CHAPTER X EVERY ONE HIS OWN DIPLOMAT

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If I found time to see all Urga during my stay there it must have been due to the fact that it is not, after all, a large city, for most of my waking hours were of necessity spent in the various yamens. First, every new-comer must have a passport to remain in town; then we had to get permission from the war minister to carry them before our guns could be returned to us; there were endless negotiations involved in the matter of my confiscated kodak and films; finally, to mention only the high spots, any one leaving the country must have still another passport and fulfil numerous formalities. All these things would still have left some of my eleven days in Urga free if Mongol functionaries worked with even the deliberate speed of our own. But nowhere in all the Orient itself, probably, is the Oriental conception of time more fully developed, and when it came to shifting from one official or yamen to another a question on which no one wished to assume responsibility, these nomad herdsmen turned ink-daubers could “pass the buck” in a way to make our most experienced army officers green with envy.

Pious Mongol men and women worshiping before the residence of the “Living Buddha” of Urga, some by throwing themselves down scores of times on the prostrating-boards placed for that purpose, one by making many circuits of the place, now and again measuring his length on the ground

The Mongols of Urga dispose of their dead by throwing the bodies out on the hillsides, where they are quickly devoured by the savage black dogs that roam everywhere

Mongol women in full war-paint

Though it was still only September, our return from Urga was not unlike a polar expedition

Every American is his own diplomat in Urga, where no nation except Russia has official representatives, so that most of our dealings were with cabinet members, especially with the minister of foreign affairs. He was a typical high-class Mongol, with greasy cue and soiled silk gown, whose qualifications for his office were that he spoke Chinese, though those who know Urga politics say he is a man of ability and the most powerful of the Mongols in the present Government. The prime minister, though a lama and a saint not many degrees below Bogda-Han himself, resembled all the others in appearance, except of course for his missing cue and certain details of dress. All the yamens were much like that of justice, to which we had the first introduction. Scores of booted and quilt-robed functionaries squatted on the cushioned platforms about the rooms of frame buildings that would be described as European, though they were built by the Chinese. An honest day’s work for any one of them seemed to be the scratching full of upright words with a weazel-hair brush of a two-foot strip of flimsy tissue-paper, the more careful copying of which would constitute their next daily contribution. The fastening of a portrait on the flimsiest of passports known to diplomatic circles, by sewing it in with pink silk thread and securing the knot with a wax seal many times heavier than all the rest of the document, left the man who accomplished it a sensation similar to that of the famous village smithy on his way to his night’s repose. The filing of a corresponding caricature of the applicant in the national archives was usually turned over to another functionary, in order to equalize the arduous toil. Then, too, no member of the staff wished to miss anything of interest. Every scrap of letter or document which we presented must be carefully examined by the whole yamen force; if it was in Mongolian, each one, from the assistant minister who would eventually take it in to his chief down to the youth who prepared the sealing-wax and wore over his eyes the black, bandit-like horsehair bandage which is the Mongol substitute for eye-glasses, must read it from end to end, which meant that we were forced to listen to the same meaningless song a score of times, for the Mongol cannot read without singing the words aloud. In my efforts to convince the Government of the harmlessness of the snap-shotting I should do about town if they would be so kind as to return my apparatus, I ran across some copies of the most photographic of our monthly magazines, and carried them to the yamens. These created unrivaled interest. All other work, slight as it always was, invariably was abandoned forthwith, and the combined force took to studying and discussing the pictures, their capped heads crowded closely together. When, hours after our arrival, it came time for the minister to give us his attention, he, too, must spend half the afternoon looking at the magazines, and end by telling us to come to-morrow when he could find time to make a decision. The advertisements won fully as much and quite as serious attention as the genuine photographs in the letter-press, which proved another cause for delay. For I challenge any one to explain in English turned into Russian and finally into Mongolian that there is really no curious race of dwarfs in America in spite of the picture of a merry tot barely exceeding in height the can of soup beside which he has stood for years in so many of our national publications.

