prized than the English or French. The Russian gave him great rolls of
roubles of various sorts for his greenbacks. Then he took the good
money on the ships in the harbor and bought, usually through a sailor,
boxes of candy and cartons of cigarettes and,—whisper this, bottles and
cases of whiskey of which thousands of cases found their way to
Archangel. The Russian then went out into the ill-controlled markets
and side streets of Archangel and sold to his own countrymen these
luxuries at prices that would make an American sugar profiteer or
bootlegger seem a piker. Meanwhile the Yank or Tommie or Poilu went to
his own commissary or to the British Navy and Army Canteen Bureau, “N.
A. C. B.” to the doughboy’s memory, or to our various “Y” canteens and
at a fixed rate of exchange—a rate fixed by the bankers in London—to
use his roubles in buying things. He could also use the roubles in
buying furs and skins of the Russians who still had the same saved from
the looting Bolsheviki. At the rate first established, an English pound
sterling was exchangeable for forty-eight roubles and vice versa. But
on the illicit market, the pound would bring anywhere from eighty to
one hundred and forty roubles. The American five dollar bill which was
approximately worth fifty roubles in this “pegged” rouble money on the
market when an American ship was in the harbor, would bring one hundred
to one hundred and fifty roubles. No wonder the doughboy who was
stationed around Archangel or Bakaritza found it possible to stretch
his money a good way. Many a dollar of company fund was made to buy
twice as much or more than it otherwise would have bought. And in
passing, let it be remarked that the Yank who had access to N. A. C. B.
and other canteen stores was not slow in joining the thrifty Russki in
this trafficking game, illicit though it was. And truth to tell, many a
case of British whiskey was stolen by Yank and Tommie and Russki and
Poilu and sent rejoicing on its way through these devious underground
channels of traffic. One American officer in responsible position had
to suffer for it when he returned to the States. The doughboys and
medics and engineers who were up there are still filled with mixed
emotions on the subject, a mixture of indignation and admiration.
“Let him now who is guiltless throw the first stone.”
Returning to the discussion of currency, let it be recorded that after
the market was flooded with all sorts of money and after the ships
stopped coming because of the great ice barrier, the money market
became wilder than ever. Finally the London bankers who had been the
victims of this speculation, decided upon a new issue of pegged
currency. At forty to the pound the old roubles were called in. That
is, every soldier who had forty-eight roubles could exchange them for
forty new crisp and pretty roubles. Their beauty was marred by the
rubber stamp which was put over the sign of old Nicholas’ rule, which
the thoughtless or tactless London money maker printed on the issue.
The Russian would have none of this new money with that suggestion of
restoration of Czar rule. Inconsistently enough they still prized the
old Nickolai rouble notes as the very best paper currency in the land,
and loud was the outcry at giving forty-eight Nickolais for forty
English-printed and guaranteed roubles of their own new Archangel
government.
To stimulate the retirement of all other forms of currency, which
measure in a settled country would have been a sensible economic
pressure, the Archangel government set a date when not forty-eight but
fifty-six roubles might be exchanged for forty new roubles. Then a date
for sixty-four, then for seventy-two and then eighty. Thus the
skeptical peasant and the suspicious soldier saw his old roubles
steadily decline in exchange value for the new roubles. Of course they
had always grabbed all the counterfeit stuff and used it in exchange
with no compunctions. That was the winning part of the game. Now they
were pinched. It afforded some merriment to hear the outcries of some
who had been making rolls of money in the trafficking.
At the same time there was real suffering on the part of peasants in
far distant areas who could not get their currency up for exchange or
for stamping and punching which itself was finally necessary to even
get the eighty-forty rate. They felt mistreated. To their simple hearts
and ignorant minds, it was nothing short of robbery by the distant
London bankers. Soldiers on the far distant fronts were caught also in
the currency reform. Some of the fault was neglect by their own
American officers and some was indifference to the subject by those
American officers at Archangel who were in position to know what was
going to be the result of the attempt to peg the currency at a fixed
rate.
