To the Edge of the World

by Christian Wolmar

  By the time the war began, the Chinese Eastern Railway had been improved, but was by no means fully operational; neither the main long tunnel nor many sidings and bridges had been completed and therefore it still had a much reduced capacity. As for the Trans-Siberian, despite a continuous programme of improvements, it was still suffering from the economies that had been made during construction, and remained a slow railway with insufficient capacity. Most crucially, as the Japanese had cannily realized, the fact that there was still no railway route around Lake Baikal created the most serious bottleneck of the whole system, and it was no surprise that chaos ensued on both sides of the lake as soon as war was declared.

  Supplies built up at Baikal Station, waiting to cross the lake on which three separate paths had been laid. First, there was a route marked by poles for sledges, which mainly carried officers, given that capacity was limited for the forty-mile crossing. It was not as comfortable as it sounds. Even the officers had occasionally to get out, because the ice on the lake freezes in big slabs, which made it impossible for loaded sledges to cross. Secondly, there was a path for the foot soldiers, who would march across the ice into the blizzards. Their only respite was the rough temporary huts erected every four miles, which dispensed tea and soup, and provided medical treatment for those with frostbite. Then, later, once the ice was deemed solid enough (the lake does not freeze until January) a temporary rail line was laid, a perilous task for its builders as there were crevasses and gaps that could prove fatal for the unwary. Indeed, at first it was thought that locomotives would be able to haul the trains all the way across the frozen lake, but one of the first to attempt to do so plunged through a weakness in the ice caused by a hot spring with the loss of several men and, of course, the engine. Thereafter, locomotives were not risked and, instead, horses and men had to haul the wagons across the white expanse, a task at which even Sisyphus might have baulked.

  Consequently, since the capacity of the ice railway was only a fraction of the amount of freight daily arriving at Irkutsk and Port Baikal, they soon filled up with supplies and groups of waiting men. According to a contemporary report the stations were packed with ‘mountains of cases, pyramids of bales, containing articles and provisions of which the troops already in Manchuria are in sore need’.8 Moreover, there were terrible scenes in the other direction as refugees fled the conflict. The correspondent of the Standard observed chaotic scenes on the trains heading westwards: ‘[There were] no lavatories, no food to be got along the line, hardly any water, no milk and 600 children of all ages huddled together for warmth, and crying with misery and hunger. It is one of the most pitiful sights of warfare, and a mere forerunner to the woes behind.’9 It would not be the last time that great suffering would be seen along the Trans-Siberian, as subsequent events during the Russian Civil War and the Second World War will show.

  Even before they reached the bottleneck of Lake Baikal, the troops had endured terrible journeys. Only the officers were provided with sleeping cars and upholstered seats and they even had access to one of the lavishly decorated church cars. In contrast, the other ranks were transported quite literally in cattle class, packed into freight vans lined with felt and some – but by no means all – had been fitted with a stove. There were narrow wooden benches for the troops to sit on, but they had to sleep on the floor. Cossacks, the mounted shock troops of the Russian army known for their hardiness, shared their wagons with their horses, which were stabled at each end of the van, while they sat in the middle. Trains generally carried around 1,100 men, as they consisted of twenty-eight wagons, each with room for forty men or eight horses. Most of the time there was not enough food for the men, because only haphazard arrangements had been made to feed them through mobile canteens. There were widespread complaints, especially as most of the time the ordinary soldiers could not afford to buy food from the sellers who rushed up to their trains at the main stations10 – one soldier moaned that they had survived on ‘little but hard black bread, foul soup and hot tea’11 for the whole journey. The authorities, recognizing that these conditions would leave the men in no state to fight if they had to endure them continuously for the full two-week journey to Irkutsk (which sometimes was much longer), decreed that for every three days of travel there would be one day’s rest. At best, it took troops thirty days to reach the Manchurian front and often as much as fifty, because of delays and breakdowns.

  Work was, in fact, well underway on the Circum-Baikal when war was declared, but as it was by far the toughest stretch of the route on which to build a railway – harder even than the Chinese Eastern Railway – it was nowhere near complete by the time the Japanese attacked Port Arthur. One of the members of the Committee for the Siberian Railway was only slightly exaggerating when he expressed the view that the line ‘surpassed in difficulty and amount of work all those constructed in the Russian Empire up to the present’.12 The Committee had sanctioned the building of the Circum-Baikal line in 1898 and the survey work which began the following year confirmed that it would be a daunting task as there were ‘50-odd miles of precipitous cliffs broken by capes, ravines, bays and narrow shelvings’.13 Overall, the railway required more than two hundred bridges and thirty-three tunnels to cover its 163-mile length and a measure of the number of curves and switchbacks was that this merely brought the railway a mere forty miles eastwards. Replaced later by a more direct route, the surviving sections are today a major tourist attraction.