However, we came to know official Mongolia well, and to find some of these functionaries pleasant and almost lovable fellows underneath their curious garb and their atrophied sense of the value of time. Eventually, too, we got results from our endless squatting about the yamens. Exactly a week after our arrival, when we had seen almost every one in ostensible authority in Mongolia except Bogda-Han himself, a soldier came to summon us to the Okhrana, and before the afternoon was gone our guns and cartridges were actually returned to us. True, the strap had been stolen from my companion’s rifle, and we were “squeezed” again in veritable Chinese fashion in the payment of the fees involved, as with our passports, by being forced to pay in “Mex” dollars instead of the legal rubles and copecks; but we had long since lost any inclination to trouble over trifles. Besides, the lumps of silver in which Mongol government employees are intermittently paid do not constitute large salaries. Permission to shoot lead, however, was not the chief motive of my yamen-chasing; I wished to turn my kodak on some of the curious types of Urga. The foreign minister having at length given me verbal permission to do so, I spent a morning in the office of the military staff—a dismal pair of little rooms occupied by a dozen gloomy and shoddy-clad Russian men and women dawdling over maps and translations—and finally interviewed the chief of staff himself. He was a tall, aristocratic-looking Russian who had been a major under the czar, but who held, of course, no rank in the “Red” scheme of things, though a kind of Cossack uniform flapped about his emaciated form and he occupied a position which in other lands would have called for at least a colonel. My hopes rose high, for here at last was a man with human intelligence enough to know that my simple request did not mean treason to the state. When the new supplication I was asked to write had been turned into Russian, he took it personally to the war minister. The interview was long, and though I was not invited to it myself, I knew that my case was being thoroughly discussed, for the minister spent some time in staring at me out of the window. Then the chief of staff returned my request with an annotation by his ostensible superior that the war department was quite willing to grant me the requested permission—if the minister of foreign affairs would also do so! I thought the struggle was won at last and that it was merely a question of awaiting the final papers with Mongolian patience; for had not the foreign minister already given such permission, if only by word of mouth? I no longer took with a grain of salt, however, the statement of my host that he had made twenty-one visits to the yamens for the simple purpose of getting a permit to ship some of his own horses out of the country.

Two days after this appeal to the chief of staff a soldier met me in the street and handed me a Mongol document. Every one having promised me permission to use my kodak again, I called at once at the Okhrana and asked that it be returned to me. The surly, slouch-hatted churl at the head of that institution, after letting me stand the usual half-hour without deigning to acknowledge my existence, looked at me in a queer way and grumbled something about “to-morrow.” Perhaps the document in my hand was not what I fancied it to be. I went out to have it translated.

It is only by the exercise of the sternest self-control that I refrain from quoting that remarkable paper in its entirety. Not that it ranks high as a literary production, nor that it is intrinsically of any particular interest; but there are probably few better specimens of that frankness in diplomatic relations between nations which has been of late so loudly demanded. Written on the usual long strip of tissue-paper folded crosswise and opening like an accordion, it proved to contain a yard or more of perpendicular Mongol script, authenticated at both ends by the big square red stamp of an official seal. A lengthy preamble led up to the statement that, “inasmuch as an individual named S——, calling himself an American consul,” had during a visit to Urga some months before been in conversation with those members of a conspiracy against the People’s Government of Mongolia who had since been executed for treason, he “had made to perish the good name of the great American nation,” and therefore said Government could no longer believe any American, verbally or in writing, wherefore permission was refused me... and so on, to the length of a treaty of peace. However, a little rÉsumÉ of recent Mongolian history and politics is essential to the full understanding of this tidbit of amateur diplomacy; for such it was, for all its ostensibly private nature, since it was plain that it had been written in the hope that I would bring it to the attention of our Government, with whom Outer Mongolia had no regular means of communicating.

