Part 5

Of course they attacked Mr. Wilson bitterly, violently, unfairly, but with enough basis of truth and fact to make their attacks effective. And their propaganda reached its goal. A limited amount was printed in English for the Allied troops. A greater amount was printed in Russian for Russian troops and Russian civilians, who as well as the troops devoured it with avidity. They were at first prejudiced against everything Bolshevist, but there was no reliable news. They knew the British were feeding them on watered milk, and this made them turn to the Bolshevik newspapers. I have been surprised to find that these newspapers were read and quoted everywhere. It was not so at first, but in July it was literally so.

In May I had only the preliminary publication of the Terms and the Covenant that had appeared in the London _Times_ of February twenty-first. I essayed to address an audience of English-speaking soldiers on the work of the Peace Congress, full of optimistic enthusiasm. After the meeting a Russian friend told me quietly that he knew I was wrong, that I was doomed to disappointment, that he had later news than I had, and finally he very secretly produced the Bolshevik papers. Of course I did not have to believe all these papers said. It wasn't all true. But I found the Russians were believing much of it. President Wilson was not having his way in the Peace Congress. He had surrendered open diplomacy and would have to surrender more, perhaps much more. He lacked the support of the American Senate, and he was hopelessly out-voted at Versailles. And there was Clemenceau. Russia knows Clemenceau. And the League of Nations would be born without teeth.

As a matter of fact these Russians through the Bolsheviki had the latest gossip on the peace parleys and their interest in the subject was very keen. They hate the Germans, but their eyes were fixed not on that hatred, but on an ideal, a hope. And now they were being disillusioned, let down. It had remained for Bolshevist propaganda to tell them that their dream was not coming true.

And British propaganda! The Bolsheviki might well have paid the bill, and it was a substantial one. The great themes about which this propaganda was built were:

The Size of the British Empire,

The Strength of the British Navy,

The Growth of the British Army since 1914,

The British Empire at War,

The Charitableness of British Royalty,

and latterly the severity of terms demanded of Germany. Great piles of sheets of old war pictures with Russian captions were scattered broadcast upon a war-bored population, and Russian editions of a transparently over-censored news communiqué which told who dined with the King, who got the Order of the Garter, who was responsible for the great war, how bad the Bolsheviki are, and how the great international game of cricket is getting on.

In this fashion did we undertake by our "Allied Bureau of Public Information" to bring Russia into the family of nations!

Not one word of the vital truth--the growing truth in these growing days--for which Russia is hungry. Not a spark of recognition for the intellectual heroism of these people whose fight for truth and freedom has only been begun. No belief in the manliness of these "children" who were to be taught. No faith in national ideals that were different from our own.

An educated Russian once said to me, holding a copy of "The British Empire at War" in his hand: "I believe that every Russian family knows more about war than whole cities of Englishmen." And I have seen a Russian peasant look at the same publication, shake his head and say: "English ne dobra."

A Russian Y.M.C.A. Secretary said to me once: "The English propaganda is making Bolos every day."

In August a squad of Americans came to Archangel from France with instructions to disinter the bodies of the 260 Americans buried in North Russia and take them to the military cemeteries in France or America for re-burial. Many of these bodies were in territory held by the Bolsheviki and the lieutenant in charge of this work asked permission of the British command at Archangel to enter into negotiations with the Bolshevik command for permission to get those bodies. Nobody doubted that this permission, would be granted by the Bolsheviki, but the negotiations were forbidden by the British, as it would be bad policy to let the Bolsheviki show us courtesies. They must remain outlaws. They must not be permitted to state their case to Americans who would tell the Russians. Americans must not see with their own eyes that the tales of Bolshevik atrocities in Shenkursk and Shagavari were untrue. The Bolsheviki must remain as black as they had been painted, so the American bodies must remain in their Russian graves.