An officer who was in Archangel during the summer on Graves Commission
service after the American units had been withdrawn, reports that
speculators for a song bought up great bales of the old Kerensky and
Nickolai currency supposed to be cancelled, dead, defunct stuff, and
when there was a considerable evacuation of central Russians who had
been for months refugees in Archangel, this currency came out of
hiding, and its traffickers realized a handsome profiteerski by selling
it to the returning people at sixty to the pound sterling, for in
interior Russia the old stuff was still in circulation. At any rate
that was Shylokov’s advertisement. During the summer, the money market,
says Lieut. Primm, became a violent wonder. On one day a person could
not obtain two hundred and fifty roubles for one hundred North Russian
roubles and a day or two later he might be importuned to take three
hundred old for one hundred new.
Neither the soldiers nor the Russians saw any justice in this
flip-flopping of the currency market, to which of course they
themselves were contributors. The thing they saw clearly was that when
they had need of English credit (that is, checks) to send money to
London banks or when they wanted to buy goods from England or America,
then they could buy only with the new, the guaranteed rouble, which
might be dear, even at one hundred and twenty-five to the pound
sterling and was dearer of course in terms of old roubles, the more the
demand was for the new roubles which were in the hands of speculators
who manipulated the market as sweetly for themselves as the American
profiteers with their oral and written advertisements manipulate our
foodstuffs and goods for us. On the other hand, if the soldier or
peasant or small merchant had dues coming to him in English money he
then found them valued at forty to the pound sterling. This difference
between eighty and one hundred and twenty-five he thought (naturally
enough to his unsophisticated mind) was due to the vacillation in
policy of enforcement of the pegged rate and prosecution of the
traffickers.
However opinion may differ as to the blame for the inability to peg the
exchange, we know it was a bonanza to the speculators. Ponzi ought to
have been there to compete with the whiskered money sharks. And we know
there were Americans as well as British, French, Russians and other
nationals who were numbered among those speculators.
After all is said we must admit that the money situation was one that
was exceedingly difficult to handle. It was infinitely worse in
Bolshevikdom. The doughboy who used to find pads of undetached
counterfeit Kerenskie on the dead Bolsheviks, can well believe that
thirty dollars of good American chink one day in the Soviet part of
Russia bought an American newspaper man one million paper roubles of
the Lenine-Trotsky issue, and that before night, spending his money at
the famine prices in the worthless paper, he was a dead-broke
millionaire.
During the time American soldiers were in Russia they were paid in
checks drawn on London. During the war, this was at the pegged rate
($4.76-1/4) which had been fixed by agreement between London and New
York bankers to prevent violent fluctuations. But at the end of the
war, after the Armistice, the peg was pulled and the natural course of
the market sent the pound sterling steadily downward, as the American
dollar rose in value as compared with other currencies of the world. To
those who were dealing day by day this was all in the game of money
exchange. But to the soldier in far-off North Russia who had months of
pay coming to him when he left the forests of the Vaga and Onega this
was a real financial hardship. Many a doughboy whose wife or mother was
in need at home because of the rapidly mounting prices put up by the
slackers in the shops and the slackers in the marts of trade, now saw
his little pay check shrink up in exchange value. He felt that his
superior officers in the war department had hardly looked after his
interests as well as they might have done. Major Nichols did succeed at
Brest in getting the old pegged rate for the men and officers, but many
had already parted with the checks at heavy discount for fear that the
nearer they got to the land for which they had been fighting, the more
discount there would be on the pay checks with which their
Quartermaster had paid them their pittances. Soldiers of the second
detachment came on home with Colonel Stewart to Camp Custer and were
obliged (most of them) to take their little $3.82 per pound sterling of
the British pound sterling paid them by Quartermaster Major Ely in
North Russia, at $4.76-1/4. Later, through the efforts of the late
Congressman Nichols, many of those soldiers were reimbursed. Of course
complete restitution would have been made by the war department if all
the soldiers had sent their claims in. Hundreds of American veterans of
the North Russian campaign lost ten to twenty per cent of their pay
check’s hard earned value.
