SOME HORRORS OF THE RETREAT
The preceding chapters are based on a report which I was asked to make
to the War Office. It is now necessary for me to interrupt the course of
my narrative in order to describe things of which, though in themselves
of no military or economic significance, it is necessary that the reader
should know in order that he may fully understand the terrible conditions
under which this retreat was conducted, the wholesale demoralization
which accompanied this flight of a people, and the profoundly depressing
effect of this demoralization on my comrades and myself.
To omit all mention of these things, and to limit myself to the
production of a precise military report made up of names, dates, figures,
technical details, and a record of petty inconveniences, would be to
leave a wholly false impression. It would be like omitting the Prince
of Denmark from “Hamlet,” for those things which I am going to describe
overshadowed everything else; they entered into our thoughts day and
night; and they will colour all our future lives. I collect them all into
one chapter so that anyone who is of weak nerves or of immature years,
or who only wants a story of adventure, may “skip” them if he will,
and cannot therefore blame me for obtruding on his notice, without due
warning, some of the ugliest aspects of war.
In the first place, to put it frankly, we were all terrified by the very
name of the Reds. There was no doubt whatever but that they had committed
appalling atrocities in Russia. The direct evidence that we had had on
that subject from thousands of sources and the piles of corpses that
some of us had seen put that fact outside the region of controversy, and
the Bolsheviks themselves do not maintain that atrocities have not been
committed. They admit them, inferentially, by saying that the Whites are
just as bad, or else they only dispute the figures. I had myself become
convinced, after more than a year’s residence in Siberia, that, verily,
some monstrous Terror must have established itself in Russia, that some
diabolical shape must be sitting on the throne of the dead Tsar.
What I saw afterwards of the leniency which the Reds can sometimes show
did not modify in the least this opinion of their rule, and I hope that
the scrupulous impartiality with which I shall afterwards give everything
that tells in their favour as well as everything that tells against them
will not obscure this fact.
Tens of thousands of peaceful people had fled into Siberia during that
space of time, rushing away from that Red Terror with nothing but the
clothes they stood in, as people rush in their night-dresses out of a
house on fire, as the farmer on the slopes of Vesuvius rushes away from
the flaming river of lava. Peasants had deserted their fields, students
their books, doctors their hospitals, scientists their laboratories,
workmen their workshops, authors their completed manuscripts.
I had seen and talked to many of these refugees, and it was clear to
me that something more than the mere fear of death had caused this
precipitate and universal flight, something Satanic, something that
threatened soul as well as body.
And now this monstrous and irresistible force was on our track—fifty
miles off, forty, thirty, twenty, ten. Had we been pursued by Germans,
Turks, or even by Senussi or Masked Tuaregs we would have been much less
uneasy than we actually were. It was not that any of us feared being
shot. It was something else. Is it any wonder, therefore, that this whole
retreat was a nightmare, that we chafed at every delay, that we anxiously
counted the gradually diminishing number of versts which separated us
from our relentless pursuers?
Worst of all was the feeling that, though we had arms in our hands, we
were as helpless as though we were unarmed and manacled in a rudderless
boat shooting down towards the falls of Niagara. We were being swept
along in the wreckage of a demoralized army which, whatever else it
did, would certainly never fight against the Bolsheviks again. We
were hopelessly encumbered by the refugees who had been forced on us;
nevertheless, we discussed the wildest plans of escape. We talked of
leaving the train and trekking northwards through the snow to the shores
of the Frozen Sea, even though it took us years, or southward to the
Chinese frontier. But we soon realized that it would be as impossible to
escape in either direction with our charges as it would to escape on foot
from an exploration party at the North Pole.
Our sleigh journey from Bolotnaya to Taiga gave us some idea of what
travelling in the snow meant; and we knew that north of us impenetrable,
uninhabited forests stretched for thousands of miles till they gave
place to the ever-frozen _tundras_ of the Polar Sea. Southward lay the
wild Chinese frontier, but it was five hundred miles southward, and the
ranges of snowy mountains on the other side of it were impassable at
this time of the year. The few villages between us and that frontier had
been converted to Bolshevism of the reddest dye by Kolchak’s punitive
expeditions, so that we could hardly expect much of a welcome from them.
