CHAPTER III
The Russian frontier—Frontier police—Disappointment at aspect of Petrograd—Lord and Lady Dufferin—The British Embassy—St. Isaac's Cathedral—Beauty of Russian Church-music—The Russian language—The delightful "Blue-stockings" of Petrograd—Princess Chateau—Pleasant Russian Society—The Secret Police—The Countess's hurried journey—The Yacht Club—Russians really Orientals—Their limitations—The "Intelligenzia"—My Nihilist friends—Their lack of constructive power—Easter Mass at St. Isaac's—Two comical incidents—The Easter supper—The red-bearded young priest—An Empire built on shifting sand.
Petrograd is 1,050 miles from Berlin, and forty years ago the fastest trains took forty-five hours to cover the distance between the two capitals. In later years the "Nord-Express" accomplishing the journey in twenty-nine hours.
Rolling through the flat fertile plains of East Prussia, with their neat, prosperous villages and picturesque black-and-white farms, the surroundings had such a commonplace air that it was difficult to realise that one was approaching the very threshold of the great, mysterious Northern Empire.
Eydkuhnen, the last Prussian station, was as other Prussian stations, built of trim red brick, neat, practical, and very ugly; with crowds of red-faced, amply-paunched officials, buttoned into the tightest of uniforms, perpetually saluting each other.
Wierjbolovo, or Wirballen Station as the Germans call it, a huge white building, was plainly visible only a third of a mile away. At Wirballen the German train would stop, for whereas the German railways are built to the standard European gauge of 4 feet 8½ inches, the Russian lines were laid to a gauge of 5 feet 1 inch.
This gauge had been deliberately chosen to prevent the invasion of Russia by her Western neighbour. This was to prove an absolutely illusory safeguard, for, as events have shown, nothing is easier than to narrow a railway track. To broaden it is often quite impossible. The cunning little Japs found this out during the Russo-Japanese War. They narrowed the broad Russian lines to their own gauge of 3 feet 6 inches, and then sawed off the ends of the sleepers with portable circular saws, thus making it impossible for the Russians to relay the rails on the broad gauge. I believe that the Germans adopted the same device more recently.
I think at only one other spot in the world does a short quarter of a mile result in such amazing differences in externals as does that little piece of line between Eydkuhnen and Wirballen; and that is at Linea, the first Spanish village out of Gibraltar.