On the 25th July 1914, at nine o\'clock in the evening, I left Saghalien, and as the ship steamed away from the loom of the land into the night I knew that at last, after eighteen months of voyaging in the East, I had turned my face homeward. I had enjoyed it, but I wanted to go home, and in my notebook I see evidences of this longing. At last I was counting the days—one day to Nikolayeusk, three days to Kharbarosvk, three days more to Blagoveschensk—and I was out in my calculations in the very beginning. The ships of the Volunteer fleet take their time, and we took three days wandering along the island of Saghalien and calling at ports I should think mail steamer had never before called at before we turned again towards the mainland.
And yet in a way it was interesting, for I saw some of the inhabitants of the island, the aboriginal inhabitants, I should never have otherwise seen. Gilyaks they are, and the water seems their element. They have the long straight black hair of the Mongolian, and sometimes they were clad in furs—ragged and old and worn, the very last remains of furs—sometimes merely in dirty clothes, the cast-offs of far-away nations.
They live by the fish. There is nothing else.
I tried hard to photograph these aborigines, using all sorts of guile to get them into focus. I produced cigarettes, I offered sugar, but as soon as they found out what I was about they at once fled, even though their boat was fastened against the gangway and it meant abandoning somebody who was on board. I did eventually get some photographs, but they shared the fate of the rest of my Russian pictures, and I am sorry, for I do not suppose I shall ever again have the chance of photographing the Gilyak in his native haunts. He belongs to a dying race, they told me, and there are few children amongst them.
And though we lay long at De Castries Bay they would not let me take pictures there at all. It was forbidden, so I was reduced to doing the best I could through my cabin port. In Alexandrosvk the police officer had aided and abetted my picture-making, but in Nikolayeusk it was a forbidden pastime, for the town, for purposes of photography, was a fort, and when I boarded the Kanovina on the river, the post steamer bound for Blagoveschensk, I met with more difficulties.
There was on board a Mrs Marie Skibitsky and her husband, the headmaster of the Nikolayeusk “Real” School, and she spoke very good English and was a kind friend to me. Through her came a message from the captain to the effect that though he did not mind my photographing himself, it was forbidden in Russia, and he begged me not to do it when anyone was looking on. That made it pretty hopeless, for the ship was crowded and there was always not one person but probably a score of people taking a very great interest. The captain was not brass-bound as he had been in the John Cockerill, but he and all his officers were clad in khaki, with military caps, and it was sometime before I realised them as the ship\'s officers. The captain looked to me like a depressed corporal who was having difficulties with his sergeant, and the ship, though they charged us three roubles more for the trip to Blagoveschensk than the Amur Company would have done, was dirty and ill-kept. It was in her I met the saloon the windows of which would not open, and the water in my cabin had gone wrong, and when I insisted that I could not be happy till I had some, it was brought me in a teapot! They never struck the hours on this steamer as they had done on the John Cockerill, and gone was the excellent cook, and the food consisted largely of meat, of which I am bound to say there was any quantity.
But in spite of all drawbacks the ship was crowded; there were many officers and their wives on board, and there were many officers on board with women who were not their \'wives. These last were so demonstrative that I always took them for honeymoon couples till at last a Cossack officer whom I met farther on explained:
“Not \'wives. Oh no! It is always so! It is just the steamer!”
Whether these little irregularities were to be set down to the discomforts of the steamer or to the seductive air of the river, I do not know. Perhaps I struck a particularly amorous company. I am bound to say no one but me appeared to be embarrassed. It seemed to be all in the day\'s work.
It was pleasant going up the river again and having beside me one who could explain things to me. Every day it grew warmer, for not only was the short northern summer reaching its zenith, but we were now going south again. And Mrs Skibitsky sat beside me and rubbed up her English and told me how in two years\' time she proposed to bring her daughters to England to give them an English education, and I promised to look out for her and show her the ropes and how she could best manage in London. In two years\' time! And we neither of us knew that we were on the threshold of the greatest war in the world\'s history.
I took the breaking out of that war so calmly.
We arrived at Kharbarosvk. I parted from Mrs Skibitsky, who was going to Vladivostok, and next day I looked up my friend the colonel\'s wife with whom I had travelled on the John Cockerill. She received me with open arms, but the household cat flew and spat and stated in no measured terms what she thought of Buchanan. The lady caught the cat before I realised what was happening and in a moment she had scored with her talons great red lines that spouted blood on her mistress\'s arms. She looked at them calmly, went into the kitchen, rubbed butter on her wounds and came back smiling as if nothing in the world had happened. But it was not nothing. I admired her extremely for a very brave woman. Presently her husband came in and she just drew down her sleeves to cover her torn arms and said not a word to him. He was talking earnestly and presently she said to me:
“There is war!”
