There is dimly remembered crossing of a black lake in the sable darkness of a December night. We travelled on a large ferry steamer on which the stokers were women. They spat guttural venom at us as we peered down at them, slicing end raking the fires with vicious thrusts of their long steel slides. A half-formed thought crossed my mind, that if there was a hell, then I sincerely hoped I should be consigned to one patronised solely by men. When dawn came we trooped along the quay at Sassnitz and climbed the gangway on to a smart, clean Danish steamer for the short run to Copenhagen.
We were waited on hand and foot. Charming Danish women fussed about us as if we had been the saviours of Denmark. It was all most embarrassing for men, rather scruffy and suddenly released into a world of women after years of enforced celibacy. We changed steamers at Copenhagen and were divided into two companies; half of us boarded the PRIMULA, the others, myself included, joining her sister ship the FRICARIA. In the darkness the two steamers slipped out quietly through the Skagerrack and Categatt into the North Sea. Grey hulled and carrying a black funnel with a broad red band the two little vessels slid through the dark waves of that traditional navel battle area, their lights blazing cheerily over the waters. On their decks men leaned over the rail and smoked to their hearts content, watching the familiar but almost forgotten swirl and foam-fleck which ships make as they speed along. Sailors to a man, those passengers joyed more than most to feel the surge and swing of a ship at sea. For me, as for many others one thing only jarred. In the depths of the ships’ holds tier upon tier of bunks had been hastily improvised. The means of escape from those holds were quite inadequate in an emergency - and the North Sea was full of' minefields and drifting mines. We took one look at those electrically lit caverns and decided that, after years of internment it would be singularly rash to tempt providence at the price of a little sleep.
Many of us turned away to find a sheltered spot on deck. Towards midnight I curled up in my greatcoat under the lea of the engine room skylight and fell asleep to the rhythmic rumble of triple expansion engine, breathing the lovely perfume of sea air and hot lubricating oil.
Chapter Twenty-Two
RESTORED TO LIFE
We came back to the world at Leith.. We arrived early and found the roads full of anchored merchant ships; strange looking craft they seemed to me. They were steamers but had only one mast, and that sprouted out of a samson post abreast of the funnel. Instead or being painted the uniform dull grey which was the fashionable livery for ships when I had sailed from Liverpool, they were daubed with great. black and white, blue and grey patches and bars in a most anomalous manner. That was my first introduction to camouflage or dazzle painting.
As the two Danish ships hauled alongside, the quays were crowded with people. One young woman stood out, a dark skinned young fisher girl her hair streaming in the wind, she was perched aloft on the jib of a hydraulic crane, apparently quite frenzied with joy and quite oblivious to danger from her exalted position.
We landed. There were no customs formalities so we tumbled ashore with our variegated loot into the arms of the inevitable reception committee. It was an extremely sensible reception committee and cut the speeches to a few words before handing us over to our self- appointed hosts. I fell a victim to an organising female with a daughter of about 15. The girl was evidently being taught the principles of polite entertainment. I can appreciate their excellent intentions. I am quite sure that all those folk were filled with an honest urge to give us a rousing welcome home. But we had not been used to it, some of the lads got out of hand, others just felt uncomfortable. I just felt uncomfortable. The noise and chatter; the entreaties to “have another cup of tea", or this or that; the questions, the staring eyes .... I was right glad to get on the train at Waverley Station that night and curl up on soft cushions in a heated compartment for the smooth, non-stop run to London. To be sure the train was full, out it was full of Kriegsgefangenen; we are back in our little world again for a few hours where we all spoke the same language and were protected from this strange world we had re-joined so suddenly.
The next few weeks were spent in a round of social courtesies punctuated by visits to the theatre. I felt somehow like a visitor to a fourth dimensional world in which all the people around me were operating on a completely different wave-length from mine. Their conversation was about things to which I was a complete stranger and my topics of conversation were mainly concerned with prisoners of war and their troubles. I was listened to with polite incredulity but complete lack of understanding.
By this time I had acquired an embryo political outlook, slightly tinged with a touch of Socialism. The last couple of years spent in close proximity with men whom I can best describe as ‘natural Labour types’ had probably tilted my powers of political perception somewhat in their direction. There was no doubt also, that some of the methods of certain types of shipowners at that time served to accentuate the necessity for ganging up on the part of those who were likely to be, all their lives, nothing but a labour pool from which to draw ships’ crews. During those first few weeks at home some of my comments were of a political flavour which caused my father honest alarm, for if there was anything he hated more than an ‘Ingineer’ it was a Socialist. In 19l8, of course the Socialist party was still largely composed and led by the horny handed sons of toil, or such of them as by sheer hard work. self education and a fanatical belief in the Common Man, had pushed themselves to the command of the growing Unions. Although they had attained some measure of parliamentary representation they had not yet attained respectability or the support of the middle class in the country.
