The preceding chapters are based on a report which I was asked to make to the War Office. It is now necessary for me to interrupt the course of my narrative in order to describe things of which, though in themselves of no military or economic significance, it is necessary that the reader should know in order that he may fully understand the terrible conditions under which this retreat was conducted, the wholesale demoralization which accompanied this flight of a people, and the profoundly depressing effect of this demoralization on my comrades and myself.

To omit all mention of these things, and to limit myself to the production of a precise military report made up of names, dates, figures, technical details, and a record of petty inconveniences, would be to leave a wholly false impression. It would be like omitting the Prince of Denmark from “Hamlet,” for those things which I am going to describe overshadowed everything else; they entered into our thoughts day and night; and they will colour all our future lives. I collect them all into one chapter so that anyone who is of weak nerves or of immature years, or who only wants a story of adventure, may “skip” them if he will, and cannot therefore blame me for obtruding on his notice, without due warning, some of the ugliest aspects of war.

In the first place, to put it frankly, we were all terrified by the very name of the Reds. There was no doubt whatever but that they had committed appalling atrocities in Russia. The direct evidence that we had had on that subject from thousands of sources and the piles of corpses that some of us had seen put that fact outside the region of controversy, and the Bolsheviks themselves do not maintain that atrocities have not been committed. They admit them, inferentially, by saying that the Whites are just as bad, or else they only dispute the figures. I had myself become convinced, after more than a year’s residence in Siberia, that, verily, some monstrous Terror must have established itself in Russia, that some diabolical shape must be sitting on the throne of the dead Tsar.

What I saw afterwards of the leniency which the Reds can sometimes show did not modify in the least this opinion of their rule, and I hope that the scrupulous impartiality with which I shall afterwards give everything that tells in their favour as well as everything that tells against them will not obscure this fact.

Tens of thousands of peaceful people had fled into Siberia during that space of time, rushing away from that Red Terror with nothing but the clothes they stood in, as people rush in their night-dresses out of a house on fire, as the farmer on the slopes of Vesuvius rushes away from the flaming river of lava. Peasants had deserted their fields, students their books, doctors their hospitals, scientists their laboratories, workmen their workshops, authors their completed manuscripts.

I had seen and talked to many of these refugees, and it was clear to me that something more than the mere fear of death had caused this precipitate and universal flight, something Satanic, something that threatened soul as well as body.

And now this monstrous and irresistible force was on our track—fifty miles off, forty, thirty, twenty, ten. Had we been pursued by Germans, Turks, or even by Senussi or Masked Tuaregs we would have been much less uneasy than we actually were. It was not that any of us feared being shot. It was something else. Is it any wonder, therefore, that this whole retreat was a nightmare, that we chafed at every delay, that we anxiously counted the gradually diminishing number of versts which separated us from our relentless pursuers?

Worst of all was the feeling that, though we had arms in our hands, we were as helpless as though we were unarmed and manacled in a rudderless boat shooting down towards the falls of Niagara. We were being swept along in the wreckage of a demoralized army which, whatever else it did, would certainly never fight against the Bolsheviks again. We were hopelessly encumbered by the refugees who had been forced on us; nevertheless, we discussed the wildest plans of escape. We talked of leaving the train and trekking northwards through the snow to the shores of the Frozen Sea, even though it took us years, or southward to the Chinese frontier. But we soon realized that it would be as impossible to escape in either direction with our charges as it would to escape on foot from an exploration party at the North Pole.

Our sleigh journey from Bolotnaya to Taiga gave us some idea of what travelling in the snow meant; and we knew that north of us impenetrable, uninhabited forests stretched for thousands of miles till they gave place to the ever-frozen tundras of the Polar Sea. Southward lay the wild Chinese frontier, but it was five hundred miles southward, and the ranges of snowy mountains on the other side of it were impassable at this time of the year. The few villages between us and that frontier had been converted to Bolshevism of the reddest dye by Kolchak’s punitive expeditions, so that we could hardly expect much of a welcome from them. In short, we had to stay in the train, and we realized from the first that there was very little chance of the train getting through.

