Russia in 1916

by Stephen Graham

I left the night the first misleading news of the North Sea battle was received. If that news had been correct it would have meant that the German Fleet had broken through and was at large, and that each war vessel had become a commerce trader. We stood a chance of being revised by Germans and perhaps of all English of age being taken away. A British captain said to me afterwards, “We received that first news as we were leaving a South American port with a cargo of nitre. We realised at once that the chances must now be considered against our arriving safely at a home port.”

Because of the battle the mail boat which had been due in at Newcastle in the morning, arrived only at nightfall, the revising officers were late in coming from the examination of the one to the examination of the other—the Rhanvald Jarl, due to go out from Newcastle that night. I did not get to my cabin till half-past-one in the morning, and had spent some hours among drunken sailors, one of whom was sick on the stairs of the Aliens Officer’s room.

The journey to Bergen was not pleasant.

No one to breakfast, no one to lunch, no one to dinner. I doubt if any one felt in the least anxious about German cruisers or stray mines. There was other preoccupation.

At Bergen I stayed three days in a hotel. The news in the Norwegian papers did not flatter the efforts of the Allies. Explanations of the real significance of the North Sea battle began to appear, but they had the suggestion of merely trying to give a better face to what was in reality a very unpleasant happening. For the rest the Germans seemed to be going ahead, and had captured the fort of Vaux. The only set-off against these things was the first intelligence of the Russian advance in Galicia.

I sailed northward in the Vesteraalen, the Norwegian mail boat going to far Kirkenaes. Boats go four or five times a week the whole distance of the Norwegian coast. They are slow, but, if time is no object, it is a most interesting journey—the placid fiords and jolly channels between mountains, the veritable gates in the rocks which upon occasion you pass through, the many fishing villages and the trawlers weighed down with herrings, the busy women with their knives cleaning the fish and emptying barrelful after barrelful of entrails into the sea, the thousands of gulls ever calling, dipping, screeching, chasing one another, and then the Lofoten Islands with their mighty heights, the increasingly stern more northern aspect of Nature, and the dwellings of man, the passing of the Arctic line, the brilliant nights with the sun still on the shoulder of the sky at midnight.

I fell in with an English Consul, a young man going to Vardö to do special work in connection with the war. He was accompanied by his wife, and she, for her part, had never been out of England before. At every place the steamer stopped we got out and went for a walk—sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for an hour or so, according to the extent of the cargo that had to be discharged or taken on.

At Hammerfest, the most northern town in Europe, dirty snow still lay on the edges of the streets. A wild place this Hammerfest, apparently all men and no women, the roadway thronged with hardy sailors. A whole forest of masts in the harbour, an all-pervading smell of cod liver oil in the town, a grey and ugly port in June, whatever it may be later on.

Many Norwegians spoke English, though with an American accent, and they were very friendly to us. I was interested, too, to observe their love of their own land, a real attachment to the rocks of Norway. It is majestic scenery all the way from Bergen to the North Cape, and it has somewhat of the characteristic melancholy of the North. If Russians lived in this land they would love it for its sadness. But the Norwegians love its ruggedness, and they say that the wild and rugged nature of their land has made them what they are. And I suppose Scots would find there grandeur and the sublimity of Nature.

After the North Cape we entered a region of utter desolation, the coast a line of snow, the sea grey and dead with the occasional black back of a porpoise showing. The wind was cold and wintry. We knew that at Vardö we should find no flowers, no vegetation.