Eastern Nights - and Flights Part 26

Our princ.i.p.al interest was now in the news from Bulgaria, for on it hinged our future movements. We visited Hatton each day to obtain translations from the local press. These I supplemented from the two-day-old newspapers of Lemberg and Vienna, bought at the kiosk.

The Bulgarian armistice was an accomplished fact, but the German troops had been given a month to leave Bulgaria. Our problem was whether to remain in Odessa until the end of this month and then try to make for Bulgaria, or to leave for Siberia at once.

Wilkowsky all but tipped the scales in favour of Siberia. He arrived suddenly from Constantinople, having hidden on a steamer that weighed anchor a few days after the _Batoum's_ departure. From being a penniless prisoner, without even the means of corresponding with his family, he was now prosperous and comfortable; for his father was a wealthy lawyer living in Odessa, and his uncle Minister of Justice in Skoropadsky's Ukrainian Cabinet.

Among his friends was the local commissary of General Denikin, whose volunteer army, composed of Kuban Cossacks and ex-officers of the Imperial Army, was preparing to advance against the Bolshevist forces in the Caucasus. Every few days the commissary sent a party of ex-officers, by way of Novorosisk, to the volunteer Army Headquarters at Ekaterinodar. General Denikin was hoping for aid from the Allies; so that the commissary was delighted at the chance of enlisting two British aviators. His offer was that we should fly with Denikin's army for a few weeks and help to organize the Flying Corps, after which we could proceed by aeroplane to some Allied detachment in Siberia.

The adventure seemed attractive, and we hesitated over it. But illness took the decision from our hands. I was laid low by yellow jaundice, and unable to travel with the next party that left for Novorosisk.

Weakened as I was by various forms of hardship, several days pa.s.sed before I recovered, under the kind-hearted ministrations of Elena Stepanovna, Hatton's Russian wife.

The aftermath of jaundice once brought us what we least desired--conspicuousness. In hot weather the Russians living around the Black Sea bathe from the beach in the altogether. There, men's bathing costumes attract almost as much attention as would a lack of them at Brighton or Atlantic City. Hatton, White, and I formed a bathing party soon after I felt better. Until we were crossing the beach below the public gardens none of us realized that the colour of my skin was still a warm yellow. The spectacle of a yellow man in all his nakedness drew many sightseers from the gardens, including Austrian soldiers. I dressed under cover of a rock, and lost no time in leaving the gardens.

No sooner was I free from jaundice than fate sent another setback.

White and I succ.u.mbed to the plague of influenza which swept across Europe from west to east, and which in one week killed forty thousand inhabitants of Odessa. For three days we lay in Vladimir Franzovitch's little room, weak, feverish, miserable, and at times light-headed, while his mistress fed us with milk and heaped every kind of clothing over us for warmth.

Recovery was hastened by the best possible tonic--news that the way to Varna, on the Bulgarian coast, was open to us. Thanks were due to several good friends for this means to freedom. Hatton had introduced us to a cosmopolitan Britisher named Waite, who enlisted the help of Louis Demy, a Russian sea-captain. Demy spoke of us to Commodore Wolkenau, the Ukrainian officer who, under the Austrians, controlled the shipping at Odessa. Wolkenau, having been an officer of the Russian Imperial Navy, was a good friend of the British. Moreover, the daily bulletins made it apparent that the Allies were winning the war, so that he was glad of an opportunity to prove his sympathies by helping British officers. He arranged for our pa.s.sage on a Red Cross ship which was to repatriate Russian prisoners from Austria, now waiting at Varna.

Meantime, there was an interval of ten days' waiting before the boat would sail. These we pa.s.sed in moving about the city, in consorting with Ukrainian officers and officials introduced by Wilkowsky, and in collecting information likely to be of use to the British Intelligence Department.

Our usual companion was one Pat O'Flaherty, an Irishman on the staff of the Eastern Telegraph Company, who had stayed in Odessa during the Bolshevist and Austro-German occupations. Entering a cafe with O'Flaherty was like a blindfold draw in a sweepstake of ident.i.ties.