And, meanwhile, the very name “Siberia” weighed upon our souls like lead. To most of us there had always been something dreadful in the very sound of these two words, “Russia,” “Siberia.” A great deal has been done to whitewash both of them, and some people in this country have almost brought themselves to believe that the serfs had on the whole a rather good time—no worry about money, for example, or about the choice of a wife—and that the Siberian convicts were treated quite well. But in the past they suggested only the clank of chains, and they suggest it still.

To me, at least, Russian history is one long horror. Even Nero and Caligula are joyous and artistic figures in comparison with Muscovy’s short series of drunken, half-mad autocrats; and the Eleusinian Mysteries are less repulsive than the charnel-house activities of Russia’s subterranean plotters and the unspeakable excesses of her religious maniacs. The illustrated book of revolutionary “martyrs,” published in 1906 under the title of “Byloe,” and the portraits of the Soviet leaders with which the Hôtel Métropole in Moscow is now adorned are as repulsive to me as Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors: the diabolically criminal type being in all three cases the same. The religious sects are as immoderate in their way as the political organizations both of the Right and of the Left. The members of one sect still practise castration in obedience to what they conceive to be the command of Christ, while the followers of another sect used to burn themselves alive to the singing of pious canticles, under the direction of a crazy priest who assured them that their spotless souls suffered no defilement from the sexual filth in which they wallowed till the flames engulfed them.

Under a blue, Southern sky, and amid objects of exquisite art, the Roman Emperors revelled and murdered on old Falernian, and without any rebuke from naked, comely gods as unmoral as themselves. Stupefied by crude alcohol, the Muscovite Tsars prayed to emaciated Saints, and sinned morosely under the reproachful eyes of a tortured Christ gazing on them from dimly lighted ikons framed in “barbaric pearls and gold.” Around them were the products of an abortive civilization, monstrous fruit of an unnatural union between Scythia and Byzantium, while, outside, the wolves howled in the dark forests of the cold and savage North.

Like an infinite stretch of desolate Polar wastes enveloped in winter darkness, save when lighted up at long intervals by awe-inspiring explosions of volcanic energy more sinister than the night itself: such seems to me the terrible story of Muscovy with its gigantic personalities revealed in flaming fire—fire that never came from Heaven—its devastating invasions; its cataclysmal popular eruptions. We fled in the fierce red glare of such an eruption, the most stupendous of them all, an eruption whose flames still leap to Heaven, and whose thunders still reverberate all over the world. Haunted by the presentiment that we would finally be overtaken by that pursuing lava torrent of revolutionary Terror, we fled across a thousand miles of frozen steppe amid scenes of murder, savagery, intoxication, debauchery, and death, all mixed together in a mad phantasmagoria that it would be impossible to parallel in any modern war.

The crowning horror was the typhus, but the sights which I saw in this connection and the statistics which I collected were so staggering that, when I afterwards told about them in Europe, my hearers simply shrugged their shoulders and refused to believe me. I particularly remember a wealthy foreign concessionaire who, being most anxious, for his own pecuniary advantage, to open up trade with Red Russia, had resolutely made up his mind that everything he had heard of atrocities, misgovernment, and disease in Russia was grossly exaggerated, and who consequently treated with brutal discourtesy anyone who told him the truth on these subjects. What I told him was certainly not in harmony with the luxurious appointments of the breakfast-room where we met or with the attentive service of the well-trained butler or the general air of eternal and assured stability with which he had enveloped himself; but I am surprised that, after the millions of deaths and the myriad catastrophes of the last six years, there are still to be found in those parts of the world that are still safe for capitalists, narrow, prosperous, and selfish men who, when told of fresh disasters to humanity, say: “Nonsense! These figures are absolutely preposterous. Such things don’t happen. You journalists never tell the truth.”

