Chapter XXIII: The Great Betrayal

Looking back, so much is clear!

On a gray November evening out on the Russian front not far from Dvinsk, the gunners, delivering a daily salute to the German trenches, heard a muttered command to stop firing. They turned to face a line of soldiers in coarse mud-colored coats, their trench-tanned faces grimly set beneath shaggy hats of sheepskin.

The gunners shrugged their shoulders and turned to the battery. “Stop firing,” again came the command.

“Who said so?” asked one of the gunners.

“We say so,” a soldier answered. “Those are our brothers over there. The war is finished. It was the Tsar’s war. They are workingmen and peasants like us. They don’t want to fight us; we don’t want to fight them. Stop firing.”

The gunner laughed.

“If you don’t stop shooting, we’ll shoot you. I tell you, you’re killing our brothers,” said the soldier again, in the same quiet, final tone.

From that hour the battery was silent. Through the Russian trenches the word had gone that peace was coming. An armistice was to be arranged in a few days, and Germany and Austria and all of Russia’s Allies were to be asked to take part.

It was still November. The armistice negotiations were on. The great parley at Brest-Litovsk had commenced. The Allies had not come, but a special train had pulled out of Petrograd with the strangest collection of envoys that ever went upon a foreign mission. There were twenty-eight members, headed by Adolph Joffe, a Russian Jew, and including a soldier, a sailor, a workman, a peasant, and one woman. There were others in the delegation not so glad to go as these. They were military experts, obeying orders from Smolney expressed in terms that permitted no other alternative. They were officers of the Russian army, thoroughly out of sympathy with the undertaking and the men who were making it--every tenet of their codes, every fiber of their poor, bewildered, uncomprehending beings outraged by this new topsy-turvy world in which they had been plunged.

The train had arrived. The efficient Germans had built a special track across that strip of No Man’s Land which divided their territory from that of the Russians. Each member of the party was provided with his own servant, a German soldier who spoke Russian. Shoes and clothes were cleaned, and no detail of preparation had been neglected. In the rooms to which the visitors were taken there was letter paper and _eau de cologne_, for which the Russian has a special fondness.

The Russians proposed their terms of armistice. They demanded that no troops be transferred from the eastern front to the fronts of the Allies during the period of the armistice, and that fraternization take place. General Hoffman declared that the armistice conditions were only such as could be proposed to a defeated nation. The delegates asked for instructions from the Commissaries, and were told to stand firm on these conditions.

Back in Petrograd, Trotzky was talking.

“In our negotiations with our present Allies and enemies, we will be constantly on our guard,” he said. “Under no circumstances will we allow them to distort the principles of general peace proclaimed by the Russian Revolution. We will propound to them most categorical questions, and every word pronounced by them or by us will be transmitted by wireless to all the nations of the world, who will be the judges of our negotiations.”

Petrograd waited, one ear turned in the direction of Brest-Litovsk, and the other pressed against the world’s key-hole, listening for rumblings of revolutions in other lands.

Night after night, in the white hall at Smolney, at the Peasants’ headquarters, in the Narodny Dom and the Cirque Modern, the men in the mud-colored uniforms talked about it.

“We soldiers, we trench inhabitants, we must have something to say,” I heard one of them declare; and another:

“We can not conduct peace negotiations by going up to the German generals with a copy of Karl Marx in our hands.”

And a third:

“We must be able to speak loudly in revolutionary language, and back our language up by cannon if necessary, but for revolutionary purposes--not for the commercial interests of the Allies.”

“Slava, Slava, Slava” (Words, words, words), said another.

The discussion centered largely on the question of the removal of troops.

“Prohibition of removal of troops to the front should cover reserves in the rear as well, and also cannon,” said a delegate named Lapinsky. “It is necessary for us to guard against all these things in order that the Allied troops and masses should know that the Russian Revolution has no intention of permitting them to be crushed by the Germans. We are not concerned with ourselves only. We must remember that the Germans have not accepted our peace terms. We must deal with the facts as they are. They have accepted our formulæ applying the principles to the Russian camp,--not to the German camp,--to the Poles and others whom they have subjugated. We must see that imperialism in Austria and Germany does not triumph.”

