“ They are not in any sense militant in spirit. They do not believe in war. Passive resistance they will resort to in a thousand ways and with rare cunning and courageous persistence, but organized warfare is not to their taste. Who rules Russia against her will or ideals from now on will have a rocky road to travel, and who looks to her for militant alliance is doomed to certain disappointment. I have had a Russian officers' club in charge for two months and can say from personal knowledge of these men that from colonels down they are utterly sick of war and distrustful of its consequences. ”

“ 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." ”

“ If the Russian soldiers whom we organized, equipped, and paid to fight the Bolsheviki went over as they did in whole companies to the Bolsheviki it was not because of any lure or reward that our enemies held out to them. It was because we in our stupidity thought of them as "swine" and employed such methods of administration and control in our Military Intervention as they had been only too familiar with in the old days of Tsarism. We failed to win their hearts or their confidence. We destroyed all their illusions about us. ”

“ He will fight a long fight for his freedom, and fight it in his own way. And he will win it, may I predict, and win it so gloriously that light will shine once more again from the East even into the West.
Standing on the key at Archangel and waving farewells to the American soldiers who filled the decks and rigging of a transport slowly moving off with the current, an educated Russian friend said to me: "They are good boys, I am glad they came and glad they are going away. But now as never before Russia knows that she cannot be a second America. Now we do not want to be a second America. ”

“ These men are all home now with their grievance. Few of them are proud of the expedition, or glad they had a part in it, or grateful to their country for its support, or willing to go again. Military intervention has been a tragedy in their lives and was an injustice to them such as no government may with impunity impose on its citizens.
We may not easily estimate the harm that military intervention has done in the lowering of our standards of national rights and in devitalizing our ideals of international relations. ”

“ Our governments do not know about this, of course, but the men know. No thoughtful person could hear these men of either nation talk about the other nation without seeing the awfulness of the thing that has been done. It is not at all similar to the attitude of the soldier who knew the British in France, nor to his disillusionment about the French. It is very much worse. It is enmity. And it is clear to me that it is directly due to the fact that our men had to fight in a bad cause, with unwilling minds, beclouded consciences, and rebellious hearts. ”

“ Their national ideals cannot take form in the molds cast by Jefferson and Hamilton. And in their struggle for freedom and righteousness it is quite conceivable that they will evolve political forms and practices adapted to the modern days and conditions.
Military men who characterize the Russian peasant as lazy, indolent, and indifferent do not know what they are talking about. They do not see through the peasant's whiskers. They resent too strongly the peasant's aversion to the military profession. The peasant is no mollusc as they learn who have to do with him long. ”

“ We may hope that the nations of South America have not taken the Russian campaign to heart as seriously as have the small nations of Europe. Whatever result our military intervention in Russia has had upon this faith, however, those of us who have been in Russia know that it has had a profound effect upon the Russian people. We have not destroyed their faith in us. ”

“ No Russian believed in the disinterestedness of England's motives. All kinds of stories were invented and believed as to the concessions and ports she was to receive, as to the debt Russia would owe her after the war, and as to King George's interest in the restoration of the Czar to his throne. Bolshevik propaganda was not idle and was all too easily believed.
The Russians knew, too, that the English liked the monarchists, took them into their confidence, had them to dinner, danced with them, and they came to believe that with England in North Russia the revolution was lost. ”

“ This year there must be a big crop or starvation. It has been a good crop but a small one because of labor conscription. And those "ignorant" peasants can tell you what that means to them however many useless paper roubles the Military Intervention may leave behind it.
The execution of suspects made Bolsheviki right and left. The inquisitorial processes of the Russian puppets of the Military Intervention were necessarily so much like those of the old régimé that they went far to dispel all illusions about the Military Intervention that might have remained in the peasant mind. ”

“ Before I went to Russia I felt that Tolstoy had perhaps weakened the Russian spirit with his doctrine of non-resistance. Now I think he only gave expression to what is most common in the ideals of the Russian mind.
In politics the Russian people are amateurs. They do not know the game. Not our game. They do not understand the compromises that are essential to the democratic state. ”

“ Every Russian was a Bolo. There was no longer possible any big coöperative 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. ”

“ To have the best the house afforded given me once or twice and pay refused would not have impressed me so much, but to have uniform hospitality extended me as though it were my right and to have this done without consciousