Part 4

Since it is necessary in this writing to generalize about the Englishmen and British officers somewhat I must say here that there were among them some splendid men. I had the privilege of knowing a few who are among the finest men to be met anywhere--tactful, human, sympathetic, and strong. But these were too small a minority.

The expedition called for military skill and it called for leadership, sympathy, social skill. There was a sad failure to realize that an expedition of this sort is bound to run into social and political problems that are quite as important, perhaps more so, than mere military practice. The management of this campaign has ignored all social and political considerations that might have contributed to its success or failure and has blundered stupidly whenever these matters have forced themselves to the front. And the military blunders have been so obvious that they have been openly acknowledged in part and are on record presumably in the war office today.

The failure of the North Russian Expedition was the failure of the British to make friends of the Russian people. There was no purpose of conquest here. The purpose of his government was to be helpful to the Russian people. But the British soldier does not think in these terms. He had been a pupil in the school of imperialism too long to become a conscious knight-errant of the League of Nations so suddenly. He took his imperialism to Russia with him, and Russia would not stand for it. He failed in Russia and the causes of his failure were:

1. The Russian distrust and dislike of the British.

2. The British inability to understand the Russian mind.

3. The British lack of respect for the Russian character.

4. The British tactlessness in dealing with the Russians.

5. The stupid propaganda conducted by the British. 6. The British war-weariness.

Probably the last of these reasons is the one that will seem most important to those who have been hearing the noise made by English politicians, but I believe it to be the least. It did not prevent the sending out of that fine new army with its marvelous supplies of stores and equipment. It did not spoil those precious plans for getting to Petrograd before winter. For it was neither British Labor nor the Bolsheviki that drove the British army from North Russia. It was the peasant population of North Russia that did this.

In April, May, and June I was told dozens of times by Russians that if the Americans left Russia, the English would be compelled to go. They did not believe the British would withdraw voluntarily. They expected to have to fight to drive them out. Some of them said they would ask the Bolsheviki to help them. Constantly new causes of irritation arose between the military and the peasants and violent expressions of military disgust with "swine" were increasingly heard. When things went wrong all blame was laid on the Russians. And it was laid on them in such a way as to increase the malady. Each day bitterness, distrust, and resentment increased on both sides. In August a British colonel said to me that he feared nothing from our enemies the Bolsheviki but everything from our friends the Russians, and he doubted if they would let us get out without another great tragedy of treachery. In August also a Russian officer told a friend of mine that the quicker the English got away the surer they were of getting away safely.

No Russian believed in the disinterestedness of England's motives. All kinds of stories were invented and believed as to the concessions and ports she was to receive, as to the debt Russia would owe her after the war, and as to King George's interest in the restoration of the Czar to his throne. Bolshevik propaganda was not idle and was all too easily believed.

The Russians knew, too, that the English liked the monarchists, took them into their confidence, had them to dinner, danced with them, and they came to believe that with England in North Russia the revolution was lost.

It was a common thing to hear an English officer say that every Russian was a Bolo. And this appellation was intended to be most opprobrious. A discussion of this charge involves an understanding of Bolos as well as of other Russians, and the statement emanates from an utter lack of such understanding. I must say that the great number of Russians that I have come to know somewhat are not at all open to the charge of being like the British idea of Bolos. They are, on the contrary, loyal, generous, honest, and reliable; neither crazy radicals nor indolent dreamers, but a plodding, persistent, patient people who also can dream dreams and turn over new pages.

On our way back to Archangel in the very last days of August we welcomed almost any suggestion that seemed to afford a pleasant justification for our retreat, and we talked much about the failure of Kolchak to meet us at Kotlas or Viatka and the unwisdom of risking another winter with Archangel for a base and such impossible lines of communication as we maintained last winter. In truth we were quite willing to realize that what we had undertaken to do there was from a military point of view stupid and utterly impractical. We did not believe anybody would ever again attempt to invade Russia from the north. But the political stupidity of our mission and our methods was never suspected, and English officers continued to talk about "swine."

