The entire aspect of the war was changed by the Russian Revolution,
followed by the collapse of the Russian armies and the Peace of
Brest-Litovsk, when for the first time the world heard the strange word
“Bolshevism,” and knew not what it meant.
The Russian armies had fought bravely in the first years of the war,
with an Oriental disregard of death. Under generals in German pay,
betrayed by a widespread net of anarchy and corruption so villainous
that arms and armaments sent out from England had to be bribed on their
way from one official to another, and never reached the front, so
foul in callousness of human life that soldiers were put into the
fighting-line without rifle or ammunition, these Russian peasants
flung themselves not once, but many times, against the finest troops of
Germany, with no more than naked bayonets against powerful artillery
and the scythe of machine-gun fire, and died like sheep in the
slaughter-houses of Chicago. Is it a wonder that at the last they
revolted against this immolation, turned round upon their tyrants, and
said: “You are the enemy. It is you that we will destroy”?
By this new revelation they forgot their hatred of Germans. They said:
“You are our brothers; we have no hatred against you. We do not want
to kill you. Why should you kill us? We are all of us the slaves of
bloodthirsty castes, who use our flesh for their ambitions. Do not shoot
us, brothers, but join hands against the common tyranny which enslaves
our peoples.” They went forward with outstretched hands, and were shot,
down like rabbits by some Germans, and by others were not shot, because
German soldiers gaped, wide-eyed, at this new gospel, as it seemed, and
said: “They speak words of truth. Why should we kill one another?”
The German war lords ordered a forward movement, threatened their own
men with death if they fraternized with Russians, and dictated their
terms of peace on the old lines of military conquest. But as Ludendorff
has confessed, and as we now know from other evidence, many German
soldiers were “infected” with Bolshevism and lost their fighting spirit.
Russia was already in anarchy. Constitutional government had been
replaced by the soviets and by committees of soldiers and workmen.
Kerensky had fled. Lenin and Trotzky were the Marat and Danton of
the Revolution, and decreed the Reign of Terror. Tales of appalling
atrocity, some true, some false (no one can tell how true or how false),
came through to France and England. It was certain that the whole fabric
of society in Russia had dissolved in the wildest anarchy the world has
seen in modern times, and that the Bolshevik gospel of “brotherhood”
with humanity was, at least, rudely “interrupted” by wholesale murder
within its own boundaries.
One other thing was certain. Having been relieved of the Russian menace,
Germany was free to withdraw her armies on that front and use all her
striking force in the west. It should have cautioned our generals to
save their men for the greatest menace that had confronted them. But
without caution they fought the battles of 1917, in Flanders, as I have
told.
In 1917 and in the first half of 1918 there seemed no ending to the war
by military means. Even many of our generals who had been so breezy
in their optimism believed now that the end must come by diplomatic
means--a “peace by understanding.” I had private talks with men in high
command, who acknowledged that the way must be found, and the British
mind prepared for negotiations, because there must come a limit to the
drain of blood on each side. It was to one man in the world that many
men in all armies looked for a way out of this frightful impasse.
President Wilson had raised new hope among many men who otherwise were
hopeless. He not only spoke high words, but defined the meanings of
them. His definition of liberty seemed sound and true, promising the
self-determination of peoples. His offer to the German people to deal
generously with them if they overthrew their tyranny raised no quarrel
among British soldiers. His hope of a new diplomacy, based upon “open
covenants openly arrived at,” seemed to cut at the root of the old evil
in Europe by which the fate of peoples had been in the hands of the few.
His Fourteen Points set out clearly and squarely a just basis of peace.
His advocacy of a League of Nations held out a vision of a new world
by which the great and small democracies should be united by a common
pledge to preserve peace and submit their differences to a supreme court
of arbitration. Here at last was a leader of the world, with a clear
call to the nobility in men rather than to their base passions, a gospel
which would raise civilization from the depths into which it had fallen,
and a practical remedy for that suicidal mania which was exhausting the
combatant nations.
I think there were many millions of men on each side of the
fighting-line who thanked God because President Wilson had come with
a wisdom greater than the folly which was ours to lead the way to an
honorable peace and a new order of nations. I was one of them... Months
passed, and there was continual fighting, continued slaughter, and no
sign that ideas would prevail over force. The Germans launched their
great offensive, broke through the British lines, and afterward through
the French lines, and there were held and checked long enough for our
reserves to be flung across the Channel--300,000 boys from England and
Scotland, who had been held in hand as the last counters for the pool.
The American army came in tidal waves across the Atlantic, flooded our
back areas, reached the edge of the battlefields, were a new guaranty of
strength. Their divisions passed mostly to the French front. With them,
and with his own men, magnificent in courage still, and some of ours,
Foch had his army of reserve, and struck.
So the war ended, after all, by military force, and by military victory
greater than had seemed imaginable or possible six months before.
In the peace terms that followed there was but little trace of those
splendid ideas which had been proclaimed by President Wilson. On one
point after another he weakened, and was beaten by the old militarism
which sat enthroned in the council-chamber, with its foot on the neck
of the enemy. The “self-determination of peoples” was a hollow phrase
signifying nothing. Open covenants openly arrived at were mocked by the
closed doors of the Conference. When at last the terms were published
their merciless severity, their disregard of racial boundaries, their
creation of hatreds and vendettas which would lead, as sure as the sun
should rise, to new warfare, staggered humanity, not only in Germany and
Austria, but in every country of the world, where at least minorities
of people had hoped for some nobler vision of the world's needs, and
for some healing remedy for the evils which had massacred its youth. The
League of Nations, which had seemed to promise so well, was hedged round
by limitations which made it look bleak and barren. Still it was peace,
and the rivers of blood had ceased to flow, and the men were coming home
again... Home again!