The Russian so loves a uniform, even after the land it represents has gone to pot, that even school-boys in Vladivostok usually wear them,—red bands, khaki, black trousers, purple epaulets
A common sight in Harbin,—a Russian refugee, in this case a blind boy, begging in the street of passing Chinese
A Russian in Harbin—evidently not a Bolshevik or he would be living in affluence in Russia
Northward from Mukden there are also many reminders of Japanese military prowess, besides the railway itself. Here the line was being double-tracked, perhaps because the diversion of shipping, by fair means and foul, from Vladivostok to Dairen was proving too much for it. The Chinese workmen lived in semi-caves and reed-mat huts, and left a bush or a small tree at the top of a slim pyramid of earth here and there to show how deep they had dug for the new grading. Dense green hills and the unpicturesque, widely scattered huts of Manchuria broke the general landscape of endless fields of beans closely planted, with kaoliang and millet, wheat and corn, demanding their share of the broad open country. Cattle, horses, mules, and donkeys were plentiful, and ungainly black pigs more so. Every little while we passed a large walled town of which we in the West know not even the name, and somewhere not far from each of them was a new Japanese section including the railway station and rows of trainmen’s houses, perhaps schools and a hospital. But for all the advantages showered upon them the migrating Japanese plainly could not compete hand to hand with the Chinese pouring up from the crowded provinces across the Gulf of Chihli. They kept shop, ran the railroad, filled all the higher positions in the enterprises, such as mining, milling, and electric lighting, in which they are engaged, but as actual producers from the soil itself, of overwhelming importance in spacious, fertile, still rather thinly populated Manchuria, they were visibly incapacitated.
CHAPTER VI
THROUGH RUSSIANIZED CHINA
The changes which burst suddenly upon the traveler at Changchun would be startling if he were not almost certain to be prepared for them. Unless his memory is short or his age brief he can scarcely be unaware of the fact that the Treaty of Portsmouth on our own New England coast made Changchun the meeting-place of that portion of the Chinese Eastern Railway which remained to the Russians after their trouncing, and that long section of it which their conquerors have made over into the South Manchurian Railway. One steps from what is essentially an American express-train upon the station platform, and from that into an express-train that is European down to its most insignificant details. Cars of the “Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits” offer him the comfort of their separate compartments, brilliantly lighted by frosted bulbs, furnished even with thermometers, roomy with the five-foot gage of Russian railways, on which trains use the right- rather than the left-hand track. The heavy-stacked engine is as different from the one across the platform still panting from its race northward as the densely bearded Russian trainmen are from the alert little brown men of the same calling. Suddenly there were Russians everywhere, and by no means all of them were of a type to make one unduly proud of the white race; some indeed were roustabouts and station hangers-on living by petty graft upon uninformed travelers, such as the latter are never subjected to on the Japanese railways of Manchuria. There was such a mixture of Chinese, Japanese, and Russians at Changchun that one could only surmise who was really in control. It was a Russian who asked me for my passport—and who raised his hat, bowed low, and retired with an almost subservient “Thank you” when I answered that I was American. Booted and spurred Russians in khaki, in woolen trousers and cotton smocks, in the best they could do in the way of an individual uniform, their waists compressed to maidenly slenderness by tight belts, strutted the platforms in long swords with an air that said plainly that they would far rather die than have to work and not be able to strut about in uniform, boots, spurs, and sword. European civilians of both sexes, tow-headed women and children, mere Russian farmers, leaned on station barriers or made their way to and from the third-class coaches. One type in particular was very familiar,—the half-subservient, half-cocky, always vulgar Russian Jew, much assured of himself now, since the new turn things have taken in Russia, but still more or less openly despised by the non-Jewish Russians. In our car was one of the most offensive of these fellows, head of the opium ring of Harbin, who acted as if he had purchased the earth from its original owners and was making it a personal plaything.
The train made incredibly long stops at every station, but excellent speed between them, though it burned wood and thereby saved us from soot and cinders. I had a sense of being in an utterly foreign land, many times more so than among the Japanese. For one thing station names were in Chinese and Russian, equally illegible to those of us who recognize a word only in Roman letters, while from Yokohama to Changchun even the most insignificant stopping-place announces itself in English. Hitherto at least the head trainman was almost certain to have a smattering of my tongue; at worst I could produce a few short but highly valuable phrases of Japanese; but these black-bearded fellows were separated from me by an utterly impenetrable linguistic wall. They might quite as well have been Hottentots or Zulus as far as any possibility of communicating with them either by spoken or written word went. Perhaps it was mainly this sense of strangeness that made the air seem surcharged with something ominous, something akin to hopeless political conditions.
But through it all the endless plains of corn and beans, millet and wheat, beautiful in their deep green, spread as far as the eye could reach in every direction, hour after hour, all afternoon long. The plodding Chinese peasant, who is the mudsill of all the struggles of rival empires to control this vast rich territory, was still toiling here and there when the sun touched the flat western horizon. But at frequent intervals Russian boys in soldierly caps came running out of yellow brick farm-houses surrounded by a kind of Chinese wall. Many more of them lived in villages, some of which might have been lifted bodily out of European Russia. At these, Chinese and tow-headed venders appeared on the off side of stations, until they were chased away by policemen, offering live chickens, ducks, eggs by the basketful. A wonderful land, Manchuria, whether for cultivating or merely for the grazing of stock; no wonder crowded Japan covets this broad, half-wasted region, yet she has already shown that she would exploit rather than people it.