Chapter Four
Shanghai

Inevitably milieu and stories force one to Shanghai. For mystery alone there were Trieste, Tangier, and Istanbul. But nowhere else did traffickers, adventurers, intriguers, and spies come together quite as they did in interwar Shanghai. No other city collected the epithets—"Babylon, Alexandria, Nineveh must have been like Shanghai"; "the greatest prostitution market in the world . . . le Wall Street de la traite "; "if Lenin saw Shanghai then he is excusable"—that were flung upon Shanghai. No city deserved them more.^[1]

There were in fact several Shanghais. There was the Shanghai of the Chinese, a city with roots extending back as far as five thousand years and already an important trading center by the twelfth century.^[2] There was the Shanghai of the Anglo-Americans—the international settlement—a prize of the opium wars and the business center along whose Bund stretched the great trading houses that made Shanghai the commercial capital of the East. And there was the Shanghai of the French—something of a misnomer because the French were a European minority in their own concession—that was the preferred place of residence for the rich but also the lair of the infamous Green Gang who ran the Shanghai underworld between the wars.

Together the three made Shanghai unlike any other city in China. The city was fabulously cosmopolitan. Its population was overwhelmingly Chinese, including many who lived within the two European settlements, but there were also thousands of Westerners—British, Americans, Portuguese, French, Germans, Italians, Spanish, Danes, Swiss,

Belgians, Austrians, Swedes, Czechs, Greeks—whose numbers swelled further as Russian émigrés poured in during the twenties and thirties. From other parts of Asia came Koreans, Indians (especially Sikhs imported as policemen), and Japanese, who, by 1915, had surpassed the British as the largest foreign contingent in the town. In 1910 there were more than a million people in the Shanghai metropolitan area, in 1920 nearly as many as two and a half million. By the mid-1930s more than three million souls crowded into the metropolis, making Shanghai the fifth largest city in the world. Of these over one million, including forty thousand foreigners, crammed into the international settlement, nearly another half million, including sixteen thousand foreigners, into the French concession.^[3]

Like other colonialists, the foreigners brought with them their clubs, their mores, their institutions, and their womenfolk, all of which turned portions of Shanghai into a little Britain, a little France, or a little Japan. But these foreigners also brought an extraordinary lust for power and money that, combined with Shanghai's proximity to the mouth of the Yangtze and the security that came with sovereign European settlements, turned Shanghai into an economic dynamo. Something clicked here between Chinese and foreigners—"a human cocktail," as Marc Chadourne was later to describe it^[4] —that generated an unbounded scramble for profit in which all nationalities participated. The result was China's most modern city and, in this sense, its most Western as well. First came the great merchant houses: Jardine Matheson, Butterfield and Swire, Russell and Co., and the trading empire of the Sassoons. Then followed the banks whose presence underscored Shanghai's internationalism and its sheer materialist rapacity. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation arrived in 1865, the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank in 1889, the Japanese Yokohama Species Bank in 1892, the Russo-Chinese Bank in 1895, the Banque de l'Indochine in 1899, and the International Banking Corporation (First National Bank of New York City) in 1902. As the century wore on factories sprang up, particularly in textiles, making Shanghai a manufacturing hub of the Orient. In all these enterprises—trade, banking, industry—Chinese were active. Chinese invested in European commercial ventures, they built cotton mills, flour mills, machine shops; even compradors could be powerful independent businessmen carving out their own merchant kingdoms. Where older Chinese balked, a new generation caught Shanghai fever and plunged headfirst into the open entrepreneurial waters.^[5]

By the interwar years Shanghai was an international metropolis in

every meaning of the word. Visitors were absorbed by the power, the activity, and the raw energy that struck them from the first moments of arrival. They saw in Shanghai another New York—"the New York of the Pacific," "the New York of the Far East," "Billion Dollar Row"^[6] —because only the New York analogy seemed to capture the unbridled vitality and modernity of this otherwise undefinable concoction. Shanghai itself took pride in this identity. It boasted of its skyscrapers and of possessing the longest bar in the world. There were modern department stores, fifty thousand telephones, sixteen thousand automobiles, well-paved streets (in the settlements), a splendid water filtration system, and a state-of-the-art gas company with the most modern facility anywhere.^[7] The same positive note, if more sedately sounded, could be found in the annual reports of the French consul general who all but ruled over the French concession in Shanghai. The concession shared in "a remarkable state of prosperity." It was more and more the residential quarter for the well-off of Shanghai. Rich Chinese in search of security built their opulent villas in the French quarter. The concession was "a very modern city." There were schools, hospitals, and a volunteer fire department equipped with the most modern fire trucks available. The French electricity, water, and tramway company of Shanghai was "one of the most beautiful French operations in the Far East."^[8]

But there was also the other Shanghai, the Shanghai of fifty-seven hundred bodies that were left in the streets or vacant lots every year, or the Shanghai notorious for the magnetic effect it exerted upon the lowlife of the world. Again there was an almost chemical response between the city and its inhabitants, a catalytic reaction that tended to stimulate the demonic or simply the seamy side to human character. "Shanghai is not a town at all," barks one of the characters in Vicki Baum's novel Shanghai '37 . "Shanghai is a poison. Man eaters live here, naked cannibalism rules here. This town is the world's refuse heap. Whoever comes here, white or Chinese, has cracked up somewhere before and Shanghai does the rest." That destiny seems to have been Shanghai's from its first days as a European settlement. Mid-nineteenth-century sweeps of hotel rooms flushed out adventurers and outlaws, men who "maintained a prudent silence about their past" and who found a refuge or home among the pirate gangs of Ningpo. By the twentieth century adventure, crime, or any illicit traffic seems to have been synonymous with the very mention of the city.^[9]

Paul Crawley was representative of the sort of flotsam that washed up in Shanghai in the twenties and thirties and that gave it its reputation

for wickedness and degeneracy: "Shanghai the modern Babylon"; "city saturated in riches and crimes, in vanities and vices, in miseries and poisons"; Shanghai "the city of all luxuries, of all horrors, of all surrenders"^[10] Crawley was an American citizen who spoke Japanese, Russian, and Mandarin. In 1922 he was in Shanghai, involved with a man named Goldenberg in a scheme to pirate the film rights to a movie, Way Down East , which the two had stolen and copied. They sold their print to a Japanese named Takamura for forty or fifty thousand dollars. Goldenberg cashed the check and the next day his body was discovered—by Crawley—in his home above the Victoria Cinema. Both the money and a diamond ring of unusual cut that Goldenberg always wore were missing.

Crawley skipped town and next surfaced in Harbin. There he met his future wife, a Russian woman who responded to his advertisement for a lady business assistant (few women who came near Crawley were ever to escape his grasp). At the time they met Crawley was rolling in money and wore a flashy diamond ring. He was also running a gambling den, trafficking in guns and narcotics, and managing a film agency of sorts. Among his associates or acquaintances was another Russian named Rybakov who had been born in Petrograd and had attained the rank of captain in the Imperial Russian air corps. In Harbin Rybakov managed the Chinese Eastern Railway Club and then an establishment called the Hotel Modern. In 1925 Rybakov had moved on to Shanghai where he managed the Palais de Danse on Bubbling Well Road.

By the mid-to-late twenties Crawley was back in Shanghai where he and Rybakov renewed their acquaintance and took up with a third person named Wilder. In 1931 the three were engaged in a confidence scheme to peddle "liquid fire" to Chinese generals in the north. Meanwhile Crawley continued to run guns and drugs between Dairen, Soochow, Shanghai, and Canton. In Shanghai he had an array of verminous contacts and accomplices: a Mr. Pan listed by police as a notorious dealer in arms; a man named Bisbierg who was also suspected of running guns; a Mr. (or Mrs.) Gaida who trafficked in heroin; and a Chinese named Ah Lee who, with Crawley, ran the Velvet Sweet Shop in Szechuen Road, a front operation for exporting opium into the United States. Crawley himself appears to have fallen prey to opium, writing one message to his wife on the back of a religious print that the Shanghai police intercepted and described as "the vaporing of one mentally afflicted." By the beginning of the thirties Crawley was smuggling firearms hidden in slot machines into Shanghai and shipping back opium

to the United States through a contact aboard an American ship. He packed a pistol wherever he went and he conducted his personal life with all the restraint of a cocker spaniel. He beat his wife, allegedly sexually abused his eleven-year-old daughter, and chased after his servants, who must have quit his employment in droves. In late 1931 the police reported that he had dismissed his housekeeper because she interfered with his attempts to seduce his seventeen-year-old secretary. At roughly the same time it was noted that his chauffeur was in a panic over Mrs. Crawley's threats to tell her husband all about their "relations" if he (the chauffeur) did not buy her a new dress. The chauffeur was terrified that Crawley would bite him, and maybe even kill him. Such was the petty and slimy world of Paul Crawley, whose file reads like a train station detective novel and whom the American authorities picked up on drug charges in early 1932.^[11]

The Crawleys of Shanghai were legion between the wars, the city a sink of covers and hangouts. The Buisson brothers worked out of the Fantasio, a dance hall where opium traffickers congregated. The two were small-time crooks on the lam who sailed from Genoa to Shanghai in 1934, set themselves up in the arms trade, and purchased an airplane for drops to their customers. After several years they had the police on their backs and returned to Europe. Later, in the 1940s, Emile Buisson, better known as Mimile, would enjoy a stretch as French public enemy number one. The Italia Hotel in the international settlement was the cover for a Corsican arms merchant who trafficked as well in cocaine and women. The Tsounias gang hung out at the Astoria Café on Broadway and ran their illicit operations behind Boo Kee and Co. on the Bund. Police suspected them of smuggling heroin and morphine into China in cases of cream of rice and cream of barley. The groceries were shipped on Messageries Maritimes liners (a contact aboard one ship was a Russian dining room steward). The Shanghai municipal police (SMP) file on Tsounias revealed connections to the Eliopoulos brothers and to Emmanuel Y., another Greek trafficker in arms and narcotics who was the subject of correspondence between U.S. drug agents and the Sûreté. His cover was an import-export firm on Jinkee Road in Shanghai.^[12]

Trafficking was the lifeblood of the city. It always had been. The august houses of Jardine Matheson, Russell, and Dent had all made fortunes importing opium into China in the nineteenth century. Only when speculation by the Sassoons drove down opium profits did Jardine branch out into more respectable enterprises.^[13] Where they left off others wormed in. After the war traffickers flocked to the city, first be-

cause the China of warlords and then of war made the town a mecca for gunrunners, second because the trade in narcotics was enormous and because efforts to stamp it out simply drove it underground, and third because Shanghai was Shanghai, a wide-open city that served as a last haven for the wasted of the world.

To these can be added a fourth explanation, the fact that Shanghai was in the grip of a vast criminal gang that had infiltrated the political life of the city and had the French police on the take. The most famous man in interwar Shanghai was neither Chiang Kai-shek nor T. V. Soong but a crime lord named Tu Yueh-sheng.^[14] Born in 1887 into the kind of poverty that was endemic in China, he had made a long ascent through the Chinese criminal underworld until he and his associates commanded the Green Gang and ruled over perhaps as many as one hundred thousand gangsters. The gang and its subsidiaries ran protection schemes, brothels, gambling dens, and opium shops. It had its hand in kidnappings and armed robberies, and by 1925 it controlled the city's opium trade. Its reach was so great that inevitably it extended to the foreign police forces. In the 1910s and 1920s the chief of the SMP's detective squad was a mobster. Worse still were conditions in the French concession where Consul General Wilden had to acknowledge the shadows that darkened the sweet glow of French accomplishments in the Orient. In 1922 the consul general dismissed the personnel of an entire police post on the payroll of the gang (the sergeant of the post returned to France six hundred thousand francs to the better and set himself up as a major industrialist). In 1924 Wilden dismissed the chief of the Sûreté on similar charges and in the following year he was obliged still again to dismiss the man's successor.^[15]

From at least the end of the war, however, the French pursued a modus vivendi with the gangsters, aware that the latter, if indulged—and coopted—could enforce a measure of order on the masses. The key figure in this arrangement was initially Huang Chin-jung, a Chinese detective with the French concession police and a man with close ties to the mob; later the connection was Tu, who began his ascent as Huang's protégé and then edged Huang off to the sidelines. In 1925 the authorities and Tu completed an official agreement that provided de facto recognition of Green Gang activities in exchange for regular payoffs. In 1927 the French extended the agreement as the Green Gang provided additional security forces during the Nationalist march north and the Communist strikes in the city. At the same time Tu struck his own bargain with Chiang, supplying Green Gang hoods to strong-arm the

Reds. Over the next five years the Green Gang all but ran the French concession, tightening their hold through labor racketeering. Eventually the French were forced to strike back, reducing but not eradicating Tu Yueh-sheng's position in the settlement. He remained an extraordinarily powerful man but even more an established figure. In 1935 Who's Who in Shanghai identified Tu as "the most influential Chinese resident of the French concession." He was president of two banks, founder and chairman of the board of the Cheng Shih Middle School, president of the Shanghai Emergency Hospital, a director of the Commercial Bank of China, a director of Great China University, a member of the supervising committee of the General Chamber of Commerce, and a member of the Conseil municipal.^[16] As such he set the tone for the rest of the city. Tu Yueh-sheng's respectability and the Green Gangs penetration of the power structure virtually guaranteed Shanghai's place as an international harbor of vice.

The binge and scandal of the city took in the White Russians; interwar Shanghai would have been unimaginable without them. Few travelers to Shanghai failed to remark on their presence. To do so would be to visit Paris and miss the Eiffel Tower or to tour Hollywood and ignore the studios. Twenty-five thousand of these refugees descended on the city by the late thirties.^[17] They were renowned as the best bodyguards in Shanghai, a profession with a future in a town where kidnapping was a habit. Former Russian officers dressed up as British colonels with revolvers at the ready were said to give "much face" to their masters.^[18] Through the streets rolled automobiles with armed Russians on the running boards. Large numbers of the émigrés crowded into the French concession, where businesses were fewer and rents consequently lower.^[19] Their cramped quarters reflected their financial condition, which in most cases bordered on the desperate. For many Shanghai was what it was for any immigrant—a place without a past and a chance to start anew. Nadezha Nikiforov's was a typical story. Born in Irkutsk in 1913, she left Russia for China with her parents in 1920, going first to Harbin—until 1933—and then to Dairen. In 1934 they arrived in Shanghai. Her father established himself as a superintendent of the Russian White Flower Society's Home for Tuberculosis and was able to house the family on the premises. Nadezha found work at a local library and then as a cashier at D.D.'s Café-Restaurant in the avenue Joffre. At some point she met a Dutch employee of the Netherlands Trading Society at Medan who was living in Shanghai in the mid-1930s. On 23 July 1937 she sailed on the SS Potsdam to Sumatra to rejoin and marry him.^[20]

For many others, however, Shanghai was the last, wretched stop on the line. Shipwrecked and destitute, they drifted into every dirty business the city had to often In Shanghai that meant a plenitude of possibilities—gunrunning, drug trafficking, petty crime, touting, espionage—but most of all it meant prostitution. More renowned than the bodyguards were the White Russian women who worked the streets and brothels and slept with men of colon Their fall indelibly stamped itself upon the image of the city, making it a symbol of ill repute and a stimulus for sensation. Around les femmes russes de Shanghaï grew up a certain literature—pornographic, cheaply sentimental, and laden with the specter of white decline in the Orient. Racism and race fear were deeply embedded in thoughts about the city, the mood that O.-P. Gilbert expressed when he wrote that Shanghai coolies were as "innumerable as flies on a cake" and that through city streets the "Chinese crowd flowed like pus," or when he wrote that "the Europeans live with the mentality of 'packed bags' . . . that mentality of the defeat of the white man."^[21] What White Russian women offered was a palpable image that tied these fears to the damage of the war and to realignments in power, although the very choice of the image meant that it was bound to entangle with other moods that the city could evoke. Henry Champly's Road to Shanghai: White Slave Traffic in Asia , which may have run through as many as thirty-eight editions, showed how seamy tales and steamy prose, the degradation of Russian women, and intimations of Japanese conspiracies invariably brought together race fear with global speculation and an ambiance that was unmistakably Shanghai's between the Wars.^[22]

The mystique of writing about White Russians derived in no little part from their immersion in the intrigues of the city. White Russians conspired in Shanghai, built revanchist organizations there, recruited among the Shanghai Russian population for wild schemes of collaboration with Japanese liberators, and funneled intelligence back to the rat nests in Paris.^[23] For many, intrigue was built into personal experience, a consequence of being caught up in the sweep of war and revolution. By the force of history these men and women had been turned into adventurers, the adventures themselves locked into the power politics of the age. Born in St. Petersburg in 1895, C. I. Znamenskii had studied mathematics and physics at the university and metallurgy at the Polytechnic Institute, a beginning with all the earmarks of normalcy, except that Znamenskii lived in abnormal times. In 1915 he entered the military and was sent to a school for officers in Irkutsk. Graduated in 1916,

he served with the army until April 1917, departed for Harbin, but returned to Siberia in 1918. When the civil war came to Siberia he sided with the Whites and was assigned to military intelligence in Omsk. From 1919 to 1920 he served with Semenov's army at Chita and then with the White forces in Vladivostok, where again his assignment was military intelligence and counterespionage. By 1922 the former student and would-be-engineer was a hardened campaigner and a seasoned spy. As the Whites were forced out of the maritime province Znamenskii emigrated to Harbin and took up a new life as a mathematics teacher. But espionage was now either in the blood or an additional means for the hard-up to scrape by, and Znamenskii, so he claimed, remained "connected with various organs of White Russian military intelligence." In 1934 he emigrated again, along with his wife and three children, this time to Shanghai. There he found work as a drawing teacher in the Ste Jeanne d'Arc College on the Route Doumer, but in 1937 he was filing an application with the Shanghai municipal police for employment in their political section.^[24]

Nikolai Vladimirovich Dolzhikov was another of these victims of circumstance who fell just as precipitously into the spy world. A mining engineer, he fled the Soviet Union in 1924, heading first to Manchuria and then to China. If he was looking for security, comfort, or fortune his life was to be a stream of disappointments. There is no indication that the man was an adventurer, yet world politics and choice sent him on a wild ride of adventures that eventually landed him among the intriguers. For two years after leaving Russia he fought with the Russian refugee forces in the warlord army of Marshal Chang Tsung-chang. Chang was the military scourge of Shantung. He was nearly seven feet tall and said to possess "the physique of an elephant, the brain of a pig, and the temperament of a tiger." His Russian cavalry wore dark green uniforms and yellow leather boots and were armed with lances, Mauser pistols, and Chinese beheading swords. Joseph Stilwell called them "the toughest eggs I ever laid eyes on."^[25] Dolzhikov served as artillery officer with the crew of one of the marshal's four armored trains. Later he moved on to work in the Japanese coal mines at Fushun, and then he came to Shanghai in 1931. He opened the German Trading Company on the avenue Joffre but the business went bust within the year. That was probably the last permanent employment he enjoyed in the thirties. For the next six years he found casual work, mostly as a mechanic.

When war broke out between China and Japan, Dolzhikov once again took a stab at adventure. Running into a Chinese officer he had

known in Shantung, Dolzhikov accepted an offer to join the man's unit as an artillery instructor. His first missions, however, were in intelligence work and after completing these he was told to report to a man known only as Colonel Charlie. The two met in a hotel room on the avenue Joffre where Colonel Charlie introduced Dolzhikov to a Russian named Pertsovskii who would give Dolzhikov his future assignments. His first job for Pertsovskii was a sabotage mission against a Japanese airfield hangar. One man died in this attack (an unknown Russian) and three men including Dolzhikov were wounded. After Dolzhikov recovered, Pertsovskii sent him on another intelligence assignment of a reconnoitering nature and then ordered him once again to lead a team of saboteurs in civilian dress to destroy Japanese pontoons near the Point Island. This time Dolzhikov refused and set up a meeting of his own with a Russian named Soivshkin, another old Shantung campaigner and currently a Japanese agent. From Dolzhikov's later testimony it would appear that he intended simply to discuss options at this meeting. But Soivshkin and another Russian whisked him off in a car to the Japanese consulate, where Dolzhikov was arrested. Two days later he was taken to a safe house on the Woosung Road where he was interrogated by a sergeant in Japanese intelligence and tortured with bamboo sticks, burning cigarettes, and, worst of all, water poured copiously down his nostrils. The Japanese insisted he work for them as a double agent, Dolzhikov refused, but after more water treatment he was forced to relent. Once set free he met with Pertsovskii several times and then, at last, went to the police and appealed for protection. The SMP—perhaps because an earlier French police report contained allegations that Dolzhikov had in fact taken the initiative in betraying information to the Japanese—said they could do nothing for him. This is where the Dolzhikov story leaves off, and one can only guess at what became of the man—alone, defenseless, up to his neck in danger, and probably wondering why he ever left Russia.^[26]

Other Russians like A. L. Rubanovich, who changed his name to A. L. Dick and who may have been both a Soviet and British agent, fit more conventional spy patterns, yet he too appears to have gotten his start in the course of the war or in the Russian civil war that followed. During the thirties Dick was in and out of Shanghai, associating with a host of dubious individuals and at one time managing a cabaret in the city's Blood Alley. Such facts, if true, would have made Dick an almost banal figure. Shanghai was to professional spies in the twenties and thirties much what Berlin would become in the fifties and sixties. So preva-

lent were spies that the city's name became a code word for espionage as it did for criminality and debauchery. Paule Herfort, who visited the city in the late 1930s, called Shanghai "the international homeland of vice, spies, and vultures." Vu et Lu suggested the city was overrun with spies, "quintuple agents at the very least." People who wrote about Shanghai invariably brought spies and intrigues into their stories. Even serious writers like Malraux or Charles Plisnier whose Alessandro Cassini dreams of going to Shanghai (instead he is sent on an undercover mission to Italy) identified revolutionary Shanghai as a city of intrigues. The image was scarcely off the mark.^[27]

How far back this identity ran is uncertain, although just before the war Shanghai was already becoming a gathering ground for revolutionaries and nationalist agitators.^[28] After the war the numbers seem to have exploded as spies and secret agents tramped through the city and set up shop practically at will. In the heady revolutionary years of the twenties Comintern and GPU operatives passed in and out of Shanghai, while the Soviets built up a spy network in China that has been described as extensive.^[29] The Kuomintang purge of the Communists in 1927-1928 dealt a stunning blow to Communist expectations in the Orient and to the Comintern organization in Shanghai. Yet even as the Russians withdrew (or were hunted down),^[30] they left behind a skeleton organization that was able to rebuild into a serious operation over the next several years.

Throughout the late twenties and the beginning of the thirties, foreign police tracked the comings and goings of Soviet agents. They were forever vigilant regarding Russians like a Madame Bulgakova-Belskii who arrived in Shanghai in December 1928 from Tientsin, where she was believed to have worked as a GPU courier to Peking, Mukden, and Harbin and to have recruited dancing partners to spread Communist propaganda among foreign troops. Following their experience in 1927, the Comintern increasingly relied upon non-Russian agents—Poles, Finns, Estonians, and especially Germans and Hungarians—to carry out their missions in China. Shanghai was the center, the location of the Orient bureau that served as the intermediary between the Comintern in Moscow and Communist parties in the Pacific and that dispatched agents throughout the region. In 1931 came another crackdown: a vast French and British sweep snared Nguyen Ai Quoc (later known as Ho Chi Minh) in Hong Kong and major Comintern figures in Singapore and Shanghai. Even then Shanghai remained a focal point of Soviet intrigues in the East. By 1937 there was once again an Orient bureau

based in Shanghai and filtering instructions through to Communists elsewhere. Meanwhile Red Army intelligence (GRU) was running major operations out of Shanghai. Richard Sorge arrived in early 1930 under the cover name of Johnson and built his first extensive spy network there. Later, when he had moved on to Japan, he used Shanghai as a drop point for his courier traffic and as a meeting place for instructions and finances. Sorge's radio operator in Tokyo, Max Clausen, began his life as a GRU agent in Shanghai. It was there that he and Sorge first met, even though the two were working different circuits. Just how many operations Soviet military intelligence had going in Shanghai in the thirties is anyone's guess, but Ursula Hamburger, who was later to carry out spy missions in Switzerland and was the agent Sonia in the Rote Kapelle network, was also in Shanghai on assignment for the Red Army from 1930 to 1935.^[31]

During these years it was probably impossible to walk up and down the Bund or to lounge in hotels without jostling up against some secret agent. A man named Pearson, who claimed Uruguayan citizenship and who arrived in Shanghai with the intention of gathering information concerning Japanese and Soviet defenses, had no trouble contacting the agents of several secret services; indeed the report on Pearson read as if the presence of such people was open knowledge in Shanghai, needing only a glance through the yellow pages to find them.^[32] Suspicious characters were always passing through, arriving in Shanghai from some other distant port, departing, and then returning like the woman S., who had been born in Riga in 1894 but called herself Czechoslovak by 1940. She spoke eight languages and had traveled widely in Europe and the Orient. In Singapore she ran a shop, but police there listed her as a drug addict, a suspected drug smuggler, and "a sly prostitute." At the time of the Munich crisis she was also identified as a Nazi sympathizer and a person unusually well informed about British and American fleet movements in the Pacific. She appears to have first come to Shanghai in 1928 where she consorted with an Austrian engineer and narcotics trafficker. She may have been back in 1938, and was known to be in contact with another Austrian, this one a doctor and suspected spy living in the city. Ordered to leave Malaya at the end of 1940, she was expected in Shanghai once again the following month.^[33]

By the thirties Shanghai was a thicket of spy agencies. Police in the settlements were constantly turning up Japanese agents. In 1935 the Abwehr was running a station in China and by fall of 1937 ready one in Shanghai, although German operatives in the city can be traced back

to the twenties, and other agents from other German postings were filing reports out of Shanghai as well.^[34] French naval intelligence maintained a post in Shanghai from as early as 1927, formalizing it into the Shanghai Transit Service in October 1929. The Colonial Ministry opened its own intelligence station in the city in 1937-1938 and by that date there was also coverage from military attachés and an intelligence branch of the French occupation corps not to mention the French concession police, who were deeply engaged in counterespionage and were in liaison with the Sûreté in Indochina and British police in Hong Kong and Singapore. Nevertheless there could never be too many spies in Shanghai, and in July 1938 the Colonial Ministry decided to send Marc Chadourne there on a separate intelligence mission. Despite the protests of the Quai d'Orsay, Chadourne arrived in the city in early 1939 under the cover of writing yet another book on China.^[35]

Still if Shanghai was crawling with professionals and was a center for secret service networks, the more typical intriguer in the city was someone like Eckelman, alias Sanders, alias Sanderoff, alias Northquist, alias Marquist, alias Lund, alias Captain Knutsen. He appears to have been born in 1899 of a German father and a Swedish mother, but so little else in his life was verifiable (or believable) that even these facts are open to suspicion. By the latter half of the thirties he was passing in and out of Shanghai and telling these stories about himself: He had been living in Hoboken, New Jersey, when the First World War had broken out and had attempted to return to Germany only to be intercepted by the Russians and imprisoned in a concentration camp somewhere in Siberia. He had escaped from the camp by clinging to the undercarriage of a railroad car and, with the help of a Swedish nurse, had made it back to Germany. He had enlisted in the German navy, become a whiz at coding and decoding, and, discovering a flaw in the codes he was sending, had been summoned back to headquarters in Berlin to devise an unbreakable code, which he had managed to produce. He had finished the war as a commander of a German U-boat (in 1918 he would have been nineteen years old). He had gone on to devise codes for a number of individual and national clients, including China, Japan, Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Basil Zaharoff, and a maharajah of India (Eckelman did séem to have certain skills as a coder and during one of his sojourns in Shanghai opened an office to sell what he called his "Cosmos trading code," but the venture failed miserably). He had flown in the Chinese air force. He was a personal friend and confidant of Chiang Kai-shek. He had traveled to Lhasa disguised as a deaf

and dumb barber on a special mission for the Generalissimo. His titles included Doctor of Law, Doctor of Philosophy (With degrees from both Berlin and Leipzig), Doctor of Political Science (from Bonn), Lieutenant Commander in the German Naval Reserve, Rear Admiral in the Chinese Navy, Brigadier General in the Chinese Army, and Commander in the Royal Swedish Navy. An undercover police agent who tracked Eckelman down in the Blue Paradise nightclub and watched him toss down several hot rums was treated to still more tales, among these the revelation that he had helped prepare the attack on a Japanese cruiser in the Whangpoo River in 1937. He was, as the undercover agent concluded, a fabulous raconteur or, as one other person summed him up, "a monumental fakir and liar."