In short, we had to stay in the train, and we realized from the first
that there was very little chance of the train getting through.
And, meanwhile, the very name “Siberia” weighed upon our souls like lead.
To most of us there had always been something dreadful in the very sound
of these two words, “Russia,” “Siberia.” A great deal has been done to
whitewash both of them, and some people in this country have almost
brought themselves to believe that the serfs had on the whole a rather
good time—no worry about money, for example, or about the choice of a
wife—and that the Siberian convicts were treated quite well. But in the
past they suggested only the clank of chains, and they suggest it still.
To me, at least, Russian history is one long horror. Even Nero and
Caligula are joyous and artistic figures in comparison with Muscovy’s
short series of drunken, half-mad autocrats; and the Eleusinian Mysteries
are less repulsive than the charnel-house activities of Russia’s
subterranean plotters and the unspeakable excesses of her religious
maniacs. The illustrated book of revolutionary “martyrs,” published in
1906 under the title of “Byloe,” and the portraits of the Soviet leaders
with which the Hôtel Métropole in Moscow is now adorned are as repulsive
to me as Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors: the diabolically criminal
type being in all three cases the same. The religious sects are as
immoderate in their way as the political organizations both of the Right
and of the Left. The members of one sect still practise castration in
obedience to what they conceive to be the command of Christ, while the
followers of another sect used to burn themselves alive to the singing of
pious canticles, under the direction of a crazy priest who assured them
that their spotless souls suffered no defilement from the sexual filth in
which they wallowed till the flames engulfed them.
Under a blue, Southern sky, and amid objects of exquisite art, the Roman
Emperors revelled and murdered on old Falernian, and without any rebuke
from naked, comely gods as unmoral as themselves. Stupefied by crude
alcohol, the Muscovite Tsars prayed to emaciated Saints, and sinned
morosely under the reproachful eyes of a tortured Christ gazing on them
from dimly lighted _ikons_ framed in “barbaric pearls and gold.” Around
them were the products of an abortive civilization, monstrous fruit of an
unnatural union between Scythia and Byzantium, while, outside, the wolves
howled in the dark forests of the cold and savage North.
Like an infinite stretch of desolate Polar wastes enveloped in winter
darkness, save when lighted up at long intervals by awe-inspiring
explosions of volcanic energy more sinister than the night itself: such
seems to me the terrible story of Muscovy with its gigantic personalities
revealed in flaming fire—fire that never came from Heaven—its devastating
invasions; its cataclysmal popular eruptions. We fled in the fierce red
glare of such an eruption, the most stupendous of them all, an eruption
whose flames still leap to Heaven, and whose thunders still reverberate
all over the world. Haunted by the presentiment that we would finally
be overtaken by that pursuing lava torrent of revolutionary Terror, we
fled across a thousand miles of frozen steppe amid scenes of murder,
savagery, intoxication, debauchery, and death, all mixed together in a
mad phantasmagoria that it would be impossible to parallel in any modern
war.
The crowning horror was the typhus, but the sights which I saw in this
connection and the statistics which I collected were so staggering
that, when I afterwards told about them in Europe, my hearers simply
shrugged their shoulders and refused to believe me. I particularly
remember a wealthy foreign concessionaire who, being most anxious, for
his own pecuniary advantage, to open up trade with Red Russia, had
resolutely made up his mind that everything he had heard of atrocities,
misgovernment, and disease in Russia was grossly exaggerated, and who
consequently treated with brutal discourtesy anyone who told him the
truth on these subjects. What I told him was certainly not in harmony
with the luxurious appointments of the breakfast-room where we met or
with the attentive service of the well-trained butler or the general air
of eternal and assured stability with which he had enveloped himself;
but I am surprised that, after the millions of deaths and the myriad
catastrophes of the last six years, there are still to be found in
those parts of the world that are still safe for capitalists, narrow,
prosperous, and selfish men who, when told of fresh disasters to
humanity, say: “Nonsense! These figures are absolutely preposterous. Such
things don’t happen. You journalists never tell the truth.”
