Читать книгу Out of the Night - Richard Julius Herman Krebs - Страница 25

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The old wanderlust stirred my blood with the coming of spring. I had had enough of lectures in the Communist University, and hungered for the winds and the freedom of the sea. Besides, the year of 1926 promised thunder. A general strike was in the offing in England, and we expected it to shake the British Empire to its foundations. In China, the revolution was clearly on its way. In the Dutch East Indies, plans hatched in the Comintern for an insurrection were afoot. I asked to be sent into the field. My request was granted. Ryatt informed me that I would serve as a courier to the Orient as soon as arrangements had been completed. In the meantime I was delegated to attend the inauguration of a Seamen’s International Club in Murmansk.

Accompanied by a girl interpreter, I started out for the Arctic port. Two days and nights our train crawled northward over a desert of snow. Situated on a dismal fjord, Murmansk was at that time still a sleepy and overgrown village spread chaotically on the slopes of low, barren hills. Its lower portion was half submerged in frozen mud and slush. The spent warmth of the Gulf Stream, pawing feebly around the North Cape, made Murmansk the only ice-free Soviet harbor north of the Black Sea. It was a bleak harbor, with unkempt sheds and piers. An ancient little trawler and two small tramp-ships hovered in the fog offshore. An indescribable gloominess lay over the place. From a smeary sky fell a drizzle that could be called neither rain nor sleet nor snow. But the houses near the station, built of rough-hewn logs, were stanch and warm.

A delegate from the Soviet Seamen’s Union awaited me at the station, where the people were dirty and ragged and sulky. He had a face from which life seemed to have drained all desire. He nodded a surly welcome and motioned me to follow him, without pulling his hands out of the holes of his tattered overcoat. We made our way to the International Club, a long and low log building, decorated with a bronze bust of Lenin, pictures of Marx and other revolutionary leaders, Red banners, a large rack full of brand-new books and pamphlets, and a phonograph with a big pink-colored loud-speaker. Rain dripped through the sacking which covered the windows in lieu of glass. There was not a lavatory in the building.

The active membership of the Murmansk Interclub was made up of five Russians, two of them girls from Leningrad who knew German and English, and four foreign seamen, a German, two Scandinavians and a Scot. They were an eager lot, quite content with their task of upholding the cause of internationalism in this wettest corner of the Soviet fatherland. I delivered the main address during the inauguration ceremony, after the chairman had introduced me as a “delegate from the workers of capitalist Europe.”

Upon my return to Leningrad a week later, I found instructions awaiting me to go via Berlin to Rotterdam to sign up there on a steamer bound for the Far East. Ryatt procured for me the necessary credentials, and a Swiss passport the original photograph of which had been replaced by one of myself.

“Whenever you are using a phony passport,” Ryatt explained in his dry, disillusioned manner, “see that you cross the frontier at night. At night the border policemen are less attentive and flaws in the passports don’t show so much under electric lights.”

To avoid traveling through Poland, where the political police was the most efficient agency in a generally inefficient country, I used the slightly round-about route through Riga, entering Germany over the East Prussian border town of Eydtkuhnen.

The express which I took from Riga had been a few short weeks before the scene of a bloody occurrence which reminded me that the profession of a Comintern courier, upon which I was embarking, is one of the most hazardous on earth. The international couriers Nette and Machmannsthal had been en route from Berlin to Moscow, carrying a batch of confidential documents forwarded by Soviet agents in London. The documents were carried in diplomatic pouches. Outside of Riga, shortly after the two couriers had crossed from Lithuania into Latvia, two strangers wearing black suits and black masks forced their way into the sleeping compartments occupied by the Comintern men. The invaders drew pistols and demanded the surrender of the pouches. It was night, and the train was speeding north at close to sixty miles an hour. Nette, who had been sleeping in the top berth, reached for the pistol under his pillow. In the lower berth Machmannsthal also snatched his gun, which he had strapped to his pajamas. Instantly the masked strangers opened fire. The couriers, still entangled in their blankets, also began to shoot. Four guns blazed away at a range of less than six feet. Nette was hit through his lungs and stomach. He pitched out of his berth, but continued to fire from the floor of the rocking train. The compartment was spattered with blood from top to bottom. When the smoke cleared away, the two assassins lay dead. Nette was dying. Machmannsthal, seriously wounded, survived. The mail-by-courier was saved. Later investigations by the Riga police and the G.P.U. in Leningrad established that the dead assailants had been former White Guards in the employ of the British secret service.