By the late thirties Eckelman was also an accomplished con man who kept dangerous company and was suspected of spying. In 1938-1939 he swindled twenty-nine thousand dollars from an art gallery in New York on the promise of using his Chinese connections to deliver a shipment of Chinese imperial treasures. (The series of letters and telegrams he sent, of transport by camel caravan where no caravan routes existed, of being bombed by the Japanese, shot at by the French, of losing sixteen men and so on are another story all its own.) In Shanghai in the fall of 1939 he took over the flat of a man named Kolacek, a former secretary in the Czechoslovakian consulate who had gone over to the Germans (following the takeover of Prague) and who had reportedly sold secret documents to an unidentified foreign intelligence service. At the same time Eckelman was associating with a known arms dealer reputed to be tied to the Japanese, and in his conversation at the Blue Paradise he let drop that he was in touch with H. D., the aviator turned suspected Japanese agent. Eckelman was known to go armed, and although some suggested he might be simply deranged, both the French and the British suspected he was working for Japanese intelligence.^[36]

Like so many others we have met from these years—the Gardiners, the D.'s, the Goldbergs, the Corrigans—Eckelman appears to have been an adventurer who inexorably drifted into espionage or intrigue. All of them illustrate how readily lives were caught up in world events after the war and how, consequently, adventures and intrigues tended to run together. That is what made Eckelman representative of the spies who turned up in Shanghai in the twenties and thirties. Many were professionals but probably many more were men and women who simply chose to lead adventurous if shady existences or people like Znamenskii and Dolzhikov who found their lives transformed by great

events that set them coursing down the conduits of history. In either case circumstances and opportunities edged them closer and closer to the intriguers until the two became inseparable. Shanghai, as a city of adventurers, human wreckage, and spies, lubricated the passages that brought them together.

Easing that convergence was the fact that Shanghai itself was increasingly drawn into global history and the cataclysms of the age. The great Western outpost in China was also a conglomeration of workers and a generator of cultural ferment that made it an epicenter of revolution and war. Three historical currents swept over China in the first half of the twentieth century—nationalism, bolshevism, and Japanese expansionism. All three forced dramatic action in Shanghai and all three carried the city into the vortex of world affairs. Perhaps as much as the First World War, the Russo-Japanese War sparked anti-imperial sentiment and the rise of nationalist movements throughout the non-Western world. Almost immediately in China it led to the creation of the Chinese revolutionary alliance. Shanghai became a headquarters of alliance activity and, as one person has described it, a "hotbed of radicalism" that made the city an important center during the revolution of 1911. By 1914 there was, therefore, already in place a tradition of militant agitation in the city.^[37]

The consequences of the First World War were to be equally far-reaching. The Japanese conquest of German bases in the Far East and Japanese expansion into Shantung had two immediately provocative results. First, German defeat, like Russian defeat earlier, implied the vulnerability of all colonial powers in China and the prospect that ultimately they might all be evacuated. Second, the series of events that followed—the replacement of the Germans in Shantung by Japanese troops, the imposition of Japan's twenty-one demands, the failure of the Western Allies to support Chinese interests despite China's entry in the war against the Central Powers, and the subsequent humiliation at Versailles, where Japanese advances were upheld—struck the Chinese as a betrayal and as a goad to further action. Together the two ignited a new wave of nationalist demands. The long-term effects were still more imposing. Despite victory the war undermined the foundations of Western power abroad and left the imperialist nations seriously overextended. The Westerners who would increasingly have to seek accommodation knew it, the Chinese knew it, and most of all the Japanese who saw China as a vast economic asset knew it. By war's end the Japanese had supplanted the British as China's principal trading partner and in

Shanghai British cotton spinning mills had ceded first rank to Japanese enterprises.^[38] The war with its vast shift in global power had conferred upon Japan precedence in the Pacific. From the 1920s on the Japanese had no intention of relinquishing or even failing to expand that position. They were determined to assert their presence in the region and to secure, at any cost, their economic interests as they defined them. That pursuit, in the context of rising Chinese nationalism and Western imperial investments, would make China a site of clashes and international tensions and eventually the battleground of war.

And there was the Russian revolution. From its inception its leaders intended to lead a world revolution. These ambitions assumed new meanings as, thwarted in the West, the Bolsheviks turned East, seeing in imperial lands or in a country like China the promise of victories and the soft underbelly of capitalism. At its second congress in 1920 the Comintern adopted the strategy of challenging colonialism on a worldwide scale and then reaffirmed that decision at a congress of subject peoples convoked in Baku. There before a mostly Muslim audience, Zinoviev proclaimed a holy war on Western imperialism. Within the Comintern there was division over the proper role of Communists in this assault on the imperialists. Lenin favored an alliance with movements of national liberation. M. N. Roy argued for independent revolutionary organization from below. A slight compromise was worked out, but essentially Lenin's position prevailed, thus setting the stage for the Communist alliance with the Chinese nationalists of the Kuomintang. Initially of marginal significance to the Comintern, China in the twenties was to loom larger and larger until it became the first great testing ground—and failure—to spread bolshevism in the East. In 1920 the Comintern sent its first emissaries to China. In 1923 the Chinese Communist Party joined the Kuomintang, and in January of the same year an agreement between Adolph Joffe and Sun Yat-sen provided for Russian financial and organizing assistance, including the dispatch of Russian military advisers. Both the Russian presence and the cooperation of the Communists were to play a crucial role in the success of the Kuomintang's northern expedition in 1926-1927 that led to the nationalists' command over China. But the centrifugal forces within the alliance were as great as their common objectives, and in early 1927 Chiang Kai-shek turned dramatically and ferociously upon his former allies, driving them out of the Kuomintang and forcing them underground in areas the Kuomintang controlled.^[39]

Shanghai was at the center of all these storms. A cauldron of some

several hundred thousand workers^[40] and the manufacturing capital of China, it would become, with Canton, the country's revolutionary city in the twenties. In 1921 it was the site of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party and in 1923 Sun Yat-sen's home in the French concession was the meeting place for the Kuomintang leader and the Russian Joffe, who hammered out the agreement committing the Bolsheviks to their adventure in China.^[41] In 1925 Shanghai was the scene of mass demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts that set off the May Thirtieth Movement, one of the greatest nationalist episodes of the decade and an event that left Shanghai a stronghold of militant radical action. Two years later the Communist-led workers seized control of the city as the northern expedition was marching on its gates. The following month Chiang's troops and the Green Gang smashed the mass movement in a bloody purge repeated throughout Kuomintang China but forever identified with Shanghai because of the extent of revolutionary organization in the city and because Malraux immortalized the event in what many consider his greatest novel.^[42]

In the thirties Shanghai remained a historical focal point as the city lived in uneasy peace with Japanese expansionism. Progressively international tensions bore down upon the Whangpoo. In 1931 the Japanese overran Manchuria. In 1932 full-scale fighting erupted between Chinese and Japanese units in Chapei just north of the international settlement. After that the atmosphere grew permanently ominous: 1937 brought war and the fall of Chinese Shanghai; 1941 the overrunning of the international settlement. The Shanghai of the late thirties that Jean Raynaud saw was still the modern Babylon but was also a city of barbed wire and foot patrols and one teeming with refugees. In the river junks and sampans flew French, British, German, and Portuguese flags in the hope of attaining a measure of protection. From half a million residents the French concession swelled to one million three hundred thousand occupants, again reflecting the scramble for security. On the Bund a French light armored car was stationed en permanence .^[43]

Thus the parade that was Shanghai took place against a backdrop of Comintern intrigues, warships in the Whangpoo, and Japanese bayonets. For the Green Gang, for example, international events were decisive. Huang made his move to chief superintendent of detectives when the war called his superiors back to France. The aftershocks of the war—nationalism, revolution, Japanese power, and a stretching of colonial resources—encouraged the French to accommodate with the mobsters. The gang consolidated its stranglehold in 1927 as Shanghai took center

stage in the civil war within the Kuomintang. Japanese aggression in 1932 forced the French to react with vigor and to scale down Tu's influence in the concession.^[44] No one—not Crawley, no White Russian—was independent of the context about them. For secret agents it was a perfect milieu.

In a globally closing world Shanghai was a nexus, a place where events were internationally determined and determining. Travelers came to witness and report as well as to enjoy, and they came between the wars in considerable numbers. The town was five thousand miles from San Francisco, nearly nine thousand from Paris, ten thousand from London if one went entirely by sea, but getting there was not very difficult. A premier port of the world, Shanghai was readily accessible. On the Messageries Marltimes Line one could travel fortnightly from Marseilles via Djibouti, Colombo, Singapore, and Saigon, reaching Shanghai in thirty to thirty-two days. On the P & O liners one could make Shanghai in thirty days from London if one took the special express train to Marseilles and then sailed via Malta, Aden, Bombay, and Hong Kong. Hamburg Amerika liners sailed to Shanghai from Hamburg and Genoa, Lloyd Triestino liners monthly from Venice, and if one chose to go overland there was the Trans-Siberian/Chinese Eastern railroad to Harbin with connection on to Shanghai.^[45]

Yet if passage was easy and the city compellingly modern, travelers never lost their sense of distance, nor their desire to journey across some invisible line into mystery, exotica, and sensation. They came seeking a Shanghai that was romantic and adventurous, and almost always the city complied with their wishes. "I could have gone to Shanghai and become the French chief of police," says Estienne at the beginning of his tale in Joseph Kessel's Wagon-lit , "and you can imagine what a field for adventure that would have been with the traffic in opium, arms, and kidnappings." "What resources here for adventure!" wrote Marc Chadourne in 1931. "Where to begin?" (a question admittedly not easy to answer).

For imaginations in the twenties and thirties Shanghai was the city of evocations and moods, its very name conjuring up a world of bandits, coolies, sampans, forbidden pleasures, traffickers, and spies. Francis de Croisset was disappointed to discover that the train to Peking was filthy and covered in spit and that there was no such thing as a Shanghai Express: "It's only called that in the movies and, alas, we're a long ways from the train that Marlene Dietrich rode." The city was like a vast Hollywood set, real, without props, yet playing to the same spellbinding

desires. Few who wrote about Shanghai failed to satisfy those needs, themselves captive to the same hunger for sensation or most skilled at exploiting them. Champly wrote about the white slave traffic to the Far East and called his book The Road to Shanghai . Jean Fontenoy wrote a series of lightweight tales about the city and called his book Secret Shanghai. Vu et Lu described Shanghai as the "incontestable capital of the international underworld," said that "all the clandestine commerce in drugs, from opium to heroin, is centered on Shanghai," called the city "the greatest market in contraband weapons" and the junction point for spies, and entitled its article "Shanghaï: sa grandeur et ses mystères." G. E. Miller wrote of Shanghai, The Paradise of Adventurers . Paule Her-fort wrote of "shady men and tainted women," of opium, gambling dens, and the criminal class that crept out from its nests at the coming of night. O.-P. Gilbert, who has been quoted copiously in these pages, summoned up five pages of unrelenting atmospherics to describe Shanghai in the late 1930s. Vicki Baum's portrait of the city—"the gigantic town, the vicious town, the industrious, dangerous and endangered town"—continued for nearly three pages to create the same viscous ambiance. Even when it was all over and Shanghai a grim city of the Reds, the code demanded a florid, highly charged style. Thirty years after the fact Edgar Snow took thirty-two lines and more than three hundred words to describe in one sentence the Shanghai he first encountered in 1928 (in a chapter called "Shanghai!").^[46]

That is how we like to remember the Shanghai that existed between the wars, victims of our imaginations and a need to foist romantic visions upon the past, although far less so than we might initially believe. It was contemporaries who first imposed that extravagant image, turning Shanghai into everything they and their readers wanted it to be. They asked much of Shanghai and the city gave much in return.

This, then, was Shanghai. Vast, scandalous, "legendary" as Gilbert called it, a special place in the twenties and thirties, and one we are not likely to see again. Intrigue flourished here, perhaps more so than anywhere else, so that the city itself became identified as the lair or the gathering ground of the spies of the world. In a town that collected the sharks and human debris of the universe matters could hardly be otherwise. But that identity was itself caught up in all that Shanghai represented in these years: sweep, globalization, crumbling worlds yet colonial pride, adventure joined to contemporary power struggles, and the pursuit of ambiance. These were themes of the age, defining Shanghai as Shanghai in turn defined its intrigues. Shanghai, the hyperbolic

Map 2.
The Adventurer's Asia.

city, magnified how closely the histories of global compression, adventure, and travel converged with the history of espionage between the wars. Spies and secret agents, as the city suggested, possessed no special realms and moved in larger, more complex worlds. The city brought out their representativeness and their evocative qualities and revealed how again their history joined with that of their times.

From Shanghai it is about twelve hundred miles to the Khingan Mountains in what is now Inner Mongolia. The Chinese Eastern Railway, joining the Trans-Siberian to Vladivostok via the direct Harbin route, runs through these mountains on the Hailar-Tsitsihar stretch; and there in 1915 the German military attaché to China, Major von Pappenheim, planned to blow up a runnel and interrupt the flow of supplies west to the front. With nine Germans, three Chinese, twenty camels, five horses, and two dogs and traveling as Russian soldiers, von Pappenheim crossed into Mongolia in late January. The expedition passed through Noganou-ta^[47] on 31 January, camped at Dabasin-Soume for several days, and then on 5 February set off for Hakhaï-aïl to win the Mongol chieftain Baboutchab over to their side. At Hakhaï-aïl von Pappenheim revealed his intentions and his true identity. He showed Baboutchab bombs he had brought along, detonated a few to demonstrate what they could do, and offered the Mongol leader fifty thousand roubles, arms, and munitions if he would provide three hundred soldiers to escort the raiding party as far as Tsitsihar (or Hailar, according to another account). Baboutchab stalled while he awaited instructions from Urga, not a good sign for the Germans. But von Pappenheim's scheme was doomed from the start. Shortly after the attaché had set out from Peking on the pretense of a hunting trip, the Japanese secret service got wind that something was up and alerted the Russian legation in Peking. At roughly the same time word filtered through to the Russian consul general in Urga from Mongolian detachments on the southeastern frontier that a party of Chinese and Germans had been spotted heading toward Tsitsihar with the intention of destroying a section of the Trans-Siberian. Several days later the consul general was in possession of more precise intelligence reported by Baboutchab. Meanwhile a Russian commercial traveler named Chadrin crossed paths with von Pappenheim's party as they were progressing toward Hakhaï-aïl. Intrigued by their clothing—certainly not Russian-issue—and unable to understand what they were saying, he attempted to approach but backed off when one of the Germans took aim at him. Proceeding on to Hakhaï-aïl Chadrin camped near to

Baboutchab and learned firsthand all about the Germans' conspiracy. On 9 February two of the Germans visited Chadrin in his tent to sound him out and put him off the scent with the story that they had come to Mongolia to prospect for gold. By 9 March Chadrin was reporting what he knew in person to the Russian vice-consul at Hailar, his arrival coinciding with yet another Mongolian report on the would-be saboteurs. Von Pappenheim had set off on a daring expedition but he had failed to reckon with the Russophilia of the Mongols who listened to him, robbed him, and then denounced him to their protectors. For their part the Russians were convinced that they would get their hands on von Pappenheim. But the last sighting of the caravan was on 2 April about three hundred kilometers east of Dolonnur. Several weeks later there were contradictory reports, one that yon Pappenheim's party had met a horrendous fate, attacked, pillaged, murdered, the cadavers set on fire, another that the caravan had been seen heading toward Turkestan. That was the last the French captain, de Lapomarède, knew as he filed his report on 30 April to the Deuxième Bureau in Paris. The report sits in the archives of the French army, a reminder of how the war carried intrigues and spy missions to the farthest reaches of the earth, where they remained even after the fighting had stopped.^[48]

There is no denying the global expanse of intrigue after the war. Before 1914 there had been a trickle of reports from around the world; after 1918 there was a flood. The credibility of these reports, as always, remains questionable. Certainly some were improbable, even risible. Yet the measured tone of many—a sense of the situation in hand—suggests that spy mania alone cannot account for the sheer growth in the files. If the French saw spies all over the world it was because espionage had assumed global proportions and because after the war one was accustomed to thinking globally.

German intrigues, previously contained to Europe and North Africa, now sprawled across the face of the map. In Africa the German threat spread south, "from Morocco to the Congo . . . with the purpose of controlling the west coast of Africa."^[49] French intelligence followed German activities in the Canaries, in the Bissagos Islands (off Portuguese Guinea), in Fernando Poo, and in the Cameroons, watching particularly for globally strategic installations or bases. In the Canaries the French were concerned about Germans "at the crossroads of the routes to Africa and America" and astride the sea lanes via the Cape on to India. German movements were scanned, including those of the German Consul Jacob Ahlers whose farms, it was reported, were a cover

for clandestine arms depots.^[50] From further south came comparable warnings: night landings of arms and munitions in Spanish Guinea; covert arms shipments to the Cameroons; reports of six thousand Nazi agents spread throughout the former German colonies; communiqués on an Africanwide spy network dividing the continent by sectors.^[51] German businesses like the Afrikanische Frucht Compagnie, whose boats were capable of speeds in excess of commercial needs, or Woermann, which had rebuilt its trading outposts with West Africa after the war, were especial targets of French surveillance.^[52]

Beyond Africa German intrigues were reported in Syria, India, Java, and Indochina. According to Julius Mader, the Abwehr was in fact operating in such lands as Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, China, and Japan by 1935 and its agent network, obviously well in place earlier, was achieving its first successes in Latin America in 1936. Two years later an Abwehr-backed putsch in Brazil came to nothing, but in the following year the Germans were again laying plans for extensive subversion in Latin America. At roughly the same time a steward on a Norddeutscher Lloyd steamer was filing reports on Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, while another confidential agent was traveling through the Dutch East Indies. The French picked up only a bit of this activity, although there are traces in their files such as the report on Karl K., a Gestapo agent who had just completed a mission in Abyssinia and was headed for the Far East, or a report of increasing German infiltration in Egypt and Palestine by 1938.^[53]

Japanese intrigues fit a similar pattern. After the Russo-Japanese War there had been some reporting on Japanese intrigues in Southeast Asia, but now the French tracked Japanese spies and covert operations clear across the globe. They followed Japanese conspiracies with White Russian circles and the recruitment of refugee spies, saboteurs, and potential fighting forces.^[54] According to French intelligence reports, Japanese agents were spreading over the Dutch East Indies. They were active in China where they trafficked in drugs, weapons, and disorder to unhinge the Chinese and prevent their consolidation as a powerful competitor. Japanese ships sailed through Indochinese waters surveying and photographing places of anchorage. At Port Said the Japanese consul kept tabs on French and British boats passing through Suez, watching particularly for arms cargoes to China. The same man scattered propaganda throughout the Red Sea basin proclaiming friendly Japanese intentions toward the Muslims of Asia. Japanese agents in Europe included a man named Schaeffer who operated in Geneva and a Japanese engineer who

gathered intelligence in Belgium. Among Japanese agents in France were a Russian, a German, an Austrian, a Norwegian, a Turk, a Japanese businessman working out of Marseilles, and a Frenchman. Recruitment in Paris for missions abroad was reputed to be common among Russian émigrés and Armenians, like the Armenian A. who held a Turkish passport and was being deployed in Singapore. Alongside the files on Germans and communists the dossiers were comparatively slim and secondary in significance; yet they too attest to a routine global consciousness after the war. Even the process of recording begot a reflexive global response as in the case of the Port Said dispatch that was circulated to London, Rome, Barcelona, Berlin, Moscow, Teheran, Bangkok, Shanghai, Algiers, Tokyo, Jerusalem, and Baghdad (among other places).^[55]

Nothing promoted the routine of global thinking, however, quite like the Russian revolution and the Third International's decision to quicken the forces of world revolution. After 1920 the Comintern's agents were everywhere: in North Africa, in Persia, in Afghanistan, in India, in Singapore, in the East Indies, in Indochina, in China. They fomented insurrection, disseminated propaganda, built communist parties, joined nationalist movements, and recruited local revolutionaries who were shipped to Russia, trained in revolutionary doctrine and methods, and then infiltrated back to their homelands. Regional centrals—the Orient bureau in Shanghai, the southern bureau in Hong Kong, the Tashkent section for central Asia—directed operations across international borders and several empires. When one was lopped off, another appeared, making the Comintern the hydra-headed monster French authorities believed it to be. Strategic decisions in Moscow moved men and resources across a worldwide playing board. Against such an assault the French could mount nothing short of a worldwide response. They filed reports on Comintern activities over whole hemispheres of the globe. They noted the coming and going of trained recruits, how many Indochinese, for instance, had been trained at the Stalin School, how many had returned, how many had been caught, how many still were at large.

Counterintelligence agents scanned the routing of resources and the shifts in activities, as in 1925 when they observed cutbacks at the Vienna central and the reassignment of operatives to Morocco and East Asia. Other agents in port cities watched over the worldwide circuits. They followed the peregrinations of sailors whom the Comintern enlisted as couriers or the use of the mails where revolutionary tracts were secreted

in newspapers or between the covers of Bon Marché catalogues (which must have sent the Boucicauts spinning in their graves). To combat the Comintern French police and secret agents went on the offensive, developing surveillance networks as multinational as those of the Bolsheviks. The Indochinese Sûreté stationed men in Canton, Hong Kong, Peking, Bangkok, Batavia, and Tokyo. They developed liaisons with the British and Dutch imperial police, forwarding, for example, the Annamese agent "Typhoon" to Singapore in 1933. Their joint operations were often extremely effective, as in the famous roundup of Comintern figures in 1931 and even more so in the progressive breaking of communist organization in Indochina. They were perhaps the most successful European police force operating in the Orient, and their success, combined with the continued revolutionary threat, no doubt encouraged the Colonial Ministry to create in 1937 its own intelligence section that extended to Shanghai, Hanoi, Nouméa, Djibouti, Tananarive, Dakar, Brazzaville, and Fort de France, each station covering a sector served by ten posts and thirteen annexes.^[56]

The French authorities, therefore, had concrete reasons to escalate their watch over vast geographical areas. One was German defeat in the war and the dispossession of German colonies by the French and the British. Successive German regimes were bound to see in the empires a source of grievance or a soft target to strike against and just as likely to see in their former colonies a logical place to concentrate this action. Moreover the previous war had demonstrated the willingness of the Germans to wage insurrectionary warfare throughout the empires and the more critical ability of the French and the British to marshal the resources of the world and to bring those resources to the battlefronts in Europe. German bases astride vital sea lanes or German interference at the source of supply could be strategically decisive in a future conflict. Hence the French were wary of German intrigues abroad and determined to maintain surveillance over them, just as the Germans themselves had reason to expand covert operations far beyond Europe.

Another reason was the global realignment that had followed the war. Even before 1914, as a consequence of Japanese victories in 1904, colonial empires like the Dutch or the French had begun to sense a Japanese shadow extending over their possessions in Asia. After 1918 the Japanese dearly established their power in the Pacific as a consequence of Russian defeat and then revolutionary implosion, Japanese gains in the war, and the curious effects of that conflict on European imperialism. On the surface the great empires were larger, more glamor-

ous than ever before. Underneath they rested on rotting foundations eaten away by the war's encouragement to nationalist sentiment and just as much by its depletion of national treasuries. The combination of wartime promises to colonial subjects, mobilization of colonial manpower, exposure of their workers and troops to radical political ideologies, and the mutually destructive nature of the conflict that was not lost on leaders of national liberation movements all corroded the ramparts of imperial fortresses at a time when a new challenger appeared increasingly expansionist. In this respect the climate was ripe for defensive postures and a monitoring of Japanese intentions. Such a monitoring, in addition, required a close look at large expanses of territory—China, all of southern and southeastern Asia—rather than simply a focus on the concessions or on French Indochina.

A third reason was the Bolshevik revolution and the international dimensions it almost immediately assumed. The French had fought battles against national revolutionaries before the war and there had been premonitions of international liaisons among revolutionary conspirators. But, as their own agents acknowledged, the Russian revolution represented something radically different: "the joining into the fray of new men, young, tramplers of all tradition, contemptuous of the older émigrés and their out-of-date ideas, and educated in revolution by the agents of Moscow. That is why one can say that Nguyen Ai Quoc's return to Canton from Russia in 1925 marked a new era in the contemporary political history of the Annamese territories."^[57] Comintern infiltration of empires was global in nature, eliciting in return an unalloyed global response. Again the very nature of the threat—its regional centrals and international circuits—required tracking across boundaries and even across continents.

Yet beyond specific causes it seems to have been simply the sheer experience of world war—campaigns in distant lands; troops shipped across hemispheres; intercontinental intrigues; decisive extra-European intervention—that habituated Europeans to thinking and acting more globally than before. The change was admittedly a matter of degree. By the late nineteenth century Europeans were accustomed to reaping the fruits of the world, literally serving them up on their breakfast trays in the morning. Cables and steamship lines tied capital cities to peripheral outposts on outlying continents. Imperialism, the construction of the Trans-Siberian railroad, and the Russo-Japanese War led to grand geo-political predictions.^[58] But the First World War introduced a qualitative difference because it showed how inextricably the fate of Europeans was

bound up in worldwide affairs. Whereas European globalism before the war had been predicated on European hegemony, and hence almost a matter to take for granted, globalism after the war reflected shrinking European mastery and consequently a world where events in distant places were more likely to affect European destinies. The postwar world would absorb European history as much as be absorbed by it. Following the war, therefore, there was no scaling back to European dimensions. Travelers rushed over the globe and reported on events in faraway places. Newspapers filled with news of the world. Geopolitical writers speculated on the changes, worldwide in scope, that the war had effected. Europeans sickened by the bloodletting sought alternatives in Eastern cultures and religions.^[59] Technology, and long-distance flights in particular, riveted contemporaries' attention over whole oceans and continents while demonstrating dramatically how much tighter or more joined the world was becoming. Radio, too, by the thirties, was a world-binding medium. The guerre des ondes that followed—airwave propaganda battles in North Africa, South Africa, Latin America, and the Orient^[60] —was symptomatic of how inevitably or routinely intrigues escalated to global stakes between the wars. Thus French authorities remained vigilant because such was their special responsibility; yet their focus on worldwide intrigue shared the same heightened global consciousness that large numbers of the general public carried after the war and that encompassed a sense of interconnectedness as much as a mood of menace or danger.^[61]

Interwar spy writing appropriated a comparable global vision, for example, in the ease with which it now took the world as a setting for secret agent action.^[62] It did so, however, with a many-sidedness that can be seen in the legend surrounding that bizarre figure, Trebitsch Lincoln. In his day Trebitsch Lincoln was a man of mystery, indulgences, and fairy tales. He was born Ignace Trebitsch, a Jew, in Hungary in the 1870s, he converted to Protestantism and preached in Canada, he served briefly in the British Parliament before World War I, but that was about all contemporaries knew about him. There were rumors of intelligence service work in the Balkans in the early years of the century, and practically everyone agreed that he had been a double agent during the war, although no one was sure just how closely he had worked with the Germans. After the war he was traced to right-wing conspiracies on the continent; rumored to have murdered the Italian socialist Matteoti on orders from London; said to have served the Chinese warlord Wu Pei-Fu; identified as the Buddhist monk Chao Kung; reported

to have joined with brigands, warlords, and Bolsheviks in a holy war to drive the whites out of Asia (to this end fomenting attacks, strikes, riots, and insurrections in Shanghai, Hong Kong, India, and the East Indies); later rumored to have collided with Lawrence in Afghanistan; placed again in the Bolshevik camp in China; and finally tied to the Japanese in Manchukuo with intimations of personally triggering the Sino-Japanese War.

