Knight Without Armour (4 page)

Barellini was very useful when they reached the train at the further side
of the lake. There was a curious and rather likeable spontaneity about him
that enabled him to do things without a thought of personal dignity (which,
in fact, he neither needed nor possessed), and when he found the train
already full of a shouting and screaming mob, he merely flung himself into
the midst of it, shouted and screamed like the rest, and managed in the end
to secure two seats in a third-class coach. He had no concealments and no
embarrassments; his excitableness, his determination, his inquisitiveness,
his everlasting talk about women, were all purified, some-how, by the
essential naturalness that lay behind them all. The train was full of
soldiers, with whom he soon became friendly, playing cards with them
sometimes and telling stories, probably very gross, that convulsed them with
laughter. The soldiers were very polite and gave up the best places to A.J.
and the Italian; they also made tea for them and brought them food from the
station buffets. When A.J. saw the English correspondents bawling from
first-class compartments to station officials who took little notice of them,
he realised how much more fortunate he had been himself The hours slipped by
very pleasantly; as he sat silent in his corner- seat listening to continual
chatter which he did not understand and watching the strange monotonous
landscape through the window, he began to feel a patient and rather
comfortable resignation such as a grown-up feels with a party of children.
The soldiers laughed and were noisy in just the sharp, instant way that
children have; they had also the child’s unwavering heartlessness. One
of them in the next coach fell on to the line as he was larking about, and
all his companions roared with laughter, even though they could see he was
badly injured.

Harbin was reached after a week’s slow travelling from Irkutsk. At
first sight it seemed the unpleasantest town in the world; its streets were
deep in mud; its best hotel (in which Barellini obtained accommodation) was
both villainous and expensive; and its inhabitants seemed to consist of all
the worst ruffians of China and Siberia. Many of them were, in fact,
ex-convicts. A.J. was glad to set out the next day for Mukden, in which he
expected to have to make his headquarters for some time. The thirty-six
hours’ journey involved another scrimmage for places on the train, but
he was getting used to such things now, and Barellini’s company
continued to make all things easy. He was beginning to like the talkative
Italian, despite the too- frequently amorous themes of his conversation, and
when he suggested that they should join forces in whatever adventures were
available, A.J. gladly agreed.

A.J. had no romantic illusions about warfare, and was fully prepared for
horrors. He was hardly, however, prepared for the extraordinary confusion and
futility of large-scale campaigning between modern armies. Nobody at Mukden
seemed to have definite information about anything that was happening; the
town was full of-preposterous rumours, and most of the inhabitants were
rapidly growing rich out of the war business. All the foreign correspondents
were quartered in a Chinese inn, forming a little international club, with a
preponderance of English-speaking members. A.J. found the other Englishmen
less stand-offish when he got to know them better; several became quite
friendly, and gave him valuable tips about cabling his news, and so on. The
trouble was that there was so little news to cable.

The ancient Chinese city wore an air of decay that contrasted queerly with
the sudden mushroom vitality infused by the war. A.J. had plenty of time for
wandering about among the picturesque sights of the place; indeed after a
week, he knew Mukden very much better than he knew Paris or Berlin. Then came
the sudden though long-awaited permission for war-correspondents to move
towards the actual battle-front. Barellini and A.J. were both attached to a
Cossack brigade, and after a tiresome journey of some sixty miles found
themselves courteously but frigidly welcomed by General Kranazoff and his
staff The general spoke French perfectly, as also did most of his officers.
He obviously did not like the English, but he talked about English literature
to A.J. with much learning and considerable shrewdness.

During that first week with the Cossacks nothing happened, though from
time to time there came sounds of gun-fire in the distance. Then one morning,
about five o’clock, a servant who had been detailed to attend on him
woke A.J. to announce that a battle was beginning about four miles away and
that if he climbed a hill near by he might perhaps see something of it. While
he was hastily dressing, Barellini, who had been similarly wakened, joined
him, and soon the two were trudging over the dusty plain in the fast-warming
sunlight.

They climbed the low hill and lay down amongst the scrub. For several
hours nothing was to be seen; then suddenly, about nine o’clock, a
violent cannonade began over the next range of hills and little puffs of
white smoke a couple of miles away showed where shells were bursting. A staff
officer approached them and explained the position; the Russians were over
here, the Japanese over there, and so on. It was all very confusing and not
at all what A.J. had imagined. The sun rose higher and the cannonade grew in
intensity; Russian batteries were replying. Barellini talked, as usual, about
women; A.J. actually dozed a little until another staff officer ran to tell
them to move off, as the Russian line was beginning to retreat. They obeyed,
descending the hill and walking a mile or so to the rear. By this time they
were dog-tired and thirsty. A Chinese trader on the road offered them some
Shanghai beer at an extortionate figure; Barellini beat him down to half his
price and bought four bottles, which they drank there and then with great
relish.