Before I narrate my personal experiences, therefore, I will quote some
official figures about the typhus epidemic in Siberia. One very good
authority just arrived from Siberia places the number of deaths from
typhus in Novo-Nikolaevsk from November, 1919, to April, 1920, at 60,000.
General Voitsekhovsky’s force of 12,000 men included 9,000 sick of typhus
when it arrived at Chita.
Dr. Semashko, the Commissar of Public Health under the Soviet Government,
and an official whom I know to be very careful in his statements,
declares that:
“In Siberia the road leading from Tomsk for two or three hundred
miles was described as covered with corpses. In fact, from Ufa right
away to the far east similar conditions have prevailed. At some towns,
Nikolaevsk, Omsk, and others, warehouses were found packed with the
corpses of people who had died from typhus.”
Even during the summer this disease, though essentially a disease of the
cold weather, continued to claim its victims; so that the havoc which it
will cause on an enfeebled population during the coming winter staggers
the imagination. And, according to Dr. Semashko and all the foreign
medical experts who have studied the question, this terrible scourge,
which has already obtained a strong foothold in Europe, is rapidly
advancing west along a front of 6,000 miles and may possibly invade
England.
Having said this much, I shall now narrate my own experiences of typhus.
During the retreat, I found it raging all along the railway line and in
many of the echelons. Before the retreat began “death trains” had passed
several times eastward—that is, trains in which nearly everybody aboard
was sick, dying, or dead, the dead lying among the living in some of the
_teplyushki_. No station-master would allow such a train to remain at
his station. He passed it on to the next station with the result that,
when it reached Vladivostock, conditions in it were so frightful that no
description of them is possible.
Some of the echelons which took part in the retreat presented an equally
shocking sight. In one of them, that of the Izhevsky Division, about
one-half the passengers died of typhus or other diseases on the way from
Omsk to Krasnoyarsk, and there was no doctor aboard.
When I passed Novo-Nikolaevsk on February 3 there were 37,000 typhus
cases in that town, and the rate of mortality, which had never been more
than 8 per cent., had risen to 25 per cent. Fifty doctors had died in
that town alone during the space of one month and a half and more than
20,000 corpses lay unburied outside the town. I got these figures from
a competent Russian doctor who travelled with me on that occasion, and
who told me that all the measures which were being taken to cope with
the epidemic were only “eye-wash.” The isolation waggons which had then
been placed at each station he called “death-traps,” and he explained to
me how they only helped to spread the disease. He went out into the town
to see a doctor whom he knew, but found that he had died of typhus and
that his wife was sick of the same disease. I went to the Polish church
and found the priest reading the funeral service over a rough deal coffin
which contained, I was told, the remains of a Polish gentleman who had
once been Governor of a Province. He had died of typhus in the train, and
his body had been stripped by the White soldiers. His wife, who was also
ill, had become so seriously upset by this treatment of her husband’s
corpse that, in order to soothe her, another lady, the only friend
she had left, had by superhuman exertions succeeded in getting a most
primitive coffin and in having the remains conveyed for Christian burial
to the church. This lady asked me to help her to carry the coffin to the
hearse that waited outside, as there were not enough men present to do
so, and I gladly consented.
Conditions in the hospitals were indescribable. In one, about which
an official report was written, the head-doctor had been fined for
drunkenness, the other doctor only paid the place a short visit once a
day, and the nurses only put in an appearance while the doctor was there.
The linen and the clothes of the patients were never changed, and most
of them lay in a most filthy condition in their everyday clothes on the
floor. They were never washed, and the male attendants waited for the
periodical attack of unconsciousness which is characteristic of typhus in
order to steal from the patients their rings, jewelry, watches, and even
their food.
All of our British party dreaded typhus with an over-mastering dread, not
so much because of the typhus as because of the hospitals. They often
said that if they went into one of these hospitals they would never leave
it alive. The bad air alone would kill them.