Thanks to Bernard Wasserstein we now have a clear idea about the true life of this man. Trebitsch Lincoln was an adventurer, a con man, and an incessant mythmaker. He advanced financial schemes in the Balkans before the First World War but there is no evidence of embroilment in Balkan intrigues. In the war he briefly contacted German intelligence, although the extent of his role as a spy was practically nil. Later, toward the end of his life, he would reopen relations with German intelligence during the Second World War. Otherwise his exploits as a secret agent were mere fabrication. After the war he was indeed a central figure in the Kapp putsch and among right-wing conspirators. He did go to China and he did worm his way into the entourage of several warlords, perhaps even that of Wu Pei-fu, but his influence on these men was probably slight. He did become a Buddhist monk, but the stories of raising revolts in Asia or manipulating Japanese expansionism were, again, pure fabrication. For much of his later life he was in and out of Shanghai, the proper setting for this sort of misfit. He died there in 1943, during the Japanese occupation.^[63]

If the life fell considerably short of the legend, it was, nevertheless, an extraordinary one. Yet it is the legend, far more than the reality, that is the significant feature about Trebitsch Lincoln. As adventurers went he was one of a crowd in the interwar years. Scattered through the archives are dossiers on a host of intriguers and bounders whose lives were as fantastic as his. Yet it was Trebitsch who stood out from the crowd and captivated imaginations between the wars. He was the subject of two full-length biographies published in France in his lifetime, one under the outlandish title Buddha Against the Intelligence Service and a second, equally inflated, called Trebitsch Lincoln, the Greatest Adventurer of the Century . Robert Boucard wrote about him in his "revelations" of British intelligence and Victor Meulenijzer introduced him into his fanciful account of Lawrence's intrigues. Xavier de Hautecloque devoted two articles to Trebitsch in his series on "The Powers of Darkness" in the Petit Journal . In 1934 Paris-Soir printed an article on him and then again in June 1938. Vu called him "the greatest adventurer of the twen-

tieth century" in two articles in 1932. He turned up in Charles Lucieto's 1928 spy novel, Delivered to the Enemy , as a Comintern agent battling imperialism, in Teddy Legrand's 1933 spy novel, The Seven Heads of the Green Dragon , and yet again in Jean Bommart's 1940 Lady from Valparaiso . He was, in these years, a ubiquitous personality, and the question for the historian is why this was so and what it all meant.^[64]

A part of the answer lies in the recurrent theme in the Trebitsch legend of the revolt of Asia. Much of this was a product of Lincoln's own compulsion toward bombastic self-promotion.^[65] But Asia as a continent of danger was also a French preoccupation in the twentieth century. The Russo-Japanese War had set minds ablaze, although even more striking from the European perspective was the fratricidal nature of World War I, its incomparable bloodletting, its massive material destruction and fiscal corrosion, and its collapse of a civilization's pretensions to moral supremacy.^[66] From the war issued a more assured and challenging Japanese presence in the Orient and a worldwide revolutionary movement set on the subversion of empires. The result was a spate of writing on a new global age, of which three things must be remarked.

First there was the judgment of European eclipse, and of a shift of world centrality to the Pacific.^[67] Second there was the strong racial tinge to a considerable part of this literature. It can be discerned most readily in such self-evident works as Maurice Muret's Twilight of the White Races or Lothrop Stoddard's Rising Tide of Color (translated into French in 1925 with approximately 3,000 sales), but the yellow-peril coin circulated freely in these years and extended as far as traditional targets—Jews—who as Bolsheviks or "Asiatics" were subsumed into the revolt of Asia.^[68]

Third there was the way Red Russia was absorbed into this imager): Anyone who has read the interwar accounts of travel to the Soviet Union and to China will have noticed their similarity. For a whole generation of French the two were lands of filth, barbarism, smells, and swarms. From each came descriptions of dreadful stench, thick odors, and scenes of squatting defecators on open view from train windows.^[69] Words like pulluler, essaimer, grouiller referred equally to the East and to the Russians. Returning from a visit to Russia in 1932 Marc Chadourne, who seems to have been everywhere in these years, recalled "a memory very precise of a scene . . . that dominates the others; that of a major restaurant in Tiflis whose doorways were guarded by beggars and young boys in rags ready to swoop down whenever a customer got up.

Each time, poor thieving birds, they threw themselves by twos and threes onto the empty table, voraciously swallowing up the remains. . . . Neither the street militia nor the waiters, nor the clients appeared shocked by their presence nor surprised by this evidently daily spectacle. . . . I have seen this sort of thing before. In China . . ." Roland Dorgelès wrote of his trip to Russia, "No one well dressed. No pretty smiles. Cleanliness is an exception. Elegance would be a challenge. Never, except in the Far East, have I experienced anything similar." Or, as Paul Morand put it, "When you reach Asia via Russia the transition is imperceptible."^[70]

Such comparisons carried over into more forceful and hence more racist efforts to see in bolshevized Russia a return to Asiatic origins. Asiatic in this sense meant despotic, chaotic, barbaric, and brutal, anything that could express the horror that came with communist revolution and placed bolshevism beyond the pale of Western civilization. The argument was a powerful one and it explains much of the appeal of fascism and its call for a recharging of European energies. Yet it also had the effect of displacing ideological debates onto racial ground, offering a fundamentally racist interpretation of Soviet Russia that fused with yellow-peril obsessions. It placed the Red threat in Asia on the plane of an eternal conflict between East and West, endowing it with all the nightmarish characteristics of one more oriental assault upon Europe, one more race invasion, and one more race war. Thus Serge de Chessin's portrait of Russia as a despiritualized and depraved land, "a thick night, an integral darkness, a renewal of the Mongol invasion on a spiritual plane awaiting an apocalyptic raid from bolshevized Asia." Of bolshevism's Asiatic origins, de Chessin made it clear, there could be no doubt:

By their birth as by their education, the leaders of the Third International are not European. If Lenin's Tartar origins were not officially established, his Kalmuck features, the Mongolian projection of the cheekbones, the slanted cut of the eyes, the thick animality of the lips and nostrils would suffice, in the absence of all genealogical research, to reveal a perfect affiliation with the Turanian type. Among the spiritual descendants from the master, virulent Semites, halfbreeds who smack of the Golden Horde's invasion, Scythians got up as Slavs. The world revolution was in the hands of Zinoviev, a formidable Jew; it is now in the hands of Stalin, an oriental mongrel.^[71]

In the story of Trebitsch Lincoln, that great patchwork of truth and fantasy that in the end was little more than a mythic projection of its times, we can recognize all of these themes. Woven into the legend of "the Jew Trebitsch Lincoln,"^[72] the Westerner turned Easterner, the se-

cret agent who would lead a revolt of Asia much like Zinoviev of Baku, upon whom the image was so dearly modeled, was the new sense of globalism after the war and the fears and maledictions that came with that vision.

Still, one detects something else in the allure of Trebitsch Lincoln and in the life he and others continually reinvented: a fabulous yarn cast against the sweep of the century and a great tale of danger and mystique set in faraway places. Like the war, his was a story that commanded retelling and invited embellishment, and that too is why storytellers found him so tempting a creature to write about. Trebitsch brought globalism together with phobias, but also with the romance of espionage and travel. His life was a profusion of campaigns and adventures spun from the great events of the day. These too made him a myth of his times, capturing softer histories and moods that, no less than alarums, explained the power of intrigue for the French in these years. Those softer histories suggest other connections between global visions and spies; and so they too force themselves upon our attention and lead us back to the voyages and adventures of wartime and after.

Werner Otto von Hentig's experience in the Great War was anything but typical, but it did represent what the event was to do for the meaning of adventure in the twentieth century. Born in 1886, the son of a Coburg-Gotha bureaucrat, von Hentig was already fashioning himself into a man of the world by the outbreak of war. After studying at Grenoble, Berlin, Paris, Bonn, and Königsberg, and taking a doctorate, von Hentig continued to travel in England and Belgium before entering the German Foreign Service in 1911. His first posting was Peking, where he witnessed the Chinese revolution. Transferred to Istanbul, he seized the opportunity to travel through Japan and southern China before heading west by way of Java and Sumatra and the eastern coast of Africa. The war caught him in Teheran from whence he hurried home to join his regiment. He took to the field and earned an Iron Cross, first class, in the first year of battle. Then in March 1915 he was recalled to Berlin to take charge of a special mission to Afghanistan. He was twenty-nine years old at this point, much traveled and tested; but only now were his real adventures to begin.

Von Hentig's was the third German expedition dispatched to the emir of Afghanistan with the intent of opening a front on the northwestern frontier of India. A first group had left Berlin in September of

the previous year, hastily and clumsily patched together among men practically all ignorant of the lands they were to travel through. Almost immediately the Foreign Office had sought to remedy the situation by sending a second mission of Near Eastern specialists to overtake the first. This was the expedition led by Oskar Niedermayer, who had spent two years in Persia and India before the outbreak of the war. By early 1915 the Foreign Office was planning a third expedition to escort two Indian revolutionaries to Kabul. Looking for an expert to lead the mission, the Auswärtiges Amt fastened on von Hentig. On 14 April von Hentig set out from Berlin accompanied by two Germans—Dr. Becker and Walter Röhr—each previous sojourners in Persia, and by six Indian and Afridi volunteers rounded up in German prisoner of war camps.

The first leg of the journey, to Teheran, was uneventful. Once in the Persian capital, however, von Hentig began to comprehend what dangers lay ahead. To proceed east along the regular caravan routes across northern Persia would mean interception and capture by enemy patrols. Only by traveling across the great salt desert, an unthinkable route in normal times, could he hope to break through to Afghanistan. Even here the constant threat of attack by desert robber tribes would offset the absence of the British or Russians. He would have to mount a caravan of guides and camels, including mules and horses that were impractical for desert travel but essential for the continuation of the expedition once it had crossed to the other side. The travelers would have to proceed quickly, in daytime, through ghastly temperatures in the middle of summer. And even if they survived the tortuous journey they would still have to slip by enemy spies and patrols to cross the border into Afghanistan. The prospects were daunting but in the first days of July, his caravan organized, von Hentig set out for a slow, arduous, and almost deadly passage through the unforgiving wasteland of the Persian desert.

Along the way the caravan experienced every horror the desert could offer: terrible heat, terrible thirst, desolation, men who fell by the wayside, attacks by desert robbers, long stretches completely devoid of water holes, skeletons as the sole indication they had not lost their way. Dr. Becker, who proceeded deeper into the desert to hide their baggage, was set upon by Russians, fought his way loose only to be attacked by desert brigands who wounded him severely in the lung (miraculously he survived through the care of local tribesmen and went on to fight for a year in Baluchistan and Persia until he was betrayed to the English and handed over to the Russians; but that is another adventure to be

recounted some other time). At one point, learning that two Russian columns were bearing down on them, the expedition left a water hole and plunged into an unexplored region of the desert, wandering for eight days through this hell hole. At last, nearly three weeks after they had begun, yon Hentig and the other survivors emerged on the other side of the Salzwüste . There they were joined by Niedermayer, whose expedition also made the desert crossing, the two missions proceeding as one to Kabul following a dangerous break through Russian lines.

At Kabul they accomplished nothing. They had endured tremendous hardships to reach the city, but by spring 1916 they were prepared to endure many more to leave it and return home. On 21 May, close to eight months after their arrival in the capital, von Hentig, Niedermayer, Röhr, and other members of the expedition left Kabul and proceeded northward. After four days, knowing that the British and Russians would attempt to hunt them down, they split into separate parties to throw their pursuers off balance. Niedermayer headed west, back through Russian Turkestan and Persia. Von Hentig headed east, for the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs and then Chinese Turkestan. Ahead of him was a journey that would make the great salt desert crossing seem a trial run. "Above were nameless mountains and deserts, scarcely seen by the eyes of Afghans or Kirghiz, much less trod by human feet." Nevertheless, into that "never seen land" he charged.

His party edged along steep mountain paths no wider than a foot. They plunged into snow drifts that reached their horses' bellies. They forded icy rivers that swept over their animals' ears. They climbed over passes more than thirteen thousand feet high, stopping every twenty to thirty steps to regain their breath. They dodged Russian patrols and then, taking a bad turn, found themselves smack before a Russian encampment. They found a way out and pushed forward into the mountains. As more Russian riders came toward them von Hentig reached for his carbine, telling himself "at least they're not going to get us alive." Again they escaped and ascended still higher. "The following four days," he later noted, "with its tortuous climbing through the mountains I don't like to remember." At last, in the final days of June, they crossed over into Chinese Turkestan and what von Hentig believed to be neutral territory. Very quickly he was disabused of this notion.

In Kashgar Allied representatives intrigued against him and sought his arrest and execution by the Chinese military governor. Only the intervention of a Swedish missionary got him out of the city alive. From Kashgar he struck out across the Gobi, again evading enemy efforts to

stop him. By November the desert was behind him. Now traveling was easy and he made his way to Hankow where he found refuge in the German consulate. He remained there until March, when the Chinese broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and yon Hentig once again found himself on the run. He headed for Shanghai, made it, and then stowed away on a ship bound for neutral America. By the time he reached Hawaii the United States was in the war, so he jumped ship in the harbor and swam ashore. But that was the end. Realizing the game was over, yon Hentig turned himself in to the American authorities. It proved a smart move. They repatriated him and he arrived back in Berlin in June 1917, 788 days and twenty-five thousand miles after he had left. Within months he was writing up his story, revealing little about his mission but telling nearly all about his travels and exploits. His publisher, in a preface, said that in the history of exploration and adventure von Hentig's experiences had rarely been equaled and scarcely surpassed.^[73]

If an exaggeration, the boast was not altogether off the mark. A great adventure story, yon Hentig's account had also been set against the backdrop of history; and that made a difference. In the past there had been truly remarkable adventure stories. One thinks, for example, of Ross, Nansen, and Peary in the Arctic or of Burton, Speke, and Baker in the tropics or of Caillié in the desert or of Przhevalskii in the mountains. To a degree Von Hentig's ordeals and his triumphs were a twentieth-century continuation of the extraordinary feats of the nineteenth-century explorers. The same motifs obtained: the great, almost superhuman challenge; the passage through faraway lands that practically no white man had seen; and the celebration of indomitable endurance over an inhospitable environment that sought to overwhelm and conquer at every turning. But for von Hentig it was the political factor—in this case the war—that propelled his journey forward, and that was to be the distinguishing feature of adventure in the new century. Again it is possible to recall nineteenth-century precedents. Oskar Lenz, in 1880, disguised as a Turk, penetrated as far as Timbuktu and Senegal, laying the way for a more methodical German penetration of Morocco. Stanley's march to retrieve Emin Bey had dear imperial motives in mind. Przhevalskii's exploratory raids into central Asia received the backing of the Russian government. Marchand's trek from Brazzaville to Fashoda was intended to preempt British command of the Sudan and the result was to bring France and England dose to the brink of war. British reconnaissance fides through Turkestan deserts and high

Pamir passes were common enough stuff in the Great Game competition Peter Hopkirk has chronicled.^[74]

Here too, however, there were clear differences, two in particular. First, political adventure in the nineteenth century was less pervasive than it would be in the twentieth. The quest for scientific knowledge, the obsession with mapping the unknown, the lure of fame or of leaving one's mark in history, or simply a yearning to reach out beyond security and comforts and to live the life of boys' tales were more likely than not to be the driving force behind earlier adventures. After 1914, as great historical developments penetrated even remote locales, the political adventure story became the rule. Second, the politicized adventures of the nineteenth century, for all their potential repercussions, lacked the envelopment in history that so frequently characterized the great adventures of the war years and after. In Indochina and the Sahara military men could live great adventure stories of conquest, but largely because they were historical sideshows, alone on the margins where nobody cared. Where a man like Marchand, with a decade of explorations behind him, might make history, von Hentig was situated in it. Larger world affairs spun out his adventures and forced perils upon him. Only to avoid enemy detection did von Hentig plunge into the desert and then throw himself into the mountains. Only because he was an enemy in unfriendly lands did he nearly lose his head in Kashgar or was he forced to steal away on a boat to America. For him politics was context, not simply pretense. Outside contemporary history his adventures had no meaning nor were even conceivable.

Thus the Great War introduced a new era in adventure because in that war and after, adventure tended to fuse with the great events of the age. There were still the odd gestures of defiance, Alain Gerbault's solo voyage across the Atlantic^[75] or Lindbergh's above it, sheer expressions of human will pitted against the implacable odds. But the voyage to Mecca or Lhasa or to the source of the Nile for the sake of the challenge was becoming distinctly old-fashioned by the twentieth century. Far more often it was war and revolution that set adventures in motion or against which the great adventure tales of the world played themselves out. It could not be otherwise in a century as unsettled as the twentieth and where history was global in its proportions. In the new global age the expedition, the trek, or the descent into serial life-threatening circumstances, was caught up in history, or simply was unlikely to escape it.

In this respect von Hentig's experiences were indeed unparalleled,

although only in comparison to earlier conditions. The war produced many such stories, most obviously Lawrence's in the Hejaz, but also that of Albert Bartels, the former trader who found himself leading a revolt of mountain tribesmen in Morocco or the exploits of Marthe Richard who, for whatever the embellishments, lived a life of danger in Spain and on board ship in the south Atlantic. Oskar Niedermayer, yon Hentig's onetime companion, shared a no less fabulous adventure on his return from Afghanistan (or for that matter in his efforts to get there). Accompanied by a Persian and an Afghan, he crossed the Kara-Kum desert by night, one step ahead of a pursuing Turcoman party. At Mesched he found the city occupied by a detachment of six hundred Russians. Warned by a friend that the caravansaries swarmed with Russian informants, he set out for Teheran and then joined a caravan for Turkish-occupied Hamadan and safety. On the way they were ambushed and plundered by desert robber bands who cracked Niedermayer over the head and knocked him unconscious. Later he was picked up by Russians, but they failed to recognize who he was and he managed to elude them. Finally, at the end of August, he straggled into Hamadan and eventually made his way back to Berlin. The contrast with the earlier adventures of Burton could not have been greater. A half-century before, the Englishman had assumed a Muslim identity and made an unforgettable but completely contrived pilgrimage to Mecca to accomplish what practically no European had succeeded in doing before him. Niedermayer too disguised himself as a Muslim. He shaved his head, dyed his beard black, dressed as a Turcoman, and even removed a gold crown from a tooth. But he did so as a matter of survival to slip through enemy lines in the midst of a war that was absorbing all of the world.^[76]

The war, because it was global, had that ability to turn what had formerly been adventure for the sake of adventure into the accomplishment of a military or political mission. Less than in the succeeding world war, but more than in the past, it swept people up, transported them over vast spaces, and then set them down in exotic lands where they could play out swashbuckling roles on the banks of the Nile or in armed caravans driving through the Caucasus^[77] or where they simply found themselves face to face with strange and extraordinary encounters a world removed from their habitual surroundings. "Who could have dreamed," wrote Vera Brittain of her brother after the war, she herself having served in the eastern Mediterranean, "that the little boy born in such uneventful security to an ordinary provincial family would end his brief days in a battle among the high pine-woods of an unknown Italian

plateau?" How much more fantastic then the lives of Emile Pagès and his companions who—out of boredom or love of adventure or simply a desire to get away from the trenches or a love affair turned sour—volunteered to operate a radio post in the middle of Siberia? Or the lives of those Czech soldiers who had gone over to the Russians and then traveled the breadth of Eurasia only to be sucked into the Russian civil war? In 1918 Joseph Kessel was beginning his travels across North America and the Pacific to Vladivostok, where he would spend his days stepping over bodies in the train station, a pistol strapped to his waist, a fortune on his person, spend his nights in the make-believe atmosphere of the Aquarium, and where he would pass a never-to-be-forgotten evening of drink among the nagaika -wielding Semenovtsy marauders that he would write up over and over again because he could not get it out of his mind and because it was so incredible that there was always a market for its telling. War adventures, in that sense, intimated of the intrusiveness that would so mark the interwar years. When the war was over, people continued to live with the great events of their day as the background noise to their lives, adventure more and more becoming a medium through which individuals were swallowed up in a direct or more immediate confrontation with that reality.^[78]

"What distinguished us from our mentors, at twenty," Malraux told Jean Lacouture many years later, "was the presence of history."^[79] The line could have been written for practically any of his creations, although the character it fit best was Michael Borodin, who appeared in The Conquerors as the cool, methodical professional, which he was. In real life Borodin was no less an adventurer, a river boatman turned revolutionary organizer, Chicago schoolteacher, and then Comintern agent. It was the last role, harnessed to the worldwide Russian revolution, that provided the scope for his prodigious talents and energies and that, by sending him to China, launched him on an enterprise that, despite its utter failure, would be the adventure of a lifetime. Already before his departure for Canton a Borodin legend had grown up around his clandestine work in Mexico, Spain, Germany, and England. In China the legend would burst beyond all proportion, set against the sweep of war and revolution in an ancient, faraway land.

Nearly everything about Borodin's time in China was romantic and oversized. He was sent as political adviser to the Kuomintang and for a while he all but directed affairs in southern China, but he reached Canton via cattleboat to avoid the British and the cloak of secrecy never entirely lifted from the mission. Upon his arrival he found everything

in chaos and his own position precarious. Throughout he would be embattled on all sides—by warlords, by dissident communists, by anticommunist Kuomintang leaders, by the suspicions and ambitions of Chiang Kai-shek, by foreign imperialists, by the immense depths between European revolutionary aspirations and Chinese realities and traditions, and by the slipperiness of his own assignment that for all its potential remained a gamble and a somewhat preposterous proposition. But he maneuvered skillfully and won Sun Yat-sen's confidence, and thereby he pushed the Kuomintang forward and gave it direction. During the heyday he was there as the Kuomintang consolidated its hold over Canton, conducted the Canton-Hong Kong blockade, and prepared for the momentous northern expedition. For nearly four years he lived at the very center of the flow of events. He was a European halfway around the world in a ragged, war-torn land, but he was also making history and that made the undertaking all the more spellbinding. As Chiang rose in power and turned against him, he sought to salvage what he could from a disintegrating situation. At revolutionary Wuhan, as the whole enterprise was tottering, he remained a larger-than-life figure to those who still believed he was the one person who could hold things together. Borodin consented to act out that role, but he could see that the end was nearing. Even when it came the adventure continued. He left China by overland caravan across the Gobi desert—a difficult and dangerous journey but the only safe route out for a man with a thirty-thousand-dollar price on his head.^[80]

Few forces shaped adventure more in the twentieth century than the Russian revolution. By allying with nationalist or anticolonial movements in the non-Western world it turned remote landscapes into breeding grounds for violent, dramatic episodes. Commissars in central Asia, a Borodin in China, or, to an only somewhat diminished degree, the dozens of Soviet volunteers who also came to China and whose lives for several years were filled with revolution, agitation, war, and considerable peril were all beneficiaries and victims of the revolution's displacement of adventure onto a political plane.^[81] The clandestine nature of the enterprise and its international circuits that often wound through distant inhospitable lands were likewise forcing grounds for suspenseful and dangerous experiences. Nearly everything about a Comintern mission—getting to one's base of operations, avoiding capture, living double lives, setting events into motion, moving through the badlands of the world, and then ultimately finding one's way back again—contained the stuff out of which adventure stories were made.

But it was also the stormy effects of revolution, tossing individuals into a maze of life threatening circumstances and casting them into the outer regions of the world, that made the revolution, like the war, a powerful device for coupling adventure to history. What happened to Ferdinand Ossendowski, who found himself on the wrong side of the revolution in Siberia in 1919, is a formidable example; there are indeed few tales more remarkable than his in the annals of adventure in modern times.^[82] Proscribed by the Reds, he flees into the forest in the region of Krasnoyarsk. He meets Ivan, a Siberian peasant, who kills two Bolsheviks hunting counterrevolutionaries and shows him how to build a log hearth to keep warm through the Siberian nights. He moves deeper into the forest and hunts to keep himself alive. He is attacked by a bear but finally brings it down with three bullets. In the spring, as the ice of the Yenisei river breaks up, he watches the flow of hundreds of mutilated cadavers, a reminder of his own fate if he is captured by the Reds. That motif never leaves his story. The Bolshevik menace hovers over this tale, a ubiquitous and omnipresent danger that gives his journey meaning and determines its action.

Ossendowski by now is constantly on the run. He goes to a deserted gold mine where he stays for a while with the guardian and his family. He meets an agronomist, a giant of a man who will be his companion for the remainder of his travels. Together they decide to flee Russia, descending into Mongolia and then breaking through to the Pacific and freedom. From this point the adventure assumes the countenance of the great treks for survival, a march through desolate and treacherous lands, buffeted always, however, by the gales of history. They travel through territory infested with Red detachments hunting down White officers. Ossendowski vows never to be taken alive and carries with him cyanide crystals. They travel over rivers and steppes. They pass by villages inhabited by Red spies. As they approach the border between Russia proper and Urianhai (in the north of Mongolia), tension mounts: "three days of constant contact with a lawless population, of continuous danger and of the ever present possibility of fortuitous death." They cross over into Urianhai, where they journey down valleys, over mountains, through burned woods, and across the Yenisei at night to avoid partisans. They have a firefight with Reds. They wrap their horses' hooves in shirts to muffle the sound as they pass close by more of the enemy. By this time Ossendowski and his friend have been joined by a number of former White officers. After a while they divide into two groups. One moves west, where it will run into Red cavalry and be practically wiped out.

Ossendowski, his friend, and sixteen others continue with their plan to reach Lake Kosogol and then strike east for the Pacific.

They ride on, crossing swamps, rivers, and mountains over steep cliff trails. They endure icy winds and freezing rains that soak through their clothing. At a Soyot village they are told that entry into the principality is forbidden. But Ossendowski cures the headman's son of a nosebleed and then the prince's daughter of "blindness" (conjunctivitis). Grateful, the prince provides a guide to Lake Kosogol. In the mountains they are again attacked by Reds, a bad sign that Bolshevik detachments have spread into Mongolia. They force the Reds back and make their way through the mountains down to the Mongolian plains where the going is easier. "But we were not gay, because again before us lay the dread uncertainty that threatened us with new and possibly destructive dangers." They come upon yurts and are again fired on by Reds. They forge ahead, only to learn that Chinese troops bar the way to the Pacific. They alter their plans and strike south through the Gobi and into Tibet. As they enter Tibet all the signs are ominous. At a monastery they encounter brigands who are armed to the teeth. Lone horsemen shadow them, galloping off as they approach. Then they are ambushed and two Russians are killed. They push on and again they are ambushed and lose another man. There is nothing to do but retreat and return to Mongolia. They fight their way out of Tibet at the cost of three more men and several wounded, including Ossendowski, who is hit in the leg. Once out of Tibet the party splits up. The officers leave to join White detachments continuing the civil war in Mongolia. Ossendowski and his companion head for the Mongolian town of Uliassautai.

It is now 1921 and Uliassautai is a center of intrigues between Reds, Whites, Chinese, and Mongols all fighting over control of the land. The question for the refugees in the town—and it is a terrifying one—is how close are the Reds to taking the city. Ossendowski rides out on reconnaissance missions through what he now describes as a magical landscape: "Mysterious Mongolia"; "The Land of Demons." He meets the Tushegoun lama, who possesses strange hypnotic powers. He comes upon Mongol medicine men. And yet he is never far removed from the twentieth century whose politics have invaded this remote and exotic country. At a telegraph post he encounters Red assassins. At the tiny settlement of Khathyl he rides into a panic of White troops who fear an imminent attack by a large Bolshevik contingent and he is forced to flee for his life. Back in Uliassautai there are constant intrigues between Chinese, Mongols, Soviet agents, White Russian troops, renegade White Russians who are little more than bandits, the balance of forces

shifting with every rumor of the fortunes of one side or the other. "Once more we found ourselves in the whirl of events."