In Berlin, I received my orders from Fritz Heckert, one of Moscow’s chief agents abroad, and a Chinese communist whose name was, I believe, Wan-Min. Bela Kun was then also in Berlin, which was at that time the seat of the Comintern’s chief agency outside of the Soviet Union. The German Republic was the most liberal and the most lax in hunting down foreign agitators. My tasks for the next few months were outlined to me over coffee and cake in the Café Bauer.

A coup was being planned for the Dutch East Indies. A victorious insurrection of the natives of Java and Sumatra, it was hoped in Moscow, would whet Japan’s appetite for these rich Indonesian islands. Any Japanese move in the direction of Java would, in turn, cause Great Britain to intervene. And that, in turn, would divert British attention from what was going on in China. The strategy was to “play one capitalist country against another” for the benefit of the Soviet Union. My duty was to convey a consignment of confidential material to M. Lan, a female Chinese Comintern agent in Indonesia. The consignment consisted of a number of packages, the contents of which were too incriminating to be sent through the mails, and too bulky to be smuggled successfully along any regular passenger route. They probably also contained money. For identification purposes, I was given the snapshot of a dog. Anyone who presented to me another copy of this photograph either in Singapore or Sabang or Belawan, would be the authorized recipient of the consignment. I was to sail as a bona fide seaman from Rotterdam, where my courier mail was awaiting me. Heckert showed me a picture of M. Lan, and told me that she would probably come aboard my ship in person.

“Your salary from now on,” Heckert said, “is eighty dollars a month. After your stuff is delivered in good order, send me a telegram and go on to Shanghai for further instructions.”

From the “Technical Bureau”—the passport forging center which the Comintern maintained in Berlin—I received a good German seamen’s book and credentials of a missionary in the employ of the Mission for Seamen in London. Before I boarded the Berlin-Amsterdam express, I was insistently warned to tell no one, “not even your mother or sweetheart,” where I was going, to avoid all private communications, and to be deaf and dumb to inquiries from outsiders. “Schweigen ist Gold,” Wan-Min explained. “If you cannot be silent, we can’t use you.”

My steamer was the Franken, Captain Kuehnemann, of the North German Lloyd, a fine new ship then on her maiden voyage.

I shipped on her by a simple ruse. When the vessel put into Rotterdam, a communist in the crew feigned serious illness and was transferred to the marine hospital. I had no difficulty in obtaining the “sick” man’s berth. But before the Franken sailed, I was brusquely burdened with additional responsibilities. A young local communist roused me from my bunk in the middle of the night.

“Come ashore,” he panted, “there’s a messenger from Hamburg.”

Albert Walter in Hamburg had gotten wind of my journey to the Far East and had quickly decided to have me transact some of his business at the expense of the Berlin office which financed my trip. I dressed and scrambled ashore. In a tavern I met Hugo Marx. His pale, thin face showed the usual foxy smirk, and his eyes were half closed. He gave me a letter of instructions marked “MEMORIZE—DESTROY,” and several thick envelopes containing money for the communist harbor units in Genoa, Alexandria, and Colombo.

The Franken steamed seaward, with my “mail” stowed away safely. The first port of call was Genoa. It rose out of the sea in the early morning, an amphitheater of pearl-gray, yellow and rose against a background of treeless green hills with crumbling forts on their crests.

