Blog Update

I went back a little while ago and labeled all of the posts that contained George Voegeli's journal entries with the label of "journal". This will allow you, the reader, to read just those posts should you want to. Here is a link. Just click the link and go to the oldest post and read backwards. This is a great option if you are new to the blog, too, and want to catch up. Also, you can access the label "journal" on the right hand side of the blog a little ways down from now on.

Danger on the Tracks

The 24th (of April 1919), within a mile of Nikolskoye, we were stopped by a Chinamen, and not fifty feet from where the engine stopped the Bolsheviks had tore up one rail length. If it had not been for this Chinamen we would have run into a river as we were just about a hundred feet away from the approach to the bridge. Here we were stalled for a whole hour as we could not find the rail as I think they must have put it in the river. So, we had to take up a rail behind us. We were only about three miles from Nikolskoye and the only thing we could make out for taking out the rail was they must have thought they were going to wreck a troop train as some of our troop trains from Khabarovsk were due any time. When we got to Nikolskoye two of our companies were here and left.

The Last Leg for the Show Troupe

The 18th we got to Harbin. This is quite a city having a population of two hundred thousand people, half of which were Chinese. The city has no car line but it has hundreds of rickshaws and droskys. Here the Chinese Easter Railway comes from Port Arthur. About twenty miles south of here the decisive battle was fought.

Harbin is divided in two parts. One is Chinese and the other is every nationality one can think of. The city has some very large sugar factories and a few places where they make Opium.

We played here three days and left Harbin for Spasskoye back over the route we came. We got to the Manchurian Mountains. When we passed our headquarters moving to Verkhne Udinsk 1700 miles away we got orders to move back to Nikolsk and join our companies there. Our whole regiment had left Kharbarovsk and started on our Spring campaign. This time we were to have over 1800 miles of track to guard. So we had to go back three hundred miles to meet our companies and then come back over the same track.
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This marks the end of George's time in the show troupe. He played the piano with a group of soldier-musicians traveling throughout Siberia and parts of China and Manchuria. Unfortunately, he does not write much about the actual performances the troupe put on for the other soldiers. It would be interesting to know more about them I think. It seems likely that the music played was rag time but from what I gather about the rise of Jazz it could be possible that they were playing a little early jazz as well.