To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [143]
As the ship and its escort skirted the northern edge of the European continent, lookouts watched constantly for German U-boats. All on board knew that no one could survive more than a few minutes in these icy waters. The first shock for the Allied delegation only came, however, when the Kildonan Castle arrived at Port Romanov, today's Murmansk, the single ice-free port in the Russian Arctic. Thousands of boxes of British and French munitions lay piled up on the town's docks and in vacant lots. Crates of dismantled Sopwith and Nieuport fighter planes, awaiting reassembly, sat covered with snow. While ships were delivering a daily average of 1,500 tons of supplies, it turned out that the rail line leaving the port, hobbled by equipment shortages and official corruption, could carry away only 200 tons a day.
The delegation had to take that same line to the imperial capital. Traffic crept so slowly that even this VIP train of cabinet ministers and generals, met midway by special emissaries from Tsar Nicholas II, took three days and nights to huff and wheeze the 700 miles to the city now called Petrograd. (In a fit of patriotism, Russia had rid itself of the German-sounding "St. Petersburg.") At the royal palace in Tsarskoe Selo, outside the city, escorted by court officers in full dress uniforms, the Allied delegation was presented to the Tsar. Milner delivered several letters from the Tsar's cousin King George V and two days later talked with him privately for nearly two hours. After a lunch that included the Tsarina and several of their children, Milner told his friend General Henry Wilson, the senior British military official in the delegation, that the imperial couple, "although very pleasant," had "made it quite clear that they would not tolerate any discussion of Russian internal politics."
An endless succession of silver-plate banquets, gala receptions, opera performances, and medal-awarding ceremonies exasperated the always efficient Milner. At one event, an observer noticed that he "kept throwing himself back in his chair and groaned audibly," muttering "We are wasting time!" To his dismay, toasts and long-winded speeches about friendship between the two great allies stretched one Anglo-Russian luncheon into an agonizing five hours. Some of the other delegates, however, thoroughly enjoyed themselves.*
Milner felt he got straight talk only when he met some reform-minded officials in Moscow, who spoke frankly of Russia's precarious state. Wilson, meanwhile, made a quick visit to the front lines, where he learned that, after two and a half years of war, Russian soldiers still did not have wire cutters. Expected to tear down German barbed wire entanglements by hand, some asked him whether British troops did the same. While the delegation was in Moscow, bread riots broke out in the streets. Inflation was out of control, and the government was printing new banknotes so fast they did not even have serial numbers.
So great was their fear of German spies gathering information from Russia's eminently bribable officialdom that, on their departure for home, the Allied delegates left Petrograd in the middle of the night, each person sacrificing a pair of shoes. These were left outside their hotel room doors to be polished, as if they expected to be in their rooms the next morning, rather than heading for their ship. After another slow-motion train journey, Milner sailed for England plunged into gloom. On the streets of the Petrograd he had left behind, there was an antiwar