But it seemed impossible to avoid this terrible disease as, owing to
the lack of water, there was no means of washing oneself or one’s
clothes, while the close contact in which we lived with the Russians made
cleanliness on our part no guarantee against the disease. There was one
case supposed to be typhus in our carriage on the journey from Omsk to
Ekaterinburg. There were several cases in the house where we lived at
Krasnoyarsk. On my way back, there was one case in the compartment next
to mine, and then, to crown all, a case in my own compartment, only about
two feet from where I lay. It was a _feldsher_, or doctor’s assistant,
who fell ill, but he would not go to hospital. I found him weeping
bitterly in his bed one morning, and when I asked him what was the matter
with him, I found that he was weeping out of pity for himself. “If I have
typhus,” he said, “I am a dead man, and if I am sent to hospital I shall
certainly die there. I know what those hospitals are.”
His knowledge of the hospitals was certainly extensive, but his pity
might have been a little more extensive; it might have extended, for
example, to me. But it never seemed to strike him that in justice to me
he should leave the compartment, or report sick, or have his clothes
disinfected, or at least refrain from throwing his clothes on to the
bench where I sat. His horror of the hospital was so great that on
hearing that the doctor, a lady, was coming to see him he dressed himself
and staggered into the outer air, where he spent the whole day so that he
might miss her.
Many Russians came on our train at Novo-Nikolaevsk and begged us, for
God’s sake, to take them with us. They would be content, they said,
to sleep on the outer platform even though that meant the certainty
of freezing to death. They would do anything to escape “the terrible
epidemic,” as they called it. It was like a rush from a plague-stricken
town in the Middle Ages.
On my way back to Omsk I found that the typhus in every Siberian town
was as bad as it was in Novo-Nikolaevsk. With the exception of a passage
and a few rooms the whole railway station at Taiga had been converted
into one huge hospital and, through the windows, one could see the sick
soldiers lying on the ground in their clothes. There was only one doctor
for every hundred patients, and in one hospital devoted to frost-bite
and gangrene cases surgeons were occupied continuously day and night
amputating limbs without the use of anæsthetics. Private houses, as
well as schools, churches, and public buildings of all kinds had been
converted into hospitals, and conditions in Omsk and Ekaterinburg were
equally terrible.
On our eastward journey things were not so bad as this, but they were
very bad indeed. A doctor attached to the White Army told me that over
20,000 people had died of typhus and cold _en route_ from Omsk to
Krasnoyarsk, exclusive of those who died in the towns. His own train
had left Omsk with over 800 persons on board, and when they reached
Krasnoyarsk twenty-six dead bodies were piled on top of one another, like
logs of wood, in the open gangways outside the brake-waggons. At least
one waggon in every train was converted into a travelling morgue, and the
dead always overflowed on to these outer gangways.
I have already described how these dead bodies were stripped stark naked
and how this practice contributed tremendously to the spread of the
epidemic.
I only refer to the matter again owing to the profound impression of
savagery and utter demoralization which it made on my mind.
The only coffin I saw was in the Polish church at Novo-Nikolaevsk,
and the only shrouds I saw were those wrapped round dead children.
The remains of those little ones were decked out by their mothers in
white clothes set off by sprays of evergreen, while the drifting snow
had added its own funeral wreaths. The calm, white faces were always
uncovered, and the bodies, I am glad to say, were never disturbed by the
corpse-strippers.
The loss in horses during this retreat has been estimated, and I give
the estimate elsewhere; but the loss in children, which has not yet been
estimated, must also have been very great. “Woe to them that are with
child, and to them that give suck in those days.”
One would have thought that, with the frozen eye of death thus fixed on
them whichever way they turned and with the sound of the last trumpet
thus blowing in their ears, the officers and soldiers of such a religious
race would prepare for their own last end; but quite the contrary was the
case; and I am rather inclined to believe, after what I have seen, that
the last trumpet will only be the signal for a final orgie of lust among
some of those who are alive when they hear it sound.
Debauchery amid corpses seems impossible, but, as Merezhkovsky says,
“What cannot happen, happens in Russia.”