Before I narrate my personal experiences, therefore, I will quote some official figures about the typhus epidemic in Siberia. One very good authority just arrived from Siberia places the number of deaths from typhus in Novo-Nikolaevsk from November, 1919, to April, 1920, at 60,000. General Voitsekhovsky’s force of 12,000 men included 9,000 sick of typhus when it arrived at Chita.

Dr. Semashko, the Commissar of Public Health under the Soviet Government, and an official whom I know to be very careful in his statements, declares that:

“In Siberia the road leading from Tomsk for two or three hundred miles was described as covered with corpses. In fact, from Ufa right away to the far east similar conditions have prevailed. At some towns, Nikolaevsk, Omsk, and others, warehouses were found packed with the corpses of people who had died from typhus.”

Even during the summer this disease, though essentially a disease of the cold weather, continued to claim its victims; so that the havoc which it will cause on an enfeebled population during the coming winter staggers the imagination. And, according to Dr. Semashko and all the foreign medical experts who have studied the question, this terrible scourge, which has already obtained a strong foothold in Europe, is rapidly advancing west along a front of 6,000 miles and may possibly invade England.

Having said this much, I shall now narrate my own experiences of typhus. During the retreat, I found it raging all along the railway line and in many of the echelons. Before the retreat began “death trains” had passed several times eastward—that is, trains in which nearly everybody aboard was sick, dying, or dead, the dead lying among the living in some of the teplyushki. No station-master would allow such a train to remain at his station. He passed it on to the next station with the result that, when it reached Vladivostock, conditions in it were so frightful that no description of them is possible.

Some of the echelons which took part in the retreat presented an equally shocking sight. In one of them, that of the Izhevsky Division, about one-half the passengers died of typhus or other diseases on the way from Omsk to Krasnoyarsk, and there was no doctor aboard.

When I passed Novo-Nikolaevsk on February 3 there were 37,000 typhus cases in that town, and the rate of mortality, which had never been more than 8 per cent., had risen to 25 per cent. Fifty doctors had died in that town alone during the space of one month and a half and more than 20,000 corpses lay unburied outside the town. I got these figures from a competent Russian doctor who travelled with me on that occasion, and who told me that all the measures which were being taken to cope with the epidemic were only “eye-wash.” The isolation waggons which had then been placed at each station he called “death-traps,” and he explained to me how they only helped to spread the disease. He went out into the town to see a doctor whom he knew, but found that he had died of typhus and that his wife was sick of the same disease. I went to the Polish church and found the priest reading the funeral service over a rough deal coffin which contained, I was told, the remains of a Polish gentleman who had once been Governor of a Province. He had died of typhus in the train, and his body had been stripped by the White soldiers. His wife, who was also ill, had become so seriously upset by this treatment of her husband’s corpse that, in order to soothe her, another lady, the only friend she had left, had by superhuman exertions succeeded in getting a most primitive coffin and in having the remains conveyed for Christian burial to the church. This lady asked me to help her to carry the coffin to the hearse that waited outside, as there were not enough men present to do so, and I gladly consented.

Conditions in the hospitals were indescribable. In one, about which an official report was written, the head-doctor had been fined for drunkenness, the other doctor only paid the place a short visit once a day, and the nurses only put in an appearance while the doctor was there. The linen and the clothes of the patients were never changed, and most of them lay in a most filthy condition in their everyday clothes on the floor. They were never washed, and the male attendants waited for the periodical attack of unconsciousness which is characteristic of typhus in order to steal from the patients their rings, jewelry, watches, and even their food.

All of our British party dreaded typhus with an over-mastering dread, not so much because of the typhus as because of the hospitals. They often said that if they went into one of these hospitals they would never leave it alive. The bad air alone would kill them.