As the situation deteriorates they leave Uliassautai for Urga (now Ulan Bator). On the way he is summoned by Colonel Kazagrandi who is fighting with Baron Ungern-Sternberg, a murderous White general seeking to carve out a vast central Asian empire independent of the Bolsheviks. To get to the colonel he travels past monasteries and ruins of cities dating back to the time of Genghis Khan. He is stopped by Mongol soldiers led by White Russians—a thoroughly vicious and murderous crew who will gun down anyone they suspect of being a Red, and that is just about everyone they meet. Ossendowski, having made it through the forests, the mountains, the deserts, the firefights, now faces the extravagantly ironical prospect of being killed by his own side. But he manages to convince them he is not a Bolshevik and they let him go. Meanwhile his leg is getting worse, he develops a fever, and he is attacked by dogs in the night. At the final relay post before Van Kure, where Kazagrandi's headquarters are located, he has his fortune told by an old Mongol who prophesies danger from a man with a head in the shape of a saddle. At Van Kure he meets Ungern-Sternberg himself, who greets him before a pool of blood. Ossendowski senses his life hangs by a thread, but he wins the baron's confidence and is free to proceed on to Urga. In Urga he is struck by the fabulous atmosphere of the place where ancient cultures and contemporary conflicts coexist and entangle. In the streets he sees lamas, Tartars, Buriats, but also Ungern-Sternberg's soldiers in blue, Mongols and Tibetans in red and yellow clothing bearing swastika insignias and those of the Laving Buddha, and Chinese troops who have gone over to the Mongol armies and wear silver dragons on their uniforms. He is introduced to Colonel Sepailov, a sadistic butcher and a nut case who is Ungern-Sternberg's commandant at Urga. The colonel's head is bald and takes the shape of a saddle. Ossendowski senses once again his life is threatened, but he is now under the protection of the baron, who takes a liking to him and tells him his life story. Life in Urga becomes surrealistic. The baron drives him around in his automobile and then presents him to the Living Buddha. Sepailov tries to kill him but fails. At last Ungern-Sternberg clears the way for a journey to Manchuria and the Pacific and Ossendowski leaves accompanied by the Mongol minister of war. Sepailov tries to waylay them but fails once again. And finally, sometime in 1921, Ossendowski makes it to Peking and out of the rabbit hole of history into which he has tumbled.^[83]

So fantastic was the story that Lewis Stanton Palen in the introduc-

tion to the French edition (it sold, perhaps, forty thousand copies within a year) went to pains to remind readers that the author was a distinguished scientist. Ossendowski was in fact no novice to Russian politics: he had been active in a Siberian separatist movement in 1905 and then again in the Kolchak government during the Russian civil war. It was the collapse of that government that had precipitated his flight into the forest. Much of his earlier life, prospecting for mineral deposits in Siberia, had been fairly exciting and a preparation for the trials he was to face after 1919. Still Stanton caught the essential difference between earlier encounters with tigers and tarantulas and the tale told in Beasts, Men and Gods when he called Ossendowski a twentieth-century Robinson Crusoe and said that "only the extraordinary events of the extraordinary period we live in" could have produced such a memoir.^[84]

That time-bounded quality to adventure in these years cannot be denied. The war set it in motion and the Russian revolution kept it going, but nearly everything about the period—its flux or unsettlement, its global connectedness, its pohtical intrusiveness into peoples' lives, and its abundance of opportunities for getting rich out of major historical confrontations—worked to tie adventure and contemporary history together. The pattern pervaded all kinds of adventures. Ella Maillart, setting out on a trek from Peking to Kashmir through Chinese Turkestan in 1935 for the love of adventure and a subject to write about, noted soldiers and troop movements and sensed herself caught in a swirl of clashes of a continental magnitude.^[85] Soldiers of fortune or adventurers (in the more pejorative meaning of the word) gravitated toward wars and revolutions of world historical consequence because increasingly these were the sources of action and money. Mercenary pilots who had barnstormed or had fought over Paraguayan jungles were, by the thirties, heading for Ethiopia, Spain, and China.^[86] Swindlers like Corrigan and Eckelman, gunrunners like Goldberg, or dubious types like Gardiner drifted inevitably at some point into the main political currents. Those who fell into history and lived adventurous lives as its victims must have been countless. The Russian revolution produced more than its share, but a little over a decade later anti-Nazi refugees who were scrambling for false papers, infiltrating closed borders, and staying one jump ahead of the police were creating their own dismal tales to hand down to future generations.

Thus adventure, like politics or society, has its own history. For the French there were many great adventure stories in these years, but probably none quite so striking as the Croisière jaune. The Expédition Cit-

roën Centre-Asie, or Croisière jaune as it was more popularly known (the term translates roughly as the yellow cruise, but certainly not a leisurely journey), was a motor caravan across the entire breadth of the Asian continent. Its main group left Beirut in April 1931 and rolled into Peking on 12 February 1932. It crossed the central Asian plateaus, attacked the Pamirs, and then, joining with a second group arriving from the east, forced its way through the Gobi and Chinese Turkestan. It was a celebrated moment for the French—a great national epic of sorts—that spawned magazine articles, books by its participants (the official history was printed in nearly forty thousand copies during the depression), and a documentary film shot as the caravan rumbled forward. In a variety of ways it was the quintessential interwar expedition, a series of exploits fabricated from the times that caught the spirit of how adventures were changing.

How this was so can be seen in the story of its voyage, and also in the developments that preceded and enveloped it. The Croisière jaune was not the first Asiatic crossing by car. As early as 1907 the French daily Le Matin sponsored a Peking-to-Paris motor race. The race grew out of commercial considerations but also out of what would be a growing tendency in the twentieth century for the expedition proper to mutate into the raid or long-distance run. Both the automobile and the airplane opened new possibilities for adventurous dashes across vast stretches of territory. They offered a speed and a mobility hitherto unknown, but the very conquering force of their technology created its own daunting muster of challenges. For nearly every challenge there was a taker, who was quick to dress up the enterprise in talk of colonial missions and extending communication lines or the other clichés of the period, although mostly these cloaked a naked love of adventure. The result was flights and motor trips over inhospitable regions to prove that one could take a plane or a car or truck anywhere in the world and that one could do it the fastest of all. The challengers who entered the Peking-to-Paris race were of this breed. Of the five entries who showed in China—three French, one Dutch, and one Italian car—the Italian team won handily, making the run of nearly eight thousand miles in two months.

The Italians traveled in a specially constructed Itala of thirty-five to forty horsepower through the Gobi and Mongolia into Russian Siberia, skirting the southern reaches of Lake Baikal to Irkutsk, and then westward to Omsk and across into Europe. Not until Nizhni Novgorod did they reach a paved roadbed. Before then they had driven over desert,

mud, terrain akin to quicksand, and railway ties, occasionally hauled across rivers by oxen or horses.

Luigi Barzini, a foreign correspondent for the Corriere della Sera , accompanied the winners and wrote up the journey in a memorable book that was something of a classic in middle-class Italian households after the war, "one of the traditional gifts bestowed on diligent school boys who passed their examination" and that attested to the resonance of the race to the subsequent postwar generation. The endearing tales of the trip like that of the Chinese clerks at the Gobi telegraph station who dutifully transmitted Barzini's dispatch after writing "No. 1" on the top of the form or of the German Hausfrau who shook her fists at the car and shouted out her window, "I know you canaille! It was you who ran over my hen last Thursday. Pay up!" as the car drove through her village no doubt contributed to the popularity of the volume. Yet Barzini also captured the true adventure of crossing Asia on wheels in the very first years of automobiles, and his account remains compelling reading today.^[87]

The Croisière jaune, however, was something else again. It was a motor caravan of half-tracks, fourteen vehicles and forty-three men in all, methodically planned and organized, and attempting a crossing over mountains where the Itala could not have dared to go. Its adventures emerged from the obstacles and hazards of the landscape, but also from the political turmoils into which it rode. Unquestionably its style built upon prewar developments, for example, the turning toward professionalism of nineteenth-century explorers like Amundsen, who fashioned himself from childhood into the consummate explorer or Peary, who worked out a methodology to make it to the top.^[88] In its advance positioning of supplies it repeated, if more systematically, what the Itala team had done over twenty years earlier. But its precedents came elsewhere, from the war years and after.

Of these there were several. One was the Expédition Citroën Centre-Afrique or Croisière noire, a motorized caravan through Africa in 1924-1925 led by the same men who were to sally into the Asian continent seven years later. Devised for its own purposes, the Croisière noire demonstrated that the autochenilles or half-tracks the Citroën factories had been developing since the beginning of the decade were capable of all-terrain travel in the most unfamiliar parts of the world. It too, moreover, was a carefully organized operation that had required more than a year of methodical planning and had been preceded or accompanied by five auxiliary missions to arrange supply depots between Algeria and the In-

dian Ocean. This also would establish a working pattern for the later preparation of the Croisière jaune.^[89]

Roy Chapman Andrews's American Asiatic expeditions into the Gobi throughout the 1920s were another antecedent. These were purely scientific missions rather than long-distance runs. Yet their drawing board meticulousness and fascination for technological prowess as well as their military look would also anticipate the Croisière jaune, and their adventures in central Asia would reveal the politicized encounters that awaited any truck caravan through this region in the interwar years. Andrews's goal was to study "the geologic history of central Asia; to find whether it had been the nursery of many of the dominant groups of animals, including the human race; and to reconstruct its past climate, vegetation and general physical conditions, particularly in relation to the evolution of man." Today the expeditions are best known for their discovery of dinosaur eggs, but in the twenties they represented the forced conquest by machines over terrain, through a combination of planning, technology, and militarylike organization. Realizing that "the fenceless rolling grasslands and the gravel desert [of Mongolia] made it possible to run off the trail at will," Andrews took his men by car into a land where there was not a single mile of railroad, where camel caravans traveled at a rate of ten miles a day, and where winter temperatures could drop to fifty degrees below zero. They traveled in Dodges because Andrews had determined that the Fords occasionally in service for caravan runs from Kalgan to Urga were inadequate for the task and that Dodges, when modified, made it "almost impossible to break a spring when traveling on rough ground." Fastidiously, with the heart of a conqueror but the mind of a quartermaster, Andrews planned out the remainder of his options. "We found that the 33 × 4.5 Royal cord tire made by the United States Rubber Company, gave the best service. . . . We carried hundreds of nuts and bolts, almost every conceivable spare part, and the very best tools; our motor experts were highly trained men." He reconnoitered—"it was obvious that the first season must be strictly a reconnaissance"; divided the main force into separate, self-contained units; and arranged for support columns—"the supporting caravan, carrying gasoline, food and other supplies, was dispatched several weeks in advance of the motor party. Its objective was a well-known place in the desert."^[90]

Andrews said he did not believe in adventures. "Most of them can be eliminated by foresight and organization." But his expeditions were packed full of them. They encountered bandits as law and order col-

lapsed in the region and consequently discovered themselves caught as well in the aftershocks of the Russian revolution and in the bloody throes of China's civil wars and her passage into the Nationalist era. In 1922 they arrived in Urga just after Ungern-Sternberg's defeat and the shift from a White to Red terror. "Murder and sudden death stalked ahead upon the streets. It was an exceedingly good place to leave." In 1925 they were obliged to take Buriat secret service agents with them into the desert and narrowly escaped arrest. In Peking in 1926 Andrews was caught in a bombing run that came perilously close to blowing him up and the following month he was caught again in a machine gun attack on the road to Tientsin. He rode through a "gauntlet of firing" for three miles, claiming the only reason he was "not riddled with bullets . . . [was] because the Chinese soldier is the world's worst shot." Conditions became so bad that both the 1926 and 1927 expeditions were canceled. By 1928 they were rolling back into the desert, bribing brigands, dodging ambushes, and engaging in a gun battle with bandits, shooting one man's ear off in the fight.^[91]

Such adventures were an indication that any motorized convoy through the region in the twenties and thirties would find itself inextricably wound into world politics. Explanations extended from intrigues surrounding air routes and explorers to military prospects for the future but began, as almost always, with the geopolitical effects of the First World War. The war was critical because it disclosed the degree to which European confrontations could distend into global warfare with strategic consequences to action in faraway, exotic, and desolate places. Central Asia in that conflict, for example, had seen subversive expeditions across Persia and Afghanistan, campaigns into the Caucasus, and a tangle of revolutionary politics that fused with world war and spread from Persia to Mongolia. There had been horse patrols through Turkestan and the Pamirs into Mongolia to gather intelligence and prevent tons of supplies from falling into the hands of the enemy (Captain Blacker's adventures, written up after the war, would be recommended reading for the Citroën planners). An armored car convoy—the Dunsterforce—had been introduced into the western reaches of the region to gather intelligence, stymie the Bolsheviks, counter German agents, secure the oilfields of Baku or perhaps destroy them, and build new lines of resistance to the Turks among the Russian, Armenian, and Georgian troops in the area (only the maelstrom of the final act to the First World War could have produced such an idiotic concoction; the expedition failed miserably).^[92]

The war had therefore brought disruption, revolution, the precedent of motorized caravans for military-political purposes, and a new history of global intrigue to the region. Even more, it had demonstrated the need to assure communication lines and to move rapidly across large and inhospitable landmasses. A German plan to buy up Mongolian cattle and herd them westward to war-depleted Turkey was instructive here. Reading about it today, one sees it as a fantastic notion, a cattle drive across a continent and through enemy lines in the midst of a global battle that would make the American trails of the west seem trifling by comparison. The French captain who warned of the plan suggested its most likely route would proceed from Chinese Turkestan through the Kilik pass in the Pamirs. But he also added that "there must exist in this southern corridor of the Pamirs . . . unmapped passes with tracks that can be followed by a herd that, having penetrated into the Amou Daria valley, will find in Afghanistan and Persia easy means to reach Baghdad rapidly and from there Asia Minor." He recommended maintaining a close watch over the mountain gorges and passes. Whether the Germans ever mounted such a drive seems highly improbable. Still the prospect pointed to the military significance of pioneering a motorized land corridor across the central Asian highlands. Fourteen years later the Citroën expedition would seek to do precisely that, following almost the exact itinerary in reverse as it moved east from Persia and Afghanistan over Gilgit and Kilik into Chinese Turkestan.^[93]

After the war the geopolitical implications to establishing regular and rapid means of communication across vast stretches of the world could be seen in the intrigues spun out of international air routes. Intercontinental routes aroused a host of suspicions. To the French, German air corridors over Asia or Africa were a medium for extending German influence and power around the globe. They recalled the Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad but also more recent associations. The Teheran-Bouchir route flew into "where Wassmuss distinguished himself," the Teheran-Herat line with connections to Tashkent and Kabul penetrated "[the] region agitated by Niedermayer in 1917."^[94] Along the west coast of Africa French agents thought they had located secret air bases or straw commercial installations to be converted to military purposes in the event of war.^[95]

No attempt to establish communication lines over distant parts of the world could fully escape such political assumptions in the twenties and thirties. It was a way of thinking that bore certain universal traits, but also the mark of the global uncertainty that followed the war and

that would easily transfer to any attempt to forge a land route through comparable areas. The connections, however, between a raid like the Citroën expedition and the suspicions attached to commercial air routings could also wind deeper. The very concept of a raid , for instance, smacked of the earlier long-distance air flights that had pioneered prospects for more routinized air service across oceans or mountains, deserts, and jungles. Moreover, the establishment of regular air transport would require weather stations, radio transmitters, landing strips, and fuel depots in remote corners of the world—Gobi outposts or mountainside air bases that were fabulous stuff for conjuring up great geopolitical intrigues or designs and that, besides, could come into being only with exploration and transport by land.

The career of Sven Hedin shows how these connections could happen. By the interwar years Hedin was one of the most celebrated explorers in the world and a man whose name was inseparable from adventure and expeditions through central Asia. As a boy in Sweden he had immersed himself in the accounts of great, contemporary exploration and had fallen under the spell of someday leading an expedition of his own to the mysterious heartland of the Asian continent. The urge to follow "the clangour of caravan-bells" never left him; at the age of eighty-five he still noted "that in my dreams I hear the melancholy sound of the caravans' bronze bells, that song of the deserts, unchanged through thousands of years." He was headstrong and courageous, thoroughly restless and incurably romantic; but he was also a professionally trained geographer, a skilled mapmaker, a gifted linguist, and an irrepressible self-publicist who understood the connection between public attention and private financing. Most of his life he traveled by horse and by camel, across deserts and into mountains. Practically nothing discouraged him. He crossed the Pamirs in midwinter, tried to penetrate Tibet disguised as a pilgrim, and when this attempt failed, he returned again and pushed his way through, despite British objections. At times he was foolhardy, once leading a caravan across the murderous Takla Makan Desert, losing two men, all but one of his camels, and nearly his own life in the process. Yet nothing held Hedin back. "I longed," he once noted, "for the open air, and for great adventures on lonely roads." His expeditions were long-term affairs, always for scientific purposes, that resulted in a mapping of the Transhimalayas, the location of the precise sources of the Indus and Brahmaputra, and a detailed physical geography of much of central Asia. No one who traveled through Kashgar or Mongolia in the twentieth century did so without sensing his formidable presence.^[96]

But to Western circles in the twenties and thirties he was also a suspicious character. British intelligence maintained a file on him and to the Shanghai municipal police he was "notorious for his adventures in international espionage" (he turned up, in all places, in the dossier on Eckelman/Lund).^[97] No doubt these suspicions emanated in part from the rumors that inevitably circulated about scientific missions to faraway places and that built upon the tradition of "intelligence rides" along border regions in Asia and Africa.^[98] Before 1914 tales of espionage had hung over expeditions to the Near East or treks into the mountains of the Asian subcontinent. After the war the suspicions escalated as French agents tracked German ethnological and sociological enterprises to western Africa or apprehensively watched geological missions traveling from China and Mongolia into Turkestan. Bernard Vernier, who mapped German Middle East intrigues and whose writing caught official notice, warned that German archaeologists, ethnographers, and geologists working from Syria to Iraq might be preparing another "'revolt in the desert' with sabotage of airfields, rail lines, and pipe lines." In fact, there were reasons to be suspicious. The First World War had seen German explorers undertake secret missions and in the thirties German archaeologists were doubling as Nazi propaganda agents in Mesopotamia. Later, in 1940 during the first full year of a second world war, the Abwehr would dispatch a Sonderkommando composed of scientists, geographers, geologists, meteorologists, and mineralogists to prepare for military operations in North Africa and the middle band stretching across the continent.^[99]

More damning for Hedin, however, were his German connections. All his life he was a Germanophile. He worshipped German culture and, fearing Russian designs on Sweden, regarded the Reich as the principal barrier to a Russian drive westwards. In 1914 he had encouraged the Germans to embark on their Afghanistan adventure, counseling that the emir "burned to break loose against British rule in India." Later in the war he would write favorably of the German war effort, including a nine-hundred-page tome entitled War Against Russia that the Germans translated as Nach Osten! Neither German defeat nor the rise of the Nazis shook his unwavering belief in the value of things German. He openly acknowledged descent from a Jewish grandparent, yet his relations with Hitler were cordial and he allowed himself, with some reservations, to be used for German propaganda.^[100]

By the twenties, moreover, those connections were defining Hedin's work as an explorer and geographer. His last great central Asian adven-

ture—the Sino-Swedish expedition—was an amalgam of conventional scientific missions and grand German schemes to lay out an air route from Berlin to Peking. It originated in a proposal from Hugo Junkers in 1925 to pay all of Hedin's expenses to western China and Turkestan (Sinkiang province) if he would collaborate in preparing the way for regular air service, and when Junkers ran into financial difficulties the following year, Deutsche Lufthansa picked up the project. Thus Hedin was off once again for inner Asia accompanied this time by Swedish scientists and field managers but also by a German meteorologist and German pilots, most of whom had flown in the war. The expedition gathered an enormous cache of information on the geography, geology, archaeology, and paleontology of the region—by 1980 over fifty scientific monographs had issued from its findings—but its principal purpose was to prepare an aerial infrastructure of landing strips, weather stations, and fuel depots in some of the most remote parts of the world. It headed into a country racked by tension between Muslim and Chinese, a zone vulnerable to Comintern propaganda and slowly wound into the Soviet orbit, a land contested between the central Chinese government and independent-minded Turkestan warlords, a territory that by the early thirties was breaking out into open rebellion and warfare, amidst great power maneuvers and foreign intrigues by agents like Colonel Schomberg who roamed the land for British intelligence. The German Foreign Office displayed considerable reluctance to promote a venture clearly diving into a political rat nest and likely to be perceived as more than an innocent commercial enterprise. It insisted on a Swedish identity to the mission—hence the name Sino-Swedish—to avoid visible entanglement in Chinese affairs: a sign of the geopolitical complications that would consume such an expedition in the postwar years. ^[101]

Hedin's group did, in fact, encounter obstacle after obstacle, running into staunch opposition not only from the Chinese but the British and the Russians who spread rumors of larger, more diabolical intentions to discredit Hedin and his men. Nor were these completely inaccurate. The expedition became a spearhead of German influence in Sinkiang until Russian interference put an end to further German penetration into the area. Meanwhile through the late 1920s Hedin and the Germans proceeded to map prospective weather stations and landing sites for Lufthansa. As the company's exasperation with Chinese stalls progressed with the years, Hedin was obliged to seek additional sources of funding. Yet the Lufthansa identity and the suspicions this aroused stuck

to the expedition. When at last in 1933 the surveying, scooping, drawing, collecting, negotiating, cajoling, and managing of a multiheaded, thoroughly modern team exploration came to an end the sixty-eight-year-old Hedin plunged deeper into political waters. With civil war raging in Sinkiang and Soviet influence inexorably gaining, the Nationalist Chinese engaged Hedin to survey motor routes into the territory in a bid to reassert their authority over the province. In late 1933 Hedin, several Swedes, and three Chinese set out in a caravan of two cars and three trucks. Over the next fourteen months they bounced from adventure to adventure, enduring house arrest, confiscation of their vehicles, and at one point an imminent threat of execution. By early 1935 Hedin was back, reporting his recommendations to the Chinese government. He returned to Stockholm in April, nine years after he had initially embarked and at the end of his most prolonged, most fruitful, yet most controversial expedition.^[102]

Hedin, then, was a figure who would cast a long shadow over any expedition rolling through central Asia. Few men had lived a life as exciting as his, but he had also dabbled in politics and lent his skills as an explorer and geographer to enterprises that extended beyond science or fame. By the interwar years he brought together in his person adventure, exploration, and the surveying of land and air passages with motorized caravans, but also the geopolitical intrigues and suspicions that could surround all of these undertakings. One contemporary summed it up when he wrote that the opening of corridors for rapid movement across Asia was part of a larger preparation for war that would engulf all of the world and in which geographers and explorers would play as important a role as the diplomats and politicians. Hedin, he suggested, was doing just that, intruding in wider international affairs.^[103] For Hedin the Sino-Swedish expedition was the end of the line. It capped a remarkable career that had seen fabulous journeys, worthy discoveries, and immersion in the forces and events that were reshaping Asia. That too made him a forerunner of the Croisière jaune and a creation of his times, because in his own personal voyage from explorer to political adventurer he fell under an essential influence of the age.

Organization, the mania to apply new technology to move human beings and equipment across distant lands, and postwar geopolitics thus formed the background to the Croisière jaune. All three were built into the expedition from the beginning, particularly the last; indeed so politically charged in its design and destination was the Croisière jaune that from start to conclusion it was nearly as much a government venture as

it was a Citroën expedition. Just when the moment of conception for a central Asian crossing occurred is a question mark, although most likely it began to germinate the instant the Croisière noire was over. Louis Audoin-Dubreuil, who was second in command to Georges-Marie Haardt on both expeditions, said that Haardt first speculated about leading a caravan to the South Pole and that only when a study proved this infeasible did he turn to the idea of driving across Asia.^[104] But after Africa, Asia was the logical terrain for a larger, more challenging, and more sensational enterprise; and both Haardt and Citroën were looking for a sequel, the one because he could not rid himself of the bug of adventure and the other because he knew the extraordinary publicity that would surround a company convoy over the silk route.

Yet as early as 1924 French official thinking was beginning to travel along the same lines. In that year a member of the French legation in Peking, a man named Garreau who spoke Russian and six Asiatic languages, was proposing a personal journey through Hami, Urumchi, and Kashgar in Sinkiang, continuing over the Pamirs to Kabul. He noted the growing political significance of the region, the contest between Soviets and British, the vast oil deposits to be tapped, and the prospect that air service from Europe to the Orient would seek the most direct route across central Asia. His voyage, he argued, would provide an opportunity to investigate the political and economic conditions of Turkestan and the future role that France might play in the area. Garreau's letter to his superiors in Paris now forms the first document in the Quai d'Orsay's dossier on the Croisière jaune, an introduction to the tight collaboration between the state and the adventurers that would include negotiations with foreign powers, reconnaissance missions, the loan of military personnel, and the monitoring of the expedition from its beginning through its end.^[105]

The Deuxième Bureau (intelligence section, no less) was brought into the planning, filing in 1927 a detailed report on routing, climate, timing, liaisons, maps, necessary equipment, reconnaissance, and the location of supply bases as if they had been ordered to prepare for a military invasion.^[106] Four military attachés were attached to the mission: Captain Bertrand in Teheran, who was to prepare the way for the journey through western Asia and accompany the mission; Waddington, a lieutenant, who was charged with reconnoitering a return route through southern Asia; Lieutenant Commander Pecqueur, a geodesist (or so he was listed), who replaced Bertrand as the Quai d'Orsay began to anticipate Persian opposition if the latter came along; and Victor Point, an-

other lieutenant commander and the nephew of Philippe Berthelot, the Quai d'Orsay's secretary general.^[107]

Of the four, Point was to play the most important role. In the mid-1920s he had commanded a gunboat on the upper Yangtze. He was young, less than thirty at the time he joined the expedition, but he was committed, coolheaded, decisive, and a bit of a political animal, all talents he would have to draw on for the next several years. As the planning firmed up he was dispatched to Peking to negotiate rights of passage and to organize supply bases on Chinese territory. There he managed to obtain the necessary authorizations and to secure the services of a French civil engineer named Petropavlovsky,^[108] who was an old China hand and possessed the contacts and know-how to oversee routing and provisioning from the China end. Point returned to Paris in spring of 1930, but several months later he was off again for China to position supplies in Mongolia and Turkestan. His orders read that he was on a "reconnaissance expedition," which meant that he was expected to gather political and military intelligence as well as geographical and scientific data. He was to be accompanied by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and by a radio operator who the Quai d'Orsay insisted should be a military man.^[109]

Meanwhile, Haardt and Citroën were lining up sponsors, soliciting authorizations, firming up itineraries, and dispatching reconnaissance missions of their own. They named André Goerger secretary general of the expedition and sent him to Persia and Russia up to the Sinkiang frontier to reconnoiter the land; "the point of attack," according to original plans, would be through Soviet Turkestan. For two years Goerger traveled, met with Sven Hedin, and charted conditions that would hinder or facilitate a passage.^[110] At the same time Haardt and the Citroën technical personnel threw themselves into assembling the team and designing the vehicles for the run. All told, nearly forty men would go. Haardt and Audoin-Dubreuil would head up the general staff. They would be accompanied by Pecqueur, Point, Teilhard de Chardin, and Charles Brull, director of Citroën laboratories. A representative of the National Geographic Society of Washington, D.C. (a cosponsor),^[111] would go along, as would the archaeologist Jean Hackin and the naturalist André Reymond. There would be a four-man film crew from Pathé Nathan, three radio operators, two doctors, an official historian (Georges Le Fèvre), an artist, an interpreter, a cook, and eighteen mechanics including two chief mechanics, Ferracci and Penaud.

They would travel in seven half-tracks constructed of duraluminum,

with six-cylinder forty-horsepower engines that could obtain a maximum speed of thirty-three kilometers per hour. Each vehicle would contain a front section or cabin for ferrying the men, a rear section designed according to the specific function of the truck, and each would tow a trailer containing water tanks, personal baggage, dressing cases, tents, beds, tables, and seats. The lead vehicle would be "the command car," conveying Haardt and his état-major . It would carry the maps, documents, weapons, typewriters, "archives," and art supplies. Next would come the scientists and their instruments. The following two trucks would transport the film crew and their equipment, much of it built into special panels on the sides of the vehicle. The radio men and machinery capable of transmitting and receiving over an eight-thousand-kilometer range would constitute half-track number five, to be followed by the mess wagon and finally a combination pharmacy/surgery/workshop truck with drawers and special compartments constructed into the sides behind hinged panels. All of the caterpillar trucks would have lifting panels of some sort, behind which would be fixed a mirror, electric light, and sink to facilitate washing up in the morning. Even today, on the verge of the twenty-first century, one is struck by the sophistication of these vehicles. Equally stunning was the degree of comfort built into an expedition heading out to conquer some of the most forlorn and rugged territory in the world.^[112]

Haardt, centralizing operations from an office in the Place de l'Opéra, clearly intended to prepare for any eventuality. Six reconnaissance voyages and five supply missions preceded the Croisière jaune. But nothing came easily. Negotiations with the Soviets went up and down like a yo-yo. First the French could traverse the Soviet Union but on a route north of Soviet Turkestan. Then they were accorded passage through Turkestan. Then in late 1930 the authorization for passage was withdrawn altogether, only several months before the journey was scheduled to begin. Haardt was left with two options, either to cancel or to reroute through the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs. The first, by this point, was no choice at all, but the second required a major reworking of the expedition. Crossing mountains demanded design revisions in the vehicles, and there was no guarantee that even then the half-tracks could make it across. In the face of these difficulties Haardt, determined to plunge on, made the only sensible decision he could: to divide the expedition in two. A main group under his command would proceed eastbound as planned, driving seven lighter vehicles modified for a mountain crossing. At the same time a second group commanded by Point would set

out from China in the seven originally built caterpillars and rendezvous with Haardt somewhere in western Chinese Turkestan. If the first vehicles made it over the mountains they would continue as a convoy of fourteen to the Pacific. If not, Haardt and a large body of his men would complete the mountain passage however they could until they joined with Point and motored on westwards. The decision must have cost Haardt dearly, representing as it did the prospect of a cruel diminution of his original goals. Yet nearly all the exploits that followed, making the Croisière jaune the great adventure it became, would be a consequence of these alterations. In the meantime, the pace of preparation quickened considerably. In the Citroën workshops mechanics labored feverishly to produce the new trucks and gear to get over the mountains. Pecqueur, who was now on board the team, was dispatched to Afghanistan to scout out the terrain and negotiate safe conduct through the country. A second Afghanistan reconnaissance was confided to Elie de Vassoigne, who flew to Teheran to inspect the routing between Mazari-Sharif and Faizabad in the north.^[113]

As the April 1931 jumping-off date approached, the different units of the expedition took up positions. In China Petropavlovsky (whom everyone called Petro) negotiated with Gobi merchants, arranged prices and insurance, bought off the Association for the Protection of Convoys (a collection of brigands and extortionists), filled 11 caravans with petrol, oil, food, tools, and spare parts, and progressively sent into the desert 622 camels loaded with 50 tons of merchandise. The seven autochenilles destined for Points group were packed into crates and shipped off to China. Point left for Tientsin to await their arrival. A month later Brull and the mechanics followed via Moscow and the Trans-Siberian. When Pecqueur telegrammed from Afghanistan that a revolt had broken out and that a northern Afghanistan crossing was impossible, Haardt and the Quai d'Orsay won British sanction for yet another rerouting through northern India. The passage through Gilgit would be still less accessible, but by now there was no thought of turning back. On the third of April a British liaison, Colonel Gabriel, left Marseilles for Bombay accompanying several hundred thousand francs' worth of materials and prepared to reconnoiter mountain routes north of Srinagar in Kashmir. In Kabul the French chargé d'affaires forwarded 472 gallons of gas, 42 gallons of oil, 48 pounds of grease, and 13 crates of provisions to Kandahar. Further north, again on the Trans-Siberian, Abel Berger, a Citroën mechanic, was bringing 15 cases of wheel parts for the trucks. On the twenty-fourth of April the Quai d'Orsay was alert-

ing its agents in Germany, Poland, Russia, and China to do what was necessary to facilitate his journey. By then, however, one was beyond preparations; both the Haardt and Point groups were already on their way.^[114]

The main column struck out from Beirut on the fourth of April, "veritable tanks [chars ] launched . . . on the conquest of unknown regions." Traveling at twenty kilometers an hour, perhaps one hundred and fifty kilometers a day, they crossed into Iraq on the twelfth, "cleared" the Tigris by the twentieth, "bivouacked" in Persia, and arrived in Teheran on the twenty-eighth to the welcome of enthusiastic crowds. As they proceeded to the Afghan frontier their Persian escort, Colonel Esfandiary, warned of difficulties ahead. "The country has no roads, trails are not secure, the nomads are turbulent. There is fighting in the north." But they encountered no problems, rejoined Hackin and Pecqueur at Girishk, and arrived in Kabul by the ninth of June. Two weeks later they had reached Srinagar at the base of the Himalayas. The first leg of the trip was culturally impressionable but physically uneventful, the column slicing forward at every stage:

It was a fine squadron, a perfected material, responsive, obedient in the service of its men. This group—soul, flesh, and steel—was a body unto itself, mobile, self-sufficient, capable of living and acting alone in the wilderness. . . .