  Under the direction of Alexander Pertsov, another of the dynamic and intrepid engineers who were responsible for building the Trans-Siberian, a diverse labour force of around 9,000 workers – principally Turkish, Persian and Italian, in addition to the Russians – was brought together and set about the arduous task of building the line along the shore from Port Baikal to Kultuk on the east side of the lake. The main obstacle was the fact that the cliffs went straight into the lake, with no beach. Consequently, the construction teams needed to build a shelf for the railway, which had to be at least fifteen feet above the lake to avoid the waves washing over the track during the fierce storms that are a regular feature of this massive lake cum inland sea. Dynamite was used extensively to create the roadbed for the railway, but this was inevitably a slow and perilous process. As with the other sections, winter prevented most activities such as track-laying, though tunnelling and bridgework could proceed.

  Originally the Circum-Baikal had been scheduled to be completed in 1906, but the imperative of the war meant that Pertsov and his fellow contractors were asked to speed up the work. The workforce was increased by fifty per cent and vast amounts of money were thrown at the project. Remarkably, the first test train managed to run on the line in mid-September, just over six months after the outbreak of the war, but it derailed ten times and, to the embarrassment of the contractors, the chimneys on the carriage ventilators had to be removed because one of the tunnels had not been built to a sufficient height. A few days later, Prince Khilkov on his test train was more fortunate and his progress was delayed by just one derailment, though the train ran at barely 5 mph, because of concern over the state of the tracks. As a result of the need for speed and the difficult terrain, the cost of the completed railway was exorbitant, even higher per mile than for the Chinese Eastern Railway, amounting to seventy million roubles (£7 million), when immediate and necessary improvements are included, which averaged £43,000 per mile.

  Given the country was at war and the line covered one of the most remote parts of Siberia, there was little fanfare to greet the achievement of having, at last, completed a railway which connected Moscow with the Pacific Ocean. The date of Khilkov’s inspection, 25 September 1904, is rarely quoted in accounts of the line’s construction. There was no golden spike, as there had been with every American railway of note, or celebratory fanfare of local townspeople, since there were none. Therefore, there was no one to take stock of this momentous achievement. More than 5,500 miles of railway had been built in just over thirteen years since work had started
in May 1891, an annual rate of 414 miles. The Canadian Pacific, which had been Russia’s benchmark, was built a bit quicker, at around 466 miles per year, but it was less than half the length and its builders did not face the same difficulties bringing in either labour or materials. Russia could, indeed, take pride in the completion of this momentous engineering feat, even if little attention was paid to it by the outside world, given the remoteness of the line and the outbreak of war.

  The opening of the line made a huge difference to Russia’s military capability, since the need to transport troops and matériel had led to renewed efforts to improve the ramshackle railway. Money was now found to remedy many of the problems resulting from corners having been cut to ensure the line’s rapid construction. A programme of major improvements was initiated, including the widespread replacement of light rails with heavier ones; the construction of more than 200 extra sidings to allow trains to pass each other and to load freight wagons; the introduction of extra rolling stock and locomotives (often seconded from other Russian railways); and the rerouting of parts of the track to avoid the steepest inclines. Together with these developments, the opening of the Circum-Baikal allowed the army to pour men into the theatre of war. From a maximum of three daily trains in each direction, by the end of the war the Trans-Siberian could cater for up to 16 pairs per day. At the outbreak of the war 125,000 Russian troops and border guards were stationed in the Far East, and by the end some 1.3 million had been taken by rail to the region. The Japanese force numbered 300,000 at the start of the war and they were reinforced by twice that number by the end, largely brought in by rail. In effect, the railways, which had been the cause of the war, also became responsible for the vast numbers fighting and consequently dying, because of their ability to deliver men and supplies to the front. Indeed, the very manner in which the war was fought, with massive amounts of troops on both sides facing each other, was a direct result of the railways’ ability to deliver constant, steady flows of men to the front line.14 At times these vast armies even dug trenches, a kind ofprecursor of the methods that would lead to the lengthy stalemate on the Western Front in the First World War, and consequently the Russo-Japanese War became the subject of intense study and scrutiny by the military preparing to fight that much larger conflict.

  Of course it was not only the Russians who made use of the railways. The Japanese not only rapidly built a railway in Korea to help transport troops and supplies to Manchuria, but after overcoming the Russian resistance in Port Arthur they took over the Russian-built South Manchuria Railway. The Russians had, at least, not made the mistake of leaving any locomotives behind, and since Japan operated on a radically different gauge – three feet six inches instead of the Russian five feet – at first they had to use teams of Chinese labourers to haul the trains along the line. Eventually, the gauge was changed and the Japanese made intensive use of the line.

  However, the improvements to the Russians’ railway supply line came too late. The Japanese might not have expected the Circum-Baikal to be completed so quickly nor for the improvements to the Trans-Siberian to be made so swiftly, but they were ready to pour enough men into battle to ensure victory. Their supply line was far shorter than that of the Russians, who would have been hampered by its length even if the railway had been working perfectly. The Japanese, conscious of the need to finish the war decisively before the Russians could build up too big an army, were able to dictate the timing and location of the war’s decisive battle at Mukden in February and March 1905. There were 620,000 troops in the field – 350,000 of whom were Russian – the greatest number up to that point in a single battle in the history of warfare and the Japanese, despite their slightly inferior numbers, were able to triumph.

