BERLIN TO MOSCOW BY AIR.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3138, 9 October 1922, Page 7

BERLIN TO MOSCOW BY AIR.

Captain Paxton Hibben, the first newspaper correspondent to fly by air post into Soviet Russia, has given the J)aily Chronicle a picturesque description' of his trip made over many landmarks in Europe's history. Here is his

story : "You will be the first foreign correspondent to enter Russia, by the aeroplane post route/ 1 Tavarish Yershov told me at the Russian Embassy in Berlin. "It will c*st you 36,100 marks." I spent two days, mostly in the rain outside the Polish Consulate in Berlin, with several hundred other unfortunates, to obtain my visa; for one must' have a passport visa to fly over Poland, as well as to land in Lithuania. 1 did' not see the necessity for the former, but the Russian authorities were adamant. "You might fall in Poland." they explained. "Then I should need a visa for another and better world, which I could not obtain at the Polish Consulate!" I replied. Through the delay I missed sailing on July 16, by the newest and most modern of' the air-post planes. It fell at Kovno that d.:y and was wrecked. I left by the next plane, however, going to Konigsberg, and I slept the following night in Moscow r~ 1200 miles in 24 hours, and leisurely going at that. The planes are Fokker type, carrying four passengers and the mail. They belong to the Russian Soviet Government, as the sickle and 1 hammer emblazoned on the 1 sides attest.

One is allowed only 20 pounds of luggage, but the allowance may be stretched a bit if the post is not too heavy. Unhappily, with The Hague Conference still in session, the official mail was very heavy indeed, and I was held, strictly to my allowance. Our pilot was a German named! Stoillbruck. I recommend him. He is a fine, red-haired, blue-eyed youth, who has no patience with nonsense in the air. The only other passenger was the regular Russian- F.O. courier, Vladimir Simin, who had madie the journey so many times that he 6lept most of the way.

Between Germany and 1 Lithuania the frontier m m plainly marked from- the air as if it were drawn with a red line. In Germany—even that sombre East Prussia, of Sudermann's "E© war"— the cultivation is meticulously thorough. Buildings are substantial and prosperous; fields are of fair size and well tended; there are good broad roadk and modern villages, and careful drainage of the land.

Beyond' the line the change is striking. Scarcely a, third of the land is cultivated, or ever has been. Straggling ill-kept forests; vast estates, undeveloped and almost uninhabited; villages, stretched along rare and crooked road®, consist of low houses with thatched roofs, and have a general air of poverty and helplessness. The fields are not the prosperous individual holdings of Germany, but community holdings, cultivated in strips extending backwards from each dwelling, or lying across the landscape like the stripes of a Roman scarf, the varying shades of the different things planted in each strip flashing in the sunlight. There are peat bogs, and much marsh land undiained, with frequent pools reflecting the clouds like polished black onyx. Most significant of all, where the German (arms consist mostly of great barns, with the Lithuanian'farms the oniy barns of any size seem to be those surrounding an occasional manor We landed at Kovno, in Lithuania at 10.55, after an hour and 25 min»f, es ' r 1 n of L 32 miles. The place is dilapidated, and the soldiers who oversee a. yen,- minute Customs inspection, with an unusual antipathy to cameras are pathetic, frightened creatures, uniformed a k Beige. One showed me proudly his record book of passports checked, m which it was recorded that Isadora Duncan, travelling as a passenger from Russia in company with her youthful poet husband, Serge Alexandrovitch Yesin, on May 10, had forgotten to provide herself with a Lithuanian visa, and in consequence been forced to pay a fine of 1,800 marks. '

At 12.45 we left Kovno, delayed by some repairs to our machine. To reassure us, perhaps, we were permitted to inspect the wreckage of the air-post plane, which had fallen the" previous Sunday The way lying across a tiny corner of Poland scarcely seemed worth the visa difficulty, for within a few minutes we were safe in Soviet Russia. Here the change of the aspect of the country, while not so far-reaching as that between Germany and Lithuania, is nevertheless marked. In Russiai there is plainly more industry and more potential prosperity than in the smaller- Baltic Republic. Jhe tanning is still done by strips, in tiie old Russian fashion, and probably will be done so. for some time, but a greater proportion of the' land is cultivated.

The answer to those, who assert that the Russian peasant, under the Communist regime, voluntarily reduced' his acreage, is to fly over the country and see lor oneself. The cultivation, it is true, i« •frequently poor; probably both tools and draught animals, as well as seed, have been lacking; but the effort at extensive cultivation is evident an id encouraging. The towns, however, are still the depressing towns of Russia of the old days The only passable buildings are the churches, of entirely disproportionate magnificence to the unkempt, unpamted wooden houses in the poorer quarters.

In the neighborhood of Vitebsk ono approaches the seen© of the Napoleonic invasion. At Vitebsk itself, with its charming convent, Napoleon prepared for the attack on Smolensk. It was the beginning of the bleeding of Napoleon's Grand Army, which frequent indecisive and costly battles wore down in man power and in courage, a work completed by the long march on Moscow and the longer retreat. But for the irreparable losses of Smolensk and Borodino, the result of Waterloo might have been different. It was in this undulating Russian plain that the knell of French domination of Europe was sounded a century and a decade ago. ( From thv air Smolensk, with JJoris Godounoy's walls and towers, has the appearance of a truly Eastern city. It might be Constantinople, an illusion which is heightened by' the onionshaped domes of the churches, and the sharp descent of part of the town to the Dnieper, as Gala rata slopes abruptly to the Golden Horn.

Beyond Smolensk, the country becomes still more closely cultivated. The fields in strips disappear, and fairsized' farms take their place." It is like skirting the edge of the Orthys mountains and looking down on> the plains of Thessaly; there is the same fecund mist, the same patches of bright sunlight lying on yellow mustard blossoms. But here in Russia, there are the great, saving patches of forests whose loss in Greece has meant the drying up of the country.

We landed at Smolensk at 4.45, and left again at 5. The landing was at the military camp, and around the plane gathered a group of soldiers of the Red Army, looking very much like boys, shockingly uniformed, but tine unstanding types that Dokhtourov or Kutusov might have commanded to the ruin of Eugene de Beauharais and' Ney.

Some of them had their wives with them, strapping girls in bare feet, finelooking and deep of bosom. There was no Customs examination, and the passport question, reputed to be so difficult, proved a mere formality confined to an argument as to whether to spell my name with the G, which the Russian considers equivalent to our H, or the K.H, with which it was spelled in Russian on my credentials. From Smolensk we had more than two hours ahead of us in the air. Near Borodino we flew so low over the field of the "battle of generals," in which Napoleon lost the flower of his army, that the golden ball on the monument which murks the battle shone like a flame, and the three smaller monuments that mark the falling place of Russian generals stood out from the quiet fields in sharp relief. It was towards nightfall that the vast dome of the Church of the Redeemer of Moscow, rose out of the plain like St. Peter's seen from the Roman campagna. Lights were being lit, here and there. As we swung in a wide, lowering circle over the roofs of Moscow, there was picked out a lofty building, on whose top electric bulbs were festooned, white tables set, an orchestra playing— I breathed a prayer that it might not be jazz—and people dining in the luxury of the old, pre-war days. Alas! New Moscow!