This sounded fairly lively, but there was nothing to be done,
so we finished up the chess tournament we had begun on the
boat. An Esthonian won it, and I was second, by reason of
a lucky win over Litvinov, who is really a better player. By
Sunday night we reached Terijoki and on Monday moved
slowly to the frontier of Finland close to Bieloostrov. A
squad of Finnish soldiers was waiting, excluding everybody
from the station and seeing that no dangerous revolutionary
should break away on Finnish territory. There were no
horses, but three hand sledges were brought, and we piled
the luggage on them, and then set off to walk to the frontier
duly convoyed by the Finns. A Finnish lieutenant walked at
the head of the procession, chatting good-humouredly in
Swedish and German, much as a man might think it worth
while to be kind to a crowd of unfortunates just about to be
flung into a boiling cauldron. We walked a few hundred
yards along the line and then turned into a road deep in
snow through a little bare wood, and so down to the little
wooden bridge over the narrow frozen stream that
separates Finland from Russia. The bridge, not twenty yards
across, has a toll bar at each end, two sentry boxes and two
sentries. On the Russian side the bar was the familiar black
and white of the old Russian Empire, with a sentry box to
match. The Finns seemingly had not yet had time to paint
their bar and box.
The Finns lifted their toll bar, and the Finnish officers
leading our escort walked solemnly to the middle of the
bridge. Then the luggage was dumped there, while we stood
watching the trembling of the rickety little bridge under the
weight of our belongings, for we were all taking in with us as
much food as we decently could. We were none of us
allowed on the bridge until an officer and a few men had
come down to meet us on the Russian side. Only little Nina,
Vorovskv's daughter, about ten years old, chattering
Swedish with the Finns, got leave from them, and shyly, step
by step, went down the other side of the bridge and struck
up acquaintance with the soldier of the Red Army who stood
there, gun in hand, and obligingly bent to show her
the sign, set in his hat, of the crossed sickle and hammer
of the Peasants' and Workmen's Republic. At last the
Finnish lieutenant took the list of his prisoners and called out
the names "Vorovsky, wife and one bairn," looking
laughingly over his shoulder at Nina flirting with the sentry.
Then "Litvinov," and so on through all the Russians, about
thirty of them. We four visitors, Grimlund the Swede,
Puntervald and Stang, the Norwegians, and I, came last. At
last, after a general shout of farewell, and "Helse Finland"
from Nina, the Finns turned and went back into their
civilization, and we went forward into the new struggling
civilization of Russia. Crossing that bridge we passed from
one philosophy to another, from one extreme of the class
struggle to the other, from a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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