British Army from a disastrous retreat to the sea. The debt of gratitude Britain and France owe to Russia’s “Unknown Warrior,” that poor unhonored hero and martyr, is incalculable. But for Russia Germany would probably have won the war outright before the end of 1916. It was the blood and suffering of the Russian people saved victory for the Allies; those incredible soldiers fought often without artillery support, without rifle ammunition, without boots or food, under conditions almost inconceivable to the well-supplied French and British and Americans of the western front. And their tale of killed and wounded exceeds enormously that of any other combatant. In 1917 Russia collapsed; she was bled white, and she remained collapsed in spite of the sedulous kicking of her allies to rouse her to further efforts. The intolerable Rasputin-Czarism went down in the disaster. After a phase of extreme disorder, and very largely because of the British hesitation to support the Kerensky Government by bold naval action in the Baltic, the hard, tyrannous, doctrinaire government of the Bolsheviki took control.
That government is a bad government; its faults are indeed of a different order but on the whole, I will admit, it is almost as bad as the former Czarist Government it superseded. Yet let us remember certain plain facts about it. It has remained in power to this day because it is a Russian-speaking government standing for a whole and undivided Russia, and the Russian people support it because it has defended Russia against the subsidized raiders of France and Britain, against the Poles and against the Estonians and against the Japanese and against every sort of outside interference with their prostrate country. They prefer fanatics to foreigners and Bolsheviks to brigands. Frenchmen or Americans in the same horrible position would probably make the same choice. The Entente, the Poles, a miscellany of adventurers, have given the Russians no breathing time to deal with their own Government in their own fashion. And now, caught by the misadventure of an unprecedented drought, millions of Russians in the regions disorganized by Kol-chak, Denikene and Wrangel, are starving to death—while Canada and America have wheat and corn to burn. There is even food to spare in some parts of Russia, but no adequate means of getting it to the starving provinces without outside assistance. And the Western World is letting these Russian millions starve because of the argumentative obstinacy of the Moscow Government, which hesitated for a time to acknowledge debts incurred by Russia—very largely for the military preparations which saved Europe—debts it is now inconceivable that Russia can ever under any circumstances pay, because of the pitiless resentment of the creditors of Russia. Yet the suffering of Russia cannot help the western money lender; they merely give him his revenge.
But even if some millions of Russian men, women and children die this winter and are added to the count of those who have already perished through the war—the war that saved Paris from Berlin—it does not follow that Russia will die. Peoples are not killed in this fashion. These distresses will not alter the fact that the Russians are the most numerous people in Europe, and a people of unexampled gifts and tenacity. Their magnificent resistance to outside interference since 1914 and their toleration of the Bolshevik Government when division would have been as fatal to them as it has been in China, is a proof of their solidarity and instinctive political wisdom. There are as many Russians as there are people in the United States of America, and they occupy an area as great and far richer in undeveloped resources. In spite of the monstrous Czarist Government which treated elementary education as an offense against the State, the prose literature, the drama, the music, the pictorial art—even the science of the Russians during the last hundred years—all this compares favorably with that of the United States. These Russians are indeed one of the very greatest of people a;nd they have survived tragic experiences that might well have destroyed any other race. And Washington, I gather, proposes to settle the peace of Europe, Asia and the Pacific without them.
There is, I know, a very strong case to excuse Washington from sending an invitation to the existing Russian Government. I would be the last person in the world to minimize the difficulties the Bolshevik Government puts in the way of any fair dealings with the western powers; it is bound by its Communist theory not to recognize them fairly and to make gestures of preparation for their overthrow. In addition to its general theoretical obduracy Moscow is also afflicted with a particularly obdurate, pedantic, argumentative and disastrous Foreign Minister, Chicherin. But practical necessity knows no theories and the Bolshevik Government, if only it can save its face, is now extraordinarily anxious for recognition from and dealings with the western Governments.
I do not see why the western Governments, having regard to the needs of Russia, should try to outdo the Bolsheviks in obstinacy, pedantry and cruelty, nor why they should not make an honest attempt to get along with the de facto government until it develops naturally into something else. For such a development only a rough working peace is wanted. Given that, and a release from impossible debts, Russia, relieved forever from the black curse of Czarism, will go right on to become a land of restored cultivation, of resuscitated mines and presently of reawakening towns, a democratic land of common people more like the free, poor, farming, prospecting and developing United States of 1840 than anything else in history.
So long as Russia suffers the Bolshevik Government I think Washington ought to suffer it, but perhaps in that opinion I go beyond the possibilities of the case. Then I suggest that at least Washington ought to set up some well-informed lawyer, some bureau, to play the part of the Russian advocate at the conference. If Russia is not to be allowed a vote in the decision of things, let her at least be heard.
Consider what the future must hold for this great people, and mark the amazing folly of the insults and evils we heap upon their land. Look it up in an atlas or encyclopaedia. Measure what it is we ignore. In a score of years Russia may be a renascent land as vigorous as the United States in 1840. In a century she may be as great and powerful and civilized as any state on earth. For such powers as France and Britain and Japan to sit in council upon the fate of the world without her is as if, in the dark years of 1863 and 1864, they had sat in council upon the future of America without the United States. Indeed, something of the sort did happen in those dark years; France, I recall, sent troops and munitions into Mexico, as recently she has sent them into Poland and South Russia. And somewhere in the world there is a grave, the grave of a “white hope,” a reactionary puppet who was to have restored Mexico to the European system—the friend of the Emperor Napoleon the Third, the Emperor Maximilian.
When I was a small boy learning.the rudiments of geography, the earth was presented to me in two hemispheres, the Old World and the new. Not once or twice only has America vindicated her right to that title. Will Washington confirm that great tradition and open a way of escape now from the tangled narrowness of Versailles f Are Germany and Russia to perish amid the incurable quarrels of the Old World or find their salvation in the New?
IV. — THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR
Washington, November 11
BRITAIN, France, Italy and now the people of the United States, have honored and buried the bodies of certain Unknown Soldiers, each according to their national traditions and circumstances. Canada, I hear, is to follow suit.
So the world expresses its sense that in the great war the only hero was the common man. Poor Hans and poor Ivan lie rotting yet under the soil of a hundred battlefields, bones and decay, rags of soiled uniform and fragments of accoutrements, still waiting for monuments and speeches. Yet they too were mothers’ sons, kept step, obeyed orders, went singing into battle, and knew the strange intoxication of soldierly fellowship and the sense of devotion to something much greater than themselves.
In Arlington Cemetery soldiers of the Confederate South lie honored equally with the Federal dead, the right or wrong of their cause altogether forgotten and only their sacrifice remembered. A time will come when we shall cease to visit the crimes and blunders