*XIV*

*ATROCITIES*

The men of this expedition were told many stories of Bolshevik atrocities. No care or effort was spared in printing these stories in both English and Russian and getting them into the hands of the soldiers. It was important to inspire fear and hatred of the Bolsheviki in the hearts of our men, more important than the verification of the stories. After the evacuation of Shenkursk we were told, with complete details, of the murder of the nuns and the Abbess, and of the members of several families who were well known to us, also of the forced marriage to favored Bolsheviki of some of the young ladies who in the happy days had danced with our officers. We were told of rape and of tortures, all in convincing circumstantial setting. This "information" we were told had been obtained most cleverly by us through spies and prisoners--and it did its work. In July, however, we learned the truth--at least I did. Three Russians whom I had known all winter and in whom I have the utmost confidence, went to Shenkursk, stayed there incognito a week, and came back. They told me that they had seen the nuns, and talked with the people who were supposed to have been murdered, that the Abbess was alive, that the girls were unmarried, and that there had been no forced marriages whatever. The one atrocity and the only one committed by the Bolsheviki in Shenkursk was the shooting of one priest. One priest was shot in the street by soldiers without official sanction. The only other Bolshevik atrocity about which I had any authentic information throughout the entire expedition was the mutilation of the bodies of some of our men who had been killed in the early days of Ustpadenga. I was unable to find any one who had any proof, however, that they had ever killed our men whom they had once taken prisoner. Perhaps they did it, but even so we were there not to imitate their worst practices but to wipe them off the face of the earth because of those practices.

A friend of mine was walking unarmed on a lonely road near the front one day when a Bolshevik soldier came out of the woods and made a friendly approach. He asked my friend if it was safe to go in and give himself up as a prisoner and was assured that it was. They went in together, the guard at the barricade took charge of the prisoner, taking him to headquarters. Ten days later my friend learned that this prisoner had been shot, and the only reason given was that he had refused to give certain desired information as to the enemy. I have heard an officer tell his men repeatedly to take no prisoners, to kill them even if they came in unarmed, and I have been told by the men themselves of many cases when this was done.

I saw a disarmed Bolshevik prisoner, who was making no attempt to escape and no trouble of any kind, and who was alone in charge of three armed soldiers, shot down in cold blood. The official whitewash on this case was that he was trying to escape. I have heard of many other cases of the shooting of Bolshevik prisoners. At one time this had become so common that the Officer Commanding troops issued and had posted up an order forbidding it and calling attention to the fact that there were many Bolshevik soldiers who wanted to come over and give themselves up but feared to do so because they had heard about our shooting prisoners, and warning our men that the Bolsheviki might retaliate by shooting our men whom they held as prisoners. I have seen at various times many prisoners brought in, but I have never yet seen one that was not robbed. The plunder belonged to the captor or the robber. We got as high as three thousand roubles off of some of them. Their boots and belt buckles were especially prized trophies. I have known cases where the captor was generous and left the prisoner some small thing, but it was only to have some other soldier take it away from him later.

We used gas shells on the Bolsheviki, but that I understand is no longer an atrocity. We fixed all the devil-traps we could think of for them when we evacuated villages. Once we shot more than thirty prisoners in our determination to punish three murderers. And when we caught the Commissar of Borok, a sergeant tells me we left his body in the street, stripped, with sixteen bayonet wounds. We surprised Borok, and the Commissar, a civilian, did not have time to arm himself. The sergeant was quite exultant over it. He killed Bolsheviki because they were barbarians and cruel. This was the only thing his government had ever told him as to why they should be killed. And the only safe way to fight barbarians is with their own methods.

The spoliation of scores of Russian villages and thousands of little farms, and the utter disorganization of the life and industry of a great section of the country with the attendant wanderings and sufferings of thousands of peasant-folk who had lost everything but life, are but the natural and necessary results of a military operation, and especially a weak and unsuccessful military operation such as this one was. One would hardly say, however, that it was necessary to close the school in order to use the schoolhouse for the storage of whisky, nor to put an entire Russian family into the street in order to make room for one officer, nor to loot personal property and ransack churches, nor to take so much whisky into the country that it could hardly be consumed when there was the greatest need for all kinds of merchandise, yet all these things were done, and acts of this kind are now outstanding features of the military "helpfulness" we went into so reluctantly.

We have been told about the employment by the Bolsheviki of Chinese mercenaries, and the dreadfulness of this was much stressed in April, but in July, August, and September we were importing large numbers of Chinese to Archangel, dressing them in British uniforms, and training them for fighting the Bolsheviki.

*XV*

*THE MUTINIES*

Early in the year there had been a few small defections of conscripted Russians at Shenkursk, Murmansk, and later at Toulgas, but the thing that broke loose in July when the Yankees had gone home and the new British army had come and started its big campaign was quite another matter. At Troitsa, at Onega, at Pinega, at Obozerskaya, on the Vaga and on the Murmansk railroad our Russian soldiers mutinied, killed their officers, and went over to the Bolsheviki. On six of our seven fronts these mutinies occurred. They were evidently not concerted, not uniform in method, but spontaneous, having the same nature, and springing from the same causes.

