Another thing that struck me was the friendly relations of the officers with those under them. As the only representative of their Western Ally on the train, I was something of a curiosity, and soldiers and non-commissioned officers liked to make excuse to look at me. I only wished I had been a little smarter and better-looking for the sake of my country, for I had had no new clothes since the end of 1912. However, I had to make the best of it, and the men came to me on the platforms or to my compartment without fear. If by chance they knew a little French they spoke to me, helped out by their officers if their vocabulary ran short.
“Madame, Madame,” said an old non-commissioned officer, “would you be so good as to tell me how to pronounce the English 'zee'? I teach myself French, now I teach myself English.”
Well, they had all been good to me and I had no means of repaying their kindness save vicariously, so I took him in hand and with the aid of a booklet published by the Wagons Lit Train du Luxe describing the journey across Siberia we wrestled with the difficulties of the English “th.”
It was a long long journey. We crept across the great steppes, we lingered by stations, sometimes there were lakes, sometimes great rivers, but always the great plains. Far as the eye could see rolled the extent of green under the clear blue sky; often we saw herds of cattle and mobs of horses, and again and again companies of soldiers, and yet so vast is the country the sensation left upon the stranger is of emptiness, of a rich and fertile land crying out for inhabitants. I looked at it from the train with eager eyes, but I began to understand how there had grown up in my mind the picture of this lovely land as a dark and terrible place. To the prisoners who came here this plain, whether it were green and smiling, or whether it were deep in white snow, could only have been the barrier that cut them off from home and hope, from all that made life dear. How could they take up their broken lives here, they who for the most part were dwellers in the cities?
Here was a regiment of soldiers; it was nothing, nothing, set in the vast plain. The buttercups and daisies and purple vetches were trampled down for a great space where men had been exercising or camping; but it was nothing. There were wide stretches of country where the cattle were peacefully feeding and where the flowers turned up smiling faces to the blue sky for miles and miles, making me forget that this had been the land of shadowed lives in the past and that away in the West men were fighting for their very existence, locked in a death-grip such as the world has never before seen.
It was well there was something to look out upon, for that train was horrid. I realised something of the horrors of the post-houses in which the prisoners had been locked at night. We could get good food at every station, but in the train we were too close on the ground and the reek of us went up to heaven. I felt as if the atmosphere of the train desecrated the fresh, clear air of the great plain over which we passed, as if we must breed disease. The journey seemed interminable, and what I should do when it ended I did not know, for opinion was fairly unanimous: they were sure I could not get to England!
With many apologies the captain of the Askold permitted himself to ask how I was off for money. I was a total stranger, met on a train, and a foreigner! I told him I had a little over forty pounds and if that were not enough I had thought to be able to send to London for more.
He shook his head.
“I doubt if even letters can get through.”
And I sighed that then I did not know what I should do, for I had no friends in Petrograd.