Our journey to Riga was half a nightmare and half a farce, and Spray called our train the “Get in and Get out Express.” We generally arrived at a new frontier in the dead of night or in the early hours of dawn, after fitful sleep. Then we were awakened by armed guards demanding to see our visa for each side of the “Danzig corridor” for Lithuania, Esthonia, and Latvia.
At Eydtkühnen, in East Prussia, we had a six-hours’ wait and were able to see something of the Russian invasion and Germany’s “devastated region” which had been the greatest cause of terror to the German mind when the “Russian steam roller” first began to roll forward before its subsequent retreat. Russian cavalry had done a lot of damage—the Germans had plenty of atrocity stories to set beside those of Alost and Louvain—and we saw even at that late date, so long after those early days of war, the ruins of burnt-out farms and shell-wrecked houses. But not many. German industry had been quick at work, and Eydtkühnen was built up like a model town, with red-tiled roofs not yet toned down by weather, and shop windows just exhibiting their first stocks.
As we passed through the new Baltic States—Lithuania, Esthonia, Latvia—I had an impression that the old British Armies of khaki men had been transferred to those far countries. At every station there was a crowd of soldiers, all of them clad in unmistakable khaki from British stores, but made into misfits for bearded, or unshaven, portly or slouchy men who looked—many of them—like the old Contemptibles after years of foreign exile and moral degeneration. Yet it would be unfair to say they were all like that, for these Baltic peasants were sturdy fellows enough, and, I should say, hard fighting men.
In Riga we put up for three or four days, waiting for a train into Russia and permission from Soviet representatives in that city to cross the Russian frontier. In spite of our visas from headquarters, those Riga Bolsheviks were extremely insolent and put up a blank wall of indifference to our requests for railway facilities. There seemed to be no chance of a place in any train, and very little chance of a train.
Spray and I kicked our heels about in the little old city, very German in its character, which seemed in a state of stagnation and creeping paralysis. In its once busy port we saw no ship but a vessel carrying a cargo of apples which it unloaded on the quayside. The restaurants were almost deserted, and we drank little glasses of Schnapps in solitary cafés. After midnight there was the awakening of a squalid night life and we watched the Riga manifestation of the fox-trot mania, and an imitation of the Friedrichstrasse Wein Stube, with a fair amount of amusement on my part because of the strange types here in a city filled with Russian exiles, Letts, Poles, Germans, Swedes, Lithuanians, and all variety of northern races. But it was not Russia, which we had come to see.
I doubt whether we should ever have set foot in Russia if it had not been for the American Relief Administration established in Riga and just beginning to send food supplies into the famine area. The chief of the Riga headquarters promised us two places on the next food train going to Moscow, and broke through all formalities by reckoning us as members of his staff.
“What about the Famine?” I asked, and he said, “There’s a Famine all right, with a capital F.”
It was a queer journey from Riga to Moscow—unforgotten by me. I have put the spirit of it, as indeed of all my experience in Russia, into my novel “The Middle of the Road,” under a thin guise of fiction, with some imaginary characters. The train started at night, and Spray and I, with our baggage carried by Lettish porters, stumbled along unlit rail tracks to a long train in absolute darkness, except in a few carriages where candles, stuck in their own grease, burned dimly on the window ledges. In the corridor was a seething mass of Lettish and Russian porters, laden with the enormous baggage of Russian, British, German, American, and other couriers, who shouted at them in various languages. A party of young American clerks and typists for the central headquarters in Moscow of the American Relief Administration (always known as the A.R.A., or even, shorter, as “Ara”) smoked cigarettes, cursed because of the darkness and filth and stench and lack of space for their baggage, and between their curses sang ragtime choruses.
Violent action and terrific language in the American accent, on the part of a large-sized man, cleared the corridor somewhat, and I met, for the first time, a cheery young giant whom I have put into my novel as “Cherry of Lynchburg, U.S.A.,” but who is really H. J. Fink, courier, at that time, to the A.R.A. He is known as “The Milk-fed Boy” by his fellow-travelers, and but for his enormous good nature, his mixture of ferocity and joviality with obstructive Bolsheviks, his genial command of the whole “outfit” from the “provodniks” or guards to the engine drivers, the journey would have been more intolerable than we found it. I take off my hat, metaphorically, to the “Milk-fed Boy.”