Soon after the revolution that made China nominally a republic, Outer Mongolia broke the ties which had bound it rather loosely for centuries to the Chinese Empire. The new Chinese Government had other problems on its hands, and for several years nothing serious was done to regain the allegiance of this vast territory, which had declared its independence without being very strict in such matters as completely expelling all Chinese officials. In 1917 there was organized in China under Japanese instructors an army-corps of twenty thousand Chinese, who were to take the enemy ships interned in Shanghai, sail for France, and win the war. But the armistice overtook these preparations and left the question of what to do with the troops on which so much training had been spent. Some genius at length suggested that they be made a “Northeastern Defense Corps,” and half the twenty thousand were sent to Urga under command of a general popularly known in China as “Little Hsu,” one of those choice morsels of humanity who had to his credit such actions as having a rival assassinated in his garden after inviting him to luncheon. All testimony seems agreed that these Chinese troops played havoc in Urga and vicinity, particularly after China had deprived Russians of their extraterritorial rights and after the “little worm” of a Russian consul who had been instrumental in having the expedition sent had departed. They began boldly looting and killing Russians as well as Mongols, and it was but a slight shift from that to attacking foreigners still entitled to extraterritorial privileges. Before matters grew serious enough to prod the powers to action, however, word came that a White Russian force was moving on Urga. “Little Hsu” ran away, leaving General Chu in command. The latter planned to kill all the foreigners left, according to his own assertion, then lost his nerve as the Russians drew near, and fled before his army; and when next seen by any of his intended victims he was basking in the hero-admiring smiles of foreign ladies and their escorts at a dance in the principal hotel of Peking.

The Russians under Ungern, justly known as the “Mad Baron,” entered Urga in October, 1920, and with the aid of Mongol troops chased the disorganized Chinese corps over the southern border of Outer Mongolia. It was then that the Paris-to-Peking telegraph line ceased to function for lack of poles. Bleached Chinese skeletons still lay scattered along the road to Kalgan when I made the journey to Urga. Ungern was one of those products of generations of Russian brutality who seem to find their keenest pleasure in bloodthirsty acts. In Urga he grew more and more mad, indiscriminately killing Mongols and Russians suspected of “Red” sympathies, and topping this off one February day in 1921 by a general slaughter of the Jewish inhabitants. Every Russian, he explained, hates a Jew; besides, the Bolshevik rÉgime with which he was at swords’ points was and is still mainly in the hands of Jews, a fact not fully realized in our land because of the muffling Jewish hand on our press, but which it is essential to keep in mind in any study of present Russian problems. So deep was his hatred of these people that he refused to waste ammunition on them; they were despatched instead by splitting open their skulls with sabers. Foreigners still living in Urga describe the streets as shambles, strewn everywhere with the corpses of Jewish men, women, and children, even of babies with their brains oozing out amid the dust and rubbish. All speak of the curious fact that many bodies lay for days where they had fallen, without a dog’s coming near them, as if even these brutes had been frightened by the madness of the baron—or had eaten to satiety. As the soldiers reveling in the pogrom depended mainly on a hasty glance to identify their victims, not a few foreigners whose physiognomy was deceiving passed some very unpleasant moments. Such sights as two Mongols and a white woman hanging from the same gatepost, the woman a poor part-witted creature who maintained even in death a ludicrous expression of inane hauteur, are still recalled by the surviving foreign residents.

At length the Bolsheviks, having first, according to their own assertions, pleaded with the Chinese for several months to join them in the expedition and catch the “Mad Baron” between them, sent an army into Mongolia. The personal amusements of the baron do not seem to have had much weight in bringing about this decision, for the “Reds” themselves have a well developed taste for flowing blood; but they had begun to worry lest the Ungern group become the nucleus of a “White” force large enough to jeopardize their own security. Moreover, being true fanatics, they were eager to bring Mongolia the dismal gospel of their strange faith. The “Reds” entered Urga in July, 1921, and have been there ever since. In those notes for publication with which governments of all colors attempt to fool their neighbors, their own people, and even themselves, the present rulers of Russia assure us that they have only a corporal’s guard in Urga, merely as a protection against a new “White” gathering, and that the Mongols rule themselves without outside interference. Even the handsome and polished Jewish gentleman who under the title of Russian consul represents the Soviet in Urga, will tell you in any one of half a dozen languages, if you take the trouble to call at his perfectly consular office adorned with a large signed portrait of Lenin in a building flaunting a faded red flag, that he is only a lone foreigner in town, like you, and that he has little influence with the Mongol Government. But if he keeps from visibly smiling as he makes this assertion, it is a sign that the urbanity which he displayed at the time of his expulsion from the United States has improved rather than diminished.