In Wanstead Park Avenue it could have brought about complete social eclipse to be discovered consorting with Socialists, and to have one in the family would have attracted as much disgrace as the unexpected appearance of an illegitimate child. So my Socialist tendencies had to be nipped in the bud. One evening I heard my Father remark to my Mother something about ‘striking while the iron was hot’. I realised that I was the said iron but had some honest doubts as to what form the heat was supposed to take. I had a shrewd suspicion that it hinged on my Father's oft expressed belief that the only good place on this earth was on a ship with several thousand miles of ocean between you and the nearest land. After a month or so of leave I was almost inclined to the same belief. There would have been no doubt whatever had it not been for the fact that I had fallen in love with the sister of Stanley McNickle, my WORCESTER colleague.
A few weeks after my return from Germany Stanley got home from sea. We were all reunited at No. 7, Harleyford Road, Vauxhall. His Father, a large, bear-like bearded Ulsterman, had practiced medicine for many years in the district. The McNickle home and the Doctor's Surgery was one of those tall, flat-chested houses of three floors and basement which still line many miles of London's streets. The front door was approached by a flight of whitewashed steps up from the flagged pavement, steps worn almost to a dangerous degree by the troubled feet of generations of Vauxhall’s sick and weary. Nearly all Dr. McNickle's patients had to be genuinely sick before they came to see him. Those were the days before the Welfare State. Doctors were paid by the patients (often they were not). To the patients of Dr. McNickle, sickness often meant destitution in that drab working-class district.
Like most doctors, Dr. McNickle had a warm sense of humour and taking it from him, his children were full of fun. Any one could pull the Doctor’s leg for he was the least pompous of all men and in snappy repartee could give as good as he could take. We used to tease him about the lethal flight of steps to his front door. We reckoned that he refused to have them levelled up in a deliberate attempt to aid business by ensuring that even if a patient had nothing much wrong with him when he decided to visit the doctor, by the time he had Slipped down those worn steps he could be reckoned on for a broken leg anyway.
Ivy McNickle was a schoolgirl of sixteen when I met her again after the War. She was a senior pupil at the Clapham High School for girls and to me, utterly charming. Petite and small- featured, with dark hair and brown eyes she really had no especial claims to beauty except perhaps, an intriguing dimple round her mouth when she smiled - which was often. She was one of a charming family, all bursting with that peculiar pixy-ish brand of Irish humour which can turn the world by a few sentences into a glorious Mad Hatter's Tea Party. All except Mrs. McNickle. The wife and Mother of this madcap crowd was a dumpy little person, kind and charming but utterly unable to join in the fun and frolic of her Peter Pan husband or her mischievous offspring. Long experience however, had given her a sort of blind man’s sense by which she could appreciate that these madcap antics which she failed to understand were really quite harmless and without malice. Which is a point of view rarely attainable by those poor souls denied in their make-up, an appreciation of sublime nonsense.
I stayed with the McNickles and went around with them a lot during those immediate post-war days, a factor which probably did more than anything to rehabilitate me after my unnatural experiences. My Father and Mother, excellent people as they were lacked the natural exuberance which could be found and shared by contact with other young people. I think my Mother was so relieved at my restoration to her bosom that she tended to cast about me a protective coat of moral cotton-wool. My Father. in his pre-occupation in trying to find a part-time post-war occupation to eke out his pension, was too busy and frustrated to offer me much company. So I fled to the McNickles.
Together we haunted the West End, the Zoo. Kew Gardens, the Serpentine and had a gala visit to that epoch making show. ‘Chu Chin Chow' with its original caste headed by Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton. When peace was officially celebrated we ganged up with the milling crowds of Londoners in the Mall and Piccadilly and outside Buckingham Place. We spent the night in joyous but quite aimless junketing. The appalling crush of people gave me adequate excuse for holding Ivy’s hand - a romantic gesture which brought balm to my young soul and a much needed restorative to a somewhat jaded spirit. I was quite hopelessly in love with the myopic narrowness of thought common to the disease when it lays low the very young. I seemed to myself a very gallant, gentil, knyght and Miss McNickle could have sent me to the uttermost ends of the earth with the raising of a not very ravishing eyebrow. I was too young, too carried away, to realise that the young woman had not attained the fine heights of feminine artifice which can with the flicker of an eyelash, deliver a blow to a besotted male leaving him as enslaved as the victim of hypnosis.
