The Unhappy Civilian
We Generally Shoot Englishmen. By R. 0. G. Urch. (Allen and Unwin. 10a. Bd.) To be persecuted, to suffer, starve and die without the con- solation of enduring these things for the sake of this faith or the other, is the lot of the ordinary man and woman in civil war ; . and Mr. Urch's account of his experiences in Russia. from 1.915 to 1920 has, by the irresponsible irony of history, an oddly topical flavour now Spain has gone the Russian way. If anyone wishes to know what the ordinary inhabitants of Madrid are beginning to see, his life in Moscow gives the pattern of it. Retreating from Riga when the Russians evacuated the city in 1915, Mr. Urch, his wife and his children, made for Moscow with thousands of other refugees, and there they had to stay through the revolutionary phase until an exchange of prisoners released them. Mr. Urch and his wife were teachers, and all through this period they managed to scrape together a living somehow. The interest of the book, indeed, lies in this fact. How does one keep afloat in the middle of a revolution? This important matter has got lost in the clash of ideologies and the tidal flux of movements ; one must thank Mr. Urch for retrieving it and presenting it in a simple, unassuming and agreeably unheroic manner.
Of the revolution itself he does not re-tell very much more than could be observed or guessed by the average anxious, ill-informed citizen who wakes up one morning to hear firing and to see soldiers crouching past the house. Money, food and fuel were more vital considerations than the monotonous sprinkle of shot, and those who wonder at the inhabitants of Madrid today who go shopping in one street while bombard- ment proceeds in the next will find in Mr. Urch's narrative the simple explanation. He and his wife, with their courageous and quick-tongued maids—who- took qifickly to the female proletarian's privilege of ridiculing male Bolshevik authority with impunity—managed somehow. They fought for bread and fuel, they sniffed the air for the slightest rumour of supplies ; and no doubt this necessity helped to build up a protective indifference to the daily horror of the firing squad. Still, the question, Who will be next ? was in everyone's heart, and it was no surprise to Mr. Urch when he was carried off one day by the Chelca. No charge was made ; he was handed from squad to squad and from prison to prison. This was at the time of the attempt on Lenin's life and of plots in which foreign governments were deeply implicated, and Mr. Urch was the victim of a general round-up.
His succeeding chapters make a minor but distinctive contribution to the immense prison literature of post-War Europe. How naturally human nature takes to imprisonment, how soon the prison population takes on self-consciousness, invents its dour jokes, conducts its minor intrigues! The prison types are perennial. There are the well-known scroungers, the self-constituted boss dispensing juitice. froin, his mattress, the bores who insist on talking, the comedian's, the suicidal. It is a picaresque university with semi-starva- tion as the curriculum and death as the degree. The men of education band together ; and there is one small but 'de- lightfully characteristic episode in which a German who, through considerations of honour, would not speak to Mr. Urch because their countries were still at war, ceremoniously removed a verminous insect from Mr. Urell's coat as a mark of private solidarity. "The enormous room" has its class loyalties.
Every day certain prisoners were called away " with things " or " without things." The latter euphemism indi- cated the worst. Mr. Urch was at last called "with ", and sa returned after many months to his family. On the way Wine he was stopped by a policeman, but when he heard that Mr. Urch had just been sitting," the policeman softened and embraced him with affection and sympathy. For those whose men were in gaol the struggle to live was, of course, intensified, and Mrs. Urch's part of the story is pretty grim. There Was no escape from the country for a long time.
Mr. Urch has no love of the Bolsheviks ; and in this he reflects the feelings of middle class people in Moteoiv of the time who saw two determined minorities lighting over their bodies. Litvinof visited the foreigners in their prison; was sympathetic, but evidently powerless with the Cheka ; he confined himself to academic comparisons with his own lot at Brixton. The foreigners do not appear to have -been badly treated. Muddle and suspicion were inevitable at the
death of a regime; and., after s.urvival, the two. feathers.which Mr. Urch seems to have been most proud to have in his cap were (1) being the only prisoner to smuggle a penknife into gaol ; and (2) being offered an instructorship in Oriental languages. To his protest that he spoke no Oriental lan- guages, the shrewd authorities replied that English was the
real language of the whole Orient v. S. Parrenarr.
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