There were some distinctive features about the Troitsa affair of July seventh. The Dyer's Battalion that mutinied here was composed of ex-Bolsheviki prisoners who had been given the option of joining our army or remaining prisoners of war, and who for obvious reasons had chosen to join the army. This battalion had been fêted and honored in many ways, and the privilege of wearing the British name on their shoulders was supposed to give assurance of their loyalty to our army. We did not conceal our stupidity about the Bolsheviki from these men. We did not keep them from hearing the stories on which we had fed our men. They saw the attitude of the English military toward the Russians and had learned the true state of Russian peasant feeling toward the military. They despised the name of the Slavo-British Legion that they wore. On Troitsa's fateful night they murdered five English officers and eight Russian officers and went over to the Bolsheviki. We recaptured a considerable number of them and executed them. Those that had not been in the mutiny we disarmed and put to labor. We had lost heavily and by treachery. It was enough to get the wind up of anybody. It got ours up. I heard many an Englishman say after that that he would never again trust any Russian anywhere. He would not discriminate. They were all treacherous, ungrateful swine. Every Russian was a Bolo. There was no longer possible any big coöperative campaign.

On the other fronts the mutinies were not of ex-Bolsheviki prisoners but of the "mobilized" conscripts who had never been tainted by Bolshevist theories or ideals and whose defection is therefore of greater significance. These men were the peasant inhabitants of North Russia who had welcomed our advent at Archangel. They had been in a sense our hosts all winter. They had worked for us, driven our transport, sold us hay and potatoes, smoked our cigarettes, and hated our enemies. But also they had told me in the spring that if the Americans went home the English, would have to go home too. Now they were murdering their officers, surrendering their positions to the enemy, refusing to advance, going over to the Bolsheviki in large numbers.

The British fought wonderfully well under these trying circumstances. At every point except Onega they re-took all positions that had been lost by treachery. They caught and shot traitors. And they also shot all other Russian soldiers who were suspected of treason. They did this with a brutality the details of which I will spare you, but not one item, of which escaped the Russian people.

The British wind was up. They were soldiers, and prepared for any fight that might be in store for them. But being shot in bed by your own men is not fighting. It is not war. There was no question of courage involved. The army had courage enough. But this was next to suicide, to go to the front leading traitors.

There was evidence one day on the railroad front that a new mutiny was brewing. All the men of the suspected company were put on a train and then disarmed. A guard went through the train and counted off the men, taking every tenth man outside to be shot without trial. The men had not mutinied, but they might, and something had to be done.

I was told about another company of eighty Russians who were under suspicion at the same time. The British officer in command gave them the option of declaring who the ringleaders were or being shot _en masse_. Under the fear of this threat fifteen out of the eighty men were named and shot without trial.

*XVI*

*THE DÉBÂCLE*

And so, there being nothing else possible, the débâcle began. But it is a big job to get an expedition out of a country, much bigger than to get it in. There were great quantities of munitions and supplies to be transported or destroyed. There were fortifications to destroy, bridges to burn, railways to tear up, all fighting facilities to cripple. There were civilians to evacuate, and all the service branches of the army, with all their vast and varied stores, to be disposed of. And there was the enemy to be dealt with. The thing simply couldn't be done with any chance of success on all of those long fingers of this expedition until a smashing blow had been delivered to the Bolsheviki, both to reduce his morale and to increase your own, which had been so seriously impaired by the mutinies.

So a smashing blow was delivered successfully at one of the finger-points, costing us more men than any other fight in North Russia; and instanter the latest retreat from Moscow began. Now there was something quite peculiar about this retreat from the finger-points in North Russia. We were not pursued. The Bolsheviki knew we were going. In fact, they seemed to be remarkably well posted as to our plans. They were willing to have us go. But they did not chase us out. The Bolsheviki had little to do with causing this retreat. This retreat was forced by the conscripted soldiers and people of North Russia, who wanted the English to go, and who were so sincere in this that they were willing to face all the dangers of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" commissar, and the unrestrained spite of every personal enemy, without English protection. A school teacher who supposed himself to be on the Bolshevik black list, said to me in July, "Our duty is to Russia. The Bolsheviki may rule us or may kill us, but our duty is to Russia. The English must go." The Labor Congress, assembled at Solombola, passed resolutions urging the hasty withdrawal of the British and were at once disbanded by the army and charged with being Bolshevik propagandists.