It is true that there are not more than two or three hundred Russian Soviet soldiers in Urga. Having painted the town “Red,” and seen to it that a Mongolian “People’s Government” of that color was installed, no great force is needed to see that the ideas of Moscow are carried out. The cabinet ministers ostensibly ruling the country are all Mongols, but at their elbow, just out of sight, sits a Russian “adviser” whose advice is never scorned with impunity. I still recall the scene when a Russian subaltern from the military staff brought the foreign minister a document that needed his signature to make it legal. As the minister began perusing it, the expression on the face of the subaltern said as plainly as if he had spoken the words, “Read it, you old beggar, if you want to waste the time, but you will sign it whether you wish to or not.” Thus the “advice” reaching Urga through the telegrams from Moscow that pour in upon the “powerless” Russian consul in a steady if slender stream seeps down through all grades of the “People’s Government” of independent Mongolia.

It has been a long way around, but we have at last come back again to that example of amateur diplomacy in which my simple prayer was denied, and a backhanded fillip given incidentally to all citizens of “the great American nation.” It is true, even as the document alleges, that an American named S—— did come to Urga a few months before my arrival, and he does not deny that he had conversation with some of the fifteen Mongols, one of them the former prime minister, another a saint high in the lama hierarchy, most of them as splendid fellows as could be found in Mongolia, who were shot a fortnight before I got there, on the charge of conspiring to overthrow the “People’s Government.” That he “called himself an American consul” is not surprising, in view of the fact that our State Department does also, and pays him a salary accordingly. Nor is there any cause for astonishment in the fact that he hobnobbed as much as possible with the most polished Mongols with whom he could come in contact, if only to avoid still greasier robes. In short, S—— is our consul at Kalgan, in whose district all Mongolia is included. Neither China nor the United States, nor in fact any nation except Soviet Russia, has ever recognized the independence of Outer Mongolia. By the law of nations, therefore, so far as any such thing exists, it is still a province of China and a part of one of our Chinese consular districts, where Americans are still entitled to extraterritorial rights and subject to trial only by their own diplomatic or consular officers. Soon after his appointment S—— hurried up to Urga to study the situation. The Mongols in power evidently hoped that his visit was inspired by an intention on the part of our Government to recognize their independence. When nothing of the kind followed, they became more and more resentful. The animosity of the “Reds,” who look upon the United States as the chief of the “capitalistic nations” opposed to their sad scheme of things, served to increase this feeling, at least with the “Red” Mongols just now in the saddle; there are many evidences that among the Mongols at large nothing has “made to perish the name of the great American nation.” That any American consul would promise a minority group in a foreign country that he would “put them in touch with the enemy of our people on the east” (by which was meant the Chinese in general and Chang Tso-lin in particular) “and give his assistance in the liquidation of the existing People’s Government of Mongolia and the restoration of the old rÉgime,” as was charged in the reply to my request, is as silly as that document itself.

But enough of politics, which to my simple mind is usually a bore. I might add, however, as a personal chuckle, that my case came perilously near causing a ministerial crisis and overturning the Mongol cabinet. Not that this is anything to boast of in these days when cabinets almost daily stump their toes on this or that insignificant pebble and sprawl headlong; but it was some satisfaction to know that, if I could not snap-shot Urga, at least I could put it in an uproar. The cabinet, it seems, deeply resented the action of the upstart Okhrana, both in replying to me direct and in reversing the decision of the ministers, and the question of resigning en bloc as a protest was, I am creditably informed, debated long and vigorously. I could not of course, even as an unofficial representative of the slandered American nation, take such an attack as the Okhrana document lying down. I replied to it sternly, therefore, in proper diplomatic form, addressing myself to the foreign minister, who received my reply in due humility. But my hope that by thus again stirring things up I might still succeed in being the cause of a national crisis did not, according to the latest reports from Urga, materialize.