The guns on the Russian front were still. The last shot to echo across to us in Petrograd was that with which the Russian General Skaloon at Brest-Litovsk dramatically ended his life in a room adjoining that in which the armistice conference was being held.

General Hoffman had accepted the terms “such as could be proposed only to a defeated nation.” The fact that he was humoring the Russians, that he might trick them the more thoroughly in the end, was not evident. The Bolsheviki, disappointed that the Allies had refused to consider coming into their conference, found crumbs of comfort in the concessions of Germany.

“It must mean,” they argued, “that the Kaiser fears the German masses. They will make him accept our honest, democratic peace.”

December 15 saw the armistice signed, and by noon of the 17th it had gone into effect.

The night before, at a rump convention of the Peasants’ Deputies, I heard Leon Trotzky make his report of the proceedings at Brest. He talked for three hours, answering the questions of his soldier peasant audience.

The meeting began in a fashion typical of those days in Russia, where night after night in every available hall in Petrograd men were shaking their fists in one another’s faces.

The Peasants’ Convention had split in its attitude toward the People’s Commissaries. The Bolshevist members and the Left Social Revolutionists anticipated welcoming Trotzky as Commissary of Foreign Affairs. The center faction, led by Chernoff, refused to acknowledge him in any capacity but that of private citizen.

In the midst of the discussion, Trotzky arrived. The Bolsheviki jumped to their feet and started a rousing demonstration in which the majority joined. The others sat stolidly in their chairs, and some whistled--the Russian equivalent of a hiss. For ten minutes pandemonium reigned. Trotzky stood silent, head up and eyes flashing behind his glasses. Finally he crossed the room to the adjoining hall, opened the door, and walked in. I followed him. The room was dark, except for a green-shaded student-lamp upon a table near the rostrum. Trotzky sat down at the table. Soon a crowd of soldiers came pouring through the door. More and more followed, until every seat in the council chamber and every inch of space in aisles and stairways was packed.

They elected a temporary chairman, and resolved to hear the report of the Commissary of Foreign Affairs. Trotzky arose to speak, and this time the demonstration met no opposing voice.

He reviewed the general international situation, then analyzed the armistice terms.

“We will ask the Germans first if they accept our terms of peace--peace without annexation, contributions, and self-definition of nations,” said Trotzky. “Then we will ask what Germany means by those terms--how does she apply them? When we understand each other fully, we will have a week’s interruption to let the people of the world know what we are doing. We want general peace. We have given the Allies a month in which to make peace. If they want more time, I suppose we can give them a little more, but we can not continue the slaughter for their sakes. We want general peace, but we can not let Russia bleed to death. We can not go on forever. We must get back to our farms and our factories. The Kaiser hates the Revolution, and most of all the Soviet government, but he recognizes the demand of the masses. We did not send any diplomats to Brest-Litovsk, it is true. Our people have spent more time in Siberian prisons than in diplomatic offices, but our program is right, and so long as we fight for that we can not die. We do not go before the governments of the world as a defeated nation, but as a victorious one. Our position is the stronger because we have no secret desires and can be quite honest. The Allies have refused to send delegates to the peace conference, but we must look out for the interests of the masses of the Allied countries, and we will do so. We must have a peace, because we must save the cultural possessions of the age and preserve the revolutionary energy of the proletariat.”

Down from Berlin to No Man’s Land came a supply of tobacco, accordions, flashlights, bad whisky, and Hindenburg _schneights_ (knives). Behind the German lines the soldier merchants set up their wares, and the Russians in worn boots and faded coats walked out across No Man’s Land to trade with them. The Germans asked for soap, bread, and clothing; also they would sell for rubles--old picture rubles of the Tsar’s régime. They turned up their noses at “Kerensky” money, and would have none of the Bolshevist issue.

The Russian soldiers had little bread to give them--they had all too little for themselves--and less clothing. But they told their German brothers, with shining, thankful eyes, how glad they were that peace was coming--that they would no longer have to kill each other. They advised them to go home and make a revolution, as they had done, and promised that in this new world of brothers there should be an end to wars.

Inside the council chamber at Brest-Litovsk, the German Foreign Minister reminded delegates of the season of the year.

