Surely the artist when he drew this was endowed with the wisdom of the
seer, the vision of the prophet. For it was drawn before the days in
which I write, before the Russian giant had proved his greatness on
the body of the Turk, before the bludgeon-strokes in the Caucasus, the
heart-thrust of Erzerum, the torrent of pursuit of the broken Turks to
Mush and Trebizond.
We know--and I am grateful for the chance to voice our gratitude to
him--the greatness of our Russian Ally. We remember the early days when
the Kaiser’s hosts were pouring in over France, and the Russian thrust
into Galicia drew some of the overwhelming weight from the Western
Front. We realise now the nobility of self-sacrifice that flung an army
within reach of the jaws of destruction, that risked its annihilation
to draw upon itself some of the sword-strokes that threatened to
pierce to the heart of the West. Our national and natural instinct
of admiration for a hard fighter, and still greater admiration for
the apex of good sportsmanship, for the friend or foe who can “take a
licking,” who is a “good loser,” went out even more strongly to Russia
in the dark days when, faced by an overwhelming weight of metal, she
was forced and hammered and battered back, losing battle-line after
battle-line, stronghold after stronghold, city after city; losing
everything except heart and dogged punishment-enduring courage.
And how great the Russian truly is will surely be known presently to
the Turk and to the masquerading false “Prophet of Allah.”
“No one is great save Allah,” says William, and even as the Turk spoke
more truly than he knew in calling the Russian great, even as he was
bitterly to realise the greatness, so in the fullness of time must
William come to realise how great is the Allah of the Moslem, the
Christian God Whom he has blasphemed, and in Whose name he and his
people have perpetrated so many crimes and abominations.