Some of the Russian officers in Omsk who had been deeply shocked by the
unfounded stories about the Communist nationalization of women seemed
to carry out that principle pretty thoroughly in their own private
lives. And now, having deserted their soldiers, they were bringing their
harems along with them, as well as all the alcohol which they could get
hold of. Most of the ladies evacuated in the staff trains were wives or
relatives of officers and officials, but the status of many others was
very different. These others swarmed everywhere. They peered delicately
at the common people out of the curtained windows of first-class cars
passing swiftly through on the West track. They “wangled” their way into
the most exclusive _coupés_. They were a drag on the whole conduct of the
retreat, and were calculated to make one a misogynist for the rest of
his life. Even the Admiral, who was married and who had the reputation
among his entourage of being almost an ascetic, was very weak indeed in
the matter of women and wine. He led an ostentatiously religious life,
attended church in great state every Sunday and holiday, and, when he
addressed the “Christian Crusaders” whom he had raised to fight the
Bolsheviks, spoke with a religious fervour worthy of the Archbishop of
Canterbury. Yet he brought with him on this, his last retreat, a certain
Madame Timereva, who is said to have followed him to the end and to have
been shot with him at Irkutsk. This case was actually cited to me by an
English officer as a shining example of woman’s fidelity at a time when
“sexual morality had become extremely loose.”
Semenov, now the most prominent Imperialist in Eastern Siberia, is also
married, but nevertheless flaunts a Jewish concubine whom he picked up
in a Harbin _café-chantant_ and whom he proudly presents to the highest
foreign officials. Kalmykov has managed to introduce obscenity into
nearly all his military orders. In short, Russia is fast losing every
vestige of Christianity and civilization; and this remark applies not
only to Red Russia but to White. Red Russia is probably the better of
the two, for it never pretended to be very prudish, whereas White Russia
posed as the champion of Christianity.
One naval officer who travelled in our train and whose place was
certainly in Vladivostock if anywhere, had been sent 2,000 versts into
the wilds because a superior officer coveted his wife; and in the War
Office at Omsk there had been many cases of young married officers being
ordered to the Front for the same reason, and being killed at the front.
The utter break-up of families facilitated this wholesale demoralization
of a people. Young girls of sixteen or seventeen were sometimes left
stranded at a station in their summer shoes without money or friends,
and, being frightened almost out of their wits by the accounts they
heard of Bolshevik atrocities, they fell an easy prey to the lust of the
soldiery. Sometimes they were dressed in men’s clothes, and their smooth,
young faces contrasted sharply with the hairy busbies and sheepskins
which they wore. Some of the girls in the soldiers’ echelons were little
more than children; others were evidently experienced campaigners and not
unwilling victims.
I might add many horrible things about the prevalence in the villages of
venereal diseases introduced by Austrian and German war prisoners and by
Russian prisoners returned from Germany, but this subject I shall leave
entirely to the medical authorities of the Allies.
Besides the soldier-refugees there were of course many peasants, some
seated in sleighs on top of old trunks and bags and other household
belongings all covered with snow, but more frequently travelling
alongside those heavily laden sleighs, others trudging along on foot, all
wrapped in dirty sheepskins and with their wild-looking fur caps pulled
down over their faces. I pitied their poor, faithful, tired horses, some
of which had come all the way from Tobolsk. Sometimes they brought cattle
with them, but these were all bought or seized by the hungry troops
before the end of the journey. We bought a cow ourselves after passing
Taiga and placed its quarters in cold storage on top of our car alongside
other perishable articles of food.
Women and children accompanied the peasants, and often got parted from
them _en route_. Parents lost their children, husbands lost their wives,
children lost one another. A British subject in our train had lost three
children at Novo-Nikolaevsk through going into town with his wife to buy
some food for them. When he returned he found that his _teplyushka_ had
been attached by mistake to another echelon which had gone off. We did
all we could for him, made enquiries at every station, and telegraphed up
and down the line, but, up to the time I left Krasnoyarsk, he had heard
nothing of the lost children. One of our staff officers had been carried
off at Omsk in the same way through his carriage getting accidentally
attached to the wrong train. A young clerk whom I employed and whom I had
sent on in General Knox’s train, placed his wife in a Russian train which
was afterwards captured. An English sergeant who had married a Russian
lady placed her aboard a train which got through, but he himself was
captured.
All the stations along the line were covered with the most pathetic
little pencilled notices regarding these lost ones.