But the retreat was on. Every embassy received orders from home to leave with all its citizens, bag and baggage, and in the early days of September they went as from a pestilence, shipload after shipload, the Americans, the French, Italian, Chinese, Serbian, Japanese embassies, consulates of all sorts, Y.M.C.A., Y.W.C.A., military missions, bourgeois Russians, and any number of enterprising citizens of enterprising countries got out.

The military preceded, accompanied, followed. By September twentieth, the last British soldier was out and the washout was complete. We heard wild rumors that the Labor Congress continued to meet in spite of the army, that they turned upon the Russian military leaders, who are well-known to be monarchist in sympathy, and informed them that they must make peace with the Bolsheviki, and that there was some bad rioting in Solombola. Two British soldiers had been beaten to death in the streets by Russians. More Russians had been shot because they were suspected of Bolshevist sympathies. As our ships pulled out of the harbor great fires broke out in the vast lumber yards on both sides of the river, the laborers were charged with Bolshevik sabotage, and an enormous pall of black smoke hung for days over the scene of this most unfortunate expedition, a sinister emblem of the ruin and hatred that lay behind us, and a symbol of angry protest from the sky itself over our stupid failure to understand the Russian people.

*XVII*

*MILITARY INTERVENTION FINANCE*

The financial contrivances of this Military Intervention in North Russia, while conceived with the best of intentions, perhaps, and being presumably in the interests of Russian welfare, created much suspicion and bitterness among the peasants and the soldiers. The country having been flooded with Kerensky and Bolshevik paper money, it was impossible to maintain any general European value, so a new rouble was issued called the "English rouble," with a guaranteed minimum value based on deposits of securities with the Bank of England. But the peasants were not interested. They did not give up their old roubles for the new. So it became necessary to force matters. A schedule of depreciation of all old roubles was published. While the English roubles stood as guaranteed at forty to the pound all old or "Russian" money, as the peasants called it, stepped down a ladder of fortnightly rungs from forty-eight to fifty-six, to sixty-five, to seventy-two, to eighty, to ninety, after which it was to have no value whatever. It was hoped, of course, that all people would avail themselves of the opportunity thus offered to dispose of their worthless money and the region would have a sound currency of some intra-national value as a result.

Then, finding that it had a lot of old roubles on hand, the British paid their Russian soldiers and civilian labor in these old roubles that they had proposed to put out of circulation, at the same time making it impossible for the holder to spend this money in availing himself of any of the resources of the Military Intervention.

Dozens of times I have seen Russian soldiers tear up this old money with which they had been paid and throw it on the floor in anger, because they could buy nothing with it.

Yet the old money stayed in circulation. When eighty was reached no attempt was made to press the process of depreciation any further. Old "Nicolai" paper had gone out of circulation, and in the early days of August the peasants generally were preferring old roubles at eighty to new ones at forty. And there was a very general feeling among the Russian people that the Military Intervention had taken all that value out of their old roubles and in some mysterious way put it into its own pocket.

*XVIII*

*PROPAGANDA*

The Bolsheviki are adepts at propaganda. They try to understand the point of view, the prejudices, the situations, of those to whom they appeal, and their propaganda is essentially sympathetic, tries to find a common ground, attempts to enter openings. They believe in propaganda. I have thought sometimes that they believe much more firmly in propaganda than in guns. They bombarded us constantly with leaflets in Russian and leaflets in English. We found them tacked up on trees in front of our lines every morning, and no one who went out to get them was ever shot at. We were forbidden to read this literature. All copies were to be taken unread to the "Information" office. As it came floating down the river on little rafts marked humorously "H.M.S. Thunderer," "H.M.S. Terrible," etc., we were warned that these were likely to be mine-traps. But they never were. We got them all. We read all the propaganda. It was interesting even when unconvincing. Having learned the names of some of our officers they sent personal messages across the lines. These made a great hit with our soldiers.

Throughout the campaign we often got better news information from the Bolshevik propaganda than from the British propaganda, which came daily by wireless but which published almost nothing of political value. The Bolsheviki watched the Peace Congress very closely, and while their reports lacked fairness as much as those of the British lacked frankness, we were very glad to get them for the facts they gave us.

[Illustration: Canadian soldiers with two captives, having changed caps. Bringing Bolsheviki prisoners into Malobereznik.]