Adventures in Journalism

by Philip Gibbs

There were forty homes here for abandoned children—abandoned not by the cruelty of their parents but by their love, because they could not bear to see their little ones wailing over empty platters. I went into a number of them, and they were all alike in general character. In one of them were fifteen hundred children, naked, or merely clothed in little ragged shirts. Their clothes had been burnt because of the lice in them, which spread typhus fever. There were no other clothes to replace their ragged old sheepskins and woollen garments. There was no heat in the rooms, for lack of fuel. There was no furniture. On the bare boards they huddled together, these little wizened things, with deep, sunken eyes, and tight-drawn skin, like little bald-headed monkeys. There were many homes like that, and worse than that, because many of the children were dying, and the rooms reeked with their fever, and the very doorposts crawled with lice.

I went into the hospitals, and they were dreadful. Because there was no fuel for heat, these people, stricken with typhus, dysentery, all manner of hunger diseases, were huddled together in unventilated wards for human warmth. Many of the beds had been burnt for fuel and most of them lay on mattresses or the bare boards. Those who had beds lay four together, two one way and two the other. There were no medicines, no anaesthetics, no soap, no dressings. The nurses were starving, and dying of the diseases they could not cure. They came clamoring round the doctor of the A.R.A. with whom I went, begging for food in a wild animal way which made his heart go sick.

But there was an opera, even in Kazan! It was true that the stench of it was pretty bad, and that its audience tightened their belts from time to time in lieu of supper, but Madam Butterfly delighted them, they thrilled to the “Carmen” of a Persian prima donna.

One night the ladies and gentlemen of the opera invaded the headquarters of the A.R.A. after midnight. They were hungry, and made no secret about it. So the young Americans of the Kazan headquarters brewed cocoa in a saucepan, with the help of one of the ladies, and scraped up some bully beef and beans and a loaf or two and some apples, and odds and ends. Not much for a banquet! Spray and I whispered together! I fetched out the last hunk of our round red cheese. It was received with a chorus of approval. It died a sacrificial death in the cause of art and beauty. The Persian prima donna had an insatiable appetite.... Out in the streets of Kazan were starving wanderers, and in the station lay the latest of the abandoned children.

The last boat to go down the Volga before the ice came was put under command of the press representative of the A.R.A., my good friend Murphy, a most kind and generous-hearted soul. Spray and I were the only passengers. We three explored the ship before she left the quayside. She had been a rescue ship for the fugitives from famine, and was in a noisome state. We dared not linger in the sleeping cabins. The very washbasins were crawling. That night Murphy and I slept on the table in the dining saloon—the safest place. Spray gave himself up for lost and curled up on the floor, where he tossed all night. I was cook on that voyage, and did rather well with boiled beans and a mess of pottage. We went down to Tetiushi, and found ourselves among the people of famine....

After two droughts in successive years, there was no harvest of any account. The Red soldiers had requisitioned the peasants’ reserves of grain for rationing the cities. Without reserves they had no means of life. The Soviet Government had supplied them with seed grain for the next harvest, and they had sown it, not expecting to reap it. They had also sent, lately, some barges of potatoes, but they lay there rotting. To carry them to the villages, horses were needed for the sledges, but there was no fodder, and the horses were dying, or dead. So we discovered the State of Tetiushi.

By a message from the Prime Minister of the Tartar Republic, four horses were found for us, and two sledges, after many hours of waiting, and we set out across the snow to the villages. They were very silent when we entered. They seemed abandoned. But we saw in one or two of their timbered houses little wizened faces staring at us from the windows. They were faces like those I had seen in the homes for abandoned children, monkeylike. We went into the cottages and found there peasant families waiting for a visitor who tarried, which was Death.

They showed us the last food they had—if they had any left. It was a brownish powder, made of leaves ground up and mixed with the husks of grain. Others showed us bits of hard stuff like lead. It was a bluish clay dug from a hillside called Bitarjisk. It had some nutritive value, but it swelled when eaten, and was the cause of dreadful agony to children. Peasant women, weeping very quietly, showed us their naked children, with distended stomachs, the sign of starvation in its last stage. From other cottages they came to where we stood, crossing themselves at the doorways, in the Russian way, and then lamenting.

Handsome Russian peasants, with blue eyes and straw-colored beards, struck their breasts with a gesture of absolute despair, and said—we had a Russian with us who spoke English—that death could not be long delayed, for all of them. The last cows had been killed for lack of fodder. There was no milk for the children, as for a long time there had been no bread. Here and there a woman wailed loudly, or grasped my wrist with her skinny hand and spoke fiercely, as though I denied her food. I remember one cottage in which a whole family lay dying, and nearly dead. It was the Famine....

I will not write more about the horrors here. In many articles, and in my novel “The Middle of the Road” I have given the picture of it, and the agony of it.