Always he met friends; but until the moment of introduction neither we nor he knew how or as what we were to be presented. To one man we were merchants from Nikolaieff; to another, motor-car agents from Moscow; to a third oil experts returned from Baku.

"Signor Califatti," said O'Flaherty on one occasion, presenting me to a wealthy Jewish speculator.

"When he was at Nijni Novgorod Fair," he continued in all seriousness, "Signor Califatti bought a beautiful fur overcoat. He now wants to sell it. Perhaps you would like to buy it."

The Jew offered a thousand roubles for the mythical overcoat, provided it conformed to the Irishman's declaration that it was of first-cla.s.s astrakhan, in four skins; while White and I remained speechless with astonishment, embarra.s.sment, and the desire to grin.

In those days the Bolsheviki of Odessa, after months of suppression by the German Military Command, were beginning to raise their heads again.

There was much talk of a withdrawal of German and Austrian troops from the Ukraine, to reinforce the French and Italian fronts. The Bolsheviki were ready, if this happened, to rise up and capture the city.

The possession of arms by civilians was strictly forbidden, and any man found in the streets with a revolver was liable to be shot offhand by Austrian soldiers or Ukrainian gendarmes. But the Bolsheviki laughed at the many proclamations anent the handing over of firearms. They hid rifles, revolvers, and ammunition in cellars and attics, or buried them in the ground.

Many of our neighbours in the working-cla.s.s quarter were Bolsheviki.

Often they scowled at and threatened Vladimir Franzovitch, as he pa.s.sed them in his uniform of a lieutenant of the Ukrainian artillery; and it was evident that when the Austrians withdrew our room would be rather more dangerous as a home than a powder factory threatened by fire.

The consul of Soviet Russia was preparing lists of men willing to serve in the corps of Red Guards that had been planned, and was spending hundreds of thousands of roubles in propaganda. An immediate rising was threatened; whereupon Austrian and Ukrainian military police surrounded the consulate, captured the lists, and arrested and imprisoned the consul and two hundred Bolsheviki who had given their names as prospective Red Guards. Sixty of them were shot.

Even that lesson failed to frighten the half-starved men who lurked in the poorer quarters. Often, in the evening, they haunted the streets in small gangs that held up pa.s.sers-by and stripped them of their pocket-books and watches, and sometimes of their clothes.

The ugliest aspect of an ugly situation was that many soldiers of the Austrian forces, particularly the Magyars and the Poles, sympathized with the Bolsheviki, and were ready to join them, exchanging uniform for looted civilian suits if the troops were withdrawn. The sudden realization that Austria was beaten, coupled with hatred of Austrian Imperialism, went to their heads like new wine. They foresaw an era in which the working man and the private soldier would grab whatever they wanted. Bands of Hungarian privates proved their belief in this millennium by sacking the warehouses in the docks under cover of night.

Odessa was overfull of members of the bourgeoisie who had flocked to what they regarded as the last refuge against Bolshevism in European Russia. Refugees had swelled the population from six hundred thousand to a million and a half. The middle cla.s.ses--professional men, merchants, traders, and speculators--knew they were living on the edge of a volcano, and tried to drown the knowledge in reckless revelry.

Each evening parties costing thousands of roubles were given in the restaurants. Wine and vodka, as aids to forgetfulness of the fear that hovered over every feast, were well worth their sixty roubles a bottle.

Their orgy of speculation in inflated prices and their mock merriment left the bourgeoisie neither time nor energy to take action against the horrors that threatened them. In general they adopted a pose of fatalistic apathy, and tried hard to soothe themselves into the belief that the Allies would save them, since they would not save themselves.

For the rest they laughed hysterically, speculated unceasingly, and talked charmingly and interminably.

The only serious preparation against a renewal of the Red Terror in Odessa was made by ex-officers, who banded themselves into a semi-official corps. But they possessed few arms and less ammunition.

Even the official forces of the Ukraine could place only a dozen small-calibre guns round Odessa, and were obliged to be content with one rifle between two or three men. In any case, the loyalty of the private soldiers in the small Ukrainian army was a doubtful quant.i.ty, and unlikely to be proof against the temptations of rich loot and rapine.