They were good times, and with the certainty of calf love waxing and waning in its uncertain way sometimes agonising times. Finally Ivy went back to school shedding the glamour of her first "civilian' clothes for the hated school uniform. Brother John Stanley went back to his ship and I applied for one also. The period of dreaming was over. I wanted to go out and see the world. I wanted to smell the hot oil and steam again; to drink hot cocoa on the bridge in the middle watch and hear the rattle of the stokers' shovels coming amplified up the big stokehold ventilators. I wanted to see the spray whipping in ruby drops over the port side light or in cold emerald showers to starboard.
Chapter Twenty-Three
EASTWARD HO!
The CARMARTHENSHIRE was an earlier edition of the unfortunate BRECKNOCKSHIRE. Built by Workman-Clark of Belfast she was a fine steamer of about 9,000 tons gross driven by a single screw from a set of sturdy triple expansion engines.
The CARMARTHENSHIRE had come through the war-unscathed. When I joined her in the Royal Victoria Dock, London she was still painted in that bewildering camouflage which had so puzzled me when I saw it first at Leith. Her Officers and crew also reflected some of the upheaval which a global war must cause to the normal running of merchant ships. She still carried a seaman gunner and gunner’s mate although the gun was removed before we sailed. The only other white petty officer was the Carpenter - a shipwright by trade - whom the war had swept to sew, probably somewhat to his surprise. The crew were native of India who, in the custom of native crews, owed their allegiance - and their jobs - to their respective serang. The deck Serang was a patriarchal gentleman with a neatly trimmed grey beard and a blistered tongue, who obviously held some pretty close blood relationship with most of his deck hands.
The Captain was a man called Hannam with whom I was to sail on several ships later in life. He gave the impression of tight- lipped austerity and it was generally believed that he never laughed. That of course, was an exaggeration for I heard him laugh - once. Of the remaining Officers the Second only needs some amplification in these notes. The others - that is the Chief and Third - were good samples of good type merchant ship Officers, a type which seemed to have moved closer to the naval type since my first voyage, a feature which must have resulted from their closer relationship with the Royal Navy consequent upon the use of the convoy system. The Second, too had taken on the polish of the naval quarterdeck from his war service with the Navy. He was a slim-hipped, clean-jawed type who wore his cap at a ‘Beatty’ angle and only buttoned three of the four- buttons of his jacket in honour of that great sailor. He was married and very much in love with a girl whom the war had washed up in a military hospital at Al Kantara near the Suez Canal. She was a nurse and no doubt found as little delight in Al Kantara as her husband found in her being there.
There should have been a fourth Officer but his place was taken by Fenwick-Stowe, the Senior Cadet. Besides Stowe and myself there was one other cadet named Gordon whom we relegated to junior position although he had done more actual sea time than I had - a point which rankled with him somewhat.
The CARMARTHENSHIRE sailed from London with a part cargo on the 17th February 1919 and put into Le Havre. Into this port millions of tons of war equipment were being hauled from the battlefields of France. Vast ammunition dumps behind the lines were being emptied away westwards to the French ports. Within an hour of our arrival the five hatches of the CARMARTHENSHIRE were open wide and slings of case goods were rattling down into her holds. We loaded something of everything from nine inch mortars to cases of horseshoes; from shells to bully beef and army rations. There were thousands of rounds of rifle ammunition and hundreds of cases of rifles; there were the ubiquitous machine guns and tons of ammunition for them too.
The destination of this mass of lethal stuff so recently thrown on a saturated market was not disclosed. But there were plenty of rumours. Some knowing characters said that it was to be taken out to sea and dumped. Others opinioned that it could all be landed in Britain, melted down and turned into peaceful goods on the "swords into ploughshares" principle. If "Pongo" Hannam knew, his natural taciturnity gave his secret ample protection. There was another school of thought - the sinister whisper with bated breath sort - whose disciples muttered with knowing grimaces that our cargo of war material was consigned to the anti-Bolshevik "White Russians" and that we were bound north away to Archangel. Never a lover of the cold, grey wastes which lie near the Poles I was deeply disturbed at the prospect. However it struck me as being a useful way of dealing with our second hand artillery and ammunition to further the overthrow of the Revolutionaries in Russia. At a little more than 18 years I can hardly be blamed for falling into the pitfalls into which our experienced statesmen with their wide knowledge of the facts planted their erring feet.
