Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 304, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 December 1915 — SEES BELGIAN ARMY LAND AT FAR ARCHANGEL [ARTICLE]

SEES BELGIAN ARMY LAND AT FAR ARCHANGEL

Correspondent Describes Surprising War Scene on the Rim of World. RUSSIA’S PORT ALL ASTIR British and French Uniforms Sighted —Austrian Prisoners Toll in Acres of Freight—Pasture Becomes Great Quay—An Odd Little Town.

By NIKOLAI KOSLOV.

(Correspondent of the Chicago News.) Moscow, Russia. —Up on the coast of the Arctic ocean, in a latitude north of Nome, I have just seen the arrival of a section of the Belgian army. This time last year the world was ringing with that gigantic hoax about a Russian army going to Belgium. Who would have dreamed that by October, 1915, an army of dapper little Flamands and Bruxellois, convoyed by British torpedo-boat destroyers, would sail around the top of the world and down the White sea to Russia and that Archangel would be invaded by Belgian gunners and armored automooile crews, roaring the “Brabanconne” and frescoing Russian transport trains with Rabelaisian sketches of victorious encounters with the Teuton? I found FTench soldiers and Belgian airmen and British bluejackets up there, too. And some hundreds of Austrian prisoners doing odd jobs in the docks. Scores of American Autor. It is quite a journey to Archangel. In America a train would have got one there between breakfast and supper. However, this is Russia. It takes two days and two nights. Among other traffic we passed on the sidings was a long stalled train of scores of American automobiles, doing the last lap of their Journey from the docks of Vladivostok.

The freight-car load of soldiers at the tail of it said they had been five weeks on their way. At Vologda I transshipped to the narrow gauge single-track line running 400 versts (267 miles) due north through the bleak subarctic tundra. It was a train with no springs, an incessant and abominable rattling and an eerie trick of buckjumping whenever the brakes were applied.

No Hurry About Double Tracking. They are supposed to be double tracking their little line, which the Germans installed, Osnabruck rails and all, in 1876 —double tracking and standard gauging it. It is the sole highway to the sole open Russian port, the only channel for the admission of munitions, apart from Vladivostok, thousands of miles east. All the foreign residents in Russia say that it should have been double tracked and broad gauged a year ago, at least. Even now, however, whoever is responsible for it seems to be playing with it. “I wonder,” a Frenchman remarked

to me on the train, "if they will have done this vitally necessary work by this time next year?” A few gangs of track laborers were going through the motions listlessly. Nor did the numerous gangs of convicts seem to be losing any sleep over their construction efforts.

For four and twenty hours we Jolted up the narrow groove, cleared through primeval forest and swamp. Already there was ice in the peaty streams meandering across our path and a powdering of snow on the murmuring cedars. Then we emerged into a district of stubble field and meadows. And suddenly into the thick of a great entrepot of freight. Pasture Becomes Great Quay. This was Bakareetsa, the main White sea railroad depot from which Russia's stores are coming. Along the Dvina bank, a strip of deserted cow pasture a few months ago, now is a great quay. Ten or twelve steamers were alongside unloading. Tens of thousands of tons of coal towered in hills and massive ridges. Rows on rows of turf-roofed leanto barracks housed the laborers. A score of sidings and acres of mud were stacked with packing cases and sacks and bales. Freighters with the colored painting of the bursting bomb betokened shells and dynamite within — regiments of freighters with everything aboard from aeroplanes to zylonite; rows of freight cars piled with great crates consigned from Cleveland, in Ohio, to Tiflis, in Asia Minor, via the environs of Spitzbergen and the watery wilderness of the Arctic ocean.

A few miles farther on the train stopped, still in a desolate region of muddy fields, for the Archangel terminus is not Archangel. We all crowded on to a steamer and navigated two miles downstream to the town, which lies on the other side of the Dvina estuary, here a couple of miles across. An odd little town is Archangel, with a pervasive atmosphere of remoteness and aloofness from the world. In summer there is no night, and the thawed swamps cut off all overland journeyings but those of mosquitoes and birds. In winter there is next to no day and the quarter mile of Troitskaja street lined with shops is all a-jingle with the bells of reindeer. Sinuous dog-sled caravans, laden with polar bear and wolf pelts, snake their way into the thronged bazaar, to barter for the summer’s bread. Busy Times in Archangel. Archangel is busy now. Archangel has never known such goings on. Soldiers and sailors and millions of tons of freight have come from the ends of the earth.