Small arms were worth their weight in silver. Vladimir Franzovitch, discovering that White and I possessed German revolvers, implored us to sell them to him before we left. He offered thirty pounds apiece for them. In Constantinople we had bought them for eight pounds each, and in England they would have cost less than forty shillings.

Vladimir Franzovitch was weighed down by the most extreme pessimism over the future of Russia.

"We cannot be a nation again for a hundred years," he said. "The people are either revelling in brute-instinct, drunk with the strong wine of a spurious and half-understood idealism, or are dying in their thousands of starvation. Most of the strong men who might have helped to save the country have been killed, and the bourgeoisie folds its arms and awaits destruction in sheep-like inaction."

He saw but one hope--the Cossacks and officers who were rallying, through incredible hardships, to Denikin's army in the Caucasus; and Denikin could make no important move unless the Allies backed him with arms and munitions. Until this happened his small army would be but an oasis in the desert of hopelessness.

We were present at several gatherings of officers, in Vladimir Franzovitch's room. Over bread and salted fish, washed down by tea, they discussed the black past and the blacker future. From them we heard awful tales of ma.s.sacres and looting during the Bolshevist domination over the Black Sea regions. Of these the most dreadful was that of the cruiser _Almaz_. There have been published many imaginative reports of Bolshevist ma.s.sacres; but for horror these are equalled by many true stories that have never been fully told, and never will be until the veil of isolation is lifted and the seeker after truth is free to gather his information at first-hand.

I have every reason to believe the story of the _Almaz_. It was vouched for not only by Vladimir Franzovitch and other Russians whom we met in Odessa, but by Englishmen who were living in the city at the time, and are now back in England. Moreover, it is perpetuated in a local song similar to those of the French Revolution.

The Bolsheviki who first occupied Odessa, in the early spring of 1918, made their headquarters on the cruiser _Almaz_. Their first batch of arrests comprised about two hundred officers, with a few officials and other civilians. These were taken to the _Almaz_, and lined up on the deck. Each man in turn was asked: "Would you prefer a hot bath or a cold?" Those that chose a cold bath were thrown into the Black Sea, with weights tied to their feet. Those that said "hot" were stoked into the furnaces--alive.

Later, one Murravieff, believed to have been formerly a _agent provocateur_ of the Tsarist secret police, came to Odessa as Bolsheviki commissary. He divided the city into four sections and the Red Guards into four parties, each of which was allotted its particular district for three days of licensed looting. The Saturnalia was due to begin in three days' time, when the first Austro-Hungarian detachment landed to restore order, in response to the Ukrainian Provisional Government's invitation. Many of the looters were rounded up and shot; but the Bolsheviki leaders, including Murravieff and several Jews, escaped with millions of roubles, commandeered from the bank reserves. Murravieff afterward had the decency to commit suicide, but his Jewish colleagues continued to flourish in Soviet Russia.

Odessa had a respite from Bolshevist domination until the tragedy of March, 1919. Then, after a period of occupation by an insufficient Franco-Greek force, the city was evacuated in the face of an army of Soviet troops. Credible eye-witnesses report the ma.s.sacre of three thousand people within a few days of Odessa's recapture by the Bolsheviks.

For all I know to the contrary, Lenin--despite the proved and d.a.m.ning evidence of past connections with the German Kaiser's penetration agents and the Russian Tsar's police agents--may be an intellectual idealist who considers all means justifiable in establishing a form of communism that may eventually better the world. But I do know with certainty that Bolshevism, as practised locally in Russia by unthinking hordes who are not and do not pretend to be intellectual idealists, means universal injustice, flagrant robbery, senseless, butchery, and a tyranny at least equal to that of Ivan the Terrible or any Oriental despot. All the writings of biased minority mongers who have confined their investigations to consorting with Soviet officials at Moscow and Petrograd, all the blinkered sympathy of labour agitators who devote their lives to fostering a diabolic discontent, all the chirruping of the mentally perverted women and men who, at a safe distance of thousands of miles from actuality, have adopted theoretical Bolshevism as the latest fashion in parlour enthusiasms, cannot condone the fact.

