Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/170

158 all they could do was to try to confine the fire to the building and not allow it to spread to the neighbouring houses. In places I saw the steel rafters bend and precipitate great sections of the floors with their loads of furniture, cabinets or safes, filled with valuable records that could hardly be replaced. Bits of hot stone were blown from the building and, like carbine shots, exploded in the air.

In one part of the crowd some hooligans attacked a group of railway officials and began beating them. But soon the police arrived in sufficient numbers, followed by Vlasienko and his men. They netted a number of bad characters, who turned out to be former criminal prisoners. In the pockets of some of them were found letters from the chairman of the Harbin branch of the Union of the Russian Nation, who was evidently making use of these men for harassing the railway officials.

The fire lasted for three days, until only the stone walls remained to mark the outline of what had been the great administrative offices of the Chinese Eastern Railway. Who had started this fire, and why they had started it, were questions which were never satisfactorily answered. No one ever uncovered the truth about the motive or the culprit. However, the Tsar's Government tried to place the responsibility upon the Central Committee, now dominated by our ruling Five; but even the gendarmes and the tribunals of the bloody Nicholas II did not succeed in this, as the accusation had no foundation either in logic or in history.

If in so serious an affair one were permitted to be facetious, one might truthfully aver that we went out in a great blaze, though it was no blaze of glory—for this was really the end. The Little Committee, which my