Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

I was left holding the fort. Captain B—— hunted up the provodnik, and with a few properly placed kicks, induced him to once more clean the coupé. He tearfully announced that there was no outside lock on the door.

Finally, we got our baggage in after a lot of labor and fighting, and never left that coupé unguarded for a minute the next three days on the way to Vladivostok.

Late one night the Russian conductor managed to get in on the plea that he wanted to see our tickets. He at once announced that he was going to put two more passengers in the coupé, and that the lower berths would have to be shared, despite the fact that it was plain there was barely room for us to get in or out, or to turn round once inside. Captain B—— referred him to me telling him that the coupé was reserved for an American officer, and that he himself had nothing to do with the matter. I lifted myself on one elbow, and reached for my pistol holster. The conductor and his two villainous passengers faded away, and presently we heard a rumpus in the next coupé, where the two men were installed over the protests of some women.

Of course, the conductor probably got a thousand rubles to provide quarters for the two men, whether they had tickets or not, as the speculators pay well for accommodation. They made themselves so obnoxious in the coupé which they got into that the women occupants were forced to get off the train at the next station and wait twenty-four hours for the next train.

At every station we were besieged by incoming passengers, who would thrust the door of the coupé open and insist that they be allowed to enter, and when we refused, they made insulting remarks. Then they camped on their baggage outside the door and sang ribald songs all night, or thrust burning cigarettes through the aperture we left for air by opening the door an inch and keeping the chain on. Or they took occasion to block us in the passage if we attempted to leave the coupé.

In order to allow Mrs. B—— to leave the coupé, I had to carry my pistol in my hand ahead of her, and wait for her to come back. And while the three of us got off at stations for tea, my orderly was left with his automatic in his hand to keep off all comers. We never pointed a gun at anybody, but having it in hand, it prevented burly Manchus, Russians and others from insisting that they had a right to come in.

At one station down the line where we were to get coal for our engine, we were delayed several hours because there was no coal. The mine was not far away, but with typical Siberian procrastination, the coal was allowed to run short at the station. When a train arrived which needed coal, it was time enough to order an engine and a dozen coal cars to proceed to the mine, load up, and return with a supply. So we lay in the yards, and kept other trains at other stations waiting, till we had coaled and released traffic in both directions. The branch line running to the mine could have kept the coal yards full, with a switch engine and one coal-car, but that would require planning ahead, and doing something before it was actually necessary to do it.

At another station, we waited five hours to change a hot “brass” on a journal. This job at home takes some ten minutes. As I watched a poor Chinese mechanic scraping the bearing in forty-below weather, using a primitive tool, I realized that the “hordes of cheap labor in Asia” need not worry us at home. This mechanic would put the semi-cylindrical bearing into the journal-box and take it out. Where it showed oil stains, the metal had to be scraped away to get a good fit for the bearing. He always scraped too much off where the oil showed it to be ill-fitting, and of course, when he put it in again, oil revealed that the spots which he had not scraped, now stuck up. So he scraped these spots away and repeated the process.

We were held up one night at a tiny telegraph station on the plains. After six hours wait, Captain B—— and I attempted to ascertain when we might expect to go on. We learned that there was a wreck two versts ahead. There were two cars off the track—freight cars. It developed later that the reason we had to wait so long to get two freight cars off the track, was due to the fact that some cases containing books had been smashed in the wreck, and the books scattered along the line. Before that freight train would come in, these cases had to be repacked and renailed till they presented their original appearance as near as it was possible to make them, by Siberian railroad men working with a single old lantern which burned lard-oil. While they tinkered with cases of books in semi-darkness, the train for Vladivostok, and all other traffic for miles in both directions, were held nearly all night. Fancy an American passenger train held till smashed cases of freight could be rebuilt and repacked!

We got into Vladivostok three days late. The transport in which I should have sailed for home departed the day before I arrived. And a notice in headquarters warned me not to go near the Trans-Siberian station because there were many cases of typhus among the refugees sleeping in the corridors! It is needless to state that I calmly went there for my baggage without worrying about typhus after living so many days in trains and stations reeking with typhus and other diseases. But one gets very finicky living at headquarters. Incidentally, there was a lot of tiger hunting done on the stairs of headquarters at Vladivostok. The whole staff became inveterate tiger hunters, and remained so, till a big Siberian tiger came down near Vladivostok and killed a bull and ate it.