“It is an auspicious circumstance that the negotiations open within sight of that festival which for centuries past has promised peace on earth, good will to men,” he said. “Our negotiations will be guided by the spirit of peaceable humanity and of mutual esteem.”

It was Saturday, December 22. Prince Leopold of Bavaria was there. The Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Czernin, with a delegation of eight Austrians, was there; and from Bulgaria, Minister Popoff and four assistants, Nesimy Bey, former Minister of Foreign Affairs from Turkey, Ambassador Hakki, General Zekki, and under foreign secretary Hemit Bey.

The plenipotentiaries of the Central Powers were taking the delegation seriously. General Hoffman paid gallant compliments to Madame Bitzenko, and laughingly suggested that they have their photographs taken together. Von Kühlmann asked the chief of the Russian delegation to state the main principles of the Russian peace proposal. The Russian demands numbered fifteen, applying the now famous formula to the world situation. On Christmas the Germans submitted their counter-proposals.

In Petrograd we listened day and night for the ticking of a wireless message from Brest-Litovsk. A German and Austrian delegation arrived, and took up headquarters at the Hotel Angletaire and at the Grand just around the corner. Little blond Petroff came in, loudly protesting that he had no platters on which to bring me my dinner, because they had all been taken to feed the Germans. Occasionally, with some of my American friends, I sat at dinner at a table adjoining that at which the Germans were dining. We regarded them curiously, and they looked upon us with equal suspicion.

I spent much of my time at Smolney those days, anxious for the first word that would indicate the Russian attitude toward the German peace terms. One day there was a rumor abroad that Russia would reject the counter-proposal.

At Smolney that night the Executive Committee listened to a report, and voted for its rejection. The resolution declared that the dominant parties in Germany, compelled by a popular demand to grant concessions to the principles of a democratic peace, were nevertheless trying to distort the idea to aid their own annexationist policy.

Already Germany was showing her hand. She contended that the will of the people of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland had already been manifested. The Russians declared this allegation to be devoid of all foundation.

“Under martial law and under the yoke of a military censorship, the peoples of the occupied countries could not express their will,” they said. “The documents upon which the German government bases its allegation at Brest prove the manifestation of the will of a few privileged groups only, and in no way the will of the masses in those territories.

“We now declare that the Russian Revolution remains faithful to the policy of internationalism. We defend the right of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland to dispose of their own destiny, actually and freely. Never will we recognize the justice of imposing the will of a foreign nation on any other nation.”

The Russian Soviet appealed to the people of Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria in these words:

“Under your pressure, your governments have been obliged to accept the motto of no annexations and no indemnities, but recently they have been trying to carry on their old policy of evasion. Remember that the conclusion of an immediate democratic peace will depend actually and above all on you. All the people of Europe look to you, exhausted and bled by such a war as there never was before, that you will not permit the Austro-German imperialists to make war against Revolutionary Russia for the subjugation of Poland, Lithuania, Courland, and Armenia.”

The Soviet bombed the German trenches with propaganda. On January 2 they circulated a pamphlet in the German lines declaring that the peace conditions submitted by the Central Powers showed the German promises of a democratic peace to be unconscionable lies.

The pamphlet asserted that Germany wanted to free the peoples on Russia’s western frontier from the sphere of revolution, in order to subjugate them to the German will, that they might impose an Austrian monarchy on Poland and make Lithuania and Courland German duchies.

The Russians asked for transfer of any further negotiations to Stockholm. In Germany the military party declared that the break between Russia and Germany was caused by this demand, keeping their people in ignorance for some time of the fact that the break had come from Germany’s refusal to evacuate Russian territory.

Trotzky himself went to the second conference, protesting that his government would not yield.

“We did not overthrow the Tsar to bow to German imperialism,” he said.

Germany practically delivered an ultimatum: “Parleys at Brest-Litovsk or none.”

“Our government placed at the head of its program a world’s peace, but it promised the people to sign only a democratic and just peace,” Trotzky said. “The sympathies of the Russian people are with her Allies and with the working classes of Germany.”

He declared that the refusal of the Central Powers to transfer the conference to a neutral site could be explained only by the determination of the government and the annexationist groups to base their dealings, not on reconciliations of peoples, but on the war map.