There can be no other reason than pique or pure ignorance for refusing any one permission to take photographs in Urga. It has no fortresses or works of defense surrounded with secrecy; as far as the presence of Soviet soldiers and “advisers” is concerned, the lens could catch nothing that could not be told as effectively in words. Simple, rather brute-faced young Russians in shoddy gray uniforms with a red star sewed upon them were about the only outward evidences of Bolshevik occupation. Here or there one or two of them stood on guard with fixed bayonets which they were even more careless than the average soldier in flourishing about unoffending ribs. Others, off duty, prowled about singly or in small groups in quest of anything appealing to their rudimental appetites which might turn up. Out toward the wireless station erected by the Chinese, where the Russian soldiers used the war-ruined office of an American mining company as barracks, detachments of fifty to a hundred of them might be met marching in close ranks at a funeral pace and singing in chorus, a rather engaging custom inherited from czarist days. It was evident, not merely from their appearance but by the way any suggestion of authority went quickly to their heads, that almost all these uncouth youths were of the peasant or the lowest city class. Though I had business in the Okhrana several times a day during all my stay in Urga, never once was I permitted to enter it, even when officially summoned, until whatever dull-faced soldier happened to be on guard at the door had halted me long enough to emphasize his authority and his dislike of the class which still dared to wear white collars. What was worse, as in every case of evil example copied by still lower strata of society, was the studied rudeness, the childish yet overbearing insolence of the Mongol soldiers, who were much more numerous, in their efforts to outdo in “redness” their Russian models.

It was common rumor that there were many “radishes” among the Russians stationed in Urga, which would account for the exceptions to the general rule of simple, plebeian faces among the soldiers as well as among those in more important positions. A “radish,” obviously, is a man who is red on the outside but white within, and the term has of late years become one of every-day speech in Russia. Many former officers of the czar, many a member of the old aristocracy whom one would least expect to find backing the new proletarian doctrine, have no other means of earning their bread than to accept some small position under the Bolsheviks and pretend to be in sympathy with their program. How many of these there are in Russia and adjoining lands who will turn upon their present rulers when they show definite signs of falling is a question not without interest to the outside world, but one which no casual visitor can answer. It is said, also, that men are very glad to be assigned to duty in Urga, where there is at least plenty to eat, in contrast to Russia where nearly every one is more or less starving. Yet there are Russian civilians even in Urga who know the pangs of hunger. Such utter poverty and abject beggary as may be seen in Harbin or Vladivostok among refugees from the Bolshevik rÉgime are not found in this bucolic land of comparative plenty, but barefoot children and the leanest faces were never those of the Mongols. I recall in particular the widow of an official wantonly killed by the “Mad Baron,” a young woman who might have been charming under happier circumstances, who dwelt with her lanky little daughter in a kind of two-room hut occupied by at least half a dozen other persons, and who shivered past our window every morning and evening to and from some sort of physical toil that had already given her the hands of a peasant woman.

Far be it from me to condemn any honest attempt to work out a new and better form of government, for certainly I should pin no blue ribbons on any which so far exist. But even a few days in Urga under “Red” rule could scarcely fail to convince any one not hopelessly prejudiced in its favor that the “Red” system does not improve human felicity, which after all, though that fact seems almost completely to have been lost sight of the world over, is the only justification for any government. Bad as opposing systems may be, this one was patently worse, if only because it brings the dregs and sediment of society to the top and submerges the purer liquid. It places the ignorant over the more or less instructed, the rude and the malevolent over those who are at least polished enough to be somewhat tolerant; it brings to the surface the residue of savagery in the human race and immerses many of the improvements that have been accomplished by long centuries of effort. I was particularly struck by this aspect of things on the evening when I attended the weekly Spektakl with which European Urga is permitted to attempt to amuse itself. That, like the government which sponsored it, was as if the stokers had come up and taken possession of the cabin and insisted on using only the meager talents to be found in their own ranks, though those who had given their best efforts for generations to providing better entertainment still tarried in the obscure corners into which the irruption had driven them.