The following specimens will give an idea of what they were like:
“Dear Ivan i am going to stay at Andy’s house in Irkutsk join
ME there the children are with me but we have no food.—OLGA.”
“Dear Masha i am waiting for you here and you will get my
address at the post office.—SERGEI.”
Surnames were seldom used in these notices; the Christian name was
generally given in its diminutive form and no attempt was ever made to
indicate who exactly the writer was. For Olga there was evidently only
one Ivan in the world, and for Sergei there was only one Masha. It never
seemed to occur to them that there could ever possibly be any confusion.
These notices were scribbled all over the walls of the stations and
halts. Sometimes they were written on scraps of paper which were pasted
on the walls. I have seen the whole exterior wall of a station covered
with them as high up as one could reach. I have never seen a station
without some of them. I have seen them sometimes pinned to the trunks of
trees, a custom learned perhaps in the happy days of courtship, before
the twin deluges of revolution and war had thundered over Russia.
This disintegration of a whole nation had been going on for two years
before the disastrous retreat from Omsk came to accelerate the process,
and it probably constitutes the greatest dislocation of family life that
has ever taken place in the history of the world. The columns of all
the Siberian newspapers always contained advertisements asking for lost
ones. In one paper I counted forty-five such advertisements in one day.
I never, during these two years, met a Russian who had not lost some
member of his family. His wife had been last heard of in Kiev. His son
had been studying in Moscow when the storm burst. The number of irregular
alliances which this great dispersal had led to will break up millions
of homes. But it is the young who will suffer most. In 1918 I had seen
how respectable and delicately brought-up Russian girls had drifted into
Harbin and there became the prey of Russian and Jewish speculators, of
Chinamen, of every kind of human vampire, every kind of international
dealer in white flesh. Those girls came from Kiev, from the Crimea,
from the most distant parts of the former Russian Empire, but they were
penniless, friendless, and absolutely helpless. There were wealthy
Russian imperialists in Harbin, but they never thought of establishing
homes for these girls or starting some sort of a society to assist them.
They were all too busy playing at high politics. But surely a time must
come when it will be impossible that so great a disaster to humanity as
this crumbling away of a whole civilization can take place in one part of
the world while another part, tranquilly unaware of what is happening,
is spending its superfluous wealth on anti-vivisection societies and on
homes for lost dogs.
All the nations have been moved to take action, in their own interest,
against the terrible invasion of typhus which is even now moving rapidly
westward from Russia. Can they not be made to realize that the utter
breakdown of civilization in Russia is an even greater danger to them
than typhus and that, for the sake not only of Russia but of humanity at
large, some little attention should be bestowed on the many thousands
of Russian girls, youths, and children who are being allowed to grow up
like wild beasts in the Far East, and in the Near East, in Scandinavia,
in Finland, and in all the countries bordering on Russia? This is surely
a work for the League of Nations; but those who undertake it must be
animated by Christian charity. If it only results in the creation of
expensive staffs and the finding of “jobs” for dug-out officers, if
it only attracts aristocratic ladies on the hunt for decorations and
American doctors on the hunt for advertisement, it had better not be
undertaken at all.
And since every European nation now finds its wealth and its energy
insufficient for the mitigation of the misery which prevails within
its own borders, I think that the time has come for the Russians to do
something themselves. The Russian organization in Paris seems to have a
good deal of money at its disposal for political purposes. The Russian
Embassies and Consulates in America and the Far East also seem to be well
supplied with funds, which they might divert for a time to this primary
duty which they have so far left to strangers. And if they can donate
no money they might at least donate themselves. For the last two years
a great number of Russian statesmen and publicists have criticized from
comfortable hotels in London, Paris, and New York all the efforts of
the Allies to put Russian affairs in order, and have spurred us on to a
further expenditure of our blood and treasure on their behalf.
They themselves have failed, so far, to produce a Cæsar, a Monk, or a
Napoleon. But they possess great funds of philanthropy, enthusiasm,
energy, mysticism. In view of the fact that tens of thousands of
Russian children and young women, cast adrift in foreign lands, are now
threatened with a fate worse than death, cannot they try to produce a St.
Vincent de Paul, a General Booth, a Florence Nightingale?