“But war maps disappear while peoples remain,” said Trotzky. “Annexationist agitators are trying to persuade the German people that behind the open and frank policy of Russia is a British or other stage-manager. Therefore we have decided to remain at Brest-Litovsk, so that the slightest possibility of peace may not be lost; so that it may be established whether peace is possible with the Central Powers without violence to the Poles, Letts, Armenians, and all other nationalities to which the Russian Revolution assures full right of development, without reservation or restriction.”

At this session General Hoffman protested against wireless messages containing abuse of German military institutions and revolutionary appeals to the German troops. He declared they transgressed the spirit of the armistice by attempting to introduce civil war into the Central Powers.

Trotzky replied that all German newspapers were freely admitted into Russia. General Hoffman said he was not referring to the press, but to official government utterances. Kühlmann said that non-interference in Russian affairs was the fixed principle of the German government, and that his government had the right to demand reciprocity.

Trotzky responded with an invitation to criticism:

“The Russians will recognize it as a step forward if the Germans freely and frankly express their views regarding internal conditions in Russia so far as they think it necessary.”

Trotzky demanded, on behalf of the Russians, the immediate repatriation of deported Poles and Lithuanians, and the liberation of Bohemians, Czechs, and others arrested for participation in pacifist propaganda, declaring the return of refugees to Poland and Lithuania of the utmost importance in the question of self-determination, and insisting that the Russians would not abandon their demands. The session ended in disagreement. General Hoffman charged the Russian delegation with speaking as if “it stood victorious in our countries and could dictate conditions.”

Kühlmann announced that it would be necessary to hold a consultation between the Teutonic Allies before any further statement could be made.

Meanwhile, the anti-Bolshevist Rada from the Ukraine was holding separate peace parleys with the Central Powers, and, unlike the Soviet government, its negotiations were secret.

All sorts of rumors found their way to us in Petrograd. German soldiers arriving from the front said they had deserted the army and, with several thousand others, were encamped in a wood behind the German lines, where, equipped with machine-guns, they were defying a German advance on Russia. Strikes were breaking out in Austria and Germany. In Petrograd the third congress of the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies met on January 23. On the 27th Leon Trotzky made his report.

It showed that at last the Germans, convinced that resistance upon the part of the Russians was impossible, were unmasking their real aims.

“Practically,” he said, “the German terms mean that the governments of Austria and Germany take into their own hands the destiny of the Poles, the Letts, the Lithuanians, and the Esthonians.”

Trotzky drew a comparison between the present peace aims, and the peace terms of the Reichstag resolution of July supporting a peace without indemnities and annexations, and the peace terms of the Germany of December 25, which lured the Russians to trust the democratic utterances of the enemy. He showed that the new frontiers were planned not only to subjugate all the people within the conquered territories, but to make further German aggression easy.

“The whole German argument was based on the assumption that the Russian government would understand, but be silent and grateful to the Germans for saving their faces by giving a mock-democratic character to their peace,” said Trotzky. “The bourgeois governments can sign any kind of a peace; the governments of the Soviet can not.”

He declared that the Ukrainian Rada was at that moment trying to make a separate peace, and insisted that, whatever happened, he would not sign a “non-democratic peace.”

Trotzky sparred for time. He knew that his government could not live surrounded by countries practising a different social creed. He counted on the spread of revolt simultaneously in the Ukraine, in Finland, in Austria, and in Germany. He did not foresee the German-inspired invitation to German troops to put down revolution in Finland, Ukraine, and the Baltic provinces.

On the ninth of February the Ukraine, upon which France had banked to keep Russia from making a peace, concluded a separate peace herself. The following day the Soviet government announced its withdrawal from the war, and also its determination not to sign an annexationist treaty, declaring its firm belief that the workers of Germany and Austria would not permit any new offensive against the workers of Russia.

Five days later Germany announced her intention to resume military operations against Russia. On the 18th, to the amazement of the populace behind the Russian line, the German troops along the entire front advanced.

They took Dvinsk with little opposition. It was late afternoon in a snow-clad village beyond the Dvinsk lines not far from the point at which, in November, the infantry had ordered the Russian gunners to stop firing. Word had come that the Germans were advancing. A shudder passed through the village. There was a hurried gathering. Some suggested fleeing, others counseled waiting.