XXIX
PROPAGANDA AND PROPAGANDA AND—
Propaganda Two-Edged Tool—From Crusaders To Carping Cynics—Be
Warned—Afraid To Tell The Truth—Startling Stories Of Bolo Atrocities
Published—Distortion Disgusts Brave Men—Wrong To Play On Race
Prejudices—Our Own Government Missed Main Chance—Doughboy Beset By
Active Enemy In Front And Plagued By Active Propaganda Of Hybrid
Varieties—Sample Of Bolshevik Propaganda Used On Americans—Yanks
Punched Holes In Red Propaganda—Propaganda To Doughboy Connotes Lies
And Distortion And Concealment Of Truth.
“Over there, over there, the Yanks are coming,” sang the soldiers in
training camp as they changed from recruits into fighting units of the
85th Division at Battle Creek. And the morale of the 339th was
evidenced, some thought, by the fervor with which the officers and men
roared out their hate chorus, “Keep your head down, you dirty Hun. If
you want to see your father in your Fatherland, Keep your head down,
you dirty Hun.” Maybe so, maybe not. Maybe morale is made of finer
stuff than hate and bombast. Maybe idealism does enter into it. Of
course there are reactionary periods in the history of a people when
selfishness and narrowness and bigotry combine to cry down the
expression of its idealism. Not in 1918.
No secret was made of the fact that the Americans went into the war
with a fervor born of an aroused feeling of world-responsibility. We
must do our part to save Christian civilization from the mad
nationalism of the German people led by their diabolic Hohenzollern
reigning family and war bureaucracy. Too much kultur would ruin the
world. Germany must be whipped. We tingled with anticipation of our
entrance to the trenches beside the bled-white France. We were going
“Over There” in the spirit of crusaders.
What transformed a hesitating, reluctant, long-suffering people into
crusaders? Propaganda. Press work. Five-minute men. Open and secret
work. It was necessary to uncover and oppose the open and secret
propaganda of paid agents of Germany, and woefully deluded
German-Americans who toiled freely to help Kaiser Bill, as though to
disprove the wisdom of the statement that no man can serve two masters.
We beat their propaganda, uncovered the tracks of the Prussian beast in
our midst, found out, we thought, the meaning of explosions and fires
and other terrible accidents in our munition plants, and turned every
community into vigilant searchers for evidences of German propaganda or
deviltry of a destructive kind and we persecuted many an innocent man.
And now we sadly suspect that in fighting fire with fire, that is in
fighting propaganda with propaganda, we descended by degrees to use the
same despicable methods of distorting truth for the sake of influencing
people to a certain desired end. England and France and all other
countries had the same sad experience. Doubtless we could not very well
avoid it. It is part of the hell of war to think about it now.
Propaganda, fair one, you often turn out to be a dissipated hag, a camp
follower.
Many years from now some calm historian going over the various Blue
Books and White Books and Red Books, with their stories of the
atrocities of the enemy, _ad nauseam_, will come upon the criminating
Official Documents of various nations that sought to propagandize the
world into trembling, cowering belief in a new dragon. Bolshevism with
wide-spread sable wings, thrashing his spiny tail and snorting fire
from his nostrils was volplaning upon the people of earth with open red
mouth and cruel fangs and horrid maw down which he would gulp all the
political, economic and religious liberties won from the centuries
past. The dragon was about to devour civilization.
And the historian will shake his head sadly and say, “Too bad they fell
for all that propaganda. Poor Germans. Poor Britishers. Poor Frenchmen.
Poor Russians. Poor Americans. Too bad. What a mess that propaganda
was. Propaganda and propaganda and—well, there are three kinds of
propaganda just as there are three kinds of lies; lies and lies and d—-
lies.”
In this volume we are historically interested in the propaganda as it
was presented and as it affected us in the campaign fighting the
Bolsheviki in North Russia in 1918-19. We write this chapter with great
hesitation and with consciousness that it is subject to error in
investigation and sifting of evidences and subject to error of bias on
the part of the writer. However, no attempt has been made to compel the
parts of this volume to be consistent with one another. Facts have been
stated and comments have been written as they occurred to the writers.
