Escaped from the land of the Tsar—What they learn—Robbed at the frontier—How they reached London—The terrors of rejection—How some outcasts get on.

IT is six o'clock on Sunday evening. It has been a wild, wet, February day, but with the twilight the rain has ceased, and a mist has come up from the river, wrapping the East End in a cold grey gloom.

Outside the newspaper shops in Aldgate flaring placards announce the latest disaster to the Russian army at the seat of war, and the internal troubles with which the empire of the Tsar is faced.

Looking at the placards, the war seems far away. The unfamiliar—to our eyes and ears almost barbarous—names of the Manchurian towns and rivers suggest illimitable space between the East in which we find ourself and the Far East where a yellow and a white race are writing history with swords for pens and seas of blood for ink, and are punctuating the pages with shot and shell.

Yet only a stone's-throw from where we stand in High Street, Aldgate, we may study real flesh and blood pages torn from the story of the war between Russia and Japan.

Thousands of Londoners pass daily along the great East End highway, and have not the faintest shadow of suspicion that within a few yards of them are hundreds of soldiers—men who have fought in the present war—men who have been in Japanese hospitals—men who have fled to escape further service, who have endured the most terrible hardships, who have, some of them, seen their comrades shot down by their side—Russian soldiers killed by Russian soldiers.

If we turn off the main road and strike down Leman Street, we shall come to a large private house, on the door-plate of which the words "The Jews' Free Shelter" are inscribed.

A few strange-looking men in sea-stained coats and high boots are standing about on the pavement, silent and solemn, with a dull, anxious look in their eyes.

We recognize the Jewish Shelter, look at the little groups, say to ourselves, "More alien immigrants," and perhaps pass on.

But if we go round to the back of the house we find ourselves in a narrow street which ends in a dead wall. And in this street, standing four deep in a line that stretches right away to the wall itself, are hundreds of the soldiers of the Tsar. They are all Jews, they have all escaped from Russia at the risk of their lives. Most of them had only a few roubles in their pockets. But they have come from Russia—some even from Manchuria—and they are here to-night in the quiet, deserted London street waiting their turn to go before the committee which is sitting in the big room of the Shelter to hear their stories, and see what can be done to help them to make a new home thousands of miles away across the seas.

Two London policemen and an inspector are standing in the roadway. They are there to preserve order among these six or seven hundred Russian reservists. But their office is a sinecure. These hunted men, fresh from a land of tyranny, are silent, cowed, incapable of anything but the blindest obedience to the authority of the land to which they have fled seeking a City of Refuge.

There is no need for the policemen to speak to them. If they did, no one in the thickly packed mob of men would understand them. None of the refugees speak a word of English; Yiddish—the German-Jewish jargon—is their mother tongue; but most of them, having been in the army, speak a little Russian.

The inspector, finding that the crowd is spreading over into the roadway, makes a motion with his hand, and the men press closer together. They understand the gesture, and obey it as quickly as they would obey the upraised whip of the Cossack.

They have not yet learnt that in England no one in authority will knock them about or kick them. If they were so used they would not show any resentment. It is the way in which they have been habitually treated in Russia. Sometimes one of their own number, placed in temporary authority to assist the staff of the Shelter, clears a way for someone to pass by, thrusting his compatriots back with a little violence. He does not understand that there is anything unusual in this method of giving an order. When it is explained to him that in England we don't lay hands upon peaceable people in this way, he is astonished. What a wonderful country! The great people don't knock a poor Jew off the footpath! They speak to him civilly! It takes a newly arrived Russian Jew many days to understand that he is going to be treated like a human being, and that even the police will not kick him or hit him on the head if he is unfortunate enough to be in the way.

This Sunday evening there are more than six hundred refugees waiting to enter the doors of the Shelter and go before the committee. During the week over a thousand have arrived. They are mostly the reservists who have been called up and have fled to avoid further service. They have served once—many of them have only just finished their time and returned to their wives and families. They don't want to go to Manchuria. They are Jews; and the Jew serves the Tsar under grievous disabilities. He cannot rise in rank. If he is killed, no information is forwarded to his relatives. In Russia, a Jew is outside the pale of humanity.

Let us pass into the building. We have left a packed army of men standing dumb and motionless outside. Here in a kind of courtyard is another silent and motionless crowd. Two hundred men at least are crowded together, and not a sound comes from their lips. They look like statues of despair. Their one feeling is of relief that they are now inside the Shelter, and so their chance of getting before the committee to-night is better.