“It’s a mistake,” said a white-bearded peasant. “We are not at war. They are our brothers--we must go and tell them.”

They appointed a committee, improvised a white flag, and set out on their errand. A short distance from the village they met the advancing Germans. They held their white flag bravely aloft, and a soldier spokesman began to explain:

“It is all a mistake--Russia is not at war. We do not want to fight our German brothers--”

The sentence was never finished. The committee did not come back. Instead, to the waiting women with frightened children clinging to their wide calico skirts, and with a terrible fear in their eyes, there came the Germans.

Germany was marching over the prostrate and bewildered form of the country she had tricked and betrayed. Uncomprehension and despair settled upon Petrograd. The People’s Commissaries met in all-night session. Trotzky wanted to fight, even though effective resistance was impossible. Lenin opposed him. There was nothing to fight with. The army had reached the limit of disorganization. Economic chaos reigned behind the lines. There was neither an army at the front nor a nation behind capable of supporting an army.

All night the Commissaries debated. Toward dawn Lenin’s will finally prevailed. A proclamation was issued protesting against the German advance, but stating:

“The Council of People’s Commissaries regards itself as forced formally to declare its willingness to sign a peace upon the conditions dictated by the delegates of the Quadruple Alliance at Brest-Litovsk.”

The information was sent by wireless to Germany. The Germans demanded written confirmation. It was despatched to Dvinsk by special messenger. Still the Germans’ advance continued. They occupied Esthonia, overran the Ukraine, and created a Turkish offensive in the Caucasus. They made no answer to the People’s Commissaries, and on February 22 the Bolsheviki called on the people to organize guerrilla warfare and resist the invaders.

Again the Bolsheviki appealed to the German working classes.

“Once more the German working class in this threatened hour has shown itself insufficiently determined to stay the criminal hand of its own militarism. We had no other choice but to accept the conditions of German imperialism until a revolution changes or cancels them. The German government is not hastening to reply to us, evidently aiming to seize as many important positions in our territory as possible. The enemy has occupied Dvinsk, Werder, and Lutsk, and is continuing to strangle by hunger the most important centers of the Revolution. We even now are convinced firmly that the German working classes will rise against the attempts of the ruling classes to stifle the Revolution, but we can not predict with certainty when this will occur. The German imperialists may hesitate at nothing for the purpose of destroying the authority of the councils and taking the land from the peasants.”

The Commissaries called on all loyal councils and army organizations to use all efforts to recreate the army.

The next day Kühlmann submitted a new offer of peace, imposing yet more drastic terms upon the broken country, and demanded that it be accepted within forty-eight hours.

Again Lenin insisted that it must be accepted.

“Their knees are on our chests and our position is hopeless,” he said. “This peace must be accepted as a respite enabling us to prepare a decisive resistance to the bourgeoisie and imperialists. The proletariat of the whole world will come to our aid. Then we shall renew the fight. All the bourgeoisie in Russia is jubilant at the approach of the Germans. Only a blind man, or men infatuated by phrases, can fail to see that the policy of a revolutionary war without an army is water in the bourgeois mill. In the bourgeois papers there is already exaltation in view of the impending overthrow of the Soviet government by the Germans. We are compelled to submit to a distressing peace.”

Trotzky was absent from this meeting, and the Central Executive Committee, by a vote of a hundred and twelve against eighty-four, accepted Lenin’s view; and the decision was telegraphed to the German government.

“Surely now hostilities would cease!” thought the Russians.

A new peace deputation was elected. Trotzky, who favored fighting, was displaced as Foreign Minister. The German government did not reply to the Russian acceptance. The German troops kept marching on. The Soviet government called upon the people:

“Resistance becomes the principal task of the Revolution.”

The workers filled the ranks of the volunteer “Red Army,” led by officers of the bourgeoise. There was hardly a factory worker left in Petrograd, and, untrained as they were, they were soldiers because they had a cause. The German advance was checked at Pskoff. The Red Guards recaptured Orsha. The regular troops, an uncomprehending horde of bewildered and dilapidated soldiers, fled in panic before their “German brothers,” looting and pillaging as they went.

