It happened on a trip I made to Moscow with Alex Gumberg. Our compartment was crowded, and the Russians, having almost hermetically sealed door and window against the night air, went blissfully to sleep. The place, soon steaming like a Turkish bath, became unbearable. To let in a breath of air, I slid the door open, then joined the sleepers. In the morning I woke to a harsh surprise. Our suitcases were gone.
"Some tovarish robbers in uniform threw them out of the window and then jumped off the train," explained the old conductor. His consolation for our grief was that they had likewise stolen the baggage of an officer in the next compartment. We grieved not so much for the loss of our clothes as for the invaluable passports, notebooks and letters of introduction our bags contained.
Two weeks later we got another surprise—a summons from the station-master in Moscow. There was one of our suitcases forwarded to us by the robbers. It contained none of our clothes but all our documents and the officers' papers—not a single one was missing.
After all, considering the plight of the hordes of deserting soldiers that swept across the land, one wonders not at the number of thefts and excesses they committed but at the fewness of them. And if the tales of awful conditions in the trenches were true, the wonder is not that so many soldiers deserted but that so many still remained at the front.