In July two American Y.M.C.A. secretaries were captured by the Bolsheviki on the Onega front. Two others had been captured previously to this and had been released by way of Stockholm, and had reported good treatment. With these taken in July the Bolsheviki had taken also a number of British soldiers, some army supplies, and some Y.M.C.A. supplies. One of the secretaries had considerable money on his person belonging to the Y.M.C.A. He was given permission to go to Archangel on parole to take this money to "Y" headquarters, and he was given by the Bolshevik command two messages. One was to negotiate the purchase of the "Y" supplies captured, as the Bolsheviki did not consider these things war booty and wished to pay for them. The other was a message to the people of Archangel assuring them that when the Bolsheviki should take their city there would be no reprisals but full political amnesty. When this paroled American prisoner reached our lines he was taken to British headquarters and there told that he could not go to Archangel on any such mission. He appealed by telephone to the American Embassy and arrangements were made for him to go to Archangel, virtually under arrest. At British headquarters in Archangel he was ordered not to make known any of the Bolshevist messages and an attempt was made to induce him to break his parole. When he told of kindly treatment by the Bolsheviki he was angrily denounced as a Bolshevik propagandist. He returned to the front and re-crossed the line according to the terms of his parole. These prisoners were sent to Moscow. They were not under arrest nor restraint, nor were the British Tommies whom the Bolsheviki held there as prisoners of war. These two men left Moscow September fifth for home by way of Vologda and Archangel. They saw nothing of the atrocities we read so much about, nor of the nationalization of women, nor the separation of children from parents by state decree, nor the other barbarities the British-American news factories give us so much to read about.

*XIX*

*CONCERNING MILITARY INTERVENTION*

During the first half of 1918 there was considerable discussion in America of the proposed military intervention in Russia. Mr. Roosevelt favored it--insisted upon it. Mr. Wilson was understood to be opposed to it, this understanding resting on the general interpretation of his utterances. The debate, widespread, was before the fact. Now that the fact is accomplished we may well look into the results.

The weak fashion in which we went into the enterprise has given rise to the theory in some quarters that it will be claimed that we did not go into it at all. If an armistice had been declared in Russia on November 11, or if America had then notified the Bolsheviki that we had no military motives there, the affair could well have been charged up to the war with Germany, and we might well claim that we had had no serious intention of interfering in the affairs of Russia. But the armistice did not even think of Russia. We were fighting a separate war there. We in Russia were not even notified officially that there was an armistice. We heard about it, and wondered where we came in. It was after November 11 that most of our fighting took place and most of our casualties were suffered. Not until March were we promised that we should be taken home in the spring, and then no intimation was given us that America was to withdraw. Rumors were industriously circulated giving the impression that other Americans were on their way to take our places, and not until our men were actually away did our "information" permit us to realize that America had withdrawn from the expedition.

We intervened. We undertook to crush Bolshevism in Russia. We sent a military and naval expedition there. We organized a civil war there. It was unsuccessful. America lost a few men, England more, Russia many more. How much more Russia suffered is not yet written. America withdrew her troops. France, Serbia, Italy withdrew theirs. England reluctantly withdraws hers.

Let us consider what this expedition meant to our own men. They were only a few thousand men, to be sure, and their little event was so much smaller than the big thing in France that it was naturally even necessarily overlooked. Because I was with them, however, I know that it was a big thing their government made them do. The men in France had faith in their cause. The men in Russia had none. Over and over again our men in Russia have argued with me that while we were fighting for freedom in France we were fighting to kill it in Russia. Some said we were fighting for the capitalists of England and France, others declared that the Bolsheviki were more right than wrong, and everybody felt that our government had made a great mistake and that a life lost there was a life worse than thrown away. In this frame of mind American boys went through all the dangers and privations and sufferings of a difficult all-winter campaign and some of them went to their last battles. Statistically it is a little thing, if you must measure everything by statistics, but I have been made to feel how terribly great a thing was the death of one man who as I held his hand cursed the fate that made him die in a fight for which he had no heart.

It was a high degree of sportsmanship that enabled these men to see it through. If Mr. Wilson told his colleagues at Paris that "if" American troops were sent to Russia they would mutiny he might have based his opinion on information as to what American troops in Russia had already said on that particular subject.

It is difficult to imagine a more unmoral situation than that of an army fighting without a sense of unction and against its sense of right, but this is what military intervention in Russia imposed on a small army of Americans.

I can testify of my personal knowledge that this was equally true of Canadian and British soldiers. I have heard that it was true of the French, the Italians, and the Serbians.