It was a hopeless situation. The Red Guards had not only to fight the highly organized German legions, but they had to disarm the panic-stricken Russian soldiers. In the rear they were fighting Kaledin, Korniloff, and the troops of the Ukrainian Rada. None of these were fighting the Germans. In action they had aligned themselves with German absolutism, and were seeking to overthrow the Russian democracy--the Soviet government.

The diplomats had been so busy hunting for German money in the camp of the Bolsheviki that they had overlooked entirely the Ukraine, the Baltic provinces, and Finland. The Ukraine situation has been shot through with Austrian and German money since the beginning of the Revolution. It had been a hot-bed of intrigue. More potent than the power of money was the natural economic desire of the upper classes in each of these places. It was not the Ukrainian worker and peasant who made a separate peace with Germany. It was not the Finnish Red Guard who invited the Germans in to subjugate their fellow countrymen. It was not the class-conscious masses of the Baltic provinces, crushed beneath the boot of the German-bred Black Barons, who cried to the Kaiser for deliverance.

Something more dangerous to the peace of the world than a government of workers, peasants, and soldiers had been carefully builded by the German agents.

When Prince Leopold of Bavaria told his advancing troops they were going upon a mission of altruism and humanity, he neglected to tell them that the people whom they were going to save were not the masses of the Russians, trying to work out their own salvation against desperate odds, but the land barons and monarchists of the old order whom the Revolution overthrew.

The Russians were blind to the true character of the men who came to Brest-Litovsk to negotiate a kaiser’s peace; but the blindness of those Russian dreamers was lucid vision as compared with the blindness of the enlightened democratic world as to the real significance of the various forces at work upon the Russian tragedy. We will pay for that blindness,--we must pay,--for democracy is not safe in the world while Russia is enslaved. No settlement of the international situation will be lasting that does not leave the peoples of Russia free to work out their own democratic salvation.

The failure of Allied diplomacy in Russia was due to the undemocratic nature of the existing diplomatic system.

It is not enough to know the movements of kings and kaisers, the pleasure of military leaders, of the will of the aristocracy. In a fight for democracy, the people, in the last analysis, are the important factor. The true study of democratic diplomacy is the study of the movements of the masses undisturbed by our own beliefs, preconceptions, or prejudices.

They were difficult--those Russians; difficult as dreamers and children always are. They lashed us with their scorn. They impugned our motives. They “swept into the ash-barrel of history” our secret treaties and dismissed us as capitalists and imperialists.

The German autocracy, arch-enemy of all democracy, had succeeded in its gigantic scheme to drive a wedge between Russia and her Allies--had trapped Russia into the belief that the German people wanted nothing but an honest democratic peace, and that only the Allies stood between them and their desire. In their minds, our aloofness gave color to the declaration of their leaders:

“Our Revolution will be crushed by the imperialism of the western democracies.”

Germany proposed new peace terms. The Russian delegates did not even stop to examine them. They said they knew they must sign whatever the terms might be. They signed a peace that was not a peace--a peace that Germany disregarded more flagrantly each passing hour--a peace that will never be a peace.

“It is our peace of Tilsit [1810],” Lenin said; “but we will finally attain our peace of 1814. Probably we shall not have to wait so long, because history is moving faster in these days.”

Truly, the Commissary of Commissaries was right: “their knees are upon our chests.”

A MESSAGE TO MARS

We were five in the little blue room in the War Hotel that night. It was one of my last in Petrograd. The electric lights, fickle at best, had failed entirely.

The tiny sputtering flame of the olive-green candle disclosed distant vistas in the eyes of Zamiatin.

Zamiatin was one of the younger of the Russian writers--a deep, quiet, imaginative chap, who talked in fables, with long spaces of silence between.

The Bolsheviki were the subject of our discussion. We argued breathlessly, with flushed faces and shining eyes, as one always argued in Russia during the hectic nights and days of the red Russian year.

Zamiatin put down his glass of tea, and with his forefinger began to trace the crimson pattern on the Bokhara table-cover.

“When I was a boy,” he said, “a little fellow about thirteen or fourteen, I read a book--I have forgotten the name--a Russian version of something like ‘A Romance of Two Worlds.’ It set strange imaginings whirling in my brain. I told my comrades about it, and they became as excited as I.