But it seemed impossible to avoid this terrible disease as, owing to the lack of water, there was no means of washing oneself or one’s clothes, while the close contact in which we lived with the Russians made cleanliness on our part no guarantee against the disease. There was one case supposed to be typhus in our carriage on the journey from Omsk to Ekaterinburg. There were several cases in the house where we lived at Krasnoyarsk. On my way back, there was one case in the compartment next to mine, and then, to crown all, a case in my own compartment, only about two feet from where I lay. It was a feldsher, or doctor’s assistant, who fell ill, but he would not go to hospital. I found him weeping bitterly in his bed one morning, and when I asked him what was the matter with him, I found that he was weeping out of pity for himself. “If I have typhus,” he said, “I am a dead man, and if I am sent to hospital I shall certainly die there. I know what those hospitals are.”

His knowledge of the hospitals was certainly extensive, but his pity might have been a little more extensive; it might have extended, for example, to me. But it never seemed to strike him that in justice to me he should leave the compartment, or report sick, or have his clothes disinfected, or at least refrain from throwing his clothes on to the bench where I sat. His horror of the hospital was so great that on hearing that the doctor, a lady, was coming to see him he dressed himself and staggered into the outer air, where he spent the whole day so that he might miss her.

Many Russians came on our train at Novo-Nikolaevsk and begged us, for God’s sake, to take them with us. They would be content, they said, to sleep on the outer platform even though that meant the certainty of freezing to death. They would do anything to escape “the terrible epidemic,” as they called it. It was like a rush from a plague-stricken town in the Middle Ages.

On my way back to Omsk I found that the typhus in every Siberian town was as bad as it was in Novo-Nikolaevsk. With the exception of a passage and a few rooms the whole railway station at Taiga had been converted into one huge hospital and, through the windows, one could see the sick soldiers lying on the ground in their clothes. There was only one doctor for every hundred patients, and in one hospital devoted to frost-bite and gangrene cases surgeons were occupied continuously day and night amputating limbs without the use of anæsthetics. Private houses, as well as schools, churches, and public buildings of all kinds had been converted into hospitals, and conditions in Omsk and Ekaterinburg were equally terrible.

On our eastward journey things were not so bad as this, but they were very bad indeed. A doctor attached to the White Army told me that over 20,000 people had died of typhus and cold en route from Omsk to Krasnoyarsk, exclusive of those who died in the towns. His own train had left Omsk with over 800 persons on board, and when they reached Krasnoyarsk twenty-six dead bodies were piled on top of one another, like logs of wood, in the open gangways outside the brake-waggons. At least one waggon in every train was converted into a travelling morgue, and the dead always overflowed on to these outer gangways.

I have already described how these dead bodies were stripped stark naked and how this practice contributed tremendously to the spread of the epidemic.

I only refer to the matter again owing to the profound impression of savagery and utter demoralization which it made on my mind.

The only coffin I saw was in the Polish church at Novo-Nikolaevsk, and the only shrouds I saw were those wrapped round dead children. The remains of those little ones were decked out by their mothers in white clothes set off by sprays of evergreen, while the drifting snow had added its own funeral wreaths. The calm, white faces were always uncovered, and the bodies, I am glad to say, were never disturbed by the corpse-strippers.

The loss in horses during this retreat has been estimated, and I give the estimate elsewhere; but the loss in children, which has not yet been estimated, must also have been very great. “Woe to them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days.”

One would have thought that, with the frozen eye of death thus fixed on them whichever way they turned and with the sound of the last trumpet thus blowing in their ears, the officers and soldiers of such a religious race would prepare for their own last end; but quite the contrary was the case; and I am rather inclined to believe, after what I have seen, that the last trumpet will only be the signal for a final orgie of lust among some of those who are alive when they hear it sound.

Debauchery amid corpses seems impossible, but, as Merezhkovsky says, “What cannot happen, happens in Russia.”

