IN BRITISH CAPTIVITY 553 552 THE CLASS STRUGGLE into his office and, with his usual Anglo African style, told him, that we were to be put on a Danish steamer to be sent to Russia. From this you will see, Mr. Minister, how our allies liberated us after a month confinement.
If England seized us as political emigrants (a lot of political refugees, as Colonel Morris expressed himself) then there was even no apparent sign of criminality as to one of our number. Konstantin Alexandrowitch Romantchenko came from Tchernigoff to New York with perfectly legal papers, was never engaged in political agitation and belonged to no party.
He was returning home with a passport issued to him by a Czarist governor. This did not hinder the British authorities from arresting Mr. Romantchenko together with us, and keeping him for a month in confinement, obviously as a result of a false denunciation, or simply as the result of an error; it is uite difficult for Englishmen to decipher Russian names, and to trouble themselves with a more careful treatment of Russian citizens these gentlemen have not learned as yet.
More emphatically was this shown in the treatment of my family by the British officals. Notwithstanding the fact that my wife was never a political emigrant, that she left Russia upon a legal passport, that she has never appeared abroad upon the political arena, she also was arrested with my two boys, 11 and years of age, respectively. The term arresting applied to my boys, is not merely a figure of speech. At first the authorities tried to separate the boys from their mother by placing them in an asylum. But as a result of a determined protest on my wife part, the boys were placed together with their mother in the house of a British Russian police agent, Horowitz, who, fearing the illegal sending of letters or telegrams, would not let the children out on the street, even without their mother, except under a strict watch.
And only after eleven days after their arrest, were my wife and children removed to a hotel and compelled to report daily to the police. They were also put on the steamer Hellig Olav together with us, without first consulting either my wife or myself as to whether we thought such a journey sufficiently safe for the lives of our children in view of the changed conditions created during our imprisonment by the entry of the United States into the war with Germany. Captain McCann, or his admiral, did not hesitate, without our knowledge or consent, to dispose of our fate and of the fate of our children, after they saw themselves compelled to free us from the allied noose. In reply to my question as to the real and formal grounds of the piratical attack upon me, my family and my fellow passengers, he said with that frankness so common among secret service men, that he himself was only an executive officer, and that he acted upon orders from London, and that was exaggerating things in general: Now in this time of a world war, when whole countries were being crushed, when Belgians, etc. etc. the style is the system, Mr. Minister. could only point out to the unselfish defender of weak nations, that if some one had grabbed him by the throat and pulled out his purse, and would have justified his act with the unhappy fate of Belgium this would hardly be a satisfactory solution of the incident.
Meanwhile the question which was not answered by the secret service captain, remains in full force: Who arrested us, and on what grounds? That the general order to detain those Russian citizens who happened to hold views not acceptable to the British Government really emanated from the British Government, is without any doubt, for Mr. Lloyd George could not miss the happily offered opportunity, to reveal, at last, that titanic energy, in the name of which he came to power. There is one more question, namely, who pointed us out to the British Canadian authorities as persons who should be detained? Who furnished Halifax in the short space of three or four days the information as to our views. line of circumstances points to the fact that this allied service was rendered by the renovated Russian consulate, the same consulate which had removed Nicholas portrait from its reception room and has stricken the word Imperial from its title.