Money and life were the only cheap commodities in Odessa. Paper roubles of every denomination--Imperial notes, Kerensky notes, Ukrainian notes, and Munic.i.p.al notes--they were in scores and hundreds of thousands; and each issue was trailed by several kinds of forgery, so that only an expert could tell the true from the false.

Everything else was rare, and wildly expensive. Meat was ten, weak tea a hundred and ten roubles a pound. New suits of clothes were un.o.btainable at any price, for there was no cloth. Second-hand clothes could be bought in the Jewish market, where the dealers demanded from eight hundred roubles for a shoddy suit and from five hundred for an overcoat. A collar cost eight roubles; a handkerchief four. Other prices were proportionate.

Seven-eighths of the factories were idle. As for the rich grain lands of the Ukraine, about three-quarters of their produce went to Austria and Germany, this being the price paid by Skoropadsky's government for the policing of the Ukrainian Republic.

The colossal price of things was due as much to Jewish speculation as to scarcity. Everything for sale pa.s.sed through the hands of a succession of middlemen before it reached the public. A consignment from Austria or Germany, or the produce of a local factory, would be bought by one speculator, sold to another, re-sold to a third, and perhaps to a fourth and a fifth. Each of the middlemen would allot himself a profit of from twenty to two hundred per cent. The same process was applied to the boots, foodstuffs, and equipment which Austrian officers and soldiers stole from their military stores and sold to the speculators.

All day long Franconi's and Robinart's, the two princ.i.p.al cafes of Odessa, were infested by swarms of swarthy Jews, who wandered from table to table, selling and re-selling, and piling up enormous fortunes in paper roubles. And elsewhere in the city hundreds of thousands of Russians were in little more than rags, many thousands of them half dead from want of nourishment.

As they pa.s.sed the cafes where the Jews sat and haggled and made it ever more difficult for the half-starved ma.s.ses to keep alive, the poorer Russians talked of pogroms. The talk culminated later, when the Germans and Austrians had withdrawn from Odessa, in ma.s.sacres of the less prosperous Jews, while the richer ones, who were the real promoters of discord, were warned in time and stole away with their wealth; as always happens when pogroms are threatened. The actions of the Ukrainian Jews during the Austro-German occupation provided a very typical instance of the provocative part played by the Jews of Eastern Europe. The Hebrew--more calculating and infinitely more cunning than the Slav peasant and workman--ties, binds, and enmeshes him in a web of usury, speculation, mortgage, and irksome liability; until the Slav, goaded beyond his powers of endurance by the men who prey on his instability and ignorance, rises up and seeks a solution in regrettable violence.

Glorious news heartened White and myself during the period of waiting for the Red Cross ship to sail. Each morning we walked down the princ.i.p.al street of Odessa until we reached Austrian Headquarters, outside of which were posted the daily official and press bulletins written in German. I mingled with the crowd before the notice board while White looked in a shop window until I rejoined him and related the latest Allied victory--the capture of Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing, La Ba.s.see, Ostend, or the final phases of Allenby's advance in Syria. With Hatton, Waite, and other Britishers we rejoiced greatly in private; while the German soldiers became glummer and glummer, and the Austrian officers lost a portion of their corseted poise as they strutted, peac.o.c.k-wise, along the boulevards.

The Russian bourgeoisie remained apathetic as ever. Their main interest in the prospect of a general armistice seemed to be the probable effect on prices, and on the rouble's value, of the expected arrival of the British. As for our Bolshevist neighbours, they continued to unearth and clean their rifles and revolvers; while the corps of ex-officers drilled, and planned defence works outside Odessa.

Under cover of dusk we slipped past the Austrian sentry at the dock gates on the evening before the Red Cross ship left for Varna, and boarded her. Louis Demy and Pat O'Flaherty accompanied us as far as the gangway.

We remained hidden throughout the night, and only ventured into the open when, at ten o'clock in the morning, we steamed out of the wide-curved harbour to the open sea.

CHAPTER XVII

SOFIA, SALONIKA, AND SO TO BED