Somebody asked where we were to be quartered, and we learned that we had better remain aboard the transport till quarters could be arranged. Of course, the officers with troops went to the nearby stations with their commands, some being sent to the Suchan Mines, some to Khabarovsk, where were the headquarters of the Twenty-seventh Infantry, and others distributed to units stationed along the railroad. But fifteen officers and fifteen field clerks of the Intelligence Division had no more homes than so many jack-rabbits.
The Chief Intelligence Officer came down to the transport and interviewed us, and gave us a chance to size him up. He had been in the country several months, had seen much of the fighting of the Cossack chiefs against the Bolshevists up the line of the railroad, and had a good grasp of the situation. But under our policy of “non-interference,” there was little use for grasping anything—the chief job was to keep hands off all Siberian affairs.
That afternoon I rode up to headquarters, passing through the muddy streets swarming with pigs, till the Svetlanskaya, Vladivostok’s main street, was reached. Then our automobile whizzed up hill and down dale over this Broadway of Asia, passing soldiers of many nations en route—French, Czechs, Russians, little black Annammites from the French possessions, Italians, Canadians, British, Japanese, Cossacks from the Don, the Urals, the Ussuri, the trans-Baikal, and bluejackets from Japanese, French, British and American warships in the bay.
The city of Vladivostok itself presented a spectacle that would have brought joy to anybody who yearned for a job as a professional philanthropist. For “The Mistress of the East” had jumped her population from the normal, which was forty thousand, to about one hundred and eighty thousand. Refugee barracks on the edge of the city were filled with people from the interior. Trains came jammed to the last shelf against the ceiling, and poured battalions of travellers into the Trans-Siberian station, where they settled down to sleep in the corridors regardless of the throngs marching over them. They looked like rag-bags come to life—these hungry, dirty, tattered people from the hinterland, a human caravan in a panic. They smelled like a circus menagerie.
Among them were many typhus victims. Beside these sick camped the well—with little complaint—and set up housekeeping on any available floor space. Some who had perhaps an aristocratic taste for privacy, or who found the air of the waiting-room a trifle spicy, filtered out to other habitations. There were, of course, no vacant rooms at the hotels or elsewhere.
Money could not always buy shelter and rarely seclusion, since the average sleeping chamber accommodated all the way from five to a dozen persons. Even billiard tables commanded a good price as places of repose. And shows lasted till dawn, so that people who slept in the daytime could be amused while sitting up all night. Thus, when one-half of the population got up in the morning, it met the other half going to bed.
Judging by conditions in Vladivostok, it was obvious that a terrible state of affairs existed in the hinterland. The refugees, clamoring for food, said so. Statistics of food-prices, gleaned from the refugees as well as from the inland press, proved a state of famine.
THE AMERICAN ARMY MULES ARRIVE IN VLADIVOSTOK
FOR DUTY
