Most of the Russian naval officers I found to be much superior in manners and in education to the average military officer. The only fault I could find with them — and it was not a serious one from a sailor's point of view — was that some of the younger men were too ostentatiously immoral. As for the bluejackets, they all looked like farm-hands that had never been aboard ship in their lives; and at Christmas, Easter and other solemn holidays of the Church, they got drunk with a unanimity and a completeness that has never, perhaps, been surpassed in any navy, even in Nelson's.
Happening to call on some friends at the " Morsky Lazarette" (Naval Hospital) on New Year's Day, 1904, I found such a stream of wounded men being carried into the building that I came to the conclusion that a battle was being fought somewhere in the neighbourhood. The explanation was that the men had all got so dead drunk that they were being constantly run over by " izvoshcheeks," falling down staircases, and getting into all sorts of scrapes.
Another place of amusement was the subsidised theatre, the Tifontai Theatre as it was called after its proprietor, a Chinese millionaire, who owned an enormous amount of property in Port Arthur, Dalny, Liaoyang and Mukden, and was a great favourite with the Russians. Some fairly good Russian companies performed in this theatre during the winter I spent in Port Arthur, the plays of Tchekoff and Gogol being the favourites. Gogol's " Vli " was a great success in January; and just before the war broke out, Jerome K. Jerome's play, Miss Hobbs (or as the Russians spelt the name, owing to the deficiencies of their alphabet, Gobbs), was being played; but the great attractions at that time were a circus, Barowfski's Circus, in which there were some good performing horses, and a new cafe chantant in " Novi Gorod " (New Town), both of which places were well attended, even on the night of Togo's attack. At that time the new cafe chantant was still respectable enough for married people to go to, but a few days more and it would have gone the way of its predecessor the Palermo, in " Stare Gorod " (Old Town) which had to be closed on account of the orgies which officers used to indulge in there.
The Russian officer is, as a rule, a sober, wellbehaved man, with a good knowledge of the beautiful literature of his own country; but in every regiment there are a few Russian officers who take their pleasures, not sadly, but madly, rushing on the stage to embrace actresses, firing their revolvers, hacking at chairs and tables with their swords and behaving generally like gay young seigneurs at the Strelna or Mauritania in Moscow. Unfortunately these men have given a bad reputation to the whole army.
As for the soldiers, the only specimen who came directly under my observation at this time was a young Pole, one of Captain Yanchivetsky's orderlies, who tidied up my room every morning. He used to enter cautiously in high boots, great coat and busby, looking like some large winter animal that has lived all its life in the outer cold and consequently feels uneasy inside of four walls. The other soldiers in the garrison seemed to spend most of their time carrying huge ikons for the regimental church or the pots and pans and furniture of their officers. Sometimes Russian officers went in too systematically for making money out of their men, with the result that the higher authorities had to interfere. I remember that one wretched, weedy-looking private used to come around to my house every morning in order to sell me milk and cheese on the part of his captain's wife.
The Jews had a remarkable hold in Port Arthur. All the leading merchants seemed to be Jews, and almost all the people who made money out of Russia along the China coast throughout the war were Jewish capitalists. One rich Russian Jew in Shanghai made enormous profits out of the repatriation of the wounded and paroled soldiers and officers from Port Arthur; and another, the well-known Baron Ginsberg, probably trebled his vast wealth by supplying stores to Rodjestvensky's fleet. I met Ginsberg's brother supervising this work in Saigon, and I regret to say that a lot of the stores he supplied were refused by the captains of the German transports which accompanied the Fleet. Some of these captains curtly declared that the stores were rotten, but I do not know if this was really the case.
It was an important day for me who had spent so much of my life in the torrid zone, when I saw my Polish soldier double the windows in my room and light a fire in the tall Russian stove, for I knew that I was going to see for the first time what a northern winter was like.