I left St. Petersburg this evening for Manchuria. The one absorbing discussion in St. Petersburg is the question of the peace negotiations. Will there be peace or not?
In the train on the way to Irkutsk,
August 11th.
I started for Irkutsk on the 9th from Moscow. The train is crowded with people—officers going to the war, men of business going to Siberia, women and children. It is exceedingly hot. The last time I travelled in this Trans-Siberian express the winter had just given way to the leafless and bare aspect of early spring. Now we travel through great stretches of green plains, past huge fir-woods which are burnt and browned by the heat. The topic of the peace negotiations continues to prevail above all other topics. I am constantly asked my opinion. We have just received the latest telegrams from Portsmouth. A man of business asked me if I thought there would be peace. I said “Yes.” “There won’t be,” he replied. The railway line is fringed all the way with pink flowers, which, not being a botanist, I take to be ragged robin. At night the full moon shines spectral and large over the dark trees and marshes, and every now and then over stretches of shining water. The officers discuss the war from morning till night. They abuse their generals mercilessly. They say that it is impossible for Russians to look foreigners in the face. In my compartment there is an army doctor. He assisted at the battle of Mukden and is now returning for the second time to the war. He tells me that he wrote a diary of his experiences during the battle and that he is unable to re-read it now, so poignantly painful is the record. He trusts there will not be peace. He is sanguine as to the future. He loathes the liberal tendencies in Russia and detests Maxim Gorki. Yet he is no Jingo.
A gentleman from Moscow, and his wife, on the contrary, inveigh bitterly against the Government and the war. (I saw these same people again at Moscow after the December rising. Their house was situated in a street where the firing had been heavy and abundant. They had had enough of revolution and blamed the revolutionaries as severely then as they now blamed the Government.) We constantly pass trains full of troops going to the war. The men all ask the same question: “When is peace going to be?” They ask for newspapers and cigarettes. I gave some of them some bottles of whisky, which they drank off then and there out of the bottle. An amusing incident happened last evening. We had stopped at a siding. Everybody had got out of the train. I was walking up and down the platform with one of the passengers. We saw a soldier throwing big stones at the window of the washing compartment.
“What are you doing that for?” we asked.
“I want to speak to his Honour,” the soldier said; “he is washing his face in the washing-room.” And through the window of the compartment, lit by electric light, we could see the silhouette of an officer washing his face.
“Why don’t you go and knock at the door?” we asked.
“They are” (to speak of a person in the third person plural is respectful in Russian, and is always done by inferiors of their superiors)—“they are ‘having taken drink’ (Oni Vipimshi),” he replied, and then he added, lest we should receive a false impression, “His Honour is very good.”
As we passed train after train of troops I reflected on the rashness of prophecy. How often I had heard it said in London, when the war broke out, that the line would break down immediately. Even when I reached Mukden I heard people say that the line could not possibly last through the summer, and here it is supporting gaily train after train in the second year of the war.