In all that there was something compact, resolute, expressive, like an affirmation. But for the moment Asia offered no opposition to this concentrated force. She seemed to recede, to defend herself against this intrusion from the West with sand, wind, space, faint distances, and low flat mountains that flared out to reappear and reappeared to vanish.^[115]

Before them now, however, rose a massive mountain barrier. No roads led through the mountains, only footpaths and horse trails, and of these only three that afforded passage into China. The first, through Chitral, was closed to all but strategic troop movements. The second, via Leh, climbed to an altitude of nearly twenty thousand feet. They must pass by the third, through Gilgit, insisted Gabriel who had reconnoitered in advance. "With my cars," Haardt replied. Gabriel shook his head. The Gilgit route was only a mule trail, cut out of a mountainside, jutting out over emptiness, winding through glacial valleys before climbing toward high mountain passes. It was closed eight months out of the year, it had just reopened, and no one was sure at the moment that even men on horseback could make it through. There were hairpin turns and gradients of more than forty degrees. Bridges, suspended over

gorges and raging torrents below, were unsturdy and had never been tested by the weight of motor vehicles. Between Srinagar and Kashgar was a forty-five-day trek through a land devoid of supplies. The maximum amount of material that a porter could bear was thirty kilos, sixty for a pack horse. An expedition the size of the Croisière jaune, would require at least eight hundred men or four hundred horses, a virtual army that would make a nonsense of logistics.

Still the French tried. They broke down into three groups, leaving at intervals, and they took only two trucks, stripped to essentials, as a symbolic gesture to see how far they could go. At the first bridge, uncertain it would hold, they used steel cables to maneuver the vehicle across. The first car caught to one side and Ferracci had to go out and straighten it, a risky operation for him but one that succeeded. Ahead, however, lay forty-five more bridges before the Kilik pass. As they moved deeper into the mountains the snow on the sides of the trail piled four to five meters thick. Climbing to nearly fourteen thousand feet, the engines lost over 50 percent of their power; but they continued to chug along. Two kilometers past Burzil, on a steep overhang, Cecillon, driving one of the caterpillars, suddenly felt the earth disappear beneath his outer track. Suspended over nothingness, the blood drained from his face, he remained glued to his seat, sweating it out for five hours until a winch worked the autochenille onto firm ground. Beyond Astor their march slowed to a crawl behind a meter-by-meter clearing of the path. Seven miles further on there was a complete washout, requiring a dismantling of the cars over a hundred-meter portage, and then a reassemblage on the other side. Throughout the painstaking acrobatics Ferracci pushed the crew along. They lowered the machines by cable down banks, they forded rushing waters, they maneuvered through zigzag turns, and they passed over frail ledges that at one point they rebuilt by hand. At last, twenty-three days out and some several hundred miles into the mountains, they drove into Gilgit. They were the first people in motor vehicles ever to appear there.

This was as far as they were to go in the half-tracks. Ahead lay a struggle at least as commanding as anything they had known up to Gilgit, and Haardt no longer felt he had the time to experiment. From the other side of the Pamirs had come a radio message that Point was in trouble, and Haardt was now pressed to cross over and come to the rescue. He left one car in Gilgit—a monument to what they had done—and consigned the other to Ferracci and his team to dismantle and take back to France. The remainder of the expedition forged on, covering

the next thousand miles with horses, yaks, and camels. They climbed to nearly sixteen thousand feet, passed through the Kilik pass, descended into Sinkiang between walls of rose colored granite, quartered in Kashgar, and then set off for Aksu and a rendezvous with Point.

For the China group all the voyage was an adventure. Where Haardt and his men had departed in triumph, Point and his team all but stole out in the middle of the night. They left amidst lurid press charges that eight hundred armed men—including a crack pistol corps—were going to descend from the west to prospect for minerals or that the Croisière jaune was the spearhead of an imperial landgrab for Sinkiang. The very name of the expedition grated on Chinese sensibilities, a fact not lost on the French, who did what they could to cover it over with the more palatable inscription of Croisière trans-asiatique.^[116] The Nationalist government imposed a Chinese delegation on Point, which was to intrigue against the mission at nearly every turn and to cause it all sorts of troubles in the Gobi and in Turkestan. As they left for the Great Wall, Kalgan, and the desert, Point learned that a rebellion had broken out in Sinkiang and that it would be wise to postpone the crossing: advice that Point chose to ignore, although not without subsequent peril. If this were not enough, they ground up nearly all their treads shortly out of Peking because of a faulty design and had to return for repairs.

Not until the twenty-fourth of April (by this date Haardt was nearing Teheran) did they make it to Kalgan, only two hundred kilometers away. There they camped at the Pioneer's Inn, famous in the years immediately after the war as a gatherimg place of European toughs and adventurers. While they awaited the arrival of an emergency shipment of spare treads to replace those they had mounted in Peking—this was the consignment Berger was shepherding on the Trans-Siberian—Point was recalled to Peking to answer new charges. Back in the former capital, Point negotiated, apologized, cajoled, and won the right for the expedition to continue. On 11 May Berger arrived with the track-bands and on the sixteenth they were out of Kalgan, now moving at a fair speed toward inner Mongolia and a new junction with the Chinese delegation. At Pailing-miao the Chinese appeared, mostly scientists, but also a journalist, a general, and a Colonel Tiao who had studied at the Soviet war college and had specialized in espionage.

The Gobi crossing was a race against the elements and dwindling gas supplies. The caravan set out with eight thousand liters, but there were detours around sand dunes and gorges, dead ends in ravines, a retracing

to find a way out, and slow running over rocky plateaus and then over every kind of sand. Winds blew sand into everything and at one point the French encountered a full desert sandstorm. Fierce heat burst several bidons of petrol, forcing Point in the end to go ahead to Soochow, where their caravans had deposited a reserve, and to return with sufficient supplies for the rest of the vehicles to make it to the town. At Soochow they were nearly trapped by intrigues against them, but Petro used an old connection to get authorization to continue westward. On the twenty-sixth of June they entered Sinkiang province, passing a sign planted at the border upon which someone had scribbled in Chinese: "Don't go west. Danger. Hide your camels in the mountains and wait," a reminder once again that they were heading into a war zone.

The rebellion raging in Sinkiang was a complex matter. It pitted Muslim populations against Chinese overlords, but the balance of forces encompassed the spread of pan-Turanian and Islamic revivalist influence (spurred on by the First World War), Stalin's collectivization policies (which drove a Kirghiz resistance movement across the border), and the impact of the Japanese expansion upon Soviet willingness to intervene in central Asia. Ma Chung-ying, a Kansu warlord whose intrusions on the side of the rebels propelled the revolt into full scale civil war, had suspicious ties to both the Japanese and Soviets that are still debated today. He may even have been manipulated as a Soviet agent provocateur by his Turkish chief of staff, Kemal Kaya, who has been identified as a likely Soviet agent and was perhaps GPU trained. To complete the picture a critical part of the fighting was done by White Russian troops loyal to Chin Shu-jen, the Chinese governor and warlord of Sinkiang (provincial chairman in Kuomintang terminology; but the Kuomintang exercised little authority over the province) until they mutinied against him in April 1933 and drove him from power.^[117] It was into this ensemble of regional hostilities, great power politics, and spillovers from the Great War that the Point group now found itself venturing.

Their arrival coincided with the first great phase of the rebellion, the fighting concentrated around the city of Hami. Meeting up with troops along a road littered with the cadavers of humans and animals, they watched as Chinese soldiers fell upon a Muslim cavalryman, hacked off his arms, sliced open his belly, and ripped out his heart as a trophy. Continuing into Hami, they witnessed a town feverishly preparing to defend itself against a Muslim onslaught. By July first they were out of Hami, leaving Petro behind to arrange security for an approaching

supply caravan. His intention was to rejoin the column four days later at Turfan, but he was to be overtaken by the attack and then siege of Ma's troops and would not break out of the town until 109 days later.

Moving west, the expedition descended into a depression below sea level where the temperature reached above 120 degrees. By now, however, their minds were on the ravages of war and the question of whether they could make it to Kashgar and the rendezvous with Haardt. At Turfan they were summoned by Chin to Urumchi. Point, smelling a trap, went alone with one truck, leaving Brull in charge of the convoy and with instructions to stay put. Once in Urumchi, Point was held prisoner amidst new intrigues and Chin's urgent desire to confiscate the half-tracks and radios for his war needs. Pressured to call Brull and the convoy to the capital, Point at last ceded but managed to warn them to camp on the outskirts and to dismantle the tracks and the running gear to prevent Chin from seizing the vehicles. There they remained for fifty-two days of negotiations, suspense, threats, clandestine radio messages to the French fleet, and promises of vehicles and radios for Chin sent expressly from the Citroën factories.^[118] At last a deal was struck: Point, a radio operator, and a mechanic would go east with Chin's men to establish radio contact between Urumchi and the Hami front in exchange for the freeing of four vehicles to proceed west to rendezvous with Haardt. It was these four trucks that converged at Aksu with the men coming from the mountains on the eighth of October.

At the junction there was an emotional greeting and a meal of roast chicken, pommes frites, salad, crème renversée, coffee, and cognac prepared by the Urumchi group who had arrived first: a reminder that the French will out in a Frenchman even in an outpost in Chinese Turkestan. But the time for celebrating was still a long way off. Back at Urumchi they waited and waited for authorization to leave, sensing themselves imprisoned and watching the last of the good weather fly by. Their plans had prescribed an eastward crossing in fall, but as winter approached they began to prepare for the worst, adapting the trucks with special heating mechanisms and procuring sheepskins, boots, gloves, and fur hats. On the twentieth of November they were stunned by the appearance of a Frenchman named Jacques Salesse who had traveled via Paris-Berlin-Moscow-Novosibirsk-Chuguchak and then nine hundred kilometers over miserable roads with the three cars and radio sets promised to Chin. Eight days later the expedition had its permission to go.^[119]

The return promised to be as dangerous as the voyage outbound. At

Hami they discovered their supplies had been pillaged and that Ma Chung-ying, a man they wished to avoid at all costs, was lurking along the road to Soochow. They would have to make it to Soochow and then drive through Kansu, because that was where their reserves had been stashed. But an alternate routing around Ma through the desert would require more gas than they had on hand. Petro remembered that months earlier one of his men had hidden supplies east of Hami, and so they decided to gamble on retrieving these and not encountering the warlord's troops on the way. With no assurance they could make it through, but no alternative except to try, they proceeded out of Hami through a countryside gutted by war. In a daring run Audoin-Dubreuil and Petro went ahead to the secret cache, found the petrol, and returned with enough to get to Soochow. Then they headed into the desert in winter, a line of half-tracks winding through a bleak lunarlike landscape.

As the temperature dropped below zero (Fahrenheit) they ran the engines without stop to keep them from freezing, rolling day and night over several hundred-mile stretches at a time. They pulled into Soochow on the eighteenth of December and had to bribe their way out. Now the weather and the lack of spare parts began to wear down the vehicles. With the temperature nearly ten degrees below zero an engine broke down, requiring eight hours of repairs in the open and the touching of metal with bare hands. Several days later, with the temperature dropping to eighteen below, they had to do more engine repairs and then replace one of the caterpillar tracks. Still a hundred and ten miles from a Catholic mission at Liangchow where shelter and supplies awaited, Haardt exhorted his men to drive through the night, even though they had not slept for three days and the mechanics were running on empty. At last at two in the morning they limped in, greeted by the German fathers although too dead tired to acknowledge their hosts. There they rested through the New Year, celebrating New Year's Day with the missionaries. The Germans toasted international friendship and the end to old enmities, the naturalist Reymond, "Reymond the skeptic," responding by standing and singing "Ich hatt' einen Kamerad " in a voice completely off-key, which made the scene all the more haunting.

East of Liangchow they headed into a country swarming with bandits. At a small village they were attacked by independent soldiers (the equivalent of bandits and a scourge of the land) who fired eleven shots into one of the trucks. Audoin-Dubreuil jumped out with his rifle in his hand, the other French followed. More shots were fired at them from soldiers advancing from the fields, a situation running out of control

until Balourdet, one of the mechanics, pulled up with a machine gun and fired forty rapid bursts over the heads of the Chinese. A parley of sorts then followed, the Chinese complaining of the French counterattack, the French asking why they had been fired upon, the Chinese replying, "We thought you were brigands," the French cynically responding, "Have you ever seen brigands traveling in cars flying the French flag?" With things smoothed over and the Chinese sufficiently impressed by the French show of force, the convoy was again on its way. The remainder of the journey was now easy riding into Peking, the Croisière jaune arriving on the twelfth of February 1932, 315 days out from the start and 7,528 miles down the road. After much fêting, interviewing, and too little rest, the body of the expedition shipped out to Haiphong for a return southern run through Siam, Burma, India, and Persia. It was a voyage, however, that they would never make. Proceeding south by stages, Haardt arrived in Shanghai on the third of March, just after the clash in Chapei between Chinese and Japanese. He saw a city racked by fighting, in a virtual state of siege, its outer streets strewn with cadavers, while offshore in the Whangpoo warships hovered with their big guns unmuzzled. Continuing on to Hong Kong he took to bed with influenza. On the morning of the sixteenth his men learned the news: he had died of double pneumonia in the night. The expedition finally, prematurely, had come to an end.^[120]

That was the Croisière jaune. It was an unforgettable adventure of the sort that only the interwar years could produce. The look was that of the twenties and thirties: the hardened glamour of Haardt in trench coat, broad-brimmed hat on his head, very aware of posing as the modern-day adventurer; the relaxed toughness of the men in leather jackets leaning against their fearsome machines.^[121] About them was the air of the late imperial age, a plunge into exotica beyond the intrusions of the past but before the homogenizing erasures of the future. They rambled through ancient city gates, posed by ruins, passed over lands a time dimension removed from the West, yet in ways that recall standard scenes from the period, lorries edging through crowded bazaar streets, a peasant crouched on a wheelbarrow beneath the wing of an airplane as a soldier in contemporary uniform looks on, the caption reading "Ancient and Modern China Side by Side."^[122] In Srinagar Audoin-Dubreuil, who climbed mountains and crossed deserts, dined in evening dress on houseboats. Goerger at the same locale watched a population float by, sensed he had stepped across a cultural time zone; but he gazed as well upon the fashionable rites of an international fast set, a gathering place

for round-the-world travelers. There were merchants of precious stones from the East, embroidered silks from Kashmir, carpets from Bukhara, yet also sports shops with equipment for tennis, golf, and polo.^[123] The contrasts were those of the expedition, a rough and tumble crew in high-tech gear, conquistadors on wheels, adventurers in a world where their kind ruled as lords. It caught, like its age, a suspended moment in time before the great tidal wave of change, but only just barely. Already a generation beyond the quest for the source of the Nile or the race to the Pole, it was a machine-age demonstration of prowess and a presentiment of the routinized travel to follow. For Haardt and his men there was danger and a tinge of romance, but that came from their historical circumstances and would disappear after them. Their voyage was conquest and travelogue, they were buccaneers and tourists.

The expedition's hero—Haardt—was of the sort that came with the times, a team leader and organizer, a man of enterprise, authority, and technical skill. Unlike a Burton or a Peary he was strangely lacking in a persona, and when he died there was little to be said except for the adventures he had mounted. No one seemed to know very much about Georges-Marie Haardt except that he was an engineer, a naturalized Frenchman born of Belgian parents, and a Citroën company man who sat on the firm's administrative council (he was, in fact, an early associate of André Citroën).^[124] Otherwise the facts of his life seemed to fade into unimportance. The New York Times said he was forty-six when he died, the London Times said he was forty-seven, and the Petit Parisien put him at forty-eight. Not even his closest collaborators could come up with more than formulaic expressions for a man who had lived since the first Sahara crossing in the twenties almost solely for adventure but had made these grand, organized affairs, swashbuckling projects designed like a blueprint. André Citroën praised his coolness under pressure, his "spirit of decision," his ability to command, and his "penetrating sense of control necessary for a real leader of men." Audoin-Dubreuil described him as a "chief," a man of adventurous but practical spirit and a planner. Citroën was "the animator, the creator," Haardt "the organizer and réalisateur. " Blandly these summed up a man who had done such extraordinary things.^[125] Yet the heroic quality was clear nonetheless. He had prepared, negotiated, organized, and designed, but then he had led forty men and fourteen half-tracks on a relentless drive across Asia. Among his men he was a presence, and with his death the expedition expired as well. It was a tragic but almost screenplaylike conclusion, lending an air of epic proportions to all of the mission. In this respect

he defined the limitations but also the possibilities for heroism in a technological age, a man of complex managerial skills who had guided his team successfully in a great venture across half the landmass of the globe.

It was too an expedition that seemed to come out of one war and to head into another. Its language was military to the core, "clearing" barriers, commanded by a "general staff," identifying its "point of attack," "an assault column out to force its way through the Pamir passes."^[126] Military men accompanied the mission, commanded its units, reconnoitered, assumed charge of security. Rolling through the barren wasteland toward Soochow the convoy of half-tracks had a menacing air about it, like a futuristic column of conquerors or of desperate armed men making a run for it through hostile territory. Vulnerable to large enemy contingents it blasted its way through bandit zones. There was a martial toughness to the dress of the crew, and they donned uniforms on the morrow of the death of their chief. Afterwards, when the adventure was over, there remained the memories of a campaign in the field and a mood of male camaraderie that repeated the bonding of the trenches.^[127]

In these carryovers of language and styles the expedition showed the effects of the First World War, "the essential condition of consciousness in the twentieth century," as Paul Fussell has called it.^[128] But there was also something of the coming war in the Croisière jaune, as if in its forced march through Asia it were the harbinger of future armored columns that would storm across the great landmasses of the world. It recalled Vernier's speculations in the late 1930s of what the Germans might have accomplished if von Hentig, Niedermayer, and Wassmuss had disposed of armored vehicles and airplanes in their theater of operations and his vision that in the next war fleets of tanks would sweep across Asia and North Africa. "The adventures of yesterday," he wrote, "will become the operations of tomorrow." Or it recalled Hauptmann Xylander's report in 1939 on the prospects for motorized fighting in the desert: "The possibility of using motor vehicles and radios has decisively altered the usability and significance of the Sahara Desert for warfare . Today motor vehicles can conquer in a single day's march distances between water holes that formerly required camel caravans two weeks of danger and troubles to cover." Perhaps what the Croisière jaunt projected most was simply the militarized look that tended to pervade large-scale expeditions between the wars. The Andrews missions had displayed it as brazenly as had the Citroën group. And probably no crossing in these years so reminded one of the Croisière jaune as Italo Balbo's

1933 aerial cruise across the north Atlantic: one hundred men in twenty-five seaplanes flying from Orbatello to Chicago via the North Sea, Iceland, and Canada. Each was an adventure, globally cast, carried out by a team of rigorously trained professionals. Each required years of planning, methodical organization, and logistical support services orchestrated in advance. Fundamentally the only difference, aside from the aerial voyage, was that Balbo was a military man leading a military squadron flown in military formation by military pilots. Yet that too was not unlike the Croisière jaune.^[129]

From those warlike intonations it was but a step back to the essential signature of the age, an adventure wrapped in world politics and the great events of the day. In a multiplicity of ways—from the Quai d'Orsay's participation to the geopolitical significance of pioneering a land route across postwar central Asia to the legacies of Hedin to the undertow of war and revolution in the East—contemporary affairs intersected with the Croisière jaune. Its great exploit was to be its crossing of Asia on wheels, but the sense of riding into history never left it. "In this country in disorder . . . what has become of the Citroën central Asia expedition?" wrote Goerger in a book about his travels for the expedition in which he set both against the unfolding of deep historical change.^[130] Under any circumstances the expedition would have been an adventure, but it became a fabulous one because it collided with rebellion and civil war in Sinkiang. Yet even here, in this remote land where geography blurred into flashes of sensation and names conjured up centuries long past, the dash of global politics made itself felt. Like yon Hentig or Borodin or Ossendowski or all the poor souls who fell through the cracks when the foundations split apart in the First World War, the men of the Croisière jaune were swept along by the currents of their century.

If their stories bear retelling in a book about spies it is because between these adventures and espionage there existed an undeniable bond. Many of the great tales of the period—those of Lawrence, von Hentig, Borodin, Trebitsch Lincoln—were, of course, tales of intrigue that solidified ties between the two. They were a testimony to the far-flung global character of espionage in the contemporary world and an impulsion to focus attention on spies and secret agents. But to a greater extent it was what happened to adventure that explains what happened to the genre of espionage. For the former, like the latter, the war was a dividing line, politicizing the exploits of men and women in remote corners of the world as it escalated the globalism of international affairs. The back-

drop to adventure in the Himalayas or the Gobi or in exotic lands like Turkestan or China became war and revolution, Japanese expansionism, the waning days of imperialism, and the global stakes and commitments that constituted the sweep of political life in the twentieth century. Like so many other aspects of the age, adventure shared in its present-mindedness and contributed to it. With adventure came reminders of the war and the events that had followed, a sense of living with contingency, with history, in effect intensely with the present. There was as well the intrusiveness—the possibility for that history to impinge upon the lives of individuals—that seems to have clung to the interwar years. The experiences of Ossendowski and his kind caught this intrusion best, but not even the Croisière jaune was exempt from it.

With these changes in adventures came changes in the stories of spies. Out of politicized exploits evolved the modern spy novel, a story of adventure with the politics added in. Such novels had existed in the past, but their proliferation following the war can only be understood in a climate that set adventures against the great events of their times. As the content of adventures underwent change so did their fictions, politicizing into spy stories that adapted the very form modern-day adventures were likely to take. There was, for example, the motif of the innocent bystander swept up in a vortex of intrigue and extraordinary trials that replicated the lives of countless individuals who had been swept up by the war and the Russian revolution. Or there was, particularly in French novels, the motif of the man of daring yet organization that repeated the heroic features of Haardt or of Borodin or the novels of Malraux where contemporary heroism required a setting of grand-scale politics—revolution, civil war—and an organization with a cause to give meaning to action.

Through the metamorphosis of adventures, the postwar spy story therefore became an evocation, an entertainment, and a source for heroics. It was a vehicle for writing about war, revolution, all the overarching events that hung over the present, although as an adventure for its times it reproduced the storytelling qualities of its origins. If politics were added in, the mix was for verisimilitude. Like adventures, what mattered most was the thrill of the story, and where real adventures merged with intrigue—as was often the case—these begged for a continual retelling, yet another reason why the life of Trebitsch Lincoln assumed such compelling proportions. Perhaps in its intrusiveness the spy story suggested a dangerous world. But where networks, support systems, and technology served as a departure point for adventures, it caught the possibility for combining individual heroism with the high-tech impera-

tives of the bureaucratizing moment. Like Haardt or Borodin or von Hentig and Niedermayer, the spy was the organization man cast in the role of adventurer.

Thus the century's adventures were another provocation to write about spies, imparting to that literature a tone sounding well beyond accusation and fear. They pointed to how closely bound up espionage was with its times; and they demonstrated the multiplicity of connections embedded in the globalism that followed the war, as did the history of travel whose own evolution takes us back again to the history of these years and to the magnetism and moods that spy stories took from them.

Travel and intrigue made good bedfellows after the war. Take, for example, Jean Bommart's Chinese fish stories. One occurs during the First World War in Chile, a hemisphere away from France. Another is set on a ship. The original in the series—Le poisson chinois —takes place on the Orient Express. On board are assassins, terrorists, arms merchants, and Georges Sauvin, the title's Chinese fish and Deuxième Bureau secret agent. Ernst, the wagon-lit conductor, works informally for Sauvin. A passenger disguised as an Englishwoman is another Deuxième Bureau operative. Monseigneur Bachou, an Albanian bishop riding the train, is a secret agent working with Sauvin. Douchanovitch, a porter at a Belgrade hotel, is in the pay of Sauvin. False passports, border crossings, the various themes of international travel in the twenties and thirties form a major part of this story, as they did in so many other interwar spy novels. For the spy writer between the wars, travel was nearly an indispensable ingredient. Tales were set in foreign locales. Movement was often the mechanism that forced the plot forward. The milieus of travel—cosmopolitan populations, hotels, trains, especially trains—were recurrent motifs in spy literature. The Seven Heads of the Green Dragon , shifting from one capital to another, set a scene on the Orient Express. There was a train scene in Jean Joffroy's Espionage in Asia . Robert Métais's Cell Number Twenty described how the trains between Belgrade and Hungary were infested with spies. Pierre Yrondy's massive German plot in From Cocaine . . . To Gas!!! included "all those travelers, habitues of casinos, international luxury trains, and worldly haunts: auxiliaries of the secret army!" Trains, boats, and hotels were the settings around which Pierre Darlix spun his tales of intrigue. No less common was the creeping of spies into the narratives of travel books, whether these were travel novels like The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars , or travel-

ogues dressed up as journalistic exposés like The Road to Shanghai , or tales of travel in exotic places like Titaÿna's Hot Nights , or stories set in faraway lands like Gilbert's Dispatches from Asia . Affinities were unending. Travel and intrigue not only crawled into bed together but embraced, coupled, and formed the beast with two backs, as with Marc Chadourne, who seems to have made a career of writing about his travels in these years but who arrived in Shanghai as a Colonial Office spy at the very end of the 1930s.^[131]

None of this coupling should have been surprising in a world crisscrossed by spies shuttling from one destination or continent to another, and where the paraphernalia of travel—border crossings, papers in order—came to assume sinister or life-threatening meanings. Revelations of global spy networks, or memories of Swiss hotel scenes in the First World War, or adventures that devolved into journeys through the gauntlet of history invariably associated travel with espionage. If life imitated art in the shape of Chadourne, art imitated life, borrowing its motifs and its themes from the very real spy world about it.

