Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

On January twenty-sixth, in reply to my classification request, I got orders to return to Vladivostok as soon as an officer who was to relieve me, arrived in Chita. I had offered my services for the war, and the war was over.

I immediately informed my friends that I was leaving soon for the United States. General Oba’s chief of staff gave a Japanese dinner at headquarters, and invited the British officers and me. We had a most enjoyable time, free from the drunkenness which marked Siberian affairs. In fact, it was my most enjoyable official function in Chita.

I made my official call on Oba the day of my departure, and he came to my room to say farewell. I was sincerely sorry to say good-bye to him.

Captain B—— and Mrs. B—— had planned to go to Vladivostok before I was relieved. They delayed their departure in order to go with me. And we went in the private car of a Russian colonel who was going to Harbin. He was in Semenoff’s service, but I surmised that he was too high a type of officer and gentleman ever to get very far in the councils of the Ataman. I did not remember having met him before in Chita—a rougher element held the front of the stage most of the time.

As the colonel’s car was in the yards, we did not have to sit in the station and wait for the train which was due to arrive from Irkutsk at nine o’clock in the evening of January 31st.

It seemed to be the coldest weather I had ever experienced when with Captain B——, Mrs. B——, and Werkstein, I set out from the Hotel Select. There was a gentle breeze blowing—a barely perceptible movement of the air—which intensified the seventy-below temperature. In the five minutes we were crossing the square before the station, walking against the pressure of a zephyr barely strong enough to stir a feather, the tears ran out of my eyes and froze on my cheeks, and my nose was frost-bitten before I could get the fur band of my cap across it.

I looked back at the line of shops and restaurants. The lights were shining through a gray haze of frozen fog, the doors were shrouded with arches of icicles like entrances to fairy grottoes.

We plunged into the dark labyrinth of lines of cars in the yards. A private train of Semenoff, with the palatial coaches of the old days, protected by a few stamping sentries. Nearby was the Ataman’s armored cars, with the muzzles of field-pieces and machine-guns jutting out over the steel sides which were gleaming white with hoar frost in the pale light of the chilled stars. A dim light spilling from our private car, revealed letters a yard high painted on the end of an armored box-car, in Russian “Cemehobr,” or Semenoff.

I could see in the distance, lights in the upper rooms of the Ataman’s residence. Probably a council of state was being held—or only an informal gathering of women who had recently been brought up from Harbin. Above the clamor of the crowds of refugees in the station, I heard the howling of wolves in the hills.

We got aboard the colonel’s car, and went to bed. The train which was due at nine that night to pick us up, did not pull us out of the city of convicts till nine in the morning of February 1, 1919.