Through Russian Central Asia

THE journey recorded in these pages was made in the summer before the great war, and although the record of my impressions and the story of my adventures were fully written in my road diary and in the articles I sent to The Times, I had thought to postpone issuing my book to some quieter moment beyond the war. But the days go on, and we are getting accustomed to live in a state of war; war has almost become a normal condition of existence. At first we could do nothing but consider the facts of the great quarrel of nations and the exploits of the armies. War for the moment seemed to be our life, our culture, and our religion. But things have changed. War started by concentrating us and making us narrow, but now it is giving us greater breadth. We have become more interested in the home life of our Allies, in the “after-the-war” prospects of Europe, in the future of our own British Empire and of the wide world generally. The war has given us a larger consciousness, and we have become, as some say, “Continental.” In any case, we are much less insular. France and Russia have become real places to the man in the street, and the account he gives of them is more credible. Even our country labourer can say where Gallipoli is, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Salonica, Bulgaria, Serbia, though, indeed, I have frequently heard the latter spoken of as Siberia. “My son’s gone to Siberia,” says the countryman; “it’s a cold place.” Our imagination ranges farther afield, and young men of all classes think of making far travels when the war is over. We are not less interested in other things, but more; only less interested in the old suffocating business and industrial life of the time before the war, of the stuffy rooms, the circumscribed horizons, the dull grind. All eyes are opened wider, all hearts have greater hopes, and that which dares in us dares more. We are reading more, reading better, and, among other matters, are thinking more of foreign countries, empires, far-away climes. The war, bringing so many nations together, has touched imaginations. It has mixed our themes of conversations and enriched our life with new colours, new ideas. So, perhaps, the story of this journey and my impressions of an interesting but remote portion of the Tsar’s Empire will not come amiss just now. Moreover, during the war many problems have become clearer, especially those of the British Empire, clearer, but none the less unsolved, and I feel that a study of a vast stretch of the Russian Empire, and of its problems and its prospective future, cannot but be helpful.