Ship travel, for instance, intertwined with espionage between the wars. The most notorious boat story from these years was the botched hijacking of the C-2 at Brest in 1937. But there were also tales of phantom ships hanging off the coasts and an incessant outpouring of reports on gunrunners. The burning of two passenger liners, the Georges-Philippar off the Somali coast in 1932 (in which Albert Londres perished) and the Paris at its home berth in France in April 1939, aroused inevitable charges of sabotage and terrorism. Sailors on ships plying Far Eastern waters formed the backbone in the Third International's courier traffic between Asia and Europe and between communist parties in the Orient. The port cities of Marseilles and Singapore were nodal points where police followed seamen, noting whom they met and what they said. At Shanghai police tracked foreign agents by the ships they took: "The undermentioned member of the GPU arrived in Shanghai from Hankow on January 20, 1930 in the SS Loongwo "; "The undermentioned Soviet agent arrived in Shanghai on January 9, 1930 from Tsinanfu via Tsingtao in the SS Hoten Maru. " Abwehr agents working out of Bremen included Otto Benecke, a steward on the NDL (North German Lloyd) steamer Gneisenau that sailed to Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore; Karl Schulze, a steward on the NDL's passenger liner Europa ; Herbert Jaenichen, a waiter on the Europa's sister ship Bremen who spoke English and French and was in touch with German agents in the United States; and Julius Hundt, who was the chief engineer on the same ship. There were also the confessions of Irene Z., a Latvian

woman picked up east of Fez, who acknowledged under interrogation that a German ship captain with the OPDR had engaged her to spy on French military installations.^[132]

Spies luxuriated in trains. They stalked their prey in corridors and compartments. They infiltrated the corps of conductors and waiters. They deployed agents at train stations. They had rendezvous on trains. And, if they were terrorists, they occasionally dynamited trains. It was especially the international trains, the grands rapides , the luxury expresses, that were haunted by the thieves, con men, drug smugglers, gigolos, secret agents, and terrorists who seem to have constituted a substantial clientele between the wars. In the newspapers of the twenties and thirties can be found a chronicle of murders and thefts aboard the intercities. In 1932 thieves on the Côte d'Azur run lifted five hundred thousand francs' worth of pearls from Lady Howard de Walden and twenty-seven hundred francs in cash from Colonel Jacques Balsam. In 1937 the French police finally broke the Katz gang, which specialized in picking pockets on the French rapides . Nicolai Kudrachov, who robbed his way through the Polish express trains, was also a Soviet spy who used his false papers to worm his way into the confidence of his victims.^[133] That was the milieu into which professional secret agents integrated easily, particularly among the personnel of the wagon-lits who traversed frontiers as a matter of course and detained the passports of their passengers for border crossings in the night. The Italians developed an extensive network of sleeping car agents to spy upon the opposition to the Fascist regime. The German secret service recruited sleeping car conductors, like Eduard Lieberman, who worked a run into Paris and operated under the cover number of U-2415. Hartwig ran an agent on the sleeping cars of the Sudfranzösische Line and couriers on the Orient Express, and the Deuxime Bureau deployed operatives on the wagon-lits, suggesting that Bommart's Chinese Fish was not entirely a work of imagination. Not surprisingly it was a sleeping car baggage handler on the Paris-Bucharest run that the Comintern agent Samuel I. tried to recruit and who put the Sûreté onto his trail.^[134]

Interwar train travel attracted spies, couriers, liaisons, and informants, but also hit men—Suvliki, the head of the GPU Berlin station was found murdered on the Moscow-Berlin express in 1932^[135] —and especially terrorists. Matuska blew up trains because he was mad, but in China trains were subject to attack by bandits or nationalists opposed to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and in the Balkans both the IMRO and Ustashi conducted an orchestrated campaign against the expresses zooming down the peninsula. Ilya Ehrenburg recalled a trip

from Romania in 1934 where armed guards rode the trains to prevent terrorist attacks. Jelka Pogorelec, Percec's secretary and a Yugoslav Sûreté plant, told how the Croatian terrorists maintained an apartment in Vienna where they manufactured bombs timed to explode on Yugoslav territory. "Dr. Morreale repeated constantly that they had to frighten off tourists from vacationing in Yugoslavia."^[136] Closer to home saboteurs targeted trains in the south of France in an orchestrated campaign of terror. It would be trite and grammatically incorrect to say that intrigue rode the trains in the twenties and thirties, but certainly spy writers fabricated little beyond what they could read in the news or pick up from the real spy wars in these years.

Clearly, the milieu provided context for interwar spy writing. But in the almost irresistible attraction to travel as a motif or a setting lay something deeper. There was, of course, travel's suspended character, its compactness within the confines of steamships or trains, as well as the inevitable border crossings that made it an ideal locus for a story of intrigue. Yet, even more, there was the very quality to travel in these years, its style, its themes, and the moods it evoked, all of which spilled over into writing about spies, providing inspiration, cause, but also shape and definition. Between intrigue and travel the same relation obtained as between intrigue and adventure. The one flowed from the other, and behind each lay the force of the age.

No era has been so associated with travel as the interwar years. It was a time when more people traveled than ever before and when more people wrote about their travels or traveled to write, the travel book becoming all but a literary rite of passage between the wars. It was a period that toward its end saw a dawning age of mass tourism. Yet it was also an era when travel could be adventurous, luxurious, and elegant, qualities that have largely disappeared since the Second World War. Leisurely travel was not only possible but often the rule. The Messageries Maritimes offered a seventy-four-day cruise from Marseilles to Port Said, Djibouti, Colombo, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kobe, Osaka, Tokyo, Yokohama and back beginning at the cost of seventeen thousand five hundred francs. Or one could sail on the Canadian Pacific's Empress of Britain for India, Ceylon, Siam, Hong Kong, Saint Helena, Rio, and other ports over a period of four months. Even regular passage by ship from Europe to the Pacific could take from five to six weeks with a host of stopovers along the way.^[137]

The leisurely pace of travel came with wealth or with desire to see and observe rather than to cram one's journey into a time slot. Yet it was also a function of the availability of means of travel between one

point and another, particularly if an ocean lay in the middle. Europeans, in fact, cherished speed between the wars, craved it, and gave their custom to it whenever they could. Luxury liners raced across the north Atlantic in quest of the prestigious Blue Ribband. North German Lloyd's Bremen and Europa took it on their maiden voyages in 1929 and 1930. Five years later the Normandie , benefiting from a revolutionary hull design, captured the prize for France on its initial crossing from Le Havre to New York amidst German grumbling and bombastic coverage in the French press ("Normandie takes the Blue Ribband"; "Normandie , beating the world speed record, approaches New York"). Cunard's Queen Mary failed to take the Blue Ribband on its maiden crossing the following year but grabbed it in August before her initial season was over. The most famous trains were the rapides and expresses. Travelers could proceed by wagon-lit from Paris to Cairo in six and one-half days, eight if they were going to Teheran, agonizingly slow for today's passengers but fast enough to merit large print advertising in 1938.^[138]

Even these speeds, however, were becoming woefully insufficient with the advent of airplanes, which seemed to eradicate distance:

"The Holy Roman Empire. In high school that still left a certain impression.
"And today:
"Paris, 4:00 in the morning;
"Strasbourg, 6:00
"Prague, 10:00
"Vienna, 11:00^[139]

Into the thirties flying remained an adventure. Ernst Klaar won the hero worship of his son when he flew from Prague to Vienna in 1936 and became "the Lindbergh of Pichlergasse." Yet more and more air travel was becoming routine. In 1937 Air France's network extended over forty thousand kilometers. The airline flew ninety thousand passengers in that year. In 1938 it had two departures weekly from Marseilles to Beirut by seaplane, flying the route in two days and beating the train by sixty hours. The midthirties guidebook All About Shanghai carried a full-page ad for Eurasia airlines:

SEE THE GLORIES OF
CHINA FROM THE AIR
Travel by the
Planes of
"EURASIA"
Safe         Speedy        Comfortable

Pioneering the development of air travel and transport in Central and West-

ern China with a vast program outlined and being carried into execution for the linking of Eastern Asia and Western Europe by air.

The advertisement did not mention, as the guidebook did further on, that the line from Lanchow just south of Mongolia to Chuguchak where European train connections could be made, had been discontinued "due to political disturbances"; nor was there any mention of the adventures and intrigues on the ground that went into the building of the air routes. Security, speed, and comfort, especially the comfort that came from the luxurious out fittings that were the mark of travel during these years and retained, for those who could afford it, the clear sense of a class experience, was what the passenger airlines strived for. The Hindenburg dirigible was designed for speed, but its accommodations were spacious, there was a dining room, a smoking room, and a sun-deck, and on its maiden voyage a crew of sixty attended to the needs of forty passengers whose only discomforts were likely to come from air currents or the German kitchen. France's luxury seaplane the Lieutenant-de-vaisseau was designed to carry only sixteen passengers on its transatlantic run. Decorated for the effect of a "flying palace," it contained eight cabins with sixteen beds, and a grand salon . The style has disappeared forever from traveling, but then so too did the Hindenburg , which burned over New Jersey. For all the appointments, flying remained a new and adventurous means of travel between the wars.^[140]

Mostly it is the ocean liners, hotels, and trains that we think of when we think about travel in the twenties and thirties. Trains are embedded in our images of the period. One of the most celebrated photographs that has come down from these years is that of the Spanish Republican army on the way to the front, a row of men in a railway carriage leaning out windows, smiling determinedly, raising their arms in the clenched-fist antifascist salute. Perhaps it is the contrast between their exuberance and the funereal quality of another famous photo from the civil war, the huddled, defeated army straggling across the French border, that makes the earlier picture so striking. But it is also the political overlay to a standard representation from the period, the railroad passenger peering out a half-opened train window in the station, that adds context and expression to the photograph, as if it were impossible to grasp the texture of these years without the intermediary agency of the train. Only the liners were a rival symbol in this last great age of ocean travel. Everyone who traveled between the wars did so at some point by train and by boat. Overseas travel still meant sailing by ship. Overland travels

meant riding the rails, and even foreign ministers conducted their diplomatic journeys by train. Each form bespoke a style and an elegance that has pretty well vanished from the face of the earth. Trains had their gatherings in evening dress to welcome in the international expresses. Ships had their lavish sendoffs and their festive arrivals. Trains had luxury cars, private compartments with lime-wood luggage racks and mahogany paneling, corridors done up in mahogany with inlaid leather, and wagon-lits and dining cars as standard first class features. Expresses like the Twentieth Century Limited or the Blue Train were assumed to be institutions. Ocean liners were designed to be the ultimate in travel opulence. With the Rex and the Conte di Savoia , Germany's Bremen , or Britain's Queen Mary sailed national prestige. The French Line's Ile de France , launched in 1926, was a trend setter in interior decor. The Normandie , launched six years later, was probably the greatest ship ever built. As long as three football fields and displacing eighty thousand tons, it was nearly twice as large as the giant liners of the previous generation (the Titanic displaced forty-five thousand tons, although only for a few days). On board were lounges, smoking rooms, a movie theater, a huge swimming pool, a tennis court, a library with forty thousand volumes bound in leather, a winter garden, a dining room three decks high, longer than Louis XIV's hall of mirrors, air conditioned, and serviced by seventy chefs. There were two deluxe apartments with four bedrooms each and more than four hundred first-class cabins, each With its own decoration scheme. The crew of thirteen hundred was the pick of the company, which by 1936 employed fifty thousand people and transported seventy-one thousand passengers on the north Atlantic run alone. Nothing captured ship travel better in these years than the Normandie , unless it was a New Yorker cartoon printed in the early thirties showing a magnificent lobby, a sweeping staircase leading heavenward, palm trees, elegant chairs and stylish people, mammoth columns, and a mother telling her crying little boy in a sailor suit, "But darling, this is a ship."^[141]

The elegance and opulence is what we recall most, perhaps because we miss it most of all; but there was a wide range of travel conditions in these years, and interwar travelers, who were compulsive narrators and who ventured into every pocket of the globe, left behind them a diverse record of their experiences with the trains and ships and hotels of the world. André Goerger, on his round-the-world travels in conjunction with the Croisière jaune, described nearly every train he took. He moaned about the acrobatics required to undress Without banging his

head on the couchette above in the curtained sleepers in the overnight from Montreal to New York. He found the Trans-Siberian a boring but comfortable ran in the oversized cars preserved from imperial days. Riding a "hard" car from Siberia to Russian Turkestan turned into "a veritable torture." His train to Bombay was pleasant and comfortable, enjoying the inventions that English gentlemen had imported to fight the heat and the insects. In China, after a rough time with students, he remembered most of all the spit, which he described in graphic, drawn out detail. Asian train travel invited wild contrast, often depending upon the nationality of the railway. Jacques Deval admired his first-class car through Japan with its plush arm chairs, its lacquer tables, its library, and its observation platform. But Patti Morand noticed most of all on the Chinese Blue Train out of Peking the flies, the Yangtze red mud in the sinks, and the soldiers armed to the teeth who escorted the conductor down the aisle. Crowds, smells, soldiers, and bandits were common images associated with Chinese train rides between the wars.^[142]

Steamship voyages in distant waters threw one back upon national stereotypes. For Paul Morand American ships were powerful, merry, and vulgar, entering ports with a din and leaving with a fanfare, playing jazz twenty-four hours a day, and liberally equipped with telephone lines. On English ships the service was excellent, the food was ghastly, one dressed strictly by the codes, and on Sunday everyone attended services. German and Dutch ships were as polished as beautiful furniture, their meals were too heavy, and their passengers were deadly dull. French boats were "the image of our political Eden: a cozy little Southern gathering of pals disturbed by a few swinish paying passengers." Everything, en principe , was either "forbidden" or "impossible." No descents at stopovers because that was expensive, no change of linens, no movies, no music. But the wine cellar was excellent, no expense was spared for decorations featuring the three musketeers, and life in the cabins at night was never boring.^[143]

As for hotel accommodations the range was unending. In Europe the grand hotels like the Carleton, the Ritz, and Kempinski's worked their way into the literature as synonymous with international travel. At Giza there was Menna House, several hundred yards from the Pyramids and laid out with splendid gardens and oriental salons. Visitors to the Manila Hotel were uniformly impressed (as they will be today). Otherwise the French found little to praise in Asian hotels. Marc Chadourne complained of the "sinister palaces" of Singapore and Calcutta and found Tokyo's Imperial Hotel hideous. Francis de Croisset recalled the mos-

quitoes that infested his Saigon hotel room. Morand remarked that the English hotels of Singapore and Hong Kong were hopelessly outdated in their standard of comfort and that their food was inedible. In the evenings, he noted, British clients dressed for dinner "in order to douse bottled sauces on the putrid dishes they swallow without wincing." From there one could descend as low as the imagination would go. Traveling through Persia the journalist Titaÿna stayed at a hotel as good, she thought, as the country had to offer. But the sheets had not been changed in six months and bugs and fleas were everywhere. A traveler more experienced in Persian ways consoled her with the saying that filth was like hunger: only the first eight days mattered. At Samara Goerger found all the hotels filled and was taken by night to a seedy, parasite-ridden dump with only partitions separating one sleeper from another. Recoiling, he insisted that there must be something better than this. In a calm, deeply philosophical voice came the response. "Better, no; worse, yes." The sentence, Goerger remarked, was beyond appeal; he resigned himself to the partitions.^[144]

Still the French traveled, all over the world. We know more about the literary travelers, because they left a written record of their journeys. But there were many other voyagers, among these businessmen, colonial administrators, adventurers, or simply ordinary middle-class French men and women who may have traveled a good deal more than we have assumed. Sailing in a Messageries Maritimes mailboat to Indochina in 1937, Henriette Celarié noted that all of her small group of fellow passengers were French: a family from the provinces, an elderly spinster and a fair number of widows, a former seedsman, and a retired cheese merchant. "The average retired French businessman," she noted, "is no longer satisfied with his slippers, his scarf, his skull cap, and his pipe. Advertising, movies, books have awakened in him a taste for traveling. Willingly he sets sail for distant lands."^[145] French insularity, an almost hermitlike turning in on self, has been seen as a theme of these years.^[146] Yet neither press coverage, which was extensively global, nor administrative concerns (for example, the files on espionage), nor the amount of travel writing, nor what travelers revealed about other travelers, seems to confirm this presumption.^[147] Robert Wohl has suggested that Europeans in general were prodigious travelers after the war because they believed themselves "wanderers between two worlds" and because they sought in travel spiritual nourishment and a source of renewal.^[148] That is a highly sensible point of view although it might equally be said that the war awakened a desire for travel because it accustomed large

numbers of people to moving to distant points around the world and because it accustomed Europeans to thinking more globally about their affairs.

Whatever the urge, the moods that accompanied and enveloped interwar travel to foreign lands could be as varied as the means of getting there. Consider, for example, the voyage by automobile that Guy Larigaudie and Roger Drapier made between Paris and Saigon over a seven-month stretch in 1937-1938. They traveled the twelve thousand kilometers in a used Ford with nearly seventy thousand kilometers already on the odometer. More strictly speaking it was another adventure in the vein of the raids across Africa in the twenties, and almost certainly the idea was in part inspired by the Croisière jaune that had made the more difficult central Asian crossing five years earlier. The voyage entailed a certain lust for action, for flirtation with danger or a testing of oneself that in the interwar years tended to combine with travel to faraway places. Linked to travel was a need to affirm oneself, to "taste of risk joined to the poetry of accomplishing a pure and difficult act."^[149] Undoubtedly that mood reached back to the war's association of self-assertion with great deeds and toughness, although it could also gather a momentum of its own in a time when the focus was global and travel to distant lands common and accessible; and it explained in part why Larigaudie and Drapier set out on such an arduous journey.

However, they also traveled to play at adventure and to live out the fantasies of a boy's own adventure book. That at least is the tone that pervades Larigaudie's account of their trip. Driving through Afghanistan the young men come across a turbaned horseman with a rifle across the saddle: he seems, Larigaudie tells us, "to have stepped out of a pirate's tale." "Which one should I shoot, the horse or the rider," Guy the Fearless tosses off at Roger. "Let them both live," Roger the Gallant shoots back to Guy. In India a mishap crossing the mouth of the Ganges leaves them "resembling . . . the shipwrecked on the illustration page of a book of adventures." Further on, stuck on a sandbar in the middle of a river, Larigaudie demands two hundred men from the chief of a Bengali village. The chief refuses and sneers back derisively. "We take out our revolvers and, with the barrel of the Smith and Wesson two inches from his face, I threaten the chief in the purest American gangster accent: 'If the car isn't out of the water in half an hour I'll blow your brains out.'" Dangers and risks there were aplenty, but also a deliberate storybook romanticizing, as if the purpose of the voyage had been from the start to step back into the pages of the tales from their childhood.

Yet what is most striking from this narrative is neither the adventure nor the play making but the introduction by General La Font, "Chief Scout de France." The general tells us that of all the wondrous events we are about to read, what he found most rewarding was that no matter how muddied or dirtied the two young men were, they never entered a person's house, or any dwelling, without first washing off in a river and dressing as properly as possible. No matter that their car could only carry essentials, room was found to pack dinner jackets, white suits, and "adequate" linen. "How comforting," the general finds, "this care for correctness in an epoch where, in reputedly elegant places, people with all the leisure in the world to look after themselves impose on others the proximity of their extra-shorts and their Lacoste shirts." And waxing on about the virtues of these young men, the general tells of how Guy and Roger, driving down train tracks where no other road existed, spent hours digging up an iron picket that impeded their way but then, despite their fatigue and the long trip ahead, took care to put it back "correctly" into its place. This is not, the general insists, a mere detail. "For me c'est magnifique because it is symptomatic of an education, a spirit, because c'est très scout. " (The general does not say whether waving a Smith and Wesson in the face of a Bengali chief and threatening to blow his head off is also très scout .) This fatuous introduction is from 1939, only months before Europe was to break out in a second world war, and reminds us how varied or idiosyncratic individuals' preoccupations and priorities could be despite the tragic course that lay ahead.^[150]

One is obliged to wonder, however, why the general need ever have fretted, for the travel accounts demonstrate that style, elegance, a sense of class rules and the codes of imperialism still obtained in these years, perhaps nowhere so transparently as in the assumption that no matter the climate or the culture, white men dressed in dinner jackets in the evening. Larigaudie took his along, but so too did Audoin-Dubreuil on the Croisière jaune. On his way to Arabia the foreign correspondent Claude Blanchard packed a dinner jacket "haunted by the idea that I might someday run into those celebrated English who dress for dinner even around the bivouac fire." André Goerger noted the terraces filled with men in smokings in Saigon, and Andrée Viollis commented on men in smokings during a tour of Cochin China with Paul Reynaud and his entourage. In Peking Francis de Croisset rode a rickshaw in his dinner jacket to a dinner at the Bolivian legation. Even Vera Vishniakova-Akimova, one of the Soviet volunteers for revolutionary work in China, commented on how one of her comrades with a limited grasp of English

had spoken enthusiastically of the democratic spirit in Shanghai where movie theaters posted No Smoking signs in the lobbies.^[151]

Alongside the persistence of the rules of the game, a stylized refusal to accept that worlds were dissolving or had already vanished, and alongside the nonchalance or indifference or however one might choose to describe General La Fonts concerns in the face of the imminent storm, there was also the inclination toward humor. That indulgent surrender to making light of events marks the French all through these decades. Morand found sarcasm and Londres made wisecracks, and Jacques Deval joked about the "inconvenience" of traveling through China in the 1930s, where trains were derailed and passengers kidnapped or murdered.^[152] Behind such accounts was a considerable element of truth, but most of all a mischievous delight in blowup and dismissal, and a wry reminder of the irrepressible amusement with which the French could be prepared to take on the world between the wars.

To humor can be added still another motif of interwar travel: the urge toward national self-assessment that runs like a thread through the travel literature, although the French who wrote up their voyages conformed to no clearcut point of view. For many the signs of decline were marked in bright letters. In Russia Gide, Schreiber, and Delbos remarked on how rarely they heard anyone speak French. André Goerger told the following story of a stop at a farm in Soviet Turkestan. The local GPU official explained to the farmers that Goerger and his companions were foreigners on a special assignment. "Ingliz" the Kirghiz replied. "Niet, Franzouski" the GPU man told them. The farmers stared wide-eyed, showing no comprehension of what he had said. Then the GPU man had an idea. "Parije" he announced; they come from Paris. That did it. The farmers had never heard of a country called France, but mention of the city of light elicited a gleam of recognition. In the Orient the refrain was the same. Marc Chadourne went through three secretaries in China trying to find one individual who could translate his work. Maurice Dekobra said that the modern Chinese woman spoke English but almost never French. Schreiber reported that nine out of ten Japanese with whom he conversed spoke to him in English and Deval noted that the menus on his Japanese train were printed in English because of the foreign traffic on that line. For René Jouglet France was an absent figure in the Orient. Pierre Billotey expressed practically the same emotion upon arriving in Saigon after a sea crossing had taught him "that the world is an English kingdom."^[153]

Yet the confrontation with the world was often far from a negative one. Andrée Viollis spoke to army officers in Japan who expressed their admiration of French military traditions. The Croisière jaune, which regarded itself as a powerful affirmation of French prestige in Asia, witnessed strong indications of French influence as it rolled across Persia. Schreiber spoke mostly English in Japan, but he found French could hold its own with any other foreign language in the country and in Egypt nearly everyone he met seemed to speak French. Both Jean Raynaud and Claude Farrère described how only the French had shown any backbone when the Japanese moved into Shanghai in 1937. Most of all, French travelers abroad retained a deep pride and faith in their empire. Those who came to Indochina, for instance, found more than a haven from an Anglo-Saxon world. They saw a land where the French had built roads, dikes, canals, bridges, schools, and hospitals, investing the best of their civilization. Even the critics who exposed the stupidities and cruelties of settler culture adhered to this point of view.^[154] Travel eastward, as too in voyages to the USSR, tapped into deep veins of contentment and affirmation as much as it triggered self-criticism or proffered signs of vulnerability and decline.

Attentiveness to French global significance or French prestige was baggage the French nearly always carried with them; and they did so in ways that draw us closer to the connections between interwar travel and espionage. Travel in the twenties and thirties was a journey into a world dramatically changed by the war and by a series of events of world importance or of such regional significance that in a globally tightened age they threatened to assume larger dimensions. Travel to Palestine or the Middle East was marked by the conflict between Arabs and Jews and by the general prospects for strife across North Africa. Travel to Indochina recalled the inroads of communism, anti-imperialism, and, after the early 1930s, the Yen-Bay massacre. China was the China of revolution, of the great events of Shanghai, of national awakening and colonial crack-up, and then of war in the Pacific that threatened to spread across oceans and continents. The United States was the rising power of international culture and finance, the land of Fordism and, despite the depression, overbearing dynamism. The Soviet Union, the great magnet of travel, was the land of world revolution and the great interwar experiment. Everywhere one went there were signs of an unstable world order and, by the 1930s, of a world depression. Travel had, through the sheer force of events, become a passage into history, recently made or in the making.

Indeed, so interwoven were travel and a feel for living with history that the very mechanisms of travel imprinted themselves upon European perceptions of twentieth-century upheaval, revolution, civil war, and war. Take trains, for example. For those who lived through the Russian revolution nothing seemed to capture better the uprootedness and unraveling of an entire nation than the jammed trains and stations, the trains that barely made it through or never at all, or the train journeys that put life and limb at risk. To the American Oliver Sayler, who witnessed the revolution and who found it "incredible when a train pulled out of a station and utterly beyond belief when it arrived at its destination," the mass scenes of trains seemed to cram into a single image a whole country in flux. Victor Voska, taking a train from Petrograd to Kiev with a Russian lieutenant to escort him, was told:

"You have a choice of accommodations . . . a car reserved for officers or the common coaches. I must tell you that the officers' car is not safe. Often the inhabitants shoot into it." After one look at the common coaches, and one smell of them, I determined to take the risk. . . . We got to Kiev without once having to lie down on the floor, an unusual record for a train journey in Russia at that period.

Later the pervasive image of civil war became the armored train and once again stations choked with people, this time the end-of-the-line refugees bereft of hope. Emigré memoirs told of maddening flights by train before the Bolshevik onslaught, of crowding into freight cars (a premonition of the century's later horrific images), and ultimately complete despair at the final stop with a station or freight car as the sole source of shelter. Joseph Kessel repeatedly described his Vladivostok adventure centered on the train station and the frightening scene of refugees piled so tightly and so deeply that one had literally to step over them to move from one end to another. And when the tide had run its course in the twenties, Ilya Ehrenburg summed up the NEP with the following story of a train near Kiev:

At one of the stations a peasant woman carrying a sack got into the "soft coach" by mistake. The conductor yelled: "Where d'you think you're going? Get out! This isn't nineteen seventeen."^[155]

For travelers who followed, to the Soviet Union but also throughout the world, trains and train voyages remained emblematic of the era and its history. Crossing the Polish-Lithuanian border Yvon Delbos watched a railroad employee cover over a part of the corridor map showing Vilna

in Poland, a reminder, he recorded, of "the recent scars left by the surgical operations of the peace treaties."^[156] In Russia visitors wrote about the bezprizorniki (homeless orphans) who clambered over train cars or about prisoner cars shunted onto side rails, the one a reminder of the utter devastation of six years of war and civil war, the other of a revolution that had turned on its own by the mid-1930s.^[157] In Italy the cliché was that Mussolini had made the trains travel on time, although trains were also ingrained in the images that memories called forth to explain what Fascism had been largely about. Roland Dorgelès described an Italian innkeeper whose love of order under the Duce was contrasted to the bitter experience of disorder immediately following the war that the man recalled in part this way:

One didn't even dare to travel. Certain days the line was cut: they had blown up the rails. . . . Other times the engineer abandoned his locomotive to go to a meeting. I could tell you about how at Civitavecchia the engineer and the fireman refused to leave because officers had climbed into a car. They didn't want to drive to Rome. So we stood still two hours at the station waiting for them to finish arguing, while employees threw pebbles at the first class [cars], and we were only able to get going again when the officers, very vexed, got off the train. Of course that kind of nonsense couldn't continue.