In accordance with the custom of most shipping companies and particularly the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, the CARMARTHENSHIRE coyly slid out between Le Havre breakwaters at some ungodly hour on a black February morning. She was a fine, solidly built steamboat, with plenty of power to push her heavily loaded hull through the water at twelve to thirteen knots. She bashed her way down channel in the teeth of a sou’west gale but her bridge was a comfortable one to keep watch on - by the standards of those days, positively luxurious. She had nice teak-sheathed decks too which, even in those far off days were becoming rather rare. All her cabins and mess-rooms were panelled and painted in white enamel. The Saloon was panelled in light oak. She was fitted to carry a dozen passengers but we left Havre with none.
Everyone, with the possible exception of the senior officers who no doubt know the answer already, was vastly relieved to see Ushant heave in sight on the port bow and to find that the CARMARTHENSHIRE’s head was swung gently towards it until she took up the Biscay course and plunged and curtsied south-south-west into the famous Biscay swell. No Archangel for us. We were chasing the sun - and a damn good job too! Dinner that night was a festive occasion. An air of relief settled down over the ship’s company and the ship took on that atmosphere of completeness which seems to pervade all ships outward bound. when they have shaken the shore things from them.
Truly we settled down, but still the intriguing mystery of our destination remained unanswered. We could only watch our course being unfolded. We picked up the magnificent flashing light on Cape Villano and pushed on southwards along the Portuguese coast. We saw the rock of Gibraltar high and magnificent in the evening air as we passed into the quietness of the tideless sea. We arrived at Port Said and waited to pass through the Suez Canal.
The rumours by now had subsided and it was pretty well known that we were bound for Vladivostok. Nobody aboard had ever been there and there was a certain amount of mild curiosity as to what sort of a place we should find at the end of the journey. There was a certain feeling of unreality about the whole thing - the sort of feeling which caused the old lady in the story to mutter “I don't believe it" when she saw the giraffe at the Zoo. We lazed away a hot afternoon at Port Said and got under weigh at dusk. We kept normal watches through the Canal. In the middle watch I had to turn out and go to my station on the after bridge with Edwards, the "Second" and his watch, to moor ship so that a lordly P & 0 mail steamer could pass, with the homeward mails. By the time we had got our mooring lines ashore I realised that, for the first time I had come up against a psychological situation bred by loneliness out of the Middle Eastern night.
The darkness was breathless and stars shone unwinkingly from up in the zenith right down to the desert horizon all round us. I don't think I had ever seen so many stars before. There seemed an unreal clarity in the air that night and the silence was the empty silence of the desert places. Away to the east a group of lights twinkled and below me on the poop I saw the lean form of the Second Mate gazing at them, his arms folded on the taffrail. He was muttering to himself. All through the mooring operations he had been behaving with a sort of nervous but fuddled ill humour. I noticed him, still muttering, sidle aft to where the six-inch manilla rope passed down through the fairleads into the blackness of the canal bank. Edwards cocked a leg over the rail and heaved himself unsteadily on to it. A horrible feeling turned my stomach when I saw that he was apparently going to jump overboard.
‘Mr. Edwards!’ I called quietly as I rattled down the bridge steps to the poop to get at him. ‘Second, for God’s sake. Sir. what's up?"
Edwards looked back, startled, still gripping the rail and sitting astride of it. It was evident that he had forgotten me. All the lascars of the watch were grouped away forward round the winch at the break of the poop and Edwards had thought he was alone.
‘Wadye want, hey? Lemme be!’
‘Don’t be a fool, sir.’ I pleaded as I reached him and caught his arm. You can't go jumping overboard like that.’
‘Who says I’m going to jump overboard, hey? He leaned down with the obvious intention of imparting a confidence. ‘I’m going ashore to my wife,’ he whispered pointing to the lights on the eastern horizon. "She’s there – hospital. Bin there for three years." He tapped his breast solemnly, "an’ I’m here, an’ I'm goin to see her’ - he raised his voice to a shout and shoved me away – ‘an' b...... the lot of ye’.
I was scared stiff. Edwards went rambling on, damning all and sundry from the Chairman of Directors, through the Captain down to the pantry boy. Suddenly I wasn’t scared any longer but thoroughly disgusted. ‘Oh shut up!’ I told him, ‘Anyway you can't go beetling off like this without a relief. I'm going to phone the Third.'