I thought she meant between Buehanan and the cat and I smiled feebly, because I was very much ashamed of the trouble I and my dog had caused, but she said again:
“There is war! Between Austria and Serbia!”
It did not seem to concern me. I don\'t know that I had ever realised Serbia as a distinct nationality at all before, and she knew so little English and I knew no Russian at all, so that we were not able to discuss the matter much, though it was evident that the colonel was very much excited. That, I thought, might be natural. He was a soldier. War was his business, though here, I think, he was engaged in training boys.
After the midday meal—déjeuner, I think we called it—she and I went for a walk, and presently down the wide streets of Kharbarosvk came a little procession of four led by a wooden-legged man bearing a Russian naval flag, the blue St Andrew\'s Cross on a white ground. I looked at them.
They meant nothing to me in that great, empty street where the new little trees were just beginning to take root and the new red-brick post office dominated all minor buildings among many empty spaces.
“They want war! They ask for war!” said my friend. I was witnessing my first demonstration against Germany! And I thought no more of it than I do of the children playing in the streets of this Kentish village!
She saw me on to the steamer and bade me farewell, and then my troubles began. Not a single person on that steamer spoke English. However, I had always found the Russians so kind that the faet that we could not understand one another when the going was straight did not seem to matter very much. But I had not reckoned with the Russians at war.
At Kharbarosvk the river forms the Chinese-Russian boundary and a little beyond it reaches its most southern point, about lat. 48°. But the China that was on our left was not the China that I knew. This was Manchuria, green and fresh as Siberia itself, and though there was little or no agriculture beyond perhaps a patch of vegetables here and there, on both sides of the broad river was a lovely land of hills and lush grass and trees. Here were firs and pines and cedars, whose sombreness contrasted with the limes and elms, the poplars and dainty birches with whieh they were interspersed. The Russian towns were small, the merest villages, with here and there a church with the painted ball-like domes they affect, and though the houses were of unpainted logs, always the windows and doors were painted white.
And at every little town were great piles of wood waiting for the steamer, and whenever we stopped men hastily set to work bringing in loads of wood to replace that which we had burnt. And we burnt lavishly. Even the magnificent forests of Siberia will not stand this drain on them long.
The other day when the National Service papers came round one was sent to a dear old “Sister” who for nearly all her life has been working for the Church in an outlying district of London. She is past work now, but she can still go and talk to the old and sick and perhaps give advice about the babies, but that is about the extent of her powers. She looked at the paper and as in duty bound filled it in, giving her age as seventy. What was her surprise then to receive promptly from the Department a suggestion that she should volunteer for service on the land, and offering her, by way of inducement, good wages, a becoming hat and high boots! That branch of the Department has evidently become rather mechanical. Now the Russians all the way from Saghalien to Petrograd treated me with sueh unfailing kindness that I was in danger of writing of them in the stereotyped fashion in which the National Service Department sent out its papers. Luckily they themselves saved me from such an error. There were three memorable, never-to-be-forgotten days when the Russians did not treat me with kindness.
The warmest and pleasantest days of my trip on the Amur we went through lovely scenery: the river was very wide, the blue sky was reflected in its blue waters and the green, tree-clad hills on either side opened out and showed beyond mountains in the distance, purple and blue and alluring. It was the height of summer-time, summer at its best, a green, moist summer. We hugged the Russian bank, and the Manchurian bank seemed very far away, only it was possible to see that wherever the Russians had planted a little town on the other side was a Chinese town much bigger. The Russian were very little towns, and all the inhabitants, it seemed, turned out to meet us, who were their only link with the outside world.
The minute the steamer came close enough ropes were flung ashore to moor it, and a gangway was run out very often—and it was an anxious moment for me with Buchanan standing on the end, for he was always the first to put dainty little paws on the gangway, and there he stood while it swayed this way and that before it could make up its mind where to finally settle down. Then there was a rush, and a stream of people going ashore for exercise passed a stream of people coming on board to sell goods. Always these took the form of eatables. Butter, bread, meat, milk, berries they had for............