In China the endless scenes of troop trains came to symbolize a nation heaving and jerking its way through revolution, incessant civil war, national unification, and then war with Japan. Travelers to the Far East wrote about filth, bandits, the pervasive presence of soldiers, and the swarming masses that characterized train journeys in China because that also evoked the fragmentation, anarchy, and historical route from one era to another that seemed China's fate in the twentieth century. Even in the graphic descriptions of spit there was an attempt to grapple with the waning respect for Westerners just as in the obsession with numbers there was a grappling with the immensity of China, its significance, and its atmosphere of movement or flow across time and space.^[158]

The envelopment of travel with history made this, perhaps, the first real age of the foreign correspondent. As individual reporters they were scarcely new. Luigi Barzini, who traveled on the Peking-to-Paris race, built a reputation covering foreign wars. Pierre Giffard of the Figaro , the Petit Journal , and later the Matin , accompanied the French army to Tunisia in the early 1880s, witnessed the British occupation of Egypt, and reported on the Russo-Japanese War. But four years of world war and then the unrelenting flow of world news propelled a tendency into

a vocation. After the war foreign correspondents became a fixture of news reporting. They fanned out to China, the Soviet Union, Morocco, Palestine and Syria, China again, Ethiopia, Spain, and then once again China. Major presses built far more extensive foreign services than ever before, maintaining bureaus or correspondents abroad. Reporters like Jules Sauerwein, Ludovic Naudeau (who had covered the Russo-Japanese War), Geneviève Tabouis, or Claude Blanchard made careers of traveling and writing about international news. Their presence, their stature, and the growth of their profession signaled the unending appetite for news of foreign provenance and the ease with which the postwar world could satisfy that need. Their numbers and their stories also contributed to a wider disposition between the wars to equate travel with reportage and to set travel, like adventure, within the context of the great events of the day.^[159]

In the interwar years their tone was infectious. Travel literature metamorphosed into the investigative report or the assessment of political conditions in the world in books like Andrée Viollis's Japan and Her Empire and later Indochina SOS , Louis Roubaud's Vietnam: The Indo-china Tragedy , Jean Dorsenne's Must We Evacuate Indochina? , Pierre Lyautey's China or Japan (1932-1933) , or Jean Raynaud's searing account of War in Asia . These authors appropriated the correspondent style—"Slowly we proceed up this river 5,200 kilometers long"; "An hour later I wander through the devastated streets of Wuchang"—or blended travel with the fact-finding mission and dispatches from the front. These were books of inquiry, many written by professional reporters who shared an urge to observe on the spot and a belief in the global interconnectedness of things.^[160]

But there was something of the foreign correspondent in nearly everyone who wrote about travels after the war. The grand tour gave way to a pervasive desire to see, to experience, and to report on the century. The borders travelers crossed were now self-conscious ones, drawn as much by the war as by national cultures. The French voyaged to see the China they identified with Borodin and Shanghai or the China torn between nationalism, communism, and Japanese land grabs. They journeyed to the United States and Japan to see the looming new powers in a truly global era.^[161] Most of all they traveled to the Soviet Union to report on "the most prodigious experiment ever attempted in human history."^[162] the laboratory of the century, the site of the future, the homeland of revolution, the source of all evil, or simply a land where the consequences of the Great War were on permanent display.

The literature was nearly as prodigious as the experiment. One person has tabulated a list of 125 books written by Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who visited the Soviet Union between 1918 and 1939. The greatest number came in the mid-to-late 1930s, but production was steady throughout.^[163] To attempt to describe them all would be merely to catalogue a predictable range of prejudices and political predispositions. The common thread was the motivation to travel to see history in action, and after that the repetitiousness and boredom that is characteristic of most travel writing. Reading through about fifteen of these books readily produces a sensation of déjà vu of the sort that would have driven Marcel to refrain from mixing tea and cookies for the remainder of his days. The authors visit factories, old age homes, collective farms, and the various institutions of a socialized society. They observe the clothing people wear in the streets, the quality of their homes, and whether they exhibit the same human affections as people in the West. There are voyages down the Volga and encounters with the bezprizorniki . There are the common reference points; Nizhni Novgorod, for example, is a "future Detroit" or un Détroit russe . There are comments about freedom and about obsessions with the five-year plan.^[164]

What stands out most, perhaps, are the scenes of return to the West. There was decompression, but also release, liberation, and the affirmation of things French. Emile Schreiber described an explosion of joy among all the foreign passengers in his train, the exchange of congratulations in the corridor as they rolled over the border, and the sight of Germans shouting "Long live Poland." Marc Chadourne described a long, lyrical descent back to France. In Poland everything was softer, more colorful. "No more Sovkhoses; no more 'giants' . . . no more busts of Lenin." Rolling through Germany he admired the flower boxes in the windows. Then rapidly across Belgium and home to farms without elevators, woods without sawmills, rivers without rafts, but bateaux-mouches, the Seine, Paris, rabbit stew, Beaujolais, and a country of harmony, measure, and liberty. Roland Dorgelès, after four months of travel in 1936 through Russia, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Hungary, remarked that from the North Sea to the Adriatic, from the Volga to the Rhine, he had seen nothing but soldiers and one immense barracks flapping with banners. To those of his compatriots who looked elsewhere for models he admonished that abroad he had seen nothing but regimentation and dictatorship. "What can they teach us? A revolution? We made one and it was more fruitful. A dictator? We had one and he

was more powerful." Life in France was better, sweeter, and freer. For Georges Le Fèvre it was straightforward simplicity. No one was shot in the streets in Russia, there were no microphones in radiators, one was not followed wherever one went; but "we live well chez nous ."^[165] Again, the French carried with them a satisfaction with their country that accords poorly with the discomposure others have insisted permeated these years.

Whatever the response, what mattered most was that it issued from the present-mindedness of the era. For these travelers as for those who scattered throughout Asia and the Americas (and they were often the same), the rush to evaluate sprang from a deeper urge to travel into the world made by the war. Sailing abroad was to sail into history, sample it, taste of it, and as frequently as not, report on what it had wrought. Even those who traveled with other agendas found that international politics had a way of intruding upon their journeys.

Here is one reason why travel and intrigue could blend so readily between the wars: the intense present-mindedness that nurtured spy writing and caused it to flourish worked the same effect on travel writing as well. A common mental climate infused the genres. Both spy writing and travel writing reflected a desire to report on the forces that had changed the world and were changing it still, and both offered a medium for doing just that. Both grew as the intensity of living with history quickened after 1914. Both expressed the greater global consciousness that came from the war and both profited by it. Consequently it was natural that spy stories and travel stories should run together and that trains and passenger liners where history was experienced and imprinted should be so often the setting for tales of international intrigue. Travel as reportage no doubt was itself a prod to reports about spies. But it was also the larger mood—the awareness of living in a distinctive moment in time—that fed the imagination with travel and spies and made the one a common theme of the other.

The moods of travel, then, might just as easily turn the French to thinking of spies. But, as we have seen, those moods were diverse and thus so too were their correspondences with espionage. Robert Wohl, for example, has described the metaphorical content of postwar travel—its evasiveness, its flux, its "universal disequilibrium," and its stress on departure—for a generation that saw itself lost between one world and another.^[166] Here too there was reason to turn to spies, those arch evaders in an age of evasion, characters who had no fixed bearings, were always on the move, changed identities with their travels, and whose very being

symbolized the impermanence of postwar settlements. The spy, like the traveler, was no less a source of fascination and a symbol in an age of interregnum.

There was, moreover, between travel and intrigue, still another shared mood, itself a conscious dwelling on moods, a romanticizing that has generally been passed over for these years and that reveals again how interwar spy writing could have much to do with its age but little to do with sentiments of fear. The work of Pierre Darlix, an obscure and sorry excuse for a writer, nonetheless represents much of spy literature after the wan Darlix wrote three books on spies in the late twenties and early thirties. Two were novels—Un soir en Pullman . . . and Last Stop Smyrna —and a third was reportage that he entitled Terrorism Over the World . All three were of a pattern where mood, ambiance, mystery, and the sought sensation became an end in themselves. The books invented everything, but they also invented nothing because their materials were the prefabricated expectations of a postwar world: that life was ruthless, that travel was luxury and abandon, that spies were prevalent, that White Russians were wild, mysterious, and altogether fascinating, that place-names were alluring if exoticism combined with contemporary history, and that all were gods of sensation that if properly summoned and appeased could be an infinite source of romance in the twentieth century.

It cannot be said that Darlix missed anything in these books except quality or sophistication of writing, yet that was never the aim. They abound with supercharged characters. There is Illya de Monpolesco whom the narrator of Un Soir en Pullman . . . meets mysteriously on the Orient Express, then glimpses again in a White Russian cabaret in Montmartre, then yet again debarking from the night luxury express between Warsaw and Berlin, and then at last in Wansee where she keeps a copy of The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars on her night table. Her life is a history of debauch. Her mother dies in the arms of a tamed gorilla. Her father is a victim of a night of orgy. Raised by her baron uncle she has tasted of "exquisite revelations" with a Serb servant, seduced the monk charged with her moral instruction, run off with the man in the Orient Express, abandoned him for an English film director, seduced his mistress, begged along the Thames, prostituted herself, married the comte de Monpolesco (one of her clients), frequented opium dens, and taken up with the Greek consul to Berlin whose lover of preference is a secret agent working for Italian intelligence. In Last Stop Smyrna there is Prince Igor-Wladimir Romanov, nephew of the czar and legal heir to

the throne. Shot at Ekaterinburg, he has feigned death beneath the pile of massacred bodies, escaped the Reds (nursed to health by an old peasant woman; Darlix's eye for the cliché was unerring), fought with Kolchak, emigrated to London, and survived life in exile as a doorman, taxicab driver, and gigolo dancer. Recruited by British intelligence, he captains a floating opium den off the coast of Nice. The intelligence service supplies the yacht and the opium, he uses the proceeds to buy arms from them, and then he runs guns to the resistance in the south of Russia, unaware that his conspiracies are always betrayed by his financiers who wish to keep the game going eternally. In Terrorism Over the World there is the enigmatic Captain Z., "secret agent." His lair is a sleazy, ramshackle office in a tucked-away quarter of massage parlors in Paris. His operatives spy on Reds, Whites, and Greens; he recalls Zavadskii-Krasnopol'skii, whose name, by 1932, would not have been unknown to Darlix.

The writing is cinematographic, a composite of set scenes and pan shots. Locales and characters function as props on a set, a central casting-created decor. The reader of Terrorism Over the World is led by the omniscient Petrovich to a ratty Billancourt hotel where, we are told, a Cantonese had spent several months before he was robbed and murdered in Marseilles and placed in a trunk by two Chinese from Peking. Inside there is an Armenian patron , obsequious and incredibly filthy, and his associate, an equally obsequious Chinese. Upstairs there are more Chinese, some drugged, some playing mah-jongg. It is here that Petrovich has taken the narrator to unravel the mystery of the Georges-Philippar fire. At the beginning of Un Soir en Pullman . . . , the camera eye pans the dining car of the Simplon Orient Express, sweeping the reader from rich insolent Americans to a faded Dutch beauty to a foreign millionaire, a mysterious frequenter of the great international hotels whom the narrator has glimpsed only four days earlier at the Moulin Rouge in Belgrade "where he was drowning his nostalgic desires in the lips of a girl from the Café Moscow"; now he is tête-à-tête with a conquest gleaned from the corridors of the sleeping car.

Screenplay effects take over completely as Prince Igor sails into the harbor of Smyrna. One is no longer reading a novel but directions for staging a shot. It is seven o'clock. The harbor comes to life. All the cosmopolitan stereotypes that a seedy grade-B mind would identify with Smyrna are present on the set. There are half-starved Armenians, Turkish stevedores, "ferreter Jews" moving out on the prowl. In a doorstep's squalid corner a Russian émigré scratches for lice. An Egyptian

tout directs English sailors to a shady cabaret. Armenian streetwalkers in rags call out to seamen on board ships. There is the beggar boy who haunts every harbor scene in the history of the movies. In the background a camel caravan tramps slowly by. Later, Igor tosses a coin to a peddler. The man doffs his fez and reveals a message on his head from the British Intelligence Service. That too is straight out of the movies.^[167]

There are still other effects crammed into these works—mysteries, intrigues, conspiracies, and tensions—although it is not likely that these mattered much to Darlix except for the nebulous moods he could extract from them. Overall his books approximated what Graham Greene would later call "entertainments," stimulants of a pleasurable if limited sort wrought out of the visual elements of travelogues, adventures, and, in Darlix's case, near-pornographic fantasies. They were also, like much of interwar literature, considerably present-minded in that they were acutely situated in the politics of their day. Yet it was the mood-making exploitation of milieu that the author had dearly in mind. In this respect the spies who inhabited his writings were no different from the White Russians, the sleeping cars, the exotic locales, or the sharp sense of contemporary context. Like the others they offered a story element, a condiment for color, ambiance, and romance. The interesting thing is the sources—all dredged from the present—that Darlix went to for these sensations, and the way such effects converged with travel writing.

This desire to set scenes, to seek out sensations, to evoke mystery and atmosphere, or to create adventures was an integral part of interwar travel literature. Beyond reportage lay a romantic, evocative longing to reach out for what Joseph Kessel called "the syllables that fascinate." If travel was a journey into the contemporary world, it was also pleasure and indulged restlessness. Paul Morand wrote that he was never really happy except on the move, that this was the sole beauty and truth in life. Albert Londres said he traveled as others smoked opium or sniffed cocaine. "It was," he wrote in a caricature of himself, "his special vice. He was intoxicated with sleeping cars and ocean liners. . . . [Nothing] exerted upon him the same devilish charm as a simple, small, rectangular railway ticket."^[168]

Travelers lusted for adventure, the chance to sail distant waters, to roam remote deserts, to wander through the storybook realms of imagination and fantasy. Riding the Trans-Siberian on her way to Manchuria, Gabrielle Bertrand shared a compartment with a young German bound for adventures and adjoined another filled with young Austrians headed

for Mongolia "in quest of Buddhist monasteries, the picturesque, shamanism." In Peking at the bar of the Hôtel du Nord, she met Helmut, who had sailed Chinese seas and Tannberg, who spoke of forbidden deserts as if they were the outskirts of Stockholm. Unable to resist she too struck out for the Gobi. At Kalgan, on the deserts edge, she camped deliberately at what remained of the Pioneer's Inn, a former haunt of traffickers, thieves, caravanners, and European adventurers. There she gave herself over to "the piercing sensation of being alive in the past among things I had read about somewhere in books, in legends perhaps." In the evening she listened to Chinese "tell me stories of brigands who had passed by here." Deeper into the evening she imagined herself among the Croisière jaune camped in this very house five years before. She evoked the image of Point uneasily pacing the room before pushing out into central Asia, then other images "several months later, a year almost, the return of the marvelous expedition worn down, wearied after long fraternal hours passed in the impassable mountains and barren outback. . . . Those forms well known to us from the movie screen and photographs." Then she drifted toward sleep, content "to be alone, far away, and leaving for still farther places." From Kalgan she pushed outward, as far as Pai-ling-miao, where she sojourned at a lamasery before crossing east through Mongol territory to Dolonnur. Afterwards there was disappointment that the adventures had not been greater, more hazardous, nearly calamitous. Still it was a taste of the Gobi, an almost magnetic plot of earth for voyagers by the thirties, combining as it did remoteness, otherness, the distant romantic associations of silk roads and tea routes, and the contemporary legends of Hedin, Ossendowski, Borodin, Vasel, and the Croisière jaune. "I had seen the brown desert of the eastern Gobi unfurl as far as the horizon," Bertrand wrote of her reasons for going. "The unlimited unknown had flung at me too violent a call for me to resist going out there."^[169]

With the urge to travel came the urge to voyage by sampan, to ride in caravans, and to cross over into the lands that began with the "great vocable" of "'Boy!'" For these travelers there was a love affair with the word mystery or its adjective, mysterious . In the Caucasus there was the far shore of the river, "mysterious," source of "a great rumor of legends." In Indochina there were the imperial tombs, where everything was "mysterious, secret, exalting." In Baghdad with the Croisière jaune, one penetrated the old city and suddenly there was "silence, calm, a hushed life, walled up in the alleyways of the native city, the mystery of heavy portals half-opened on entrepôts , small mosques where imams

snuffle. Nothing has changed since the Abbasids." Voyagers knew, in the travels they wrote about, how to pile on images and call forth haunting, if vague, sensations. Their romantic gestures were automatic, at times almost compulsory. Arriving at Suez on her way to Indochina, Andrée Viollis wrote of "the first blazing colors of fire and blood; the first camels, triangular silhouettes cut out against the whitened heat of the sky; old bearded men, with rods, dragging little gray donkeys; wide-eyed women camouflaged behind blue veils: Africa." At Saigon Francis de Croisset painted a quick pastiche from the Orient. "Along every watercourse that I cross floats a village of sampans and junks. The flocks of birds that rise and recede sparkle under the vibrations of light. On the riverbank women beat their linen of brilliant colors. Zebus descend to drink, mounted by the naked children." For the professionals it was easy, a mere matter of impressionism and an homage to a conventional, all but anticipated style, what Jean Ajalbert labeled "la littérature des paquebots." But the amateurs lapsed into it too, even the smirky Tranin whose voyage across Africa was a triumph of the ordinary yet who felt the need to write of Bedouins evoking "le désert sans fin, l'amour, la mort."^[170]

From these years came a persistent craving to endow the contemporary world with mystery, to coat it in ambiance, and, in what was perhaps its most distinctive feature, to construct its moods out of the materials of the age, especially those of war and revolution. Romantic drives between the wars did not flee from the great cataclysms of the day but seized and possessed them for the realm of sensation. Much like the urge to hold onto the war, postwar romanticism saw in dying worlds and the dawning of new ones a fabulous source of emotion and passion. It found its particular tonality in the era's accoutrements like sleeping cars and luxury liners or the new, colored associations that could be attached to great city place-names—the Berlin of inflation, the Moscow of revolution, the Madrid of civil war, and the Shanghai of intrigue and Pacific adventurism. In the romantic temper to interwar travel there was not the obverse of reportage but the complement, a desire to ravish a present-laden relation with the world for the seductive rewards that one could wrest from it.

Joseph Kessel's Wagon-lit , published in 1932 and serialized in Voilà , showed how forcefully those romantic currents appropriated the present-mindedness of the period for their own mood-setting purposes. Written by an incessant voyager and seeker after sensation, the novel was standard Kessel fare: lightweight, quasi-autobiographical, heavily

laden with ambiance, and set at the nub of contemporary politics for the sole end of soaking up the atmospherics of history. It was written to make money and to sell the wagon-lit company, but it was typical of both Kessel and the era that promotion should equate with unbridled romanticism. The novel begins with Estienne—the narrator of Siberian Nights —recounting in a Montmartre cabaret his adventures with a woman eleven years earlier. It is historical time encased within storytelling time, after the war and the extravagant adventures in Vladivostok: "I was twenty-one and already I had known submission and command, the stakes of combat, fortune, and death, the wonderful comradeship of flight. Victory had touched me with her blade. Crossing America had been a mad and grandiose binge. At Vladivostok I had seen the violence, misery, and lewdness of humanity in all its nakedness and all its savagery." He could, he tells his listeners, have gone to Shanghai, "and you can imagine what a field for adventure that would have been." He could just as easily have gone to Peking and taught French classics. "It was 1919, the beginning of the year. There was a shortage of men." But he returns to Paris and becomes a journalist. Then he hears of a mission to famine-ridden Russia and decides that he too must go, because Russia means travel, perhaps the story of a lifetime, the lure of the steppes, the romance of Asia, and a deep, breathtaking descent into the sweep of history:

To penetrate Russia, to listen to her tumultuous voices, her roars, her sufferings, to report all the vices, the convulsions, and the thunderbolts of a revolution without equal—that, in a single stroke, would make my fortune.

From this point everything—the journey, the place, the historical set-ting—will be a mere stimulant to sensation. Estienne takes the wagon-lit to Riga. He needs few comforts, he says, but not when he travels. Then they are essential, indispensable:

That comes from the consuming mystique that traveling holds for me. . . .

How many times, in my rather poor childhood, did I stand on the station quais dreaming before trains made up completely of sleeping cars that contained for me the very, essence, all the magic, of earthly travel. On their flanks the placards carried the names of capitals, of great unknown cities. . . . Inside polished woods, velours shone softly. The women, in the corridors, seemed more beautiful, the men more daring.

On board he climbs into his bed, experiencing a "voluptuous sensation from the fresh sheets, the soft pillow, the steady rocking and the

mysterious course of the train . . . so strong and so penetrating that it balanced for a few moments my lassitude." With every turn of the wheels he senses a "savage wind" blown in from "deep in the Orient, from the steppes of Russia. This was a transitory soil, a broad and coarse entry toward ferocious peoples and climates." There are rigorous border crossings that interfere with sleep, first into the Polish corridor, then back to German territory, then over into Lithuania where every station is packed with soldiers and patrols. For Delbos these were the scars of war but Estienne drinks it all in, converts it into more frissons and thrills. "How this rough rhythm shook me! It carried with it violence, danger. It announced lands less secure, in a state of alarm." He tells Clarke, the man he shares his compartment with, that he is intent on getting into Russia however he must, clandestinely if necessary if he cannot get a visa. Clarke tells him that if he goes on talking like this out loud his goose will be cooked the moment he crosses the border. Clarke means this as a warning, but for Estienne it is confirmation that all the romantic capital he has invested in going to Russia will pay out in still more intoxicating dividends:

"You think that from here on there are spies, Chekists?"

I pronounced these words with such joy, with such relish that Clarke shook his head.

For all the demons pushing him forward, Estienne goes no farther than Riga. There revolution, place-names, people, and trains conflare into one long sensual surrendering. He associates with social revolutionary circles and meets Nina, a nineteen-year-old student who longs for him to tell her of Paris:

I spoke with a dreadful injustice of the only city in the world that I truly love I confused it with my debaucheries. . . . I described the bars, the restaurants de nuit , the half-undressed women, the lewd dances, la drogue blanche, la drogue noire , and above it all that aroma of obsessive, intoxicating, powerful sensuality.

He abandons himself to Nastia the gypsy girl, seeking in her "the mirror of Asia, the homeless hordes. . . . I wanted through the go-between of a woman who carried its mark to possess the Orient." At the end he returns to the romance of travel, arranging for Nina to live out her fantasies as she rides the Paris wagon-lit into the yards:

I dosed the door, lowered the curtains. The light that scarcely filtered through resembled that from night lamps. And at this moment I know that I could have taken Nina, that she awaited my will, ready for anything.

But was it not better and worse and more heart-rending and softer to hear the murmurs that flowed from this childish mouth:

"It is nighttime . . . the customs officers have inspected the luggage . . . the passports are in order. . . . The train rolls. . . . The West approaches . . . Riga-Paris. . . . The train rolls.^[171]

Writing about China captured a similar mood, the place-name itself—la Chine —becoming an incantation opening doors to a dense, atmospheric land of swarms, smells, barbarism, chaos, pirates, bandits, warlords, gunrunners, opium gangs, coolies, and the clash of vast twentieth-century political forces. It was a picture of considerable verity, but it was also a posture, a conscious forcing of ambiance, a setting of scenes, and the rendering of a nation into a gigantic canvas upon which the imagination could paint in broad, colorful strokes the romantic or sensation-seeking images it sought to assign to the country. For these pleasures one condescended to the tropes of exoticism, although mostly the evocations of China in the twenties and thirties emanated from a contemporary scene. O.-P. Gilbert fabricated moods out of postwar wastage and decay, White Russian flotsam washed up in Shanghai, or Europeans looking for a terrain of "heroism . . . White heroism"—"I had had it up to here," recounts one of his characters, "with Europe after the war. She seemed to me aged, absurd, gangrenous. . . . I needed something else; I chose Asia." His China was psychically charged with warlords and pirates and a dying age of European imperialism. In the Communist adventure in China Maurice Dekobra found the source for an overwrought tale of sexual violence and political intrigue. For Marc Chadourne, Borodin was "the Adventurer of the Century." "Where are Galen, Eugene Chen," he lamented in the softer days of 1931. "Where are the cadets of Whampoa who, upright on cars bristling with machine guns, swept all Canton to the barbed wires of Shameen? Where are the strike pickets, the dock thieves, the extortioners of ships? . . . Where are the Reds of yesteryear?" What he discovered nevertheless was the material for a dozen vignettes, well turned, titillating, pleasurably digestible; and the unmistakable setting they would all come looking for:

A wet dawn. . . . A crown of peaks emerges from the clouds, bald mountains concealing armored domes. Passing by, one divines the presence of the great idle guns hidden in those eyries. The Gibraltar of Asia. . . .

The mist clears in a thousand fiery shafts, amid . . . freighters, liners, naval vessels, hundreds of rusty or shining hulls, in blacks, grays, whites, and reds, all contributing to the uproar of whistling and hammering and shouting. . . .

Among them scud the somber-hued hordes of Chinese boats, with sails of mats and rags, their sterns covered with flower pots. One of them rams us in a crash of splintered wood and flapping sails, while twenty hooks lay hold of us at once. Confusion of boarding. . . . These shrieks of madmen, this frenzy, these foul-spoken gallows'-birds—I already begin to recognize all this. It is China—the howl of her starving pack, her color of spices, her stinking rags, her insolence, her voracity, China.^[172]

Behind this consumerlike urge to devour the present lay a presentiment that the romantic encounters with the world of the past were shutting down rapidly in the twentieth century. "Who comes with me to Isfahan in the season of the roses must ride by slow stages as in olden days. Who comes with me to Isfahan at the season of roses must accept the perils of evil paths where horses stumble, must sleep in caravanserais, crouched in a niche of beaten earth, among the flies and vermin. . . . Who comes with me towards some lost oasis in fields of white poppies and gardens of pink roses, will find an old town of ruins and mystery."^[173] That was Pierre Loti, writing of his journeys across India and Persia toward the turn of the century. Thirty years later Elisabeth Sauvy (Titaÿna) found Isfahan corrupted by American tourists, and André Goerger arrived in Teheran full of expectation undone by deception. "When one has visualized the tales from Persia where the wondrous cleaves endlessly to the splendor of the decor, the reality of modern Teheran is disappointing. A few well shaded attractive avenues running up to the palace of the royal family, here and there a porch covered with the azure faiences that are the charm of the country, such are the rare witnesses to a brilliant past." For the Croisire jaune, Kermanshah was a faded city. Since the coming of cars, they were told, "the caravans tend to disappear and the great camel inns are put to other uses."^[174]

Already, in the previous century, the threat of an end to unchartered territories and, worse, the demystification of exotic lands beyond Western reach appeared very real. Peter Bishop has shown, for example, how the West made of Tibet a repository for its dreams about the sacredness of faraway places as romantic sanctuaries of this type increasingly disappeared from a well-traveled world and how the fixation grew as even Tibet seemed imperiled by the arrival of casual travelers—"almost routine"—in the lower Himalayas by the late nineteenth century. Yet Bishop has also noted how the tone became unmistakably sharper, edgier, the construct more and more artificial, as the true corruption of Tibet set in only with the twentieth century when the global spread of technology and travel surpassed anything the nineteenth century had

known.^[175] That was natural. The twentieth century ushered in an age of homogenization of culture and facility of access that has become a commonplace in our day. The agencies of this change were the emergence of a truly global world, mass culture and the media of mass communications, and new forms of rapid and penetrating transport, especially the automobile and the airplane, all of whose effects had begun to be felt by the end of the First World War.