Some of the Russian officers in Omsk who had been deeply shocked by the unfounded stories about the Communist nationalization of women seemed to carry out that principle pretty thoroughly in their own private lives. And now, having deserted their soldiers, they were bringing their harems along with them, as well as all the alcohol which they could get hold of. Most of the ladies evacuated in the staff trains were wives or relatives of officers and officials, but the status of many others was very different. These others swarmed everywhere. They peered delicately at the common people out of the curtained windows of first-class cars passing swiftly through on the West track. They “wangled” their way into the most exclusive coupés. They were a drag on the whole conduct of the retreat, and were calculated to make one a misogynist for the rest of his life. Even the Admiral, who was married and who had the reputation among his entourage of being almost an ascetic, was very weak indeed in the matter of women and wine. He led an ostentatiously religious life, attended church in great state every Sunday and holiday, and, when he addressed the “Christian Crusaders” whom he had raised to fight the Bolsheviks, spoke with a religious fervour worthy of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Yet he brought with him on this, his last retreat, a certain Madame Timereva, who is said to have followed him to the end and to have been shot with him at Irkutsk. This case was actually cited to me by an English officer as a shining example of woman’s fidelity at a time when “sexual morality had become extremely loose.”

Semenov, now the most prominent Imperialist in Eastern Siberia, is also married, but nevertheless flaunts a Jewish concubine whom he picked up in a Harbin café-chantant and whom he proudly presents to the highest foreign officials. Kalmykov has managed to introduce obscenity into nearly all his military orders. In short, Russia is fast losing every vestige of Christianity and civilization; and this remark applies not only to Red Russia but to White. Red Russia is probably the better of the two, for it never pretended to be very prudish, whereas White Russia posed as the champion of Christianity.

One naval officer who travelled in our train and whose place was certainly in Vladivostock if anywhere, had been sent 2,000 versts into the wilds because a superior officer coveted his wife; and in the War Office at Omsk there had been many cases of young married officers being ordered to the Front for the same reason, and being killed at the front.

The utter break-up of families facilitated this wholesale demoralization of a people. Young girls of sixteen or seventeen were sometimes left stranded at a station in their summer shoes without money or friends, and, being frightened almost out of their wits by the accounts they heard of Bolshevik atrocities, they fell an easy prey to the lust of the soldiery. Sometimes they were dressed in men’s clothes, and their smooth, young faces contrasted sharply with the hairy busbies and sheepskins which they wore. Some of the girls in the soldiers’ echelons were little more than children; others were evidently experienced campaigners and not unwilling victims.

I might add many horrible things about the prevalence in the villages of venereal diseases introduced by Austrian and German war prisoners and by Russian prisoners returned from Germany, but this subject I shall leave entirely to the medical authorities of the Allies.

Besides the soldier-refugees there were of course many peasants, some seated in sleighs on top of old trunks and bags and other household belongings all covered with snow, but more frequently travelling alongside those heavily laden sleighs, others trudging along on foot, all wrapped in dirty sheepskins and with their wild-looking fur caps pulled down over their faces. I pitied their poor, faithful, tired horses, some of which had come all the way from Tobolsk. Sometimes they brought cattle with them, but these were all bought or seized by the hungry troops before the end of the journey. We bought a cow ourselves after passing Taiga and placed its quarters in cold storage on top of our car alongside other perishable articles of food.

Women and children accompanied the peasants, and often got parted from them en route. Parents lost their children, husbands lost their wives, children lost one another. A British subject in our train had lost three children at Novo-Nikolaevsk through going into town with his wife to buy some food for them. When he returned he found that his teplyushka had been attached by mistake to another echelon which had gone off. We did all we could for him, made enquiries at every station, and telegraphed up and down the line, but, up to the time I left Krasnoyarsk, he had heard nothing of the lost children. One of our staff officers had been carried off at Omsk in the same way through his carriage getting accidentally attached to the wrong train. A young clerk whom I employed and whom I had sent on in General Knox’s train, placed his wife in a Russian train which was afterwards captured. An English sergeant who had married a Russian lady placed her aboard a train which got through, but he himself was captured.

All the stations along the line were covered with the most pathetic little pencilled notices regarding these lost ones.

