Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

We reached Khabarovsk at two in the morning, our passenger train coming into the yards in such fashion that some six freight trains were between us and the station, which is generally the case. As the freights were being shifted about continuously, it was impossible to attempt to go under them with my baggage, and when, after an hour’s wait, I got a porter, it appeared that we would spend the remainder of the night running round the tracks of the yard. For having gone a quarter of a mile to get round a line of freight cars on one track, another train on the next track would come rolling down between us and the station. It was nearly daylight when we got out of that moving labyrinth.

And the single drosky-driver at the station, knowing that he had a monopoly on my business, for all the others had departed with incoming passengers, demanded sixty rubles to take me to the American post.

Without argument, I piled my baggage in, clambered aboard, and then paid him his proper twenty rubles at the end of the journey. He did not demur—such methods proved to him that I was a personage not to be trifled with. Had I given him thirty, he would have chased me all night to get the other thirty, for to display weakness by over-payment puts one down as a person who can be brow-beaten and robbed. Generosity in Siberia stamps the stranger as a fool. And as a matter of fact, I paid him double rate, for the Imperial rubles I gave him were worth about twice the local paper money.

There was still a detachment beyond the Amur River, about twenty versts away, which I had not visited. Colonel Styer gladly provided me with a horse, and a mounted orderly to ride to this station, saving me the two days necessary to make the trip by trains. And the Chaplain of the Twenty-seventh, a hard-riding and hard-praying Southerner representative of our best type of army chaplains, said that he would go with me.

The trip was arranged while I was dining as the guest of Colonel Styer and Chaplain W——.

Once more I was in quarters with Lieutenant-Colonel Morrow, the regimental captain-adjutant, S——, and a second lieutenant, W——, who had been commissioned from the ranks after several years in the regular army. The building was large and roomy, having formerly been the residence of a Russian officer and his family while a regiment of Siberian Rifles had been stationed in Khabarovsk in the old days. We used their silver and furniture, their rich table covers, candelabra and samovars.

The walls of the house are four feet thick, with hollow spaces between connected with the flues of the many great stoves, in such way that the smoke and heat from the fires circulate between the walls before escaping from the chimneys. Fifty and sixty degrees below zero are said to be usual winter temperature there.

A stove in Siberia is not a stove at all, to use a Hibernism, but a sort of tile temple built into the wall, reaching from the floor to the ceiling. The front of this structure merges with the surface of the wall, and the tiles being of various colors and designs, they add to the interior decorations. And it is startling to come in of a cool evening and touch a wall hot enough to suggest frying eggs upon it. My memories of that house are permeated by a kindly old Russian moujik, with long reddish beard, long hair, wrinkled and blinking eyes. Whenever one had occasion to pass him, he abased himself—he was a most pathetic demonstration of the Russian style of turning service into servitude. He seemed to spend all the day and night stuffing wood into the fireboxes.

An old soldier who had been with Colonel Morrow had charge of the servants; a soldier cook prepared the meals, and the house work was done by the blond moujik, a Russian woman and her daughter. It was a happy place—what the veteran regular calls “old army stuff,” meaning that everybody begins by assuming that the other fellow is a gentleman, knows his business, and attends to it without attempting to look, talk or stand in imitation of von Hindenburg. These latter traits afflict some persons new to the uniform of an officer, because many young men gained commissioned ranks without going through the “shavetail” period of their training. This term comes from the old style of shaving the tail of a mule new to the army, which serves as sort of a warning signal to such as may have dealings with him, that the mule has not acquired proper discipline and a regard for the feelings of others.

And no matter how high a cadet may stand in his class at West Point, when he comes to the army, he is a “shavetail officer,” for about a year, and admits that he has a lot to learn about army ways. This is one of the reasons why the old regular officers, and the officer fresh from civil life, have not always gotten on well together in the new army.