And that, by pure mischance, was all that A.J. saw of the actual Russo-
Japanese War, for the beer had been mixed with foul water, and that same
evening, after sending a long cable to the
Comet
, he fell violently
ill and had to be taken to the base hospital. There his case was at first
neglected, for it was hardly to be expected’ that the doctors, in the
after-battle rush of work, should pay much attention to a foreign war-
correspondent with no visible ailment. Later, however, when his temperature
was a hundred and four and he was in the most obvious agony, they changed
their attitude and gave him good nursing and careful attention. For a
fortnight his life was in danger; then he began to recover. The hospital was
clean and well- managed, though there was a shortage of drugs and bandages.
Barellini, on whom the bad beer had had no ill effects at all, visited him
from time to time, as also did some of the other correspondents. It was
universally agreed that he had met with the most atrocious luck. Afterwards,
however, he looked back upon his period in hospital as the time when he
really began to know Russia and the Russians. To begin with, he made great
progress with the language. None of the nurses or patients could speak any
English and after his third week in hospital he found himself beginning to
converse with them fairly easily. What struck him most was the general
eagerness to help him; he could not imagine a foreigner in a London hospital
being so treated. Both men next to him were badly wounded (one in the stomach
and the other with both legs amputated), yet both took a keen delight in
teaching him new words. They were middle-aged, with wives and families
thousands of miles west; they accepted their lot with a fatalism that was
bewildered rather than stoic. One of them always screamed when his wounds
were being dressed, and always apologised to A.J. afterwards for having
disturbed him. Neither could read or write, yet when A.J. read to them, very
haltingly and with very bad pronunciation, from a book by Gogol, they
listened enthralled. They were devoutly religious and also very
superstitious. They had not the slightest idea why their country was fighting
Japan, but they assumed it must be God’s will. The one with the
amputations did not seem to worry very much; his attitude seemed chiefly one
of puzzlement. It had all happened so quickly, almost as soon as he had gone
into battle; he had had no time to fight any of the enemy; indeed, it was as
if he had travelled seven thousand miles merely to have his legs blown off.
He could not get rid of a dim feeling that the Japanese must have been
personally angry with him to have done such a thing. He felt no
vindictiveness, however. There was a badly wounded Japanese in the ward; the
men treated him very courteously and often spoke sympathetically to one
another about him. As they did not know a word of his language nor he a word
of theirs, it was all that could be done.

Both A.J.’s neighbours told him all about themselves and showed the
frankest curiosity about his own life. They thought it very strange that
people in England were so interested in the war that they would send out men
especially to describe it for them, and they were amazed when A.J. told them
how much his journey had cost, the price of his cables to the
Comet
,
and so on. They listened with great interest to anything he told them about
English life, English politics, and so on, though such matters were difficult
to compress within the confines of his still limited Russian. They always
showed their appreciation with the most childlike directness, often giving
him articles of food which he really did not want, but which he could not
refuse without risk of hurting their feelings.

The effect of his weeks in hospital was to give him an extraordinarily
real and deep affection for these simple-hearted men as well as a bitter
indignation against the scheme of things that had driven them from their
homes to be maimed and shattered in a quarrel they did not even understand.
The fact that they did not complain themselves made him all the more inclined
to complain for them, and the constant ingress of fresh wounded to take the
place of men who died had a poignantly cumulative effect upon his emotions.
He had already cabled Aitchison about his illness, promising to resume his
job as soon as he could; now he began to feel that his real message might be
sent as appropriately from a bed in hospital as from a position near the
lines. After all, it was the tragic cost of war that people needed to
realise; they were in no danger of forgetting its excitements and occasional
glories. In such a mood he began to compose cables which a friendly nurse
despatched for him from the local telegraph-office. He described the pathos
and heroism of the Russian wounded, their childlike patience and utter lack
of hatred for the enemy, their willingness to endure what they could not
understand. After his third cable on such lines a reply came from
Aitchison—’Cannot use your stuff advise you return immediately
sending out Ferguson.’ So there it was; he was cashiered, sacked; they
were sending out Ferguson, the well-known traveller and war-correspondent who
had made his name in South Africa. A.J. was acidly disappointed, of course,
and also (when he came to think about it) rather worried about the future.
There was nothing for it but to pack up and return to Europe as soon as he
was fit to leave hospital—to Europe, but not to England. The thought of
London, of the London streets, and of Fleet Street, especially, appalled him
in a way he could not exactly analyse. He had a little money still left and
began to think of living in France or Germany as long as it held out, and as
the most obvious economy he would travel back third-class. He left hospital
at the beginning of August and caught the first train west. The discomfort of
sleeping night after night on a plank bed without undressing did not prevent
him from enjoying the journey; the train itself was spacious and the halts at
stations were long and frequent enough to give ample opportunity for rest and
exercise. His companions were nearly all soldiers, most of them returning to
their homes after sickness or wounds, and their company provided a constant
pageant of interest and excitement. The long pauses at places he felt he
would almost certainly never visit again and whose names he would almost
certainly never remember, gave an atmosphere of epic endlessness to the
journey; and there was the same atmosphere in his talks to fellow-travellers,
with some of whom he became very intimate. Sometimes, especially when sunset
fell upon the strange, empty plains, a queer feeling of tranquillity
overspread him; he felt that he wanted never to go back to London at all; the
thought of any life in the future like his old Fleet Street life filled his
mind with inquietude. And then the train would swing into the dreaming rhythm
of the night, and the soldiers in the compartment would light their candles
and stick them into bottles on the window-ledges, and begin to sing, or to
laugh, or to chatter. Siberia surprised him by being quite hot, and sometimes
the night passed in a cloud of perfume, wafted from fields of flowers by the
railside. Then, early in the morning, there would be a halt at some little
sun-scorched station, where the soldiers would fetch hot water to make tea
and where A.J. could get down and stretch his legs while the train-crew
loaded wood into the tender. Often they waited for hours in sidings, until
troop trains passed them going east, and for this reason the return journey
took much longer than the eastward one.

At a station a few hundred miles from the European frontier A.J. got into
conversation with a well-dressed civilian whom he found himself next to in
the refreshment-room. The man was obviously well educated, and discussed the
war and other topics in a way that might have been that of any other cultured
European. He made the usual enquiries as to what A.J. was doing and who he
was; then he congratulated him on his Russian, which he said was surprisingly
good for one who had had to learn so quickly. The two got on excellently
until the departure of the train; then they had to separate, since the
Russian was travelling first-class.