It was quite unintentional but that bit about reliefs was a stroke of genius. It got through the Second's fuddled reasoning and struck a chord. No, you just can’t shove off and leave the ship without a relief. Shockin’ bad form. Not done. Edwards tottered back over the rail and stood on the dock again. I nipped up to the navyphone on the docking bridge and shoved the button. The Third answered.
"Can you come aft?" I asked. "The Second is as tight as a wilk and trying to get ashore down the mooring lines’. I heard a muttered swear word as I snapped down the phone, and went back to where Edwards stood swaying slightly, still crying curses on the universe. I took his arm.
‘Look Sir, the Third is coming aft. But if you go down those lines," I pleaded, ‘you'll be left ashore when we get under weigh again, and you'll never be able to walk over the desert. It is out up with trenches as far as you can see. Can’t you get leave in Suez?’
‘What, that frosty faced old b..... on the Bridge give me leave? Not b..... likely! He doesn’t care if I haven’t seen the wife for a hundred years. I’m goin – now.’
He shook my arm free and cocked a leg over the rail. Another arm stretched out of the darkness besides me and the ‘Third’s’ voice said blandly, ‘Come here you bloody fool.’
One heave and Edwards was back on deck, struggling feebly but beginning to sob with the onrush of alcoholic remorse. The Third propped him up expertly and shepherded him gently away. He evidently had considerable experience at this sort of thing.
The P & O liner slid quietly past, a blaze of light from stem to stern, and we were allowed to go our way. With the dawn we anchored in Suez Bay. We saw nothing of Edwards that day and later it transpired that the ‘frosty faced old b .....’ had been, rather more human than the second Mate had supposed. He was given leave to visit his wife at Al Kantara.
Suez town in the first quarter of the twentieth century was not a place of beauty. Its most significant features seemed to be heaps of rotting garbage round market stalls, rapidly approaching a state of stinking putrefaction, and clouds of semi-moribund blue- bottles which grazed with insulting impartiality on both human features and the ordure of the streets. The sunlight seared the eyeballs and the incessant simian chatter of the natives was appalling. The clean decks of the CARMARTHENSHIRE in the comparative cool of the evening was a delicious and noble contrast to the horrors of Suez. Yet obviously lots of people called it home. It’s simply a matter of what you are used too.
We hurried away down the hot calms of the Red Sea and across the ageless Indian Ocean. Under the hills and amongst the green isles of Singapore we lay for a day or two converting our boiler furnaces to oil burners and taking in oil fuel. Then we headed away up the China Sea to Vladivostok.
Chapter Twenty-Four
A SLIGHT TOUCH OF REVOLUTION
Vladivostok harbour, on an April morning in 1919 was deceptively peaceful. Vladivostok has a big, landlocked natural harbour with low hills rising easily all round and a wide sea entrance to the south’ard.
0n the day CARMARTHENSHIRE arrived the surface of its waters was mirror smooth but a lazy swell from some far-off Pacific storm lifted under our stern as we steamed in.
Going alongside the stone quay was simple, which was just as well as no tugs were in evidence. In fact very little activity disturbed the early morning calm. The town of light coloured stone houses rose up the hillside as if it were terraced. Several hundred railroad box cars blocked the sidings near the quays, the amount of vegetation between their wheels giving a practical clue as to their long term in idleness. The fact that many of them had little stove pipes from which smoke lifted lazily into the still air seemed to indicate that they supported quite a considerable population. There were few other ships in the port and none of any size except for three cruisers, one British, one American and one Japanese.
Across the harbour to the eastward the low hills swept back, dark and barren and seemingly void of all life. But that was another bit of deception.
Vladivostok, at the time of our arrival, was still in the hands of the anti-Bolshevik bloc which had at least some degree of support from the British and Allied Governments. The British didn't like the Bolsheviks much because they went about killing royalty and upsetting the capitalist system; the Japs didn’t like them because they thought they might be successful and make Russia a potential menace in the East; the Americans were rather inclined to the belief that their ideas might be sound but admitted that some of their methods were a bit crude. But for the sake of homogeneity they came down solid on the side of their Allies in the late war. The CARMARTHENSHIRE’s large and valuable cargo of war material was intended to supply the ‘White’ armies fighting the ‘Reds’ of Admiral Kolchak. It was not clear at first just where this fighting was going on; we supposed it must be somewhere in the hinterland. There was no display of military activity such as one expected in a garrison town. Instead Vladivostok seemed to be lacking even the most reasonable amount of civic law and order which one might expect in a town of f its size - if one accepted the comically futile traffic police who, armed with curved sabres tried quite ineffectually to bludgeon the traffic into some sort of discipline.