Thus the world, to postwar travelers, was appearing smaller, more trivial. Paul Morand predicted that his generation would be the last to have any sense of the true dimensions to the globe. "Where we still delight in a great circumnavigating journey, others will no longer see anything but a 'farrago of trips.' A tour of the cage will go quickly. Hugo in 1930 would write, 'The child will ask: Can I run over to India? And the mother will answer: Take along a snack.'" And Ella Maillart, venturing into one of the most remote regions of Asia, had difficulty believing that she had actually written home to expect another letter from India in six months' time, or that they should begin to worry if a year went by without further news of her whereabouts. "Fine perspective for a century of airplanes and radiograms!"^[176]

The signs of change, and consequently of foreclosure, were everywhere. Some came from the desiccating impact of mass commercialism on both the subject and object of travel. Camped near the Euphrates on one of the great adventures of the century, Audoin-Dubreuil, second-in-command of the Croisière jaune, sought to freeze the moment into an evocative snapshot—"We set up our tents on an imposing site. . . . The sun goes down. Georges Le Fèvre, chronicler of our voyage, is seated before his typewriter. . . . Laplanche and our radio operators raise the antenna of the wireless. Goerger, our secrétaire général , writes down Georges-Marie Haardt's instructions while Haardt shaves"—but then converted the image, almost instinctively, into a plaything of Western consumerism. "It really is a model camp: it would go perfectly as lead toys in a department store show window next Christmas." Roland Dorgelès described the experience of lounging in the garden of a Hungarian village inn when a boy came running with a message that set the place abuzz. So rapidly did the peasants fly out of their chairs and alert everyone they saw that Dorgelès was certain a farm had caught fire. But the alarm was the word that four motor coaches filled with American tourists were arriving from Gödöllö, and the panic was the villagers' haste to get out of their contemporary clothing and into their folkloric costumes so as not to disappoint their visitors (and wipe their village off the tour routes in the future).^[177]

Other signs came from the routinization that followed the technological conquest of space and that stripped much of the world of its sense of remoteness. By the 1920s desert travel by automobile was becoming a norm, and by the 1930s air routes were covering most of the world. Two routes by car between Damascus and Baghdad were in use by 1923 and continuing on to Teheran was considered no problem. Every Thursday there was regular service between the Iraqi and Syrian capitals, two cars setting out from each city and meeting halfway to camp overnight before heading on to their respective destinations. Further east, in the Gobi, the Dodges that had served Roy Chapman Andrews's central Asiatic expeditions so well were sold off as a fleet and put into operation by a Chinese company on the Kalgan-Urga run. "Our explorations," Andrews wrote in his history of the expeditions, "had the unexpected result of opening western Mongolia to motor transport. Immediately after our return from the first Expedition, fur dealers came to ask how they could reach far distant trading stations. We told them where to send gasoline and how they could go; now fur and wool buyers who cross the desert use dozens of cars, where only camels had traveled until we came." In the Sahara liaison by car was assured between Algiers and Timbuktu as early as 1924. So confident were the French of opening the desert to still more motor travel and then to a mass wave of tourism, that it was suggested future travelers would return from the Sahara with the phrase on their lips: "I've come from the desert, the place was packed!" One year after Larigaudie and Drapier completed their grueling journey they learned that a road had been built south of Mandalay. "What for us was an epic," Larigaudie put in a footnote at the end, "will become tomorrow a walk-though for tourists."^[178]

Travel by air was slower in coming, but its spread around the globe, once launched, was no less relentless. Regular air routes were established in Europe and the United States, but also in Latin America and across large parts of Asia. Having trekked on an adventure across central Asia, Ella Maillart caught an Air France flight home (by stages) from Karachi while her companion, Peter Fleming, flew Imperial Airways to London. Even more striking as an example of the powers of routinization was an announcement that appeared in L'Illustration in 1936 advising of regular passenger service from Casablanca to Dakar, the very route that Mermoz and his comrades had flown as the "line" with almost daily heroics only a decade before. The contrast with legendary days of the past was not lost on the author of the piece, who saw it all as a "sign of the times, [a] sign of the technical advancements that confer on an air service, daring but a short time ago, the security compatible

with normal and regular transport of passengers."^[179] That was written with some pride, and indeed adventures like the "line" or the Citroën expeditions had (in part) been intended to pioneer an eventual routinized service with all the regularity and security that mass travel might demand. But if the very stuff of legends contained within it the promise of softer, less heroic voyages in the future, then it also meant the shredding of the mysteries of the world, the fading of romance or color to travels in distant and exotic lands, and, most ironically, the very end to adventure itself.

That sense of irretrievable loss preyed on the French in the interwar years. Baghdad, Titaÿna reported, was congested with American cars, Parisian women, the sounds of jazz, men of letters drinking Perrier water. What remained of Ctesiphon the twentieth century was finishing off rapidly. In search of authentic, fanatical Islamic culture she went to the sacred cities of Persia. In the desert villages she tracked the "caravans of the dead," the camel caravans of tinkling bells and terrible smells that carried the embalmed corpses of the faithful on their promised pilgrimage to the holy places. But at the end of her story she says she was torn from a reverie by the blast of a horn and the sight of the camel driver she had left in Bakhtiari country pulling up in a Ford laden with coffins. "'I bought some old Fords at the frontier,' he told me. 'In the desert there's no need for a roadway and the dead travel faster'"^[180]

René Pinon expressed nearly the same thing when he remarked that driving into the Syrian desert produced strange and foreboding contrasts. Alongside desert cultures that went back millennia were the advance postings of a modern industrial society—factories and pipeline pumping stations—the spread of the one signaling the eradication of the other. Automobiles and planes, he argued, already spelled an end to the camel as a means of transport and an "adieu [to] the biblical and koranic poetry of the camp in the desert, the evenings under the tent, the convergence of flocks at the water holes, the tales of war and love around the fire," lines whose sentimental effusiveness were no less a testimony to the romantic yearnings of these years. Not even the great luxury liners were spared this kind of lamentation. "Today one embarks as if one were taking the métro," wrote Marc Chadourne of his voyage across the Atlantic via the SS Manhattan .^[181]

Nothing captured better the inexorable banalization of the world after the war than the experience of travel to Angkor Wat. For the French the great temple complex in the midst of the Cambodian jungle was laden with romantic, adventurous identities. Pierre Loti, who, as

one person has put it, exercised a "massive influence on the spiritual geography of an entire generation," had in his Pèlerin d'Angkor left behind an unforgettably romantic account of his pilgrimage to Angkor that every subsequent French traveler to the ruins probably read. His voyage had been a five-day affair, up the Mekong by fly boat, then deeper upriver by sampan, and then finally overland by cattle cart until he had arrived at the first of the temples. He had described a primitive descent back into all but prehistoric times, through "woods beyond measure and impenetrable bush," through a land of lizards, serpents, monkeys, and a people who scarcely seemed to have evolved since mankind's earliest days, a country so overgrown and lost in time that even his sampan guides lost their way in the tropical channels. At Bayon, the most ancient of the temple sanctuaries, he had been forced to hack his way through the liana and then to cut his visit short at the urging of his guide because "our carts have no lanterns . . . and we must return before the hour of the tiger." He had camped on straw mats in an open-air shelter, and during his stay he had shared the ruins with no other visitors save pilgrims from Burma and three French archaeologists.^[182]

But those days had gone forever by the end of the war. By the 1920s Angkor was accessible by automobile—one day's journey from Saigon—and by 1936 it was on the tour stops advertised by the Messageries Maritimes cruises. There were hotel accommodations with screened windows, fans, and showers, not yet the plush resorts that await today's jet-lagged traveler in nearly any remote portion of the world, yet nonetheless a far cry from anything smacking of adventure. For the voyager who wished a memento or some proof of the voyage there were postcards for sale and little bits of sculptures that the merchants guaranteed as authentic. Pierre Billotey, who came in 1929, contrasted Loti's arrival before "this forest that encloses on all sides the temples and palaces and forms with them a decor of mystery, of gigantic enchantment" with his own before "pretty grounds . . . serviced by commodious avenues" and wondered whether the influx of tourists would soon require the installation of turnstiles. Francis de Croisset described a bus tour organized by a Central European company that left Saigon at dawn, lunched at Phnom Penh (with brief visit of the city), and then arrived at Angkor at the very end of the day with just a momentary interlude of rest before touring the complex in the fresh hours of the evening, at last discharging the "heroic tourists" for their dinner and bath. Of his own experience he recounted the following exchange with a friend in Saigon who suggested he borrow his car and drive out to Angkor:

—There's no way you can get lost. You have a few rivers to cross by ferry. You will sleep at Phnom Penh. Spend a day there. It's worth the trouble, and then it's straight ahead through Kam-Pong-Thom and the forest until Angkor. Why are you laughing?

—Because you speak of this trip as if it were a matter of going from the Madeleine to the Opéra.

Once settled in he was divided in his moods, content with his comforts but feeling deprived of his adventure and acknowledging that the mysteries that had greeted Lyautey lay beyond anything that he would encounter.^[183]

No description, however, compared to that of Roland Dorgelès in On the Mandarin Road , written in 1925. It really requires repeating nearly in full:

On the way from Phnom-Penh, at Kampong-Luang des lacs, where one transfers to the small boat for the Viam, or mouth, of the Siem-reap River, the last stage on the way to the ruins, one suddenly sees on the right a large sign, fastened to two posts. Dumfounded, one reads this: "Pèlerins d'Angkhor , turn to the right." Motorists are thus diverted to the road leading to the jetty.

Nothing more is needed to change the whole spirit of the journey and wipe out the spell created by the fleeting visions of forests with flowering vines, tiny villages on piles, huge, grazing buffaloes with birds perched on their backs, naked children splashing in the water with their skin glistening in the sun like fish-scales, flights of egrets overhead, pagoda-cocks and barrister-birds with black-wings and coral-headed cranes. At last to escape the civilized colony, really to penetrate ancient Asia, the hospitable and marvelous Kambudja, whither all the wistful beauty of the world seems to have sought refuge! Then, presto! one comes upon this sign-board of the Motor Club, ridiculous homage to the memory of Loti, and back one drops to earth with a thud. Civilization has penetrated everywhere, and there is nothing for it but to resign oneself. "The world is greater than you believe" wrote Renan. But things have changed. Today he would have to write: "The world is much smaller than you think. . . ."

You need not expect anymore to cover the last lap from Siem-reap to Angkor War on the back of a royal elephant, trampling down the underbrush, tearing up shrubs, and breaking off branches. A good macadam road now leads to the sala , and it has been extended in a circuit of the various temples through forty kilometers of forest. It is true that a couple of beasts with trumpets are attached to the hotel, but they are there for the same reason that there are goat carriages in the Champs Elysées. "C'est pour la regardelle " as they say in the Midi. And small trucks line up near the mounting platform for the elephants.^[184]

For Dorgelès there were no regrets. He was at ease with his comforts and insistent that exoticism was only what one was prepared to make of it. "Everything is interesting to whoever knows how to see." Still his

portrait of Indochina was that of a steamy, mist-laden land where the romance of the past was confined to the storybooks. Gone were the tiger hunts, fiefdoms, and stories of pirates. Gone were the days when upriver planters would scan the river anxiously for visitors because now they could motor to Saigon within the same day. Gone was the exoticism of the past because "the monstrous machine now rolling over the world, making all five continents alike, has passed this way." Or as Louis Malleret put it in 1932 in the very first sentence of a book that would chronicle a literature of adventure, romance, and lush picture-making: "One must resign oneself to it: today, in Indochina, except perhaps in a few poorly known parts of Moï country, adventure is no longer possible."^[185]

From this tension between romantic drives and a sense of foreclosure arose, in good part, the forced atmospherics that were so pronounced in the interwar years. Confronted with an end to mysteries and romantic ventures into the world, the age manufactured its own. There were treks through faraway landscapes, artificial flirtations with adventure to recreate and drink in a mood like Bertrand's incursion into the Gobi. Elisabeth Sauvy, who called herself Titaÿna, decried the corruption of the desert, but she built a career out of drummed-up experiences and voyeuristic forays in search of sensations. These she peddled in newspapers, magazines, and books under such giveaway titles as "Around the World Aboard a Tramp Steamer," "In the Land of Pearls," "Unknown Mexico," "Aboard the Dirigible 'Hindenburg,"' Hot Nights (scenes of life and sex in southern climes), and the melodramatic Caravan of the Dead , beneath whose primeval overtones ran a fabricated quest after Persian exoticism.^[186]

Even bona fide exploits drenched in romanticism were swept up in the manufacturing mill. The stories by Henri de Monfreid, first published in the early 1930s, provide a good illustration. De Monfreid's life seems to have come out of a legend, perhaps fitting because that is what he would make of it. His father was a gentleman painter, obscure in the full circumstances of his birth, a friend of Gauguin, Maillol, and Verlaine. The son, born in 1879, grew up on the Mediterranean coast, learning to sail first on his father's two-masted schooner, then on an old fishing bark left along the shoreline. Educated in Paris, he went through a series of jobs—coffee salesman, representative for the milk trust, dairy farmer—all of which he found drearily oppressive. A long bout of Maltese fever left him a business failure but provided the escape that he had been seeking. "I was mined financially, but the fever had set me free,"

was how he would put it. Determined to start over again only far off in the world, de Monfreid boarded a ship in 1910 heading for Djibouti: "A deck passage . . . East," as he later wrote in the inimitable romantic prose style of the thirties. There he worked for a French trading firm dealing in skins, but this too he found crushingly petty:

Was it for that I had come to Africa? Here I was after two years in the desert and the bush, tied to my account books and inventories, fretting with debits and credits, losses and gains, like any grocer or dry good's merchant on the public square. Adventure? Precious little of it. Thirst in the desert; a touch of fever during the season of rains; mild skirmishes with pilfering black men. But most of the time, in a sweltering comptoir at Djibouti, a baked mud house in Harrar; a hut on the mountain side, juggling with columns of figures, selling, buying, exchanging, loading pack mules for Diré Daoua and the coast for the problematic profit of some one—rarely for my own. The whole race of traders, we were like some noxious breed of insects burrowing in the rich African soil. Like beetles on a dungheap. That was what Africa meant to us—desert and plateau and mountain—a marvelous dungheap to plunder and abandon.

Bored and burning for less confining enterprises, he quit his job, purchased a dhow, assembled a crew, and launched himself on a life that would make him celebrated up and down the Red Sea, and later in France, as a cultivator of pearls, a gunrunner, and a smuggler of hashish.^[187]

By the beginning of the 1930s he was setting his adventures down onto paper. He wrote in a disarmingly seductive way, first because for a man of action he displayed clear talents as a stylist and second because he showed no qualms in revealing his own foibles and misfortunes, acknowledging as he put it that "like the rat of the fable, I have left a good many tails on the battlefield."^[188] The power of the stories lay mostly in their romance, their tales of pearl fishing, pearl trading, arms trafficking, drug running, evasions at sea, and sea wrecks. He recounted intrigues with French authorities, Turkish soldiers, British intelligence agents, Greek drug merchants, Arab, Abyssinian, and Somali smugglers and slave traders, all these set amidst barren mountains, basaltic cones, coral reefs, isolated moorings, pirate coves, hostile seas, and the practically biblical cities of the Red Sea, a body of water whose name tones were improbably evocative.

His first book, Secrets of the Red Sea , which related his earliest adventures as a pearl trader and gunrunner before the First World War, was a great success, selling fifty thousand copies over the course of the thirties and indicating the resonance such romantic tales could strike in these

years. Its publishing history, and that of its sequels, were equally revealing. The first compilation of de Monfreid's adventures appears to have occurred at the end of the twenties in conjunction with an American journalist, Ida Treat, and was published in English in 1930 under the title, Pearls, Arms, and Hashish . The first French volume, Secrets of the Red Sea , contained only part of its stories, and with certain changes of detail. As subsequent French volumes appeared, filling out much of the remainder of the original tales, they too suggested a certain reworking although, even more, a conscious effort to expand de Monfreid's stories into a series. The sequel-like quality to subsequent books was apparent in their sheer numbers—he churned out twenty or more volumes in the thirties—and also in their strands of continuity, for example, "As I recounted in Secrets of the Red Sea , the munitions which had been seized on the island of Maskali had been advanced to me by this syndicate . . . ," lines from the opening pages of Hashish . By 1935 his publisher, Grasset, was excerpting passages and publishing these separately in its "Great Adventurers of Today" series alongside Guzman's With Pancho Villa and Frank Buck's Bring Them Back Alive ("based on the famous film," as the series advertisement put it).^[189] Such promotional treatment represented the inevitable trivialization that awaited any contemporary adventure but, even more, the forced quality to ambiance and mystery between the wars, even when the original versions were unassailably spellbinding.

In this respect there was not much distance separating de Monfreid's narratives from grand reportage adventures like Joseph Kessel's "Slave Trade." "You have carte blanche for the subject, the time, the expense," Kessel was told by the editors of the Matin . "But we need an enquête that will tear readers away from their routines and everyday cares. We need an astonishing adventure. Do you have any ideas? Think about it." Four days later Kessel, after rummaging through a League of Nations report on the Red Sea slave traffic, was back with his plans for a great exposé: "There are still slave markets like those of three hundred years ago. The slave trail! A fide and a fascinating adventure for the public. What do you think?" With three companions Kessel left for Djibouti on New Year's Day 1930, returning in April with his story. He had seen a slave trader, followed his trail, and crossed the Red Sea over to Yemen. The series began its run in May 1930, blanketing four columns on the front page the first day and requiring an extra printing of one hundred and fifty thousand copies of the paper. Symbolically, among those who had made it all possible, facilitating Kessel's Red Sea passages, was Henri de Monfreid.^[190]

Characteristically, however, the desire to reintroduce atmosphere into the world led to a turning of the period's present-mindedness in on itself. Kessel's Wagon-lit or the scene setters of China found their echo in grand reportage on gunrunning to Morocco or on border crossings without papers. Moods were created out of contemporary dramas and the great political events of the day. That is why White Russians, as well, became such captivating creatures between the wars. They were the human debris from the century's shipwrecks, the true global denizens of their global age, dispersed by revolution and civil war to the four corners of the world. They established colonies in Paris and Berlin, but also in Istanbul, Harbin, Mukden, and Shanghai and their newspapers, printed in Paris, were read in Argentina, Madagascar, Montreal, and Australia. They turned up in nearly every flea-bitten outpost from far western China to the funnel of the hulk of the Fontainebleau in the roadstead of Djibouti. As the Croisière jaune rolled across Asia it crossed paths with a former czarist general (overseeing the production of opium) in Khorassan, ran into more White Russians at Urumchi, and still more among the troops at Hami. At a powder factory thirty, miles to the interior side of Addis Ababa the Dutch foreign correspondent, Pierre van Paassen, came upon a colonel "who had fought with Denikine under the walls of Petrograd against Leon Trotsky."^[191] If many were survivors because of painstaking perseverance, others, victims of circumstance or temperament, drifted into louche or adventurous lives. They were gunrunners and drag traffickers, white slavers and prostitutes. They were soldiers of fortune, so thick in the Orient that they fought as units in the armies of warlords from Sinkiang to Manchuria. As spies their numbers were legion and as intriguers they were without parallel.

They were thus sad but glamorous figures, fabulously evocative of their times and as such an unending source for constructing an ambiance out of the present. They were fascinating for their talismanic qualities, their reaffirmation of the mysteries that remained, and they functioned in literature as stock characters on a set, a romantic, if lurid, presence for the armchair tourists of interwar Europe. In his memoirs Klaus Mann recalled how his imagination had soared when he first encountered White Russians in Berlin in the surrealistic days of 1923:

I was keenly interested in the backgrounds and tragedies of the innumerable refugees teeming throughout the city. Were they innocent victims or were they laden with crime? . . . And how somber was exile really? I figured it rather harsh but not without epic features. To escape from the GPU, at night, over snowy roofs; to arrive in Warsaw or Bucharest, with no possessions but two priceless

diamonds; to open antique stores and fright dubs everywhere between Cannes and Los Angeles; to weave political intrigues and kiss the beloved icons in squalid hotel rooms; to rush from country to country haunted by nostalgia and Soviet agents: it could be no easy life, to be sure. And still, it attracted me, in a weird, irrational way.^[192]

That was the requisite style for this age of abandonment, dissolution, and flux. Paul Morand, who was a far better stylist than Mann the younger, surrendered to the same melancholic siren calls in Flèche d'orient , which he published in 1932 with a printing of over twenty thousand copies. The protagonist in the novel, Dmitri, is a Russian who has come west in 1915 and abandoned all ties to his past and to Russia. Not for him the White Russian community, "On ne trouve chez lui ni icons, ni samovar," the narrator tells us as the mood fog rolls in:

He does not share that morbid taste for the night of the true Russians, angels of darkness. He does not frequent that termitelike world, princes with painted eyelids, lordly door-to-door salesmen in wines, cossacks in women's trades, or dawdle as they do in gloomy cabarets of sugared drinks, empty talk, songs, and regrets. Their ill-defined situations, their murky stories, their voluptuous appetite for tears, their soft inclination for passing over to the enemy, their interested disinterestedness, their contempt for money and their extravagant needs, and that insipid compote of goodness and evil, and that incomprehensible need to be "understood," all that leaves him indifferent, all that gulls him not, and when people speak of the charme slave , he smiles.^[193]

Yet in Romania, which he flies to on a whim, he comes to discover and experience Russia through the gypsy melodies of a man called Ionica. Before that haunting semi-Asiatic assault Dmitri's cosmopolitan skin crinkles and sloughs off, the novel ending with Dmitri drifting spiritually away from the West as he sails down the Danube, abandoning himself to the call of the motherland.

In the Far East the White Russians were at their most pathetic, and thus their most dangerous. Schreiber, at Harbin, saw in them the last act of a racial drama between Whites and Asians and de Croisset, writing of the same city, said that the refugees' fall corroded all Western prestige in the Orient: "All the white race loses face!" But Paule Herfort's Harbin was a city where Russian women "dressed on credit and disrobed for cash," an epigrammatic introduction to the conventional atmospheric tone that these people nearly always seemed to command. "They plot, they spy, they drink vodka, they carouse, they spend their last penny, and on Monday they return to their work or their intrigues." Pierre Lyautey's Harbin was a place where practically no one possessed "less

than three passports or four nationalities. Hollywood could give us a rest from American crimes by situating some of its films here." And for Bertrand, who traveled in part to live out her fantasies, Harbin, city of misery and human disgrace, was a melodramatic gold mine. "Risk and poetry. Amour de l'amour , defiance of money, crimes, and discretion . . . Voilà Harbin!" she wrote of a city she also described as "surprising and dangerous, surpassing in boldness, in gangsters, in intrigues, in extravagance the worst of American Chicagos." "In the cellars of the brothels and gaming houses," she went on, as if her unthrottled pursuit of sensation had shifted into automatic drive, "where burrowed deep down are who knows what great dramas of the future, novelists, lovers of intrigue and murky exoticism, will find material to write up for a long time to come."^[194] And so they did. Like Champly's Road to Shanghai or Gilbert's Shanghai of fallen women and Japanese intrigue, the racial fears inherent in the plight of Russians in the East were no match for the aroma of romance that clung to these refugees wherever they went. Or as Joseph Kessel put it for Paris:

Those who in the years 1924-1925 dragged out their idleness, their debauchery, their sadness, or simply their nocturnal temper in the make-believe daylight of Montmartre, those who loved the unique landscape formed by the rues Pigalle, Fontaine, and Douai, landscape of drunken Americans, Negroes with saxophones, tangoing Argentines, girls a bit haggard, pimps in dinner jackets, flower merchants, beggars and taxicab drivers, landscape that smelled of benzine, perfumes, makeup, and, secretly, of drugs, those who loved to watch, in place Pigalle, the descending and dancing cascade of signs, fascinating and deceptive like les artifices de joie , those who mingled among the strange people who begin work when normal people sleep, hysterical, perverse, guileless people, outside humanity, the material of pleasure, will recall the singular number of Russian restaurants de nuit gathered together over several square meters of the nocturnal zone.

These establishments grew and multiplied like unwholesome plants. They came in all sizes and styles, from three-story music factories to minuscule retreats filled by a half dozen tables. In certain ones, beneath a blue tinged churchlike light reflected in massive silver cups, one could get drunk silently as if in celebrating a rite; others, on the contrary, reverberated without end with music, songs, and savage dances.

At every step one collided with cossacks stationed as sentinels before the cabaret doors. Singers and dancers, sauntering during interludes, bareheaded, dressed in velvets and silks, entered the bars, the cafés. Women with white skin and limpid eyes, gaudily covered, laughed or cried without reason. Princes drank like brothers with former horse thieves.

There were men there who had spent their lives making the night seem shorter to those who paid, real instruments of joy, born, like the violins that

they played instinctively, to sing and please. They were the tziganes of the great restaurants of Moscow, of the islands of Petrograd that the river of emigration had carried as far as Paris. Some of them had played for the grand dukes, for the czar, for Rasputin. Fortunes had been thrown beneath their bows. Although at Montmartre their remuneration was meagerer, if they had work and something to drink they were happy.

But others who also carried violin and guitar cases and who wore the same castoff clothing often let break through on their thoroughbred faces a distress as troubling as their vacant stare.

Thus commingled, famished, disguised guards colonels, professors, noblewomen, prostitutes, improvised artists, and famous tziganes came, sometimes with a soul violent and sincere, sometimes with an adulterated bohemianism, to deliver to couples knocked senseless by noise, light, and champagne the barbaric, desperate, and sometimes sublime inspiration that limitless, formless Russia had deposited in her songs, in her dances, and in the hearts of her worst children. . . .

Pigalle , cut-off corner of the world, port without haven for bodies lost and souls adrift, arid and neurotic refuge, a help only to those whom alcohol unfastens and cocaine shakes, mirage of forced joy destroyed by the first rays of the sun, such was this strange and inhuman country.^[195]

That was from Kessel's Nights of the Princes . The master of White Russian romanticizing, he too gravitated to the refugee haunts of Montmartre as Dmitri did to the melodies of Ionica, lavishing there his emotional resources and drawing in return his emotional sustenance.

What White Russians offered so too did spies. Like the refugees their underground worlds, their intrigues, their secret wars, and the supposed glamour of their lives summoned moods that the interwar years seemed to be seeking. They too were creatures with the power to transcend routine and endow a present-minded world with a sense of mystery about its own being; and consequently they too were dragooned into the romanticizing enterprise. Inherently atmospheric, they possessed the ability to appeal for that reason alone. That also explains why, in the popular spy world, Trebitsch Lincoln could be such a commanding figure. A prestidigitator and a human chameleon, he was mysterious, exotic, beyond ken, unfathomable. His adventures transported readers to foreign, romantic lands—Afghanistan, Siam, China—and magnified their secrets rather than deflating them. Perhaps he personified alarms and racial visions after the war, but it was the dramatic, romantic cast he gave to global politics that mostly explains his attraction. His life was a fabulous yarn sprawled across continents, a counterpoint to a shrinking, "comprehended" world, and thus it was told and then told again.

Nearly all the efforts of spy writers strained to this end; nearly all

searched for that kind of yarn. It is indeed difficult to wade through the embellishments, the indulgences, or the searching for effects that pervade interwar spy writing and not see in these the same conscious striving to conjure up storybook realities that sent Bertrand to the Gobi or Kessel to Ethiopia or that made of White Russians a theme of their age. Jean Joffroy did it in Espionage in Asia , where every character appears to have walked off a Hollywood set. Charles Pontivy arrives in the Far East after duels with gunrunners and drug smugglers, especially the formidable Ferrugini. He still carries a slug in his shoulder from a running sea battle with a boat out of Barcelona, flying the French flag, captained by a Greek, commanded by an Algerian, crewed by Spanish sailors, and charged with German arms. He reports to Gilbert Joffroy, agent R-22, veteran of perilous missions in the Orient, a man who has set up spy networks in Turkestan and Persia, who has known "the flight without glory, the ambushes," the pursuit of foreign agents, and who has just bagged four Soviet spies in Rangoon. His quarry is Izoumo, a Japanese intelligence officer who directed counterespionage services in Mongolia in 1925-1926, was spotted in Soviet Turkestan as a horse trader in the late twenties and thirties, was identified as a yogi in Calcutta in 1934, was seen at the Singapore defenses in 1934, was glimpsed again in Indo-china and then in China in 1935-1936, where he disappeared until surfacing once more in Calcutta as the action of the novel begins.^[196] And the press did it, for example, in the following description of Madame Krivoshcheev the last eyewitness to see Skoblin alive:

A woman of forty years, dark haired, slender, nervous, with short-cropped hair, big tired eyes, smokes cigarettes. . . . She refuses all interviews but pronounces with a restrained voice vague and subtle sentences, infinitely vague and subtle. . . . She knows nothing, absolutely nothing, of Russian affairs in Paris. . . . She has lived too long in the Far East . . . Harbin, Shanghai, all the mysterious cities where émigré Russian women lead their lives of adventure and secret miseries. . . . We imagine those astonishing stories, those appalling legends that travelers bring back of the girls of the steppes given over to pleasure, to vice, to death in an Asiatic nightmarish setting pierced by the cries of guitars. Champagne, opium, Chinese with cruel eyes, the lewd cunning of the Japanese, the raging brutality of settlers and the light from these bodies nude, soiled, defiled, wounded, bleeding from love. . . . Madame Krivoshcheev, in a word, stirs in us their violent images.^[197]

So too did Darlix, Crozier, Richard, and a host of others who saw great profits in great atmospheric stories and who left behind them the trace of modern-day romancers, the reveries of professional mood-makers.

That in the end is what brought travel and intrigue so closely together. Each concerned worlds of mystique and adventures, and the forced yet wondrous manufacture of these.

Thus between postwar globalism and intrigue the associations ran long and deep. There was the global reach of spy networks, the relocation of spy wars to the empire, the vision of vast global conspiracies, or simply the matter-of-fact global approach to intelligence reporting that revealed how keenly the French found themselves thrust into worldly affairs after the war. There was equally the eagerness to go out into the world as adventurers and observers, the desire to conquer and know, the fascination with sweep and upheaval that yielded a forcing ground for stories of spies, just as the stories themselves became a medium for evoking a clearcut sense of an age. Finally there was the romantic quest that tales of voyagers lead us back into, back to the sense of foreclosure and the insistence for ambiance, if need be to fabricate or import it where none other existed. This the French did, as did their spy writers who understood the call to romanticize the century and who answered by creating a Shanghai for the métro.