A communist had to be careful in Italy. Mussolini’s likeness seemed to stare through every shop window in Genoa. Hawk-eyed young Blackshirts were in every street. One wrong word, one careless move, one harmless little crime of omission could consign scores of honest revolutionists to destruction in the inquisition chambers of the Ovra. The messenger of the Italian “underground” organization came aboard in the guise of a stevedore. He recognized me by a prearranged sign: a blue bandanna with a double knot around the neck. His open, energetic face belied all popular conceptions of the aspect of a conspirator.

“Give me a cigarette,” he said genially.

I struck a match for him and waited for the password. The Genoese gave it with almost playful nonchalance. “Let’s go once more to Tripolis. . . .” he hummed in Italian.

That was the first line from a soldiers’ song of the Turkish War.

“. . . Oh, let’s cut off the heads of Arabis,” I continued.

I sauntered forward. He followed leisurely. In the bosun’s locker, I handed him the envelope I had received from Hugo Marx. It had been hidden in a new coil of rope. The Italian tore the envelope open and went over its contents. It contained some typewritten sheets and a sum of money in American dollars. I arranged with him to come aboard that night to take me to a conference of water-front functionaries. The Italian tore the envelope into tiny shreds. The money he pocketed. The letters he fastened to his thigh with a rubber band. He was ready to depart.

“Good luck,” I said. “Don’t forget—tonight.”

“Viva Lenin,” he replied with quiet fervor. “Ora e sempre!”

“Let go, forward and aft!”

The Franken steamed down the coast of Italy, and several days later she bunkered at Port Said. Coal barges drew alongside, and a band of howling Arab coal-heavers overran the ship. I had a letter for the communist harbor organization of Alexandria, the chief port of Egypt. I knew that my Hamburg headquarters had sent word to inform the comrades there of my coming. No doubt they would send a messenger to meet me at Port Said. I waited. For a while I expected the Alexandria courier to be among the hawkers of coral knick-knacks and Turkish delight. But he did not turn up.

The winding banks of the Suez Canal glided by, hot and yellow, deserted except for batteries of mooring poles, a few huts and donkeys, and at times a camel bearing an atrocious load. The Franken traversed the length of the Red Sea. Forbidding Bab-el-Mandeb appeared and vanished in a starry night. And after six days’ steaming through the leaden Indian Ocean, the anchor went down in Colombo roads.

In the north, crowded and mysterious, lay India. At school in Leningrad I had heard N. M. Roy, the leading East Indian Bolshevik, lecture on the problems of the communist offensive in India. The Party was strong in the industries of Bombay, Madras, Calcutta. Participants in strikes and demonstrations were counted by the hundred thousand. Child labor, the longest hours, the lowest pay, and the highest death rate furnished superb material for agitation. But in India, the obstacles in the way of communist advance were stronger than among more primitive colonials. Primitive people are impatient and virile. The Hindu’s chief vice was his senile tradition, his enervation, his passivity. The Communist Party of British India was forced to fight on many different fronts. It fought British imperialism. It fought Gandhi as a traitor to the Indian peoples. It fought the reactionary portion of the native bourgeoisie. It allied itself with the liberal faction and the intelligentsia, with the intention of cutting their throats later. It took pains not to step on the religious toes of the Moslems of the Malabar Coast. And wave after wave of propaganda literature, printed in Moscow and Leningrad, in a dozen of the hundreds of Indian languages, strove to break down the most stubborn obstacle of all—the caste system of the Hindus.

The courier of the Colombo organization, a middle-aged Lascar, was punctual. At sunset he paddled out from shore in a comfortable skiff. He clambered aboard, carrying ebony toy elephants and a bundle of gaudy shawls which he at once began to peddle among the mates and engineers. He wore mended khaki pants and a sleeveless blue shirt, dangling outside his belt. The password that had come to him from Hamburg he shouted loudly all over the ship:

“Who’s got for me the London Times? I like to read. No matter how old.”