Admiral Kolchak
There seemed to be no sort of industry in the place and the apparent barrenness of the surrounding country made me wonder how the population was fed. Money was represented by incredibly filthy rouble bills bearing astronomical figures, or little packets of kopek notes. Each note was about the size of a postage stamp and they were secured into hundreds by rubber bands or tied with thread. Nobody knew quite what the rate of exchange was and even amongst the inhabitants the money value changed daily according to the current rumours.
Swarms of Manchurians, still sewed up in their padded, quilted winter clothing, swarmed aboard to discharge the cargo. This was done with a verve and complete disregard of personal danger which would have made a British Stevedore scream for his Union representative. 0ur Lascar Serang appeared to find nothing alarming in the homicidal methods of the padded celestials, and went so far in his Oriental fatalism as to put some of his dependant relatives overside, painting right under where cargo slings were hurtling through space.
This piece of stupidity resulted inevitably in an accident. When the cargo was about half discharged a set of cases, very badly slung, came roaring up from number three hold and swung in a wild arc over the quay. The violent jerking loosened the cases and the sling load slipped. Came a terrible half second of suspense and then the sling collapsed, showering heavy cases over where the Serang’s nephew was painting the ship's side. The human frame is not constitutionally adapted to accept heavy weight flung at it from a great height and shortly after being brought aboard the man died. It is a matter for deep philosophical conjecture whether, in the case of the Serang’s nephew, horseshoes could be considered as the harbingers of good fortune. The cases were full of them.
Human life in Vladivostok in the year 1919 was not looked upon with the same degree of sanctity as that which prevails in more material civilisations. After a few minutes devoted to violent recriminations and screaming accusations between the Manchurian stevedores the incident was closed and discharging resumed with redoubled fury. As far as I know action was taken against anyone who might reasonably be supposed to have been responsible, directly or indirectly for the sailor’s death. But there was a certain amount of concern as to which Officers would attend the funeral. In fact there was a marked disinclination on everyone's part to take charge of the funeral party. Finally the Chief Steward and myself were told that we had been awarded the privilege. I was more than a bit disgusted at this. Quite apart from a natural and personal objection to offering my person to the vagaries of revolution-torn Vladivostok town, I considered the decision to be a piece of arrant responsibility-dodging on the part of my seniors. The fact that the Chief Steward had been thrown in to add the weight of years to the scales did nothing to appease my indignation, for by no means could he be legitimately be “tied up” as chief mourner to a man not even of his department. But of course we went.
The coffined body was lowered overside by a derrick a few days after the accident and put into a ramshackle, horse drawn hearse. A small party of the dead man's colleagues, shepherded by his reprehensible uncle, climbed into open horse carriages. Having seen all aboard the Chief Steward and I got into the last chariot of the line. It was incredibly dilapidated and had a few wisps of dirty straw on the floor. I felt rather like Mr. Jarvis and his lorry on the Dover Mail and shared some of his depression and misgivings.
The streets of Vladivostok in 1919 must have been fundamentally the same as when the city was first built. They were either unpaved tracks or paved with uneven stone setts. To judge by the steepness of many of the roads they had been designed primarily for pack animals rather than wheeled traffic. Our procession made slow progress, rather from the natural hazards presented by the state of the roads than through any attempt at funereal unction. On one occasion, on a particularly steep up grade where some of the stone setts had been removed to repair a citizen’s house, the hearse got into difficulties and its occupant showed signs of glissading out of the stern. Uncle however, was up to the occasion as ever and with a trill on his pipe and a volley of orders had the funeral party out of their carriages like shot from a gun. With the dexterity of a juggler warming up for the rope trick, the grey-bearded Serang produced a length of spun yarn. A few round turns and a couple of half hitches and his deceased relative was ready to continue the appalling journey. Half a dozen shoulders to the wheel of the hearse soon had it out of the hole in the road and the procession got under way again.
The solemnity of the occasion had been somewhat disturbed however, by this unexpected adventure, and the Kalassis showed evident symptoms of relapsing into their natural cheerfulness. A few ribald remarks brought the old Serang’s head round and he ripped out a string of Hindustani comments which would have polluted the light of the sun - had there been any sum visible that day. The poor relations relapsed into silence and the cortege rattled on, ever upwards towards the hills outside the town.
