“At Plesetskaya we were questioned very thoroughly by a Russian officer who spoke English very well and showed marked sympathy toward us and saw to it that we were better treated, and later in Moscow saw to it that we had some small favors. In three days’ time we were again on the train for Moscow, travelling in what seemed luxury after our late experience. The trains to Moscow ran only once a week as there were no materials to keep up the equipment.
“On our arrival we found the streets sloppy and muddy, with heaps of ice and snow and dead horses among the rubbish. Few business places were open, all stores having been looted. Here and there was a semi-illicit stand where horsemeat, salt fish, carrots or cabbage and parsnips, and sour milk could be bought on the sly if you had the price. But it was very little at any price and exceedingly uncertain of appearance. We were sent to join the other prisoners, French, English, Scotch and Americans who had preceded us from the front to Moscow. They had tales similar to ours to tell us.
“The next morning at 10:00 a. m. we were wondering when we would eat. The answer was: Twelve noon. Cabbage soup headed the menu, then came dead horse meat, or salt fish if you chose it, black bread and water. Same menu for supper. We learned that the people of the city fared scarcely better. All were rationed. The soldiers and officials of the Bolsheviks fared better than the others. Children were favored to some extent. But the ‘intelligenza’ and the former capitalists were in sore straits. Many were almost starving. Death rate was high. The soldier got a pound of bread, workmen half a pound, others a quarter of a pound. In this way they maintained their army. Fight, work for the Red government or starve. Some argument. Liberty is unknown under the Soviet rule. Their motto as I saw it is: What is yours is mine.’ “
Captivity with all its desperate hardships and baleful uncertainties, had its occasional brighter thread. The American boys feel especially grateful to Mr. Merle V. Arnold, of. Lincoln, Nebraska, the American Y. M. C. A. man who had been captured by the Red Guards a few days preceding their capture. He was able to do things for them when they reached Moscow. And when he was almost immediately given his liberty and allowed to go out through Finland, he did not forget the boys he left behind. He carried their case to the British and Danish Red Cross and a weekly allowance of 200 roubles found its way over the belligerent lines to Moscow and was given to the boys, much to the grateful assistance of the starving allied prisoners of war.
But they became resourceful as all American soldiers seem to become, whether at Bakaritza, Smolny, Archangel, Kholmogora, Moscow or wherenot, and they found ways of adding to their rations. Imagine one of them lining up with the employees of a Bolo public soup kitchen and going through ostensibly to do some work and playing now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t-see-it with a dish of salt or a head of cabbage or a loaf of bread or a chunk of sugar, or when on friendly terms with the Bolshevik public employees volunteering to help do some work that led them to where a little money would buy something on the side at inside employees’ prices. Imagine them with their little brass kettle, stewing it over their little Russian sheet-iron stove, stirring in their birdseed substitute for rolled oats and potatoes and cabbage and perhaps a few shreds of as clean a piece of meat as they could buy, on the sly. See the big wooden spoons travelling happily from pot to lips and hear the chorus of Dobra, dobra.
They will not ever forget the English Red Cross woman who constantly looked out for the five Americans, the thirty-five British and fifteen French prisoners, finding ways to get for them occasional morsels of bacon and bread and small packages of tea and tobacco. On Easter day she entertained them all in the old palace of Ivan the Terrible.
How good it was one day to meet an American woman who had eighteen years before married a Russian in Chicago and come to Moscow to live. Her husband was a grain buyer for the Bolshevik government but she was a hater of the Red Rule and gave the boys all the comfort she could, which was little owing to the surveillance of the Red authorities.
And one day the sergeant met an American dentist who had for many years been the tooth mechanic for the old Czar and his family. He fixed up a tooth as best he could for the American soldier. The Reds had about stripped him but left him his tools and his shop so that he could serve the Red rulers when their molars and canines needed attention.
The American boys gained the confidence of the Russians in Moscow just as they had always done in North Russia. They were finally given permission to participate in the privileges of one of the numerous clubs that the Red officials furnished up lavishly for themselves in the palatial quarters of old Moscow. Here they could find literature and lectures and lounging room and for a few roubles often gained a hot plate of good soup or a delicacy in the shape of a horse steak. Of course the latter was always a little dubious to the American doughboy, for in walking the street he too often saw the poor horse that dropped dead from starvation or overdriving, approached by the butcher with the long knife. He merely raised the horse’s tail, slashed around the anal opening of the animal with his blade, then reached in his great arm and drew out the entrails and cast them to one side for the dogs to growl and fight over. Later would come the sleigh with axes and other knives to cut up the frozen carcass. On May day the boys nearly lost their membership in the club, along with its soup and horse-steak privileges because they would not march in the Red parade to the gaily decorated square to hear Lenin speak to his subjects.
Was the Red government able to feed the people by commandeering, the food? No. At last the peasants gained the sufferance of the Red rulers to traffic their foodstuffs on the streets even as we have seen them with handfuls of vegetables on the market streets of Archangel. Prices were out of sight. Under a shawl in a tiny box, an old peasant woman on Easter Day was offering covertly a few eggs at two hundred roubles apiece.