We pass from this courtyard to an inner room. It is packed. We have seen already nearly a thousand deserters from the Tsar's army. The Shelter cannot provide accommodation for a tenth of this vast army of fugitives. But every one will get a ticket that will give him food and a lodging. So much these unhappy immigrants know. What they do not know is whether they will be helped to America, to Canada, to the Argentine, to any of the lands where there are Jewish colonies, and where they will be able to toil and save, and in time send for the wives and children left behind in Russia to join them.

All of them have paid the fare to London. Some of them have hidden about them the fare to America or Canada. But others are penniless. They have been robbed at the Russian frontier. They have had to part with every rouble to pass the officials. Sometimes they have given up everything to the sentries to save themselves from being shot down.

It is a peaceful Sunday evening in London, but here are all the horrors of war. And of all London's myriad people, only a few active sympathizers in the Jewish community know of this human tragedy working itself out in London's heart.

Let us leave these unhappy ones massed together in quiet street, in crowded yard, and in the packed room, and pass into another room in which the committee are now sitting, as they will sit on far into the night, examining every man in turn as to his trade, his means, and his prospect of earning a living if room is found for him in one of the ships which the sympathy and philanthropy of their co-religionists have secured for these poor wandering Jews.

Let us sit at one of the long deal tables at which members of the committee are cross-examining the applicants for guidance and assistance, receiving money, making out tickets, and dispatching the refugees to various parts of the world.

A squarely built man of about thirty, pale, haggard, and with a hunted look in his eyes, comes forward. He tells his story. He is a builder of wooden houses. He had served his time, and had been home but for a few weeks, when he was ordered to rejoin. He talked the matter over with some fellow-reservists. They made up their minds to escape. They sold their possessions, got together a little money from their friends, and started. There were six of them, and they got into a train. After travelling a long time they came to a station, at which the carriage was entered by soldiers, who dragged four of the company out. The men were charged with being deserters. Two of the company remained in the train; the man standing now at the table was one of them. But they knew their turn would come, so they scrambled out on the other side of the line and ran for their lives across the country.

A party of soldiers started in pursuit. The men reached a river and leapt in. The soldiers fired and killed one. The man at the table swam to the opposite bank and made good his escape. For many hours he went on and on in his wet clothes, shivering with cold, his limbs benumbed. He endured the most terrible privations; but at last he reached the frontier, got into Germany, and with the money concealed about him purchased a ticket to London.

He stands before us in London to-night, waiting to know where the committee can send him for the roubles which he still has left. He receives a ticket for a ship leaving for Canada, drops a knee in the Russian manner of salutation, and goes forth gleefully into the street to think out the future in the London lamplight.

The man who takes his place is a fine-looking young fellow. Where has he come from? When he is asked, he answers, "Mukden."

Everyone at the table looks up at that. Is it possible that a Russian deserter has made his way from Mukden to Whitechapel? Yes. Here are the facts vouched for, proved beyond dispute.

This man had been serving a year in the Mukden garrison. During a sortie he, with some hundreds of other Russian soldiers, was forced on to a frozen river. The ice gave way, and they all fell in, the Japs firing at them from the bank. An officer in the same regiment as the Jewish soldier was wounded in the head, and was sinking, when the Jew got hold of him and swam with him to the bank. The officer was taken to the hospital, and the Jewish soldier followed him there shortly afterwards, suffering from pneumonia.

The Jew got well, but the officer died after lingering some weeks. Before his death he got the Jew called to him, and said, "You've been good to me—here, take these three hundred roubles—all I have—and get out of this hell as soon as you."

The Jew managed to escape, got rid of his uniform, and made his way across Siberia, now tramping, now travelling by chance conveyances. He reached Moscow in ten weeks. Thence he came to the Shelter in Whitechapel.

Here is a well-set-up young fellow; he is six feet, a height not common among Russian Jews. He wants to go to America, where he has friends. This is the story he tells. Again it shows the Russian officer in a new light. I will call the man Marcovitch. Even in these pages it would not be wise to give his real name, for the agents of the Tsar have keen eyes and are everywhere.

He was orderly to the colonel of the regiment. When the regiment was about to leave on active service, the colonel thought that Marcovitch was too good to go out and get shot. He did not, however, like to tell him in so many words to desert, so this is what he did. The regiment was stationed on the German frontier, so the colonel told Marcovitch he wanted him to cross over into the nearest German town to make some purchases for him there. At the same time he gave him two sealed envelopes, which Marcovitch was not to open till he got into German territory. When he opened them he found that one contained instructions how to get to England, and the other rouble notes for £10. Marcovitch took the hint and the money, and arrived safely in Whitechapel.