It is a town transformed into a freight yard—freight piled mountain high on the quays, waves of freight passing inland up the slope behind the custom house. All over the square there and overflowing into the main street itself lie acres and acres of bales and rails and crates and tubs and boxes, and tens of thousands of a mysterious breed of reddish sack. Archangel has original ideas about sidewalks that would not commend themselves to American motorists. Streets have these raised wooden sidewalks running up the center. Every now and then along these sidewalks passed British naval officers and seamen, intermingling with transplanted men of the Russian Baltic squadron. Past the shabby town duma, one enters what has hitherto been known as the German quarter, a long avenue of the best houses in town, running due north toward the suburb of Solombola.

Motor jitney boats, ferries, dinghies, tugs, liners, sailing skiffs, barges, ocean tramps and long log rafts from the forest of Viatka busy themselves out in the Dvina, well displayed against the low bank and flat horizon leagues to the westward, where dainty distant silhouettes of monasteries and churches fleck the rim of the earth. I passed a great red brick brewery on tho Dvina bank, converted into a Red Cross hospital. Convalescent soldiers were standing in the ward windows, gazing glumly upon about five acres of boxes of empties piled as high as a house. Not so bad for a little town of 20,000. At a marine departmental office on the Troitskaja was a fine automobile. The chauffeur was a Russian naval man, and its door was opened by a

British bluejacket orderly as the two admirals, Russian and British, came out. Prisoners Look Comfortable. Ahead, down the bank, appeared a great cluster of masts. That was the Solombola suburb, the lower docks of Archangel. I reached it by a wooden causeway bridging a broad creek, the banks of which are occupied by timber yards. Women were loading log barges. On the opposite bank, half a mile away, I saw gray figures moving. Austrian prisoners or German?

I came closer. Oh, Austrians. Austrians clean and very well clad in their warm, scarcely soiled uniforms and greatcoats. They were on general dock laboring jobs, mostly in a great field of bales of American cotton, surrounded* on all sides, except the river, by an eight-foot timber palisade, with sharpened tops. They looked well fed and cheerful. I might add here that whatever adverse criticisms may justly be made of the Russians, they treat their prisoners as gentlemen. The Russian is a pretty good fellow, from the human point of view —a natural born democrat and a sportsman.

There were a lot of guards about in Solombola, civilian armed, civilian unarmed and Russian soldiers. Unfamiliar passers-by are eyed suspiciously. At the dockyard entrance holes in the palisade stood civilian guards with belt loaded rifles slung across their backs. Above the gates were holy ikons, gilded pictures of saints, with two peculiar tippets of fur hanging from them.

There was an intensely interesting flow of traffic along this road to the Solombola docks, a medley of races, a library of odd human documents. Through the deep black mud passed wagons driven by slant-eyed Samoyeds, an Eskimolike tribe of the Russian arctic littoral, hnd skull-capped Mohammedan Tartars from the parched deserts of Turkestan. And there were carts driven by hairy Russian moujiks of the north, with huge reddish beards; and carts driven by clean-shaven dapper little Austrian prisoners, each with a civilian guard in tow. Cossack soldiers were on scampering ponies and Malo-Russian soldiers plodded afoot. British jack tars navigated the sidewalk with a fine, free roll and men of the imperial Russian navy walked in quick, short steps.

Sees Two French Soldiers. Just as I was passing the clanging foundry two French soldiers appeared, among the passers-by, real French poilus in their long blue greatcoats and baggy red breeches. What they were doing and whether or not they were forerunners of a big landing like that of the Belgians I do not know. In the main street of Archangel one afternoon I saw what I thought was a group of British army officers. I found they were Belgians in the new smart khaki uniform, closely copied from the British. A few Belgian soldiers appeared on the streets the following day, to the intense interest of the natives, many of whom took them for a new brand of Austrian.

Next morning Archangel was snowed Under with Belgian soldiers, mainly gunners and flying men and men well versed in running armored automobiles and perambulating forts. Little men, hardly bigger than Japanese, enveloped in blue greatcoats; the gunners with crossed cannon in red braid on their arms. Polite little men, too. Meeting on the step, they hold a shop door open for a woman to enter first, with a bow, and a “S’il vous plait, madame!”

It was difficult to get a shave in Archangel that day, though there are plenty of barber shops for the use of sailors. Rows of Belgian soldiers occupied the chairs and benches in the hinterland. It was next to impossible to get stamps at the post office because of the Belgians there.

Tn a group of Belgian officers in the Offitzerov restaurant was a priest, also in militant khaki. He was dressed like an officer, except for his fasten-behind clerical collar and a red, black and gold cross pinned to his breast. The gold tassel dangling from the front of the Belgian officer’s cap, by the way, is a cause of much giggling to the Russian maidens. For three days the Belgians remained. Then, as mysteriously as they had appeared, they faded away toward the south.