I took him forward under the pretense that I wanted to buy a shawl, and handed him his letter. He promised to forward it to Pondicherry, the French colony, where the headquarters of the Maritime Section was established. I found no time to go ashore with him. The Franken was at anchor only a few short hours. We parted. As I leaned at the bulwarks, watching the Lascar paddle away in the velvety darkness, I suddenly saw him as a maniac who was trying to cross a stormy ocean in a coffin. For a moment the aim I and he and all of us struggled for seemed endlessly far away. “We are all maniacs, paddling through the night in coffins,” I thought. “Dead men on furlough!” I heard the lapping of the harbor water and the thump of the chain cable in the starboard hawse-pipe. On the low shore lights burned dimly. I went below for coffee and a smoke.

The Franken steamed eastward, skirting the Bay of Bengal, shunning the dangerous Nicobar Islands. The approaches to Malacca Straits were dotted with shipping, with liners and tramps from overseas, with filthy little coastwise steamers, with high-sterned junks that looked like dozing bats, with native craft of outlandish shape and cut of sail. Around this passage between the Indian Ocean and the China Seas the ports of call lay within a scant day’s run from each other. The first was Sabang, rich, green and bluff, a coaling station on the northern tip of Sumatra. Belawan, Pulo Penang, Singapore followed. Here, I had been told, the revolution would strike next. Here the chief consignment of the contraband I carried was to be taken ashore. My tenseness grew from day to day. I slept little. I must not miss the messenger from the Indonesian Party. Whatever the many book-sized packages contained, I had carried them halfway around the world. They were important. I scrutinized each tawny Malay stevedore as he came aboard. I watched the boatmen, the hawkers, the ship-chandlers’ runners for a sign of recognition. I even wondered whether the courier I awaited might be among the little ten- and twelve-year-old girls who came aboard to wash the sailors’ laundry and to peddle their hips.

Nothing happened in Sabang. No likely stranger approached me while we lay in the glaring roadstead of Penang. Then came Singapore. The lines were hardly fastened around the bitts and the metal rat-guard brought out, when a shipmate hailed me.

“Ho—come here! There’s woman asking for you.”

Out of a cluster of Chinese dockers stepped a small Chinese woman. She was dressed smoothly in black. Her motions were graceful, her features lean and energetic. She knew my name. In the shelter of the rudder house astern she drew what looked at first glance like a piece of cardboard from her miniature black-and-gold handbag. It was the photograph of a dog.

“Do you like this type of dog?” she inquired pleasantly.

“I have one just like this,” I laughed.

So I met M. Lan, the female liaison officer of the Communist Party of Indonesia. She gave me the address of a Babu money changer’s booth on a square just outside the limits of the harbor. At night, with the aid of a young Chinese, I smuggled my contraband ashore past a cordon of drowsy Sikhs. Nearby M. Lan sat smoking in a rickshaw.

To this day I do not know the exact nature of the illicit consignment I transported from Rotterdam to Singapore. Taken together, the packages weighed perhaps three hundred pounds. They may have contained Belgian automatics, or ammunition or explosives. In any case, it was dynamite, printed or real, and I was thoroughly glad to see it leave my jurisdiction without a mishap. “Transaction completed,” I cabled to Fritz Heckert in Berlin.

The expected revolutionary coup came to pass less than half a year later. In November, 1926, large sections of the toilers of Java rose with guns in their hands. An insurrection in Sumatra followed. Buildings were burned to the ground, railways were blasted, much blood was spilled in battles between the insurgents and government troops. The tactics used by the rebels of Java and Sumatra were much the same as I had witnessed during the barricade fighting in Hamburg. The same, also, was the directing hand behind the scenes. The risings failed. Hundreds fell in battle. Hundreds were wounded. Thousands were captured and sent to the prison camps of New Guinea. Hundreds were summarily condemned to death by military courts.