The following specimens will give an idea of what they were like:

“Dear Ivan i am going to stay at Andy’s house in Irkutsk join me there the children are with me but we have no food.—Olga.”

“Dear Masha i am waiting for you here and you will get my address at the post office.—Sergei.”

Surnames were seldom used in these notices; the Christian name was generally given in its diminutive form and no attempt was ever made to indicate who exactly the writer was. For Olga there was evidently only one Ivan in the world, and for Sergei there was only one Masha. It never seemed to occur to them that there could ever possibly be any confusion.

These notices were scribbled all over the walls of the stations and halts. Sometimes they were written on scraps of paper which were pasted on the walls. I have seen the whole exterior wall of a station covered with them as high up as one could reach. I have never seen a station without some of them. I have seen them sometimes pinned to the trunks of trees, a custom learned perhaps in the happy days of courtship, before the twin deluges of revolution and war had thundered over Russia.

This disintegration of a whole nation had been going on for two years before the disastrous retreat from Omsk came to accelerate the process, and it probably constitutes the greatest dislocation of family life that has ever taken place in the history of the world. The columns of all the Siberian newspapers always contained advertisements asking for lost ones. In one paper I counted forty-five such advertisements in one day. I never, during these two years, met a Russian who had not lost some member of his family. His wife had been last heard of in Kiev. His son had been studying in Moscow when the storm burst. The number of irregular alliances which this great dispersal had led to will break up millions of homes. But it is the young who will suffer most. In 1918 I had seen how respectable and delicately brought-up Russian girls had drifted into Harbin and there became the prey of Russian and Jewish speculators, of Chinamen, of every kind of human vampire, every kind of international dealer in white flesh. Those girls came from Kiev, from the Crimea, from the most distant parts of the former Russian Empire, but they were penniless, friendless, and absolutely helpless. There were wealthy Russian imperialists in Harbin, but they never thought of establishing homes for these girls or starting some sort of a society to assist them. They were all too busy playing at high politics. But surely a time must come when it will be impossible that so great a disaster to humanity as this crumbling away of a whole civilization can take place in one part of the world while another part, tranquilly unaware of what is happening, is spending its superfluous wealth on anti-vivisection societies and on homes for lost dogs.

All the nations have been moved to take action, in their own interest, against the terrible invasion of typhus which is even now moving rapidly westward from Russia. Can they not be made to realize that the utter breakdown of civilization in Russia is an even greater danger to them than typhus and that, for the sake not only of Russia but of humanity at large, some little attention should be bestowed on the many thousands of Russian girls, youths, and children who are being allowed to grow up like wild beasts in the Far East, and in the Near East, in Scandinavia, in Finland, and in all the countries bordering on Russia? This is surely a work for the League of Nations; but those who undertake it must be animated by Christian charity. If it only results in the creation of expensive staffs and the finding of “jobs” for dug-out officers, if it only attracts aristocratic ladies on the hunt for decorations and American doctors on the hunt for advertisement, it had better not be undertaken at all.

And since every European nation now finds its wealth and its energy insufficient for the mitigation of the misery which prevails within its own borders, I think that the time has come for the Russians to do something themselves. The Russian organization in Paris seems to have a good deal of money at its disposal for political purposes. The Russian Embassies and Consulates in America and the Far East also seem to be well supplied with funds, which they might divert for a time to this primary duty which they have so far left to strangers. And if they can donate no money they might at least donate themselves. For the last two years a great number of Russian statesmen and publicists have criticized from comfortable hotels in London, Paris, and New York all the efforts of the Allies to put Russian affairs in order, and have spurred us on to a further expenditure of our blood and treasure on their behalf.

They themselves have failed, so far, to produce a Cæsar, a Monk, or a Napoleon. But they possess great funds of philanthropy, enthusiasm, energy, mysticism. In view of the fact that tens of thousands of Russian children and young women, cast adrift in foreign lands, are now threatened with a fate worse than death, cannot they try to produce a St. Vincent de Paul, a General Booth, a Florence Nightingale?