The last straggling shacks on the outskirts of the town were left behind and then we stopped between two wooden buildings, a little larger and better kept than the miserable hovels we had been passing. This was the entrance to the cemetery. There were no stately Cyprus trees around that cemetery; no wrought iron gates between massive masonry pillars to remind the intruder of the majesty of death. Nothing but the wooden buildings, a heap of planks, a couple of old wheel barrows and a few picks lying negligently around served to break the monotony of that sterile hillside.
We had picked up an interpreter from the Agent’s as we passed through the town and now he and the Chief Steward and I alighted and entered the more pretentious of the two sheds - for they were little more - to tender the necessary documents giving authority for the burial. Then we waited. After a bit, while the Agent’s man and. the Cemetery official argued I strolled outside.
It was April, but the air was still chilly. The bleak hillside, quite barren of vegetation so far as I could see and composed of a nasty looking yellow clay soil was surrounded by a tumbling vista of similar hills with a long, tortuous slope down to where the town lay by the water’s edge. Except for certain parts of Patagonia I don't think I have ever seen such lifeless desolation. And it was calm. In the silence which seemed almost to exude from that Hill of the Dead I could hear tiny sounds from miles away in the town. Following the line of quays I could see the CARMARTHENSHIRE lying alongside with the three allied cruisers ahead of her.
The funeral party waited with the stoicism of the oriental. I waited with the impatience of the westerner and the moody pessimism of the Celt. I felt that all was not well. In such a place of chaos and inefficiency it was almost impossible that a mere funeral could be conducted without some major catastrophe. I re-entered the shack-office and found that my acute apprehensions were not without foundation. The Official stated quite blandly that he had not been informed of our particular internment. In short there was no grave dug. It was very difficult to dig graves just then because the ground was still frozen after the winter - and the grave diggers were not there. The Chief Steward asked our interpreter to speak to the Vladivostok agents on the telephone. I wandered out again to attempt to reassure the Serang whose oriental stoicism was being somewhat dissipated by his natural irritability. Although his carelessness - or callousness – had been responsible for bringing his unfortunate nephew to this spot, the old man was not going to have his relative's mortal remains insulted by bad management. I managed to calm him down but I could see that the organisation at the cemetery was in line with a sort of slap-happy, utter lack of planning which we had met with in the port generally. I felt far from calm myself, for I had received no briefing on what to do with a corpse nobody wanted.
Whilst I was waiting for the Agent to conjure up some sort of a solution to the debacle I turned from the group of native sailors and walked idly over to the big shed which stood across the entrance road from the office hut. I glanced in through the rather cobwebby window. For a moment I couldn't realise what the enormous heap rising about eight feet above the earth floor was composed of. Then quite suddenly I was aware that I was gazing into a girl's face behind that dirty window; but the face was upside down, with half-closed eyes and an incredibly stupid expression on its features. The girl’s body lay on its back across the top of the heap and was stark naked. I realised with a constriction of the heart that I was staring into the face of a corpse. And the arms, legs and torsos flung about and protruding grotesquely from the heap were corpses, hundreds of them, some with wounds, the lower ones already in a revolting state.
I am afraid I walked a bit unsteadily back to the office, not feeling very well. Inside, I asked the Russian translator mono-syllabilically, what that charnal house meant. He shrugged his shoulders casually.
“Unknown peoples,” he explained.. "'We collect them from the streets every night. Many are killed every night. And the poor peoples, they can’t afford a funeral so they carry them out to the streets and leave them. The ground is getting softer, so bye and ve dig a big hole ...... In ze vinter it does not matter.
The cemetery official emerged from an inner office wearing the expression of a man who had been persuaded to do something against his better judgement. He rattled off a string of sentences at our interpreter.
"He says;" explained the Russian "that zere is anuzzer grave but the party, 'e not arrive yet. So you can 'ave him. All right, we go quickly now before ze other party come”.
And we did. The Indian sailors carried their Comrade’s body over the rough hillside, down about a quarter of a mile to where a new grave stood waiting. Two shovels stood up out of a mound of yellow earth beside it. After the coffin had been lowered into the grave by our sailors and the earth replaced they performed a short ritual for the dead. Each man had in his band a twiggy stick. In turn they walked clockwise round the grave, uttering prayers and digging the sticks in at the corners of the grave. Then a terrible thought struck the Serang. Ho turned to me as one of his own Department who would understand such things as were troubling him. "Sahib," he said in tones of acute anxiety. "Sahib, does our brother's face look towards Mecca?”
