Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

We fought our way into a car, inch by inch, shouldering through the disembarking passengers and clambering over their bundles and bales. The first compartment we could get into was still full of sleepily-protesting passengers, six being jammed into a compartment designed to hold four. The place was in a filthy condition, floors, berths, and window-ledges being covered with food refuse, cigarette stubs, dirty papers, candle-wax, mud which had melted out of ice tracked in at various stations. The single guttering candle revealed it to be in a condition worse than a pig-sty.

“We will hold this,” said Captain B——. “You remain here and I will see the provodnik and pay him to clean it, and see that it is locked. Then we will move our baggage in.”

He returned presently, having given the provodnik twenty rubles for cleaning, and surety of possession. I suggested that my orderly be left to hold it against the mob already swarming in and thrusting the door open as they passed to look in. Captain B—— said that it was safe enough, and that we would breakfast at the station while the coupé was being cleaned, when we would begin moving our baggage. I doubted the safety of this move, but as he was running things and asserted that the station master was a friend, I felt assured that he was right.

After breakfast, still before dawn, I sent my orderly to get our tickets. He came back saying that the line was so long that he could not get to the window. Inquiry developed the fact that I could get a military pass by seeing the Czech officer in charge of transportation. We found him far up the railroad yard in a third-class car, with a lot of his soldiers eating their breakfast. He sat on a shelf and scribbled a pass.

Now our baggage must be moved to the coupé we had set aside in the Vladivostok train. I left my orderly to look after the transfer with the aid of a hired porter, and hastened to the compartment we had chosen.

On the way through the crowd I met Captain B—— who went with me. We found the car a seething mass of humanity, struggling with their boxes in the corridor, and making a fight to gain entrance to every coupé which had been preëmpted by the earliest, luckiest and strongest of the travellers.

To our surprise we found the coupé which we had hired cleaned, full. There was a burly Russian soldier, a Japanese officer, and a pair of Russian civilian speculators lying in the berths, and the whole place was crammed with baggage. They protested wildly at supposed intrusion.

Captain B——, being in Russian uniform overcoat with gold shoulder straps, informed them all that they must get out, as he had reserved the coupé. This met with violent opposition as the party inside was well settled.

Captain B—— called for the provodnik, and as that worthy could or would not come, he seized the baggage nearest at hand and began pitching it out on the heads of those in the corridor.

I managed to get a window open, and he pitched bags and grips out on the mob outside. The effect was magical. Our squatters needed their personal effects more than they wanted the coupé, and they dashed out to salvage their things, expressing themselves in Russian and Japanese as not at all admirers of Captain B——.