Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

An American Infantry captain bound for Harbin to take command of a company there, serving as guard for the consulate, shared quarters with me in one of the fourth-class cars, with the Czech soldiers, and my interpreter, Werkstein, was with me.

There was a dining-car improvised out of a small and springless ordinary box-car, by building a range into one end, cutting a door in the other, and building a table down the center. Along the sides were piled our food supplies, our bread hanging in sacks from the roof, and under the table our feet rested on frozen cabbages, potatoes, and beef.

The cook got off now and then, and having, with mere money, wheedled the “starving populace” into parting with fat pheasants, threw the dead and frozen birds into the cook-car with brutal disregard of the needs of the natives. And as a further example of dire necessity, of food shortage, I observed at one place some peasants (not pheasants) so close to starvation, that they had nothing with which to grease the wheels of their wagons but best Siberian butter! We heard about this time by cable that the Congress of the United States would be asked to appropriate a hundred million dollars for the purchase of food, which food was to be sent to wheatless and meatless Europe in order to prevent the spread of Bolshevism—that same Bolshevism which had swept Siberia “as the result of a lack of food.”

Chang, a wily Chinese, bossed the “China boys” who did the cooking and waited on the table. And a place at the table generally meant being frozen, or roasted, according to whether one sat at the end away from a red-hot stove near the door, or near the stove. And it seemed that the engineer picked out the roughest part of the road-bed to show his best speed, when we were at meals.

A doctor once asked me to pass the cheese. At the same instant, we hit a curve, and a whole round of cheese from the top of the pile of stores behind him over his head, toppled over, sailed over him and alighted on his coffee.

As we got into Manchuria, the temperature dropped to about forty degrees below zero. The door of the diner, from which emerged the warm air, was draped in great icicles, and when the door was opened, we were met by a rush of steam—the warm air meeting the cold.

The women nurses, having modern ideas of ventilation, left the windows of their compartments slightly open one night. In the morning the heating-pipes in that car were useless, for it was a hot-water system, and the provodnik had allowed the fires in the heater to go down during the night. The sleeping car, for the rest of the trip, might have served well as a cold-storage car.

With two stoves going continually in our fourth-class car, even though they burned Manchurian coal and gave off a yellow smoke, most of which escaped into the car, kept us comfortable. We were warm, if not sanitary. And when the weather got to sixty below, I gave up all ideas of hoping for fresh air while sleeping.

And during the day, at every stop, we three Americans got out for air, risking having our feet frozen in the process. The Czechs did not seem to mind—they went on with their cooking, and stoked the fires all the harder to warm the air we had cooled by opening the doors to go out.

Everything that was metal inside, became covered with heavy frost—pistols, iron braces, nail-heads, bolts. And to touch any of the iron work with bare hands, getting on or off the car, meant leaving a palm sticking to the iron.