  The construction of the line through Korea and the adoption of the South Manchuria Railway by the Japanese highlighted a tragic irony for the Russians. This not only gave the Japanese easy access to Harbin but, theoretically, there was now a railway line that went into the heart of Russia from a foreign and potentially hostile land. The war taught the Russians a hard lesson: the very railway they had built in order to further their imperial ambitions could be used against them: ‘The railway system Russia had constructed provided it with the capacity to threaten Japan, but the capture and control of this system would have provided the latter with the capacity to launch a rapid and potentially unstoppable counter-offensive, with the railway line allowing the transport of supplies and men in the same way that Russia had achieved at the early stages of the war.’15 In truth, it was not quite as easy as that. Taking over a defeated adversary’s lines is difficult, as the Japanese found out when having to change the gauge of the South Manchuria Railway, and the notion that an alien army, even one as adept at using the railways as the Japanese, could harness the Trans-Siberian to ride into Moscow was far-fetched. However, as we see in the section on the Russian Civil War in chapter 8, whoever controlled the railway would control Siberia.

  Nevertheless, the added capacity of the line and the threat it posed to future Japanese expansion were undoubtedly helpful to the Russians in the peace negotiations brokered by the Americans at Portsmouth, Maine, in September 1905. Their lead negotiator was the ubiquitous and rehabilitated Sergei Witte, who charmed the American public, which helped his negotiating position. The Japanese, aware that the Trans-Siberian was now a much more effective railway than at the outset of the war, accepted a deal that did not reflect their overwhelming military victory. They did, however, obtain control of the South Manchuria Railway, ensuring that Russia was denied access to Port Arthur, the casus belli. The war also exposed to the Russians the foolhardiness of relying on the Chinese Eastern Railway to reach the Pacific. Attention started to be paid to the building of the alternative Amur Railway, although it would take a decade before it was completed providing at last Russia with a route across the nation entirely on its own territory.

  Despite the unexpected and somewhat unmerited concessions gained at Portsmouth, the anger in Russia that had long been brewing over this awful war, which had resulted from naked imperialist ambition, almost caused the collapse of the tsarist regime. There had been growing unrest in Russia for some years, with the tsar refusing to compromise on ceding any of his power. A massacre of peaceful demonstrators in St Petersburg in January 1905 with a death toll of more than a hundred exacerbated the tensions and the defeat at Mukden further intensified the protests. Throughout the year, there was a sharp increase in the level of organization and militancy of strikes and protests, which threatened to bring down the government. Revolution, however, was averted by the October Manifesto, a proposal drawn up by, inevitably, Sergei Witte, to create a Duma (parliament), which attracted the support of the less radical protesters and kept the tsar in power for a dozen years, even though he later repudiated the document and ensured the Duma, when it was created the following spring, had very limited powers.

  The chaos following the end of the war made journeys on the Trans-Siberian even more eventful and haphazard. The English poet and member of the banking family, Maurice Baring, heading west from Irkutsk on the Trans-Siberian Express in October 1905, reported being stuck for four days at Samara on the western side of the Urals during the height of the troubles. At first, it was relatively calm and passengers were given money to buy provisions, but those in third class, who had only been given chits to redeem for food, looted the refreshment rooms and took away all the rations. Eventually, an officer who knew how to operate the telegraph system wired ahead and was granted permission to proceed. According to Baring, ‘we found a friend, an amateur engine-driver, and an amateur engine, and we started for Penza.’16 Inevitably the engine broke down, but another was found and Baring arrived in Moscow fortuitously just as Witte’s charter had been issued, which meant that peace for the time being resumed.

  In the aftermath of the conflict there was no shortage of generals, notably General Aleksey Kuropatkin, the Minister of War, ready to blame the inadequacies of the railway for the defeat.
He argued that had the railway been in a better condition he would have been able to deliver more troops to Manchuria and won the day. This was a very simplistic reading of the situation. Of course, the Trans-Siberian had its inadequacies, but the general’s accusation underestimated the fact that waging a war at the end of a 5,000-mile supply line was always going to be difficult, however well the railway functioned. In fact, it was a bit rich for the generals to blame the railway given their own failings. They repeatedly used the wrong tactics, sending thousands of men to their deaths by failing to recognize that weaponry had changed dramatically since Russia’s previous major war, the Russo-Turkish conflict of 1877–8. While the Japanese had modernized their command structure and ensured their men fought on full stomachs, the Russians still treated them as serfs with little regard to their needs. Moreover, the Russians’ failure to make effective use of modern weaponry, such as machine guns and improved artillery, hampered their ability to counter the Japanese attacks. As the key academic work into the role of the railway during the war suggests, ‘while Russia was so ineffective in applying advanced technology in the military sphere, its railway-building was virtually a model of success in this, the most advanced and exacting of technologies’.17 The Russians’ skill at building railways had not yet transferred to other spheres, as Witte had hoped it would.