STREET SCENE IN VLADIVOSTOK WITH BAY
IN THE DISTANCE
The Svetlanskaya is along a bench of the hills over the city, and affords a fine view of the harbor. Our headquarters were in a store-building close to the bay, across from the department store of Kunst and Albers, the chief mercantile organization of Siberia, with chain stores in the principal cities. The building our stab, or staff, occupied, was a brick structure of two stories and basement, and resembled a library building. It had been used as offices and store-rooms by Kunst and Albers.
When I reported, I was told that I could register at the base, from which I had come. Back at the base they told me to register at headquarters, so I never did register, but went back aboard the transport.
That night I received orders to proceed to all stations, under verbal orders of the commanding general, and in connection with certain intelligence work, to call the attention of the troops to the Third Liberty Loan. A Russian-speaking orderly from our own army, with an unpronounceable name, was assigned to me. I called him Brown. I was told that I must have my baggage aboard a troop-train leaving the base at eight o’clock that night for Khabarovsk, but that I could board the train at ten o’clock at the city station of the trans-Siberian.
Having no quarters, I put all my possessions, consisting of bedding-roll and two lockers, into a box-car of the train with the aid of field clerks and German war-prisoners. We got it out of the transport and aboard the train at the last minute—or what I thought was the last minute. I was later to learn that there is no necessity for hurry in Siberia.
But the train did not come out of the yards to the depot. Not that anything was wrong; it was simply that the engine failed to appear. All through the frozen night, a couple of locomotives wheezed up and down and whistled signals. Russian railroad men blew horns interminably, and there was every evidence of laudable activity. The American major who was to have charge of the train delivered a line of profanity with all the fervor and efficiency of the old regular army. But the Russian station officials—lay down on benches and went to sleep!
It was five o’clock in the morning before that troop-train of box-cars rattled up to the station, and another hour of horn-blowing and whistling before we were finally under way. Then we blew out the guttering candles and lay down on a shelf in a dirty car.
IV
TOWARD KHABAROVSK
When morning dawned, we found ourselves rolling along at about ten miles an hour over a plain, with wooded hills in the distance. The fields were brown and sere, for it was then the first week in October, and the air was feeling the first chill of winter.
About nine o’clock we reached Nikolsk-Ussuri, where the railroad splits, one track, the Chinese Eastern, going across Manchuria to the Siberian border, and the other, the one we were to follow, proceeding to the north through the Maritime Provinces as far as Khabarovsk, where it crosses the Amur River north of that city, and then runs to the northwest well inside the Siberian border, with a branch line running down to Blagoveschench. The main line then goes to Kerak, and crossing the Shilka River, joins up with the Chinese Eastern over Manchuria, at Karimska, a few versts to the southeast of Chita, capital of the province of Trans-Baikal.