If they were forced to be consistent with one another it would be using
the method of the propagandizer. We prefer to appear inconsistent and
possibly illogical rather than to hold back or frame anything to suit
the general prejudices of the readers. Take this chapter then with fair
warning.
Keenly disappointed we were to be told in England that we were not to
join our American comrades who were starting “Fritz” backward in
Northern France. We were to go to Archangel for guard duty. The expert
propagandists in England were busy at once working upon the American
soldiers going to North Russia. The bare truth of the matter would not
be sufficient. Oh no! All the truth must not be told at once either.
It’s not done, you know. Certainly not. Soldiers and the soldiers’
government might ask questions. British War Office experts must hand
out the news to feed the troops. And they did.
Guard duty in Archangel, as we have seen, speedily became a fall
offensive campaign under British military command. And right from the
jump off at the Bolshevik rearguard forces, British propaganda began
coming out. Does anyone recall a general order that came out from our
American Commanding officer of the Expedition? Is there a veteran of
the American Expeditionary force in North Russia who does not recall
having read or hearing published the general orders of the British G.
H. Q. referring to the objects of the expedition and to the character
of the enemy, the Bolsheviki?
“The enemy. Bolsheviks. These are soldiers and sailors who, in the
majority of cases are criminals,” says General Poole’s published order,
“Their natural, vicious brutality enabled them to assume leadership.
The Bolshevik is now fighting desperately, firstly, because the
restoration of law and order means an end to his reign, and secondly,
because he sees a rope round his neck for his past misdeeds if he is
caught. Germans. The Bolsheviks have no capacity for organization but
this is supplied by Germany and her lesser Allies. The Germans usually
appear in Russian uniform and are impossible to distinguish.” Why was
that last sentence added? Sure enough we did not distinguish them, not
enough to justify the propaganda.
Immediately upon arrival of the Americans in the Archangel area they
had found the French soldiers wildly aflame with the idea that a man
captured by the Bolsheviks was bound to suffer torture and mutilation.
And one wicked day when the Reds were left in possession of the field
the French soldiers came back reporting that they had mercifully put
their mortally wounded men, those whom they could not carry away, out
of danger of torture by the Red Guards by themselves ending their
ebbing lives. Charge that sad episode up to propaganda. To be sure, we
know that there were evidences in a few cases, of mutilation of our own
American dead. But it was not one-tenth as prevalent a practice by the
Bolos as charged, and as they became more disciplined, their warfare
took on a character which will bear safe comparison with our own.
The writer remembers the sense of shame that seized him as he
reluctantly read a general order to his troops, a British piece of
propaganda, that recited gruesome atrocities by the Bolsheviks, a
recital that was supposed to make the American soldiers both fear and
hate the enemy. Brave men do not need to be fed such stuff. Distortion
of facts only disgusts the man when he finally becomes undeceived.
“There seems to be among the troops a very indistinct idea of what we
are fighting for here in North Russia.” This is the opening statement
of another one of General Poole’s pieces of propaganda. “This can be
explained in a very few words. We are up against Bolshevism, which
means anarchy pure and simple.” Yet in another statement he said: “The
Bolshevik government is entirely in the hands of Germans who have
backed this party against all others in Russia owing to the simplicity
of maintaining anarchy in a totally disorganized country. Therefore we
are opposed to the Bolshevik-cum-German party. In regard to other
parties we express no criticism and will accept them as we find them
provided they are for Russia and therefore for ‘out with the Boche.’
Briefly we do not meddle in internal affairs. It must be realized that
we are not invaders but guests and that we have not any intention of
attempting to occupy any Russian territory.”
That was not enough. Distortion must be added. “The power is in the
hands of a few men, mostly Jews” (an appeal to race hatred), “who have
succeeded in bringing the country to such a state that order is
non-existent. The posts and railways do not run properly, every man who
wants something that some one else has got, just kills his opponent
only to be killed himself when the next man comes along. Human life is
not safe, you can buy justice at so much for each object. Prices of
necessities have so risen that nothing is procurable. In fact the man
with a gun is cock of the walk provided he does not meet another man
who is a better shot.”
