Читать книгу The Cable Game. The Adventures of an American Press-Boat in Turkish Waters During the Russian Revolution онлайн

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Forty miles we rode that day over dusty highways that wound their way through waving fields of the whispering kowliang (or millet) that bent and swayed in the breeze. A few hours’ sleep at Tieling in a deserted shell-torn Russian house, then a five hours’ pounding over rough rails in a box car and we were back once more at the Grand Headquarters of the army at Moukden.

Here we paid our final respects to the officers of the staff whom we had known off and on for nearly two years. A few hours passed, and again we were on the train. This time it is a ten hour stretch in a third class car to Newchwang, the end of the neutral and uncensored cable.

In the early hours of the morning, with typewriter on my army trunk, half a column cable was pounded out, and that afternoon the Chicago News printed the first cable from the field of what the army thought of peace. A day’s delay in Newchwang to sell my horse, then two nights on a B. & S. freight steamer to Chefoo, and thence by boat and rail two days more to Peking, and a white man’s hotel. No one who has not lived in a Chinese village, surrounded by the filth and vermin of a Manchu compound, during the rainy season, with water trickling through the roof on the inside and mud two feet deep without, can quite realize what a bed, a bath, clean clothes and good “chow” means. Two hours after arriving, a blue-clad Chinese boy handed in a cable from Chicago. It ran: “Await further instructions, Peking.”