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 feted 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 cooeperative 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 DEBACLE*
And so, there being nothing else possible, the debacle 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.]
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 communique 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.