We arrived at Kharbarosvk. I parted from Mrs Skibitsky, who was going to Vladivostok, and next day I looked up my friend the colonel's wife with whom I had travelled on the John Cockerill. She received me with open arms, but the household cat flew and spat and stated in no measured terms what she thought of Buchanan. The lady caught the cat before I realised what was happening and in a moment she had scored with her talons great red lines that spouted blood on her mistress's arms. She looked at them calmly, went into the kitchen, rubbed butter on her wounds and came back smiling as if nothing in the world had happened. But it was not nothing. I admired her extremely for a very brave woman. Presently her husband came in and she just drew down her sleeves to cover her torn arms and said not a word to him. He was talking earnestly and presently she said to me:
“There is war!”
I thought she meant between Buehanan and the cat and I smiled feebly, because I was very much ashamed of the trouble I and my dog had caused, but she said again:
“There is war! Between Austria and Serbia!”
It did not seem to concern me. I don't know that I had ever realised Serbia as a distinct nationality at all before, and she knew so little English and I knew no Russian at all, so that we were not able to discuss the matter much, though it was evident that the colonel was very much excited. That, I thought, might be natural. He was a soldier. War was his business, though here, I think, he was engaged in training boys.
After the midday meal—déjeuner, I think we called it—she and I went for a walk, and presently down the wide streets of Kharbarosvk came a little procession of four led by a wooden-legged man bearing a Russian naval flag, the blue St Andrew's Cross on a white ground. I looked at them.
They meant nothing to me in that great, empty street where the new little trees were just beginning to take root and the new red-brick post office dominated all minor buildings among many empty spaces.
“They want war! They ask for war!” said my friend. I was witnessing my first demonstration against Germany! And I thought no more of it than I do of the children playing in the streets of this Kentish village!
She saw me on to the steamer and bade me farewell, and then my troubles began. Not a single person on that steamer spoke English. However, I had always found the Russians so kind that the faet that we could not understand one another when the going was straight did not seem to matter very much. But I had not reckoned with the Russians at war.
At Kharbarosvk the river forms the Chinese-Russian boundary and a little beyond it reaches its most southern point, about lat. 48°. But the China that was on our left was not the China that I knew. This was Manchuria, green and fresh as Siberia itself, and though there was little or no agriculture beyond perhaps a patch of vegetables here and there, on both sides of the broad river was a lovely land of hills and lush grass and trees. Here were firs and pines and cedars, whose sombreness contrasted with the limes and elms, the poplars and dainty birches with whieh they were interspersed. The Russian towns were small, the merest villages, with here and there a church with the painted ball-like domes they affect, and though the houses were of unpainted logs, always the windows and doors were painted white.