reached Nikolsk-Ussurisk the next morning. An American captain came to the train. His orderly had been sent back to Vladivostok, ill. The captain was without an interpreter.
“Look here,” said Gordon. “You can’t go on here without an interpreter—and I’ll not need mine till I get to Irkutsk. You’ll have a new interpreter sent up to you by that time. I’m all right on this train—for a week or two. Send mine along to me when I telegraph where I am.”
“Well, that’s an idea!” said the captain. “A most pious idea! Perhaps I can send your man along after you in a couple of days. He can catch this train all right, on a passenger train.”
“Hold my man, sir, till you hear from me,” said Gordon. “I’ll wire when I need him. There is a Czech in this car who speaks fairly good English. I’ll get on all right.”
“Now that’s mighty decent of you,” said the captain. “What’s your name—so there won’t be any hitch about sending your man on?”
“Gordon, sir—Peter Gordon.” And the train rumbled on, leaving behind the native of Russia who had been detailed as interpreter for Lieutenant Peter Gordon.
The railroad followed old caravan trails into Manchuria and Mongolia, over plains and up through mountains in which yellow bonzes hid themselves from the world on sky-kissing peaks in secret monasteries. Then, winding down through the passes, the train traversed the millet plains where the conquerors of ancient Tartary and China recruited their hordes of warriors—and on into the wilderness of Siberia where wolves still ruled.
The land was now held in the grip of a desperate cold. The wheels whined as they ground along on frosty rails. Bridges lay in ruins across rivers, replaced by shaky structures of logs that swayed and groaned under the weight of the train.
And at every station Peter found mobs of refugees fighting to get aboard anything that moved. Some were trying to get to Vladivostok, some wanted to go in the opposite direction to Perm, or Ufa, or Samara. They wanted to get anywhere but where they were. Long strings of box cars in the sidings were packed with men, women, and children, ragged, filthy, hungry, dying, dead. Those alive threshed grain by hand from the rotting piles in the fields, or fished in the rivers with wooden spears. And there were trains coming back from the front filled with human derelicts—in cattle cars festooned with crimson icicles!
Yet the people seemed patient in their misery. They waited patiently while first one faction rose to power only to fall again. And usurpers gambled for power with bands of brigands which their leaders called armies. The people had destroyed one government. Now they waited for some one to create another for them.
Lieutenant Peter Gordon watched day by day in silence. At times, his eyes flamed with anger. But he smiled sometimes, too, when he mixed with peasants in the station restaurants and ate cabbage soup with a wooden spoon. For the peasants had many queer and amusing things to say about the Americansky after they had assured themselves that the stranger could speak but a few words of Russian, and understood less. But Peter understood enough to know that these peasants were not at all friendly to officers, no matter what country they came from. They wanted no aristocrats in Siberia, American or otherwise. They were going to kill all the aristocrats, and be free men. They were not going to leave all the land to aristocrats, and pay taxes so that their rulers could make slaves of them. Not any more.
One evening Peter strolled up toward the engine while the train was stopped in a station.
“When will we get to Chita?” he asked the engineer.
“Perhaps to-morrow.”
“Are you sure we won’t go through Chita sometime to-night?”
“No, not to-night. Not till long after daylight.”
“Thank you,” said Peter, and walked away. The Russian engineer stared after the American officer in bewildered surprise, for the American officer was speaking in perfect Russian. There was something queer about it, the engineer knew—but, of course, Americans are educated and speak all languages. Still, that was the first one the engineer had ever heard who could speak the Czar’s Russian—as good as the conductor.