XLVIII
The journey to Riga had not been too bad, except for examination of passports and luggage at odd times of the day and night, at unexpected frontiers. This happened each side of “the Polish corridor,” which had been made by the Treaty of Versailles like a wedge driven through Germany to Danzig. It happened again on the frontiers of Lithuania and Latvia.
An American in the train called it the “Get-in-and-get-out-express.” It stopped for six hours at Eydtkuhnen on the border of East Prussia, and there was time to walk about and see something of the devastation made by the great Russian drive in the early years of the war. Here were still the blackened ruins of farmhouses and barns and peasants’ cottages, but German industry had built up the villages again, very neat and pretty under their new red roofs, wonderful in contrast to the poor attempts at reconstruction in the war zone of France.
Bertram had to wait four days in Riga before he could get a train to Moscow. The Soviet agents there were unhelpful and rather insolent. The stamp of the Moscow Executive Committee on his special passport did not seem to inspire them with any zeal. They informed Bertram that he might have to wait three weeks for a train—or longer. The thought seemed to amuse them.
Three weeks in Riga! The idea was affrighting because of its boredom. In three days Bertram had exhausted the interests and amusements of a city that seemed dead all day and only wakened to life at one in the morning, when the night cafés and dancing-halls were filled with a company of Letts, Poles, Russians, Finns, and Germans, drinking large quantities of schnapps in quick gulps until their eyes watered and their noses reddened, and they became quarrelsome with their women and each other in a medley of languages.
In one of these cafés Bertram sat opposite an American who opened a friendly conversation.
“Staying long in this City of Departed Glory?”
“Not longer than I can help. I want to get to Moscow, but the trains don’t work.”
The American asked his business there, and raised his eyebrows with a smile when Bertram said, “Journalism. I want to find out the truth about the famine.”
“Well, there’s a famine, I’m told,” said the American. “You might call it a famine, without much exaggeration. About twenty-five million people starving to death, more or less. I’m pushing up some food. A relief train is going to-morrow with the first supplies. That’s my job. I’m A. R. A.”