While they might as easily have led these childlike people of the Gobi toward better things, the “Reds” seem only to have improved the natural cussedness of those Mongols upon whom they have had any influence whatever. The two races have, to be sure, many qualities more or less in common, and a history which dovetails here and there. The Mongols under Jenghiz Khan defeated the Russians, destroyed Kieff, and made almost all Russia tributary to them. Out on the edge of Urga stands a long row of European barracks built by the Russians in czarist days as a part of their program of training a great Mongol army. In other words, it has been give-and-take between these neighboring races for centuries, and, shading together as they do through the intermediate Buriats and Kalmucks, they seem much more closely allied than Europe and Asia in general. In fact, seeing the two side by side, one was more and more struck with how Oriental are the Russians. They are Oriental, for instance, in their cruelty, and while they can perhaps teach little of that quality to a people who until yesterday placed condemned criminals in stout boxes and left them out among the skulls and dogs to die, they have certainly done nothing to soften their innate barbarism. Surely it is no worse to cut open the body of an executed felon in quest of some organ of fancied medicinal value than to sentence two of the most cultivated and charming young Russian ladies in Urga to serve the “Red” army in Siberia for five years in punishment for the atrocious crime committed by one of them in being the wife of a “White” officer—for “serving” a “Red” army in this sense means something quite different from sewing on buttons by day, something which makes a five-year term easily a life sentence.

Though they were on the whole surly now toward strangers in general and Caucasians in particular, one felt instinctively that this was not natural Mongol behavior. For they are a simple people, close to nature, a race with lovable traits for all their obvious faults. Three years ago, say those who knew it then, Urga was as free as air, a delightful place to visit, for all its filth and superstition. Hardly a Mongol but had a smile and a cheery, jocular greeting for any one, of whatever race, be it only at a chance meeting in the street. If now the atmosphere of the whole place kept the nerves taut, it was rather because of things that had recently been imposed upon them from the outside, things which they might or might not wish, but which they have no choice but to accept. In the olden days the visitor to Urga came and went, carried on business or loafed, and never met the slightest interference with his personal freedom. Now, though the European colony may stroll at sunset a few times back and forth along the noisome stream oozing past the market-place, no one may go out at night without imminent danger of spending the rest of it in clammy durance. This rule, added to the double windows of most houses, covered with wooden shutters, Russian fashion, gives the nights a deathly silence, only occasionally broken by the barking of foraging dogs, hoarse-voiced as if they all had heavy colds from sleeping outdoors. A humorous touch may soften this general atmosphere of apprehension, for the “Red” and Mongol idea seems to be that only those who sneak noiselessly along the dark streets can be bent on mischief, and the small non-Russian foreign colony have found it efficacious in returning from their dinner-parties to sing and whoop at the tops of their voices to convince prowling soldiers that they are innocent of any evil intent.

It is risky now even to use the word Guspadin, a kind of Russian “Mr.,” before any name, in any language; one is expected to say Tavarish, meaning comrade. When they first came, the “Reds” showed every intention of introducing the same communism in Mongolia as in Russia. They demanded all title-deeds of real property, announcing that they would rent everything of the kind for thirty years to the highest bidder, no matter who the owner might be. The agents of foreign firms replied that the titles to their company buildings were on file with their legations at Peking, or at the home offices in America or Europe, or gave some other plausible answer, and, though copies of them were demanded, these were returned later with the information that they were of no use. Mongols and Russians, however, have in many cases been made communists willy-nilly, and some have already been stripped even of personal property. Those who have been in both places say that interference with peaceful pursuits is worse in Urga than it ever was in Soviet Russia. Merchants are particularly bitter, because while business is growing steadily better in Russia since the decree legalizing it, here it is being taxed to death. It is difficult to get a frank statement from the mistrusting Chinese merchants, who make up a majority of the trading class; but it is hard to believe that they are any more satisfied with the often confiscatory as well as burdensome methods of the “Red” authorities than are the disheartened foreigners. Every import or export, for instance, must pay a very high duty based on the retail selling price. Fines for technicalities and the often unavoidable breaking of some silly rule are the order of the day, while on top of the cost comes the wasted time and effort caused by the inexperience of the Mongols in matters of government. A caravan of sixty camels bringing in or taking out bales of marmot skins must halt for two or three days while every skin is counted and the bales made up again. When an Anglo-American branch got in a shipment of cigarettes, every one of the ninety-eight packages in each of the seventy-two cases had to be counted. Why they did not count each cigarette remains a mystery. The same rule applies to bricks of tea, cakes of chocolate, and the most minute of articles.

