When I last visited Archangel, six years ago, it was a dreamy, lifeless, melancholy port. One felt that, like its sister city, Kholmagora, it had once been great, but its greatness had finally set. You could feel the melancholy of Russia there, the sadness of material failure so characteristic of the Russian soul. But to-day! To-day the vision has fled, the tempo has changed. All the ships of the world find anchorage in her harbour, and motley crowds throng her streets. That the war has brought about. A year before the war fifty vessels entered Archangel port. During the last twelve months something like 5000 have entered. Great liners and transports and weather-beaten tramps and three-deck river boats stand in majestic pride. Their smoke and steam make a dome over the city of Archangel when you approach it from the north.
There are Norwegians and Yankees, with their colours flamboyantly painted on their bows to warn the submarine off; Russians and French, with their tricolours streaming; but most of all English ships, with their proud rain-washed Union Jacks lolling in the wind. I was taken through the whole harbour in a little, arrow-like steam launch—from the Thames! How often it had shot under the arches of our little bridges, and now it was puffing and panting on the vast brown Dvina, be-dwarfed by huge ships, driven by a Lett from Riga, and constantly going short of steam and getting becalmed far from either shore.[1] Besides troops, the French are taking great quantities of alcohol used in the manufacture of high explosives, and I saw many barges heaped up with barrels of spirit and wondered if there were many leaks. The Russian manufacture of alcohol has probably not diminished as a result of the prohibition of the sale of intoxicating liquors in Russia, but has proved to be a valuable war export. This fact is especially important to take into consideration with regard to Russian temperance reform. When the war is over and the market for this alcohol is partially lost, will there not be another movement of resistance on the part of the manufacturers?
I saw all manner of crates with machinery, parts of aeroplanes, and the like, and British vessels discharging these things, and I saw grain and flax and timber going on for us from Russia.
Go into the chief restaurant of Archangel, and as like as not all the customers are English captains, and they are reading back numbers of the Daily Mail and talking “ship.” At the Café Paris there is a “skippers’ table,” where they are also captains all, and the waitresses quarrel as to who shall serve there, though none of them knows two words of English. In the Alexandrovsky Gardens you see English sailors with Russian girls, and neither can say a word to the other. Their only language is that of looks. One of our men showed me a card with poetry written and violets painted and asked me to translate the words for him and write an answer. It ran something like this—
What need for words when without them you are so
eloquent?
Why should the lips move
When the eyes speak so well?
Sailors tell wonderful stories of feminine conquests, and it is evident the Russian girls are partial to them. Even at the theatre, in front of you are sitting such unlikely persons as a fireman and a stoker, and one says to the other with disgust, “I can’t understand a blooming word. Can you?” Some Englishmen have exercise books with Russian words and phrases laboriously copied out—an impossible language!
All is going well in Archangel. The Russians, in spite of their inexperience, are handling the immense quantities of materials well, and the “stuff” is all steadily proceeding to the places where it is most needed. New quays have been built, and loops of railway run along them, and some ships, carrying nothing weighing less than three tons, yet discharge all their immense articles of cargo in considerably less time than it took to put them on at Liverpool or Dundee or Newcastle as the case may be.