I deserted the Franken in the harbor of Hong Kong. The Chinese seamen and dockers were out on strike. British marines patrolled the wharves of this British Crown Colony perched on the edge of a China seething with the promise of revolt. I still had in my possession some four hundred dollars of the Comintern money originally destined for Egypt. I decided to use it for agitation among the British, American and German seamen in Hong Kong harbor. But I quickly learned that such a plan was not feasible in a place where the British navy and the British secret service poked flashlights into the obscurest corners. They were hunting high and low for one Kuchiomov, a Comintern agent who had come to Hong Kong to organize a continuance of the general strike. Then I learned of the case of Comrade Dosser, another agent of the Comintern who had tried to settle in Hong Kong in the guise of a commercial representative. His Eurasian mistress had made an attempt to poison him in his hotel. Dosser tied her hand and foot, and changed his quarters, but was soon arrested and deported. With true Bolshevik pertinacity he returned secretly, was arrested and deported again, but escaped to Shanghai. British agents seized him there, and since then nothing more was heard of Comrade Dosser. This information caused me to decamp. I embarked for Shanghai as a deck passenger on a coastal steamer.

In Shanghai, I reported to a contact address of the Comintern in the lower part of Nanking Road. It turned out to be a barber shop. A Chinese student took my credentials, and told me to wait. The following day we boarded rickshaws and rode out into the beautiful gardens on Bubbling Well Road. To be drawn through the streets by a half-naked and sweating human draft animal made me uncomfortable. The glistening yellow back in front, the patter of bare feet on the burning asphalt, the strident gasps of a voice shouting for the right of way aroused in me an urge to leap off, to pat the perspiring shoulders, to say, “Listen, take it easy, let’s have a lemonade together.” But the streets of Shanghai were as unsentimental as they were full of motion. Passing me were red-faced mountains of flesh in immaculate white, bearded Sikhs stalking under their turbans with a mixture of meekness and complacent arrogance, dirty children rolling in the gutters, women grunting under fearful loads, chanting traders. And everywhere I saw unsmiling workmen, swinging along the sidewalks, bitterly poor, but able and hardy, prime material for any revolution. “China is Asia!” was a phrase I recalled hearing from the lips of a leader in Leningrad: “If we have China, we also have India and all that lies between.”

We stopped at the gardens in the vicinity of the Majestic Hotel. A man with pronounced Slavic features and the manners of a courteous Parisian was waiting there. He was of a type that would fit into the role of a school teacher or of a locomotive engineer. His name was Mandalian. He was the Comintern agent in charge of operations in the district of Shanghai.

No orders regarding my next assignment had come through from Berlin. “We can use you here just as well,” Mandalian observed after a few perfunctory questions. His first act was to make me surrender to him the four hundred dollars in my possession. After that we promenaded through the gardens, Mandalian talking in a rapid but disciplined voice, and I straining to catch the significance of every word.

“Don’t cock your head to one side like a conspirator,” he admonished me before we had sauntered a hundred yards. “There may be watchers. Be legère; act like an idle man chatting about the horse races.”

Mandalian spoke mainly about the foreign warships and foreign soldiers in China, an armed force which constituted the greatest danger for communist revolution in China. The guns of the gray ships could not be put out of action by a frontal attack of even a million badly armed coolies. Another way had to be taken; the disintegration of the morale of foreign sailors and soldiers by means of persistent propaganda. The Comintern had created a special anti-military department to engage in this work in Shanghai, under the direction of a capable Chinese communist named Siu. The men from the foreign warships simply refused to let themselves be drawn into political discussions by Orientals whom they had been taught to despise. Comrade Siu needed a man who could meet the British and American sailors and marines on their own ground, who could talk their language and be looked upon as an equal. To Mandalian I was that man. Until I got further orders from Berlin, I was to assist Siu in the anti-military department. I met him the same day in the house of the Chinese Seamen’s Union.

Comrade Siu had studied in Europe and knew German well. He was a stocky, mobile man in his thirties, married to a Russian girl who acted as his secretary. The number of functions he held was astounding. He was the Party commissar for the Shanghai Seamen’s Union. He directed the work of communist spies in the well-organized remnants of the former Kolchak army, whose surviving members were stranded in Shanghai by the thousands. Siu also managed the affairs of the revolutionary student groups in Shanghai. He put a fairly new mimeograph machine at my disposal and introduced me to a group of Japanese and Chinese comrades with whom I was to work. “Den Panzerkreuzern muessen wir die Zaehne ausziehen,” he remarked. “Let’s pull out the warships’ teeth!”

