It was holiday time, the end of July, the Englishman’s great liberation moment when, even if he goes on working in office or factory, he ceases to work hard and lazes at his work. His wife and family have gone to the seaside. He will join them in a week or so. Meanwhile he is “camping out at home.” The young man is buying stout boots and greasing them for tramping, is scanning maps and guidebooks, and making absurd tables of mileage, prospective hotel bills and expenses. The teachers, with the children, are liberated from the schools, and the former are gone on Polytechnic tours and what not, whilst the latter chalk mysterious diagrams on the pavement and play hop-scotch, or play “Wallflowers, wallflowers, growing up so high,” or “This is the way she went.” The unfashionable but numerous marriages take place of those who must make the honeymoon coincide with annual leave, and the happy couples take Cook’s tickets to Strasburg, to the Tyrol, to Munich.
And those Russians who must escape their fellow-Russians, and don’t like the bad drains of their own watering-places, are off to German baths and Bohemian and Austrian spas. Students are tripping across to Switzerland. And on all in German territory the guillotine of war is going to fall. At all the money-changers’ offices at Charing Cross and in the City you can buy German marks, though there is not much gold to be had. French gold, English, Russian can be had in almost any quantities, and Cook’s will sell you German hotel tickets for all August.
One lazy July afternoon I sat on the wooden steps leading up to my veranda and talked with a Cossack on wars in general, what prospects of war there actually were at that moment; and we concluded that there might possibly be war with Austria. It was the idlest talk, but the Cossack lives for a new war, and I did not like to discourage him. He for his part rather hoped for a nearer war; one with China would suit him, but he’d thankfully consider a war with Austria if nothing else were available.
I went along the exterior street of the village to the little post office facing the wall of the White Ones, as they call the Altai, and talked with the postmaster about marals, and he closed the office to go out and show me where his garden was. Here also were several maralniki, and I found them when clambering up the ridges, and the deer, seeing me, would scamper away. The village had a butter factory, and I used to go there and wait during the last stages of production for a pound of butter, and, sitting on a bucket upside down, chatted with other villagers. Opposite the cottage where I stayed lived the priest, and he often came across and talked. The church was the next building after the priest’s house, and was a beautiful little wooden temple built by the peasants themselves. I was quickly in the midst of the life of the settlement, and when the news came I was at once thought to be the obvious person to apply to for information. On the 30th of July, after a long day on the mountains, I slept serenely on the overcoats on the floor of my Cossack habitation. Next morning came the young horseman with the red flag flying from his shoulder, and the tremendous excitement and clamour of the reception of the ukase to mobilise for war. As I wrote when I described this in “Russia and the World,” the Cossacks were not told with whom the war was or would be, and one of the first surmises that they made was that the war must be with England—crafty old England, who always stood in Russia’s way and was siding with the Turks again. Or she was afraid Russia was going to attack India.
The real news came at last, and with it the necessity to return to Europe as soon as possible. The war came across my summer as it came across the summer of thousands of others, cutting life into two very distinct parts. At the village of Altaisky I must draw my war line dividing past and present, one part of life from this other new astonishing part. The story of my journey has drawn to its close. Before, however, leaving the subject of Russian Central Asia I would give the thoughts and reflections that the journey has suggested, and especially those referring to Anglo-Russian rivalry in empire, the questions of India and Constantinople, the future of our friendship and of the two empires.
APPENDIX I
RUSSIA AND INDIA AND THE PROSPECTS OF ANGLO-RUSSIAN FRIENDSHIP
THE prospects of Anglo-Russian friendship are very fair at the moment of writing, the after-the-war prospects. Generally speaking, international amity or hostility has heretofore depended on the absence or presence of clashing interests. Russia does not stand on our road of Empire, and has never fought us and could never fight us commercially as Germany has done. Our only doubt about Russia has been as to her possible designs on India. Fifty years ago there were few Englishmen who did not entertain expectations of eventual war with Russia, and after the annexation of Merv, and the running of the Central Asian Railway thither, Beaconsfield was obliged to assure us that the keys of India were to be found in London, and consisted in the spirit and determination of the British people. We felt we were secure because we could fight Russia and did not fear her. As Lord Curzon wrote in his book on Russian Central Asia:
“The day that a Russian army starts forth from Balkh for the passes of the Hindu Kush, or marches out of the southern gate of Herat en route for Kandahar, we may say, as Cromwell did at Dunbar: ‘Now hath the Lord delivered them into my hand.’”
Our other bond of security lay in the fact that the Russians knew they could not successfully attack us. Though it must be said now, after our thwarted efforts against the Turks on Gallipoli and our experience in Mesopotamia, that it is not clear that we could count on winning a distant war of invasion. Though we are increasing daily in military power and sagacity, as a result of fighting the Germans, we are not so military a nation as we were in the days of the Crimean War. But the invasion of India by Russia may well be put out of the head once and for all. No statesman in Russia ever seriously contemplated it, and in this country those statesmen who thought of it either decried the idea or used it as a political bogey. As Namirovitch Danchenko said recently: “From my seventy years’ knowledge of Russian life, I should say that the people who dreamt about the conquest of India could be found in Russia only in a mad-house.” No serious steps were ever taken to thwart Russian imperial policy in Central Asia, and all that fear has brought about was mistrust and a refusal to enter into partnership with Russia in certain schemes in Asia.
The Russians have been ready to trust us for a long time, and they were anxious for an Anglo-Russian agreement even at the time when the invasion of India bogey was most in the air here. Probably the Germans, those persistent enemies of Anglo-Russian friendship, were responsible for a great deal of subterranean propaganda in England. Many in England were pro-Russian—Gladstone (though, of course, even Gladstone asked for a war credit on one occasion of fear of Russia), Carlyle, Froude, Kinglake—there was a real basis of sympathy. But the poisoners of the mind of the British people succeeded. What an interesting glimpse of popular feeling is found in Burnaby’s “Ride to Khiva” if we read it now. There is a certain poignancy in his remarks. Consider this passage to-day: