So each suffered in his fashion.
All through the open country parties of cavalry went trotting from farm to farm. Infantry drove in sledges, holding their rifles ready. General Orloff had then made his headquarters at Segewold, some forty miles north of Riga, and obtaining a sledge there with a Lett driver who spoke German, I was able to travel far through the low hills and wooded valleys where the troops were at their work. The ruins of ancient castles built by the Prussian Orders are rather frequent in that neighbourhood, and the modern country houses which have taken their place are especially fine—great mansions like our own “outposts of barbarism,” some with gables and mullions, some with classic pediments and columns in the “Georgian style.” But all were empty now, and not a sound arose even from the stables and barns. One great house, as famous as any monastery for its liqueurs, had been burnt to a cinder of ruin, and there was hardly a farm around which had not lost a father or son, hanged for burning it. The farms we passed appeared to be equally empty; but when the driver gradually discovered that I had no direct concern for Russian Government or German landowners, he began to spread communications along the road by a system of signals and cries. Faces would then peer out from the entrances of fowl houses, or sudden questions would come from the depths of a holly bush. In the quick conversations that followed I heard the word “Cossacks” constantly repeated, for every mounted soldier is to them a Cossack, and the question they always asked was whether the soldiers were coming. Too often they were coming. We had seen them behind us, or had watched a party moving down a hill, or cautiously making their way through woods. The infantry in sledges were harder to distinguish; but they were less numerous, and they went in obvious terror. Under their houses some of the peasants had dug deep holes to hide in, and some had taken to caverns in the sandstone hillsides, covered among the woods. But it was chilly weather for that kind of life. The soldiers were everywhere. In every parish a certain number of victims had to be offered up to create a salutary impression, and all I can hope is that our lonely little sledge, passing almost unobserved along the lanes, may perhaps have saved one or two by its warnings. That it was allowed to pass unobserved must be put down to kindly fortune, for I had applied for the necessary permission to visit the country districts, but had applied utterly in vain. I have often noticed that the agents of justice display a peculiar shyness about the presence of spectators when they are killing men and women as the law directs.
On the other hand, there was, perhaps, too little reserve about another habit practised by the officers in command—the habit of ordering executions by telephone in the presence of the condemned. In Riga I had heard of instances, and they appeared to me to show a peculiarly cold-hearted brutality, though I do not quite understand why. The driver told me of a similar case which had happened in Segewold. After the rapid court-martial and sentence, the officer rang up on the telephone: “Hullo! Is that the sergeant? All right. Have a firing party here six o’clock to-morrow morning. Three prisoners to be shot. Six men will be enough. No, better bring ten perhaps. Mind they’re not late. Six o’clock to-morrow morning. Three prisoners. All right.” Then he rang off, and the prisoners were led away. It was like ordering the funeral lunch in the hearing of the sick.
As a contrast to these things I may mention an occurrence that was thought humorous, and was known to every one in Riga at the time. It concerned a young Lettish schoolmistress who was sentenced to be flogged. Not understanding either the sentence or the brutal orders and gestures of the soldiers, whose duty it was to carry it out, she thought she was to be violated, and that story was an inexhaustible subject of mirth among the commercial and landowning classes in the Riga restaurants. I have heard it translated into four languages so that no one present might miss the full humour of the situation.
So it went on. In the country the people died by hundreds. They were flogged, they were hanged, they were shot. Their wooden farmhouses were burnt to the ground. Their children were turned out in the winter to starve. Men and women alike were slaughtered by hundreds, and no one had pity on them. I heard no single word of pity or of understanding spoken in any language, and week after week the bloody assize went on.
Thank God, there were reprisals, however few. Soldiers on the march through the town moved in single file for fear of bombs, and even that did not always save them. The assassinations of policemen upon the streets averaged one or perhaps two a day. The police lived in terror, and as they went their rounds in groups of two or three, they were escorted by an equal number of soldiers with fixed bayonets. Continual alarms arose from every quarter of Riga; the reports of revolvers or rifles would suddenly be heard, and this way and that the people ran. Two or three days after I arrived there was a gallant rescue from the very police-station itself. At eight o’clock in the morning two women came to the door with food for five prisoners who were lying under sentence of death for the assassination of a police officer named Porschetsky. As they were going away, eight or ten men entered. Some seized the police on duty, killing one and wounding two others who resisted, and four went to the cells and released all five prisoners, who walked quietly in different directions down the streets and escaped, though without their hats. One of them was recaptured two days later while foolishly tying on a false beard in a barber’s shop. His sister who was with him, fell on the floor, and clinging to the knees of the police implored for mercy. The barber fainted with excitement, and the man was dragged away and shot.
The same afternoon a young boy passing my hotel was bayoneted to death by a soldier for refusing to halt at command. Whether he was another of the five or simply did not hear the order, I did not discover. He was under twenty, dark haired, with the clear and intellectual face that characterises the Lettish students, artists, and other revolutionaries of the towns.
Of the same type was another boy who was shot the following Sunday morning at nine o’clock just outside the castle wall. There were eight in the firing party. “One, two, three—fire!” said the sergeant, and the boy fell like a dummy on the stage, to the edification of the early churchgoers who crowded round to examine the body. And with that typical scene in my mind I was obliged to take leave of the Baltic Provinces, marked in every economic map as one of the few fairly prosperous regions of the Russian Empire.
CHAPTER XVI
THE PARTIES OF POLAND
Outside the discussion of an English Education Bill, I suppose that upon the world’s surface you would not find such an atmosphere of energetic pettiness and trivial virulence as in Warsaw. Not that the ultimate aims of the chief combatants are petty, but that many natures take so much more delight in clawing their friends over trifles than in uniting against the common enemy.