“Off there in the big black sky above the silver birches was a planet called Mars, peopled like ours with human beings. We made up our minds to get into communication with those other people. We thought of many plans. Finally we conceived the idea of building a great letter ‘A’ and setting it on fire. We believed Mars would see and answer us, and in a very short time we would arrange an alphabet and carry on long conversations. Perhaps it would revolutionize the whole universe--who knew? We were on fire with the idea.

“We told our parents about it, but somehow they did not seem to realize its importance. There was a famine in the village that year, and they were busy trying to get food to the people. They had no time for us and our great scheme.

“But this did not discourage us. We went on just the same. We cut down logs in the forest, and built a monster ‘A,’ bigger even than our dreams of it. The great night came. We set it on fire, and then, standing in breathless silence, eyes fastened on the velvet blackness, we waited. We waited and we waited. Nothing happened. Mars did not answer.”

Zamiatin lifted his finger from the crimson spot upon the Bokhara cover, and settled back in his chair. For a moment we sat there, tense and quiet as that group of small boys on the edge of the forest a score of years ago.

They built a letter “A” there in the City of Peter in the fall of 1917. They set it afire. Then--simple, trusting, hoping children that they are--they waited--and waited. There was nothing wrong with the letter “A,” but Mars did not answer.

Blinded by schemes of conquest and dreams of Empire, Mars could not see.

“Universal peace; brotherhood; no annexations or contributions; and self-definition of nations--”

It was an alphabet Mars could not comprehend, born of a blind faith the glory and beauty of which Mars can not know, and the rest of us only half suspect.

Zamiatin was not a Bolshevik. He belongs to the Russian _intelligentzia_. Like the others, he had preached theoretical revolution, but his spirit shrank from the hard, accomplished fact.

But Zamiatin, with his boy’s experience and his artist’s visioning, had seen the letter ‘A,’ and felt the wonder and the tragedy of the dream of those men drawn back from exile to flash flaming signals at the universe.

* * * * *

The train that carried me away from Petrograd was almost the last to pass in safety through war-torn Finland. Troubled days were full upon her, but the frozen face of her was as calm and peaceful as a sleeping child.

The City of Peter lay behind me, wrapped in the gray morning mist. Tragedy was in the air. That vague, frightful thing--the Terror--was on every man’s tongue. Apprehension was in every man’s eye. Lurking there in the black shadows of every human brain were the words: “The Germans!” To a few they were a secret hope--restored titles, estates returned. To the mass--death and destruction and shattered dreams.

I looked through the mist down a long vista of coming years, and asked of the mysterious, inscrutable city what would be left of the hour and the place for another age.

Time seems to have his own peculiar sense of values. He sifts out most of the things we would save. For every time the world of to-day thinks of the Franco-Prussian War it speaks a hundred times of the French Revolution. Out of the defeat of France there came that great historic milestone marking the struggle of the mass to climb from under.

Out of the success of Prussia there came Prussian militarism, to breed its own ultimate destruction. Time may reject the battle of the Somme and the Gallipoli campaign, and dismiss the blockade and the submarine with a word; possibly he will have forgotten entirely the names of Cabinet ministers and great generals: but I doubt whether he will discard the Russian Revolution.

Revolution is the blind protest of the mass against their own ignorant state. It is as important to Time as the first awkward struggle of the amœba. It is man in the act of making himself.

Time will be able to overlook the pathetic, the tragic, the cruel, the silly forms of expression that revolt frequently takes, and see only the magnificent urge behind those expressions.

Time will have all the advantage over us. He will be able to keep his emotions from getting tangled up in the situation. He will be able to put the Bolsheviki and the Mensheviki, the Cadets and the Social Revolutionists, in their proper pigeonholes.

Time will give to the world war, the political revolution, and the social revolution their true values. We can not do it. We are too close to the facts to see the truth.

To have failed to see the hope in the Russian Revolution is to be as a blind man looking at a sunrise.

Mingled with my sorrow, the morning I left Petrograd, was a certain exultant, tragic joy. I had been alive at a great moment, and knew that it was great.

THE END

Transcriber's Notes:

Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.

Perceived typographical errors have been changed.