These are exceptional cases. Most of the stories that are told are tales of misery and despair, of homes broken up, of wives and children left behind, of terrible journeys and hairbreadth escapes, of freedom purchased at a price almost as terrible as death itself.

Almost every man of the hundreds thronging the Shelter and its annexes to-night has served his time with the colours. Hardly any are recruits. Most of the men have left dear ones behind them—dear ones who are still ignorant of the fate that may have befallen the fugitive. And all of them are prepared to go anywhere—to the most distant parts of the earth—if only they can be free to work and make a new home for their kindred in some land of liberty.

All, before they are sent away, even though they have the money to pay their passage, will have to pass a medical examination. If they are suffering from certain forms of disease they will be refused on the other side. The victims of persecution in Russia and Roumania have ere this made the journey of thousands of miles to the New World only to be refused admittance, and to be sent back again across the sea. It is a terrible picture to dwell upon—a miserable fellow-creature, ill, weak, despairing, refused a foothold everywhere—a storm-tossed human waif, whose one crime is that he dared to cling to the faith of his fathers in the land of the Great White Tsar.

Those who cannot hope to be received in America or Canada, or who are unfit to be sent to the Jewish colonies, are told so plainly, and at once. Every effort is made to get them out of London, and they are kindly treated.

But these Jewish immigrants are never utterly disheartened. Self-preservation is an instinct of the race.

I saw a man turned away regretfully by the committee one night. He had but a few shillings in his pocket. A week later I saw the same man with a basket in the Lane selling stockings at a shilling a pair. A fortnight later he had a little barrow with goods for sale on it. When I heard from him last, he had sent to Russia for his wife, and had opened a little shop in the Ghetto.

There are men in the city of London engaged in large businesses, and employing hundreds of Christian hands in manufactures not previously carried on in England, and these men came from Russia and Poland poor persecuted Jews, with but a few shillings in the world to call their own. If I were to make a list of the big Jewish manufacturers and tradesmen, and Jewish men of learning and of science, who came to this country poor alien immigrants, the revelation would be an astounding one.

But we must not stay now to look back or to look forward. The people to whose stories we are listening to-day have left the past behind them, and their future is an unknown quantity. The present is to them a problem which shuts out all other considerations.

Here is a refugee who fled from a city of massacre. He had been wounded in a riot at Ekaterinoslav. During the riot his brother disappeared, and it was supposed that he had been killed and quietly buried by the authorities.

When this man gives his name it is a peculiar one. A member of the committee remembers that some time previously a man with a similar name had come to the Shelter from Russia, and had been sent to America. The books are referred to, and a full description of the man is found.

It is the brother who was supposed to be dead. The poor applicant is overjoyed. He receives his ticket for America, and goes from the room almost hysterical with joy. He is going across the seas to find in the new land the brother whom he had mourned as dead.

A young woman comes before the committee with tears in her eyes. She has her ticket for the Argentine. What does she want?

She tells a pathetic little story. Five years ago her only sister left Russia and came to London. She sent her address to her relatives. The girl who is now before the committee has accompanied her husband, a reservist. When she left home she took her sister's last letter with the address on it and put it with her few belongings. She has lost the letter. She has been all day tramping about trying to find anyone who can tell her where her sister is living. To-morrow she will have to leave London for the Argentine. She may be quite close to her sister at this very moment—the sister she loves—but she must go away to-morrow, and in all human probability they will never meet again.

What can be done? Nothing. To find a certain woman in London, who left Russia five years ago, is beyond the power of the committee. They can only offer the weeping girl their sympathy.

Here is a boy of fourteen—a sturdy little fellow. He steps up boldly to the table. Where are his parents? He has none. His father and mother were killed in the massacre of Kischineff. He has obtained enough money of friends and sympathizers in Kischineff to make his way to England. He has come alone from Kischineff to London, and he asks the committee to help him. The boy's story is a pitiful one. The committee investigate his case, and it is decided to send the lonely little voyager to the Jewish Orphanage at Jerusalem.

The quiet of the Christian Sabbath night has settled on London as we make our way from the Jewish Shelter to the wide thoroughfare that leads to the deserted and silent streets of the City.

But outside the Shelter in that grey back street a serried mass of silent suffering still waits dumbly, patiently, for the dawn of a new life.

Far away in the Pales of Settlement women and children are wondering and weeping—wondering if the husband, the father, is alive or dead, if he has reached the City of Refuge or been captured as he fled—if he has died by the way, or been shot down by the soldiers of the Tsar.

They will hear in time. Letters and cards are on the way to them bearing the London post-mark and the unfamiliar stamp with the head of King Edward VII of England upon it.