For the second time that day I felt that physical constriction caused by shock. No sun pierced the drab skies to give a clue. I realised that if the men discovered that they buried their dead in the wrong direction a rapid exhumation was imminent. I noticed the Russian cemetery official getting fidgety and our interpreter was anxious to be off. 'No more than I was, or the Chief Steward, for we feared the arrival of the “other party." with consequent trouble. I glanced round quickly as if sizing up the orientation of the place and took a snap decision.
“He is well, Serang,” I assured the old man.
“Hatch sahib, thank you. We go back to the ship now please?”
“Yes Serang, and jhuldi carow, for the night is coming.”
The Serang flung a sharp order to his men and they trooped away up the hillside again, followed by the two Russians and the Steward. I paused and looked back towards the grave, with its twigs reaching up upwards like suppliant hands. Low down in the western sky the setting sun flashed a red beam under the cloud blanket and was gone. Our dead brother has been buried the wrong way round.
But the little black figures toiling up towards the cemetery gate kept on walking. I reckoned that God would overlook my misjudgement and snap decision – I was prepared to take the rap. I hurried up the hill after them.
We finished our cargo discharging in an atmosphere of mounting military tension. News filtered through to the humble level of the cadets' cabin that a Bolshevik army was closing in on Vladivostok. We hoped somewhat fervently that they would take their time about it, for as far as we could see any reasonably intelligent military body could take possession of the place any time it liked.
But the oldest profession in the world was, as ever, completely unimpressed by the stupendous events taking place all around them. Their wares were internationally exchangeable for any useful currency and the rates of monetary exchange mattered very little. Two nations held the monopoly of' prostitution in Vladivostok and they lived in two separate colonies. There were the Russian girls and the Japanese girls. Normally a condition of somewhat uneasy truce held the two parties from international conflict.
One day towards the end of our stay however, something happened which upset the peace quite considerably. The Russian girls, for all their profession, were good followers of the Russian Orthodox Church. They were faithful enough to suspend business during a very sacred church festival. which considering that it meant a loss of revenue in desperately hard times is considerably more than many more devout Christians would do.
The Japs, not being of the same faith, saw in this a golden opportunity to divert some of the Russian girls custom. When the news of this piece of commercial claim jumping reached the Russian quarter there was very considerable indignation manifest on all sides. Before long a body of infuriated Russian women backed up by a corps of male supporters in the shape of a bunch of tough U.S. navy men, invaded the Japanese street and proceeded with much screeching to break things up.
The inevitable happened. The Jap brothels disclosed a fair sized colony of Japanese sailors and the row was on in earnest. Russian police who were tactless enough to interfere were coshed indiscriminately by all parties and both sexes. I have no direct evidence of any British sailors being present in the first phases of the battle but I have also no reason to disbelieve that there may have been some of our race present. They probably took both sides with complete impartiality.
Before long it was obvious that the scrap was developing into a. general riot. There was also more than a suspicion of a political tinge being introduced into the affair .. you can always rely on certain brands of politicians to drag their particular sort of nastiness into any honest and straightforward difference of opinion until you wake up one day to find you are fighting for something you don’t understand on behalf of a spiv you cordially detest. If the Battle of the Brothels had been allowed to develop it is possible that Mt Vladivostok might have been captured for the Bolsheviks without a single Red Army soldier being present. Nobody had thought up the expression Fifth Column in those days but the tactics are as old as Troy. Something had to be done in Vladivostok on that day and done quickly. It was not done by the Russians. The three allied cruisers in the harbour landed armed parties who quickly broke up the fighting, rounded up their erring nationals and dragged them back to their ships. Naval patrols took over the trouble area until all was quiet again. Next day the three cruisers left, stealing quietly away like dogs with their tails between their legs.
With her holds empty the CARMARTHENSHIRE cast off from the quay, turned short round and headed south out of the harbour towards Japan. That night two young women in tattered clothes, their dark eyes on the verge of tears sat in the Engineers' Mess and ate real food. The Second Engineer had. found them in the coal bunkers. The girls said they had lived the winter in one of those rusting railroad d wagons in the freight terminal of the Trans-Siberian Railway at Vladivostok. They said they had worked their way east from Russia and the firing squads. They hinted hat they were of noble birth. Maybe they were, but I doubt it. I also doubt whether they found their way into the coal bunkers without some professional assistance.
It wasn’t long before the Bolshevik Admiral Kolchak entered Vladivostok and presumably collected the bulk of the cargo which CARMARTHENSHIRE had carried all the way from Western Europe on a forlorn and ill-conceived mission.