These men are all home now with their grievance. Few of them are proud of the expedition, or glad they had a part in it, or grateful to their country for its support, or willing to go again. Military intervention has been a tragedy in their lives and was an injustice to them such as no government may with impunity impose on its citizens.

We may not easily estimate the harm that military intervention has done in the lowering of our standards of national rights and in devitalizing our ideals of international relations. The precedent that has been established, however, is most unfortunate and may in the future be used to strengthen the hands of some one who may be trying to lead us into a more serious error of the same sort. I must, moreover, say that this enterprise has done considerable harm to the most important friendship in the world--that of England and America--as far as so great a thing could be affected by the few thousands of men who were directly engaged in the expedition. Our governments do not know about this, of course, but the men know. No thoughtful person could hear these men of either nation talk about the other nation without seeing the awfulness of the thing that has been done. It is not at all similar to the attitude of the soldier who knew the British in France, nor to his disillusionment about the French. It is very much worse. It is enmity. And it is clear to me that it is directly due to the fact that our men had to fight in a bad cause, with unwilling minds, beclouded consciences, and rebellious hearts.

Again I do not know how much our participation in this affair has vitiated the faith of small nations in our disinterested friendship for the weak. We may hope that the nations of South America have not taken the Russian campaign to heart as seriously as have the small nations of Europe. Whatever result our military intervention in Russia has had upon this faith, however, those of us who have been in Russia know that it has had a profound effect upon the Russian people. We have not destroyed their faith in us. One mistake could not do that. But we have disillusioned many of them concerning the soundness of our judgment if not the purity of our motives, and they will hereafter, I think, look carefully into our alliances before trusting themselves utterly to our guidance.

Having got into a bad job the governments found it expedient to suppress news, to manipulate news, and even to manufacture a little.

Whether we have actually prolonged Lenin's tenure of office and Trotsky's reign in power we cannot of course know. But this is quite conceivable, and they are still in office and in power two years after the November revolution. We know that the armed barrier that we have built around them and forced them to build in front of us has prevented us from reaching them with any of the more convincing proofs of our "friendly purpose" than the shrapnel and h.e. we have managed to get over into their lines. The business men and educators and engineers and uplifters that we were going to send have had to wait while we undertook to settle Russian turmoil by making more turmoil.

We organized civil war in Russia. The Russians were not fighting the Bolsheviki--not our way. They did not want to fight them--in our way. We made them. We conscripted them to fight for their own freedom. It was difficult, but we had our army there and the army made the peasant patriotic--our way.

The Russian hates conscription; but what were we to do? If he wouldn't fight voluntarily he was a damned Bolshevik and must be made to. And so, as ever, one thing leads to another--especially when we are not quite clear that the one thing is a right thing. The conscripted Russians who rebelled against us and went over to the Bolsheviki were of course a small proportion of the whole. All sorts of mixed motives and confused judgments and conflicting loyalties entered into the situation, but one thing clearly emerged. This was civil war. Every man's hand is set against his neighbor. And now as we confess the futility of our intervention and evacuate, the evil harvest is to be reaped. No peasant can escape it. No woman or child can escape it. Suspicion, recrimination, tale-bearing, jealousy, hatred of Russian for Russian is the harvest our intervention has left behind it.

*XX*

*CONCERNING RUSSIAN PEASANTS*

The peasants of North Russia are generally supposed to be the poorest and least progressive class of Russians, living in the poorest and least desirable part of the country. I think that if this is true the interest which all Russia holds for Americans can hardly be exaggerated.

The people of North Russia are peasants. The professional and trading classes are negligible--perhaps smaller than anywhere else in the white world. The towns are small and few and even the towns are peopled largely by peasants.

North Russia, humanly speaking, consists of long tortuous arteries of life called rivers. The banks of these rivers are thickly, almost densely, populated. Villages of from twenty to a hundred houses are strung along so continuously and here and there clustered about a great church so thickly that you wonder where there is land for all these people to cultivate. Never, however, do you find an isolated settler. If it is a forest nobody lives there. You find a village or nobody.