Was not that fine stuff? Of course there were elements of truth in it.
It would not have been propaganda unless it had some. But its falsities
of statement became known later and the soldiers bitterly resented the
attempt to propagandize them.
The effect of this line of propaganda was at last made the subject of
an informal protest by Major J. Brooks Nichols, one of our most
influential and level-headed American officers, in a letter to General
Ironside, whose sympathetic letter of reply did credit to his respect
for other brave men and credit to his judgment. He ordered that the
propaganda should not be further circulated among the American
soldiers. It must be admitted that the French soldiers also suffered
revulsion of feeling when the facts became better known. The British
War Office methods of stimulating enthusiasm in the campaign against
the Bolsheviki was a miserable failure. Distortion and deception will
fail in the end. You can’t fool all the soldiers all the while. Truth
will always win in the end. The soldier has right to it. He fights for
truth; he should have its help.
Our own military and government authorities missed the main chance to
help the soldiers in North Russia and gain their most loyal service in
the expedition. Truth, not silence with its suspected acquiescence with
British propaganda and methods of dealing with Russians; truth not
rumors, truth, was needed; not vague promises, but truth.
In transmitting to us the Thanksgiving Day Proclamation, our American
diplomatic representative in North Russia, Mr. Dewitt Poole, published
to the troops the following: “But so great a struggle cannot end so
abruptly. In the West the work of occupying German territory continues.
In the East German intrigue has delivered large portions of Russia into
unfriendly and undemocratic hands. The President has given our pledge
of friendship to Russia and will point the way to its fulfillment.
Confident in his leadership the American troops and officials in
Northern Russia will hold to their task to the end.” This was a
statement made by our American Charge d’ Affairs after the Armistice,
it will be noted.
The New Year’s editorial in _The Sentinel_, our weekly paper, says, in
part: “We who are here in North Russia constitute concrete evidence
that there is something real and vital behind the words of President
Wilson and other allied statesmen who have pledged that ‘we shall stand
by Russia.’ Few of us, particularly few Americans, realize the debt
which the whole world owes to Russia for her part in this four years
struggle against German junkerism. Few of us now realize the
significance that will accrue as the years go by to the presence of
allied soldiers in Russia during this period of her greatest suffering.
The battle for world peace, for democracy, for free representative
government, has not yet been fought to a finish in Russia.”
With the sentiment of those two expressions, the American soldier might
well be in accord. But he was dubious about the fighting; he was
learning things about the Bolsheviks; he was hoping for statement of
purposes by his government. But as the weeks dragged by he did not get
the truth from his own government. Neither from Colonel Stewart,
military head of the expedition, nor from the diplomatic and other
United States’ agencies who were in Archangel, did he get satisfying
facts. They allowed him to be propagandized, instead, both by the
British press and news despatches and by the American press and
political partisanships of various shades of color that came freely
into North Russia to plague the already over-propagandized soldier.
Of the Bolshevik propaganda mention has been made in one or two other
connections. We may add that the Bolos must have known something of our
unwarlike and dissatisfied state of mind, for they left bundles of
propaganda along the patrol paths, some of it in undecipherable
characters of the Russian alphabet; but there was a publication in
English, _The Call_, composed in Moscow by a Bolshevik from Milwaukee
or Seattle or some other well known Soviet center on the home shore of
the Atlantic.
These are some of the extracts. The reader may judge for himself:
“Do you British working-men know what your capitalists expect you to do
about the war? They expect you to go home and pay in taxes figured into
the price of your food and clothing, eight thousand millions of English
pounds or forty thousand millions of American dollars. If you have any
manhood, don’t you think it would be fair to call all these debts off?
If you think this is fair, then join the Russian Bolsheviks in
repudiating all war debts.
“Do you realize that the principle reason the British-American
financiers have sent you to fight us for, is because we were sensible
enough to repudiate the war debts of the bloody, corrupt old Czar?