We were blissfully unaware of our own grotesque audacity. Our combined force consisted of a score of assorted communists, including a handful of Japanese and two Scandinavians lusting for adventure. Equipped with a portable printing machine and a weekly allowance totaling a hundred Shanghai dollars, we set out to “pull the teeth” of the combined navies of Britain, France, Japan and America on the lower Yangtze-kiang. The sum we received to finance our fight amounted perhaps to one-fifth of the salary which the Comintern paid to Comrade Mandalian and Comrade Siu. It was they who later spoke learnedly in Moscow conventions about the reasons for the Chinese defeat; we of the rank and file had no word in the matter.

About one-third of the warship crews spent their nights ashore in relays. They frequented the music halls and tingle-tangles of the International Concessions and the brothels and sing-song dives in the Tchapai district. The girls in the brothels were Chinese, hardly more than browbeaten children under a veneer of viciousness, and without a will of their own. Most of them had been sold into slavery by their parents at the time of their first menstruation, and the owners of the brothels discarded them when they reached maturity. These houses of misery were patronized exclusively by Europeans and Americans, and the majority of the customers were men from the foreign warships and the marine detachments. To the Chinese communists in our unit fell the task of besieging the popular brothels. They joined the waiting rickshaw coolies at the entrance, and plied every arriving blue-jacket or marine with tracts containing incitements to disobedience and mutiny. One of the Chinese comrades employed his wife and sister to befriend the girls in the houses for the purpose of smuggling our leaflets into the rooms of the child prostitutes. The latter seemed intrigued by the promise that their greedy and unmerciful masters, the brothel bosses, would be dumped wholesale into the Whangpoo River after the revolution.

The foreigners in our anti-military department, the two Scandinavians, six or seven Japanese and I, concentrated on the music halls of the Nanking Road area. There was always a sprinkling of navy men and marines in the crowds that filled these places night after night. The girls here were Eurasians or the daughters of Russian refugees, rather prettily dressed, lewd, and wholly mercenary. We found some sympathizers among the Eurasians who were willing to accept sheafs of propaganda material for distribution to the bevy of blue-jackets each of them had on hand, but this scheme was effectively sabotaged by some of the Russian women who seemed to be acting as undercover agents for local White Guard organizations. Besides, the rivalry between the moody, drink-hungry Russians and their flashier, younger Eurasian sisters was virulent. In the end, there was nothing for us to do but to engage the warship sailors in direct political discussions. Regularly the debates threatened to end in a fight. The blue-jackets had come ashore to amuse themselves, and they resented our instructions unless we first invited them to a drink. For that, however, we lacked the money.

In the mass slaughter of communists which followed Chiang Kai-shek’s break with Moscow in 1927, nearly all the Chinese comrades I had worked with in Shanghai perished. Years later, after the death penalty for communists had been decreed in Japan, I learned the fate of my Japanese companions. “Comrade Sano and his aides—Fukumoto, Nabejana Mitamura and Takara—were abducted by Japanese secret police in Shanghai and spirited aboard a ship to Kobe.” The report which the Comintern received about them bore the comment: “Vermisst; keine Org-Folgen,” meaning: “They disappeared. Their disappearance had no damaging consequences to the organization—they kept their secrets like good Bolsheviks.”

After three weeks of anti-military work, my sojourn in Shanghai ended abruptly. On a stifling day at the end of July, 1926, Siu, through his Korean courier, asked me to meet him at a corner of the Rue Molière.

“I have news for you,” Siu said.

“Instructions?”

“Right.”

He told me that I was needed in San Francisco. He had an address neatly printed on a leaf of yellow cigarette paper.

“Report to this address.” he said.

“How the devil am I to get to San Francisco?” I demanded. “I haven’t even five dollars.”

Siu shrugged his thick shoulders. “You may wait for the money, or you may travel without money. There is nothing a Bolshevik cannot do. In any case, turn over your contacts to Comrade Sano.”