There can be no more hospitable people anywhere in the world than these Russian people are. Their doors are never closed against strangers, and with unfailing courtesy they offer the best they have. I have traveled nearly a thousand versts by sled over this northern country and stopped every six hours at a private house for a samovar and perhaps a bed. To have the best the house afforded given me once or twice and pay refused would not have impressed me so much, but to have uniform hospitality extended me as though it were my right and to have this done without consciousness of virtue made me feel that the world's championship in hospitality abides with the people of this bleak and inhospitable country.

[Illustration: The women work in the fields with the men. Russians love their homes and their villages devotedly.]

They get their living from the soil in a very short season, and this is possible only because the summer day is twenty-four hours long. This means that in the short growing season the crops grow very rapidly, and it also means that all the work has to be done in that limited time. If the crops grow twenty-four or twenty-two or twenty hours, then the peasant must work the harder. The wife and mother and children must also work. Most of the farm work is done by each family for itself, but some of it is done by the whole village co-operatively. I spent a half-day working in a hayfield with peasants from Konetsgory who were eight versts from home. There were seventy-five of them, men, women, and children, and they stayed in that field five days and nights until the great stacks were finished. The hay was community property to which each family had a right in proportion to the number in the family. I noticed that they ate by families while at this work, the food being strictly private property. And I saw Mrs. "Smith" give Mrs. "Jones" some of her fresh cake, and other little private property courtesies. I asked if the families at Konetsgory not represented by workers in the field would have a right to any of the hay. Of course they would, because they were doing other work as directed by the staroster.

The staroster is a public official chosen by a meeting of the peasants whose duty it is to assess labor for any public or co-operative purpose. His assessments are compulsory upon men, women, children, and horses. With most of the men in the army, as is now and has been the case for so long, his chief labor resource of course is women. When there are exceptions to his authority such as doctors and school teachers, these persons do not count in the distributions of the co-operative products.

In all distributions of land and products now women are counted. This is a result of the revolution and has been brought about not because it was legislated but as a spontaneous product of the common sense of right. When Russia does have an election, as we must hope some day she will, these peasant people all assume as a matter of course that women will vote.

Americans do not need to be told how backward Russia is in the matter of machinery and especially agricultural machinery. But I gave myself a surprise one day by going to every house in a small village and finding in every house but one a one-horse cast-steel modern plow. I found also some very good harrows and a few hand-wheel sewing machines, but practically nothing else that could be called modern. I have since seen two mowing machines and one hay-rake. The absence of machinery here is practically as universal as it has been represented. There is no prejudice against it and the people are not ignorant of it. They want it, and they have plenty of money to buy it with, but it is not here to buy, and the money has uncertain value.

There is so much printed matter in America proving eighty-five per cent illiteracy among the Russian people that I approach this subject timidly. I cannot find the eighty-five per cent. I have yet to find one child ten years of age who cannot read and write, and the subject is of such interest to me that I always inquired about it. I found some old peasants who could not and some who could but sensitively would not write their names for me. I had Russian soldiers line up by hundreds to sign their names in a register and not a man would fail to write his own. I had peasants tell me that they knew how to read and write when they were children but had forgotten it since. I have no statistics on the subject, but it would be interesting to have the statisticians go up the Dvina River looking for the eighty-five per cent. In almost every village the best house is the schoolhouse. When it is not the best it is still a very good house. Among hundreds of villages there is not one of twenty houses or more that does not maintain a school eight months of the year.

Russia has but one church. I met a few dissentients--evangelicals and atheists--but the dissent is not organized and there is very little propaganda of reform. The Bolsheviki at first prohibited the church as an evil thing. Many of the un-Bolshevik Russians have dropped the church as a useless thing. But nobody seems to have undertaken to reform the church. And yet one of the greatest reforms in ecclesiastical history is taking place. In a moment and without warning the physical and militant props dropped out from under this institution and it had to stand alone or sink. Some of it did sink. Some of it was scuttled by the Bolsheviki. Then came the aftermath--the afterthought of the people. They missed something. They had not entirely outgrown the church. They had hated its arrogance and exactions, but they still believed what it had taught them and felt its spell. Now that they were free from it they voluntarily returned to it. But it is with a new attitude. These Russians go to church now looking for something that they hardly find. And the priest's only resources now are spiritual--superstition, art, inspiration, service, truth--perhaps he will make use of all in the struggle for existence.