Not long after their arrival the “Reds” passed a law making the Russian silver ruble legal tender on a par with the “Mex” dollar and requiring every one to accept it as such. When an American firm protested that this meant a loss of 40 per cent on prices, and refused to comply, it was heavily fined. Moreover, the fine was paid, legal rights of extraterritoriality notwithstanding. It is small wonder that foreign stock is scarce in Urga and that important firms are closing their branches there. So far as I was able to find, the “Reds” had introduced only one reform worth while: they had decreed that Mongol women must give up their extravagant head-dress, saying that the silver with which it is heavy could be used to better purpose. Some twoscore head-dresses were seized, but even Bolsheviks learn in time that feminine fashions cannot be decreed by lawmakers; they returned the confiscated contrivances later, and the custom remains. In fact, all the “Reds” in Urga have not done as much for the handful of the human race there as have three brave Swedish girls who are fighting alone the most wide-spread of Mongolia’s physical diseases with missionary zeal and without making any noise about it.

Whatever other forms of violence the Soviet has used in its efforts to make neighboring Mongolia a first convert and a nation after its own heart, it has not dared openly attack the “Living Buddha.” The fanatical Mongols would almost certainly kill all foreigners in the country, irrespective of nationality, if their blind god were molested; though the rumor is rife that the “Reds” have threatened to deal with him as with the former prime minister if he uses his influence against them. Outwardly they try as hard to keep up the fiction that he is the head of the Mongol Government as they do to convince the world that they have no real hand in the latter. The official bulletin, only newspaper in Urga, in announcing the execution of the fifteen alleged conspirators, called attention to the law which decrees that those who try to change the form of government shall be cut up in small pieces, their immediate family banished two thousand versts from the capital, all their property confiscated, and all their relatives sent as slaves to distant princes. There are many such slaves in Mongolia, by the way; Bogda-Han has thousands of them, just as he has of cattle. But, added the official organ, the family and the property of these fifteen were not molested, by order of the “Living Buddha!” It is true that the title Bogda-Han means emperor, but he was long since shorn of any temporal power, not to mention the fact that he is said to have no sympathy whatever for the “Reds” or any of their works.

It is common belief that the Chinese will never return to power in Urga. A recent despatch from a Japanese source asserting that Moscow has declared Mongolia a federated state of Russia has not been confirmed, but it might as well be that in name as well as in fact. As I write, a story comes through that the “Living Buddha” is asking China to take charge of the country once more, but that again is from a Chinese source. The hard, cold facts in political matters are difficult to find in such a double-faced realm as the Orient. But the future of Mongolia will be worth watching, as will the apparent tendency of the Soviet to continue the imperialistic thrust toward the south and east which it inherited from the czarist rÉgime.

As if they wished to make up for their earlier harshness, the “Reds” made my departure from Urga extremely easy. Perhaps I should see a less flattering motive in their leniency. In any case my baggage was barely opened and shut again, though most travelers find departing a more trying ordeal than arrival, and ordinarily every line of writing leaving the country is rigidly censored. The only unpleasantness that befell us was the failure of the greasy Mongol holding the official seal to reach the Okhrana before noon, though we had been there ready to start since eight. Booted soldiers again rode with us to the far outskirts of the city, halting us at various yamens, so that the sun was well started on its decline before our papers were examined at the last yourt, and we were free to reach if possible the first distant stopping-place before nightfall. Not until the next afternoon, however, when the frontier outpost of Ude passed us without comment, did that sense of apprehension which seems just now to hang like a cloud over Outer Mongolia give way to one of relief and confidence of the future.

Long caravans that we had passed a fortnight before were still laboriously making their way toward Urga. Men all but unrecognizable as such under their many sheepskin garments still squatted at trenches dug in the desert, coaxing wind-shielded fires to blaze, or bowed their fur-clad heads to the bitterly cold wind sweeping at express speed down out of the north; and we drove for nearly a hundred miles through fields of snow and ice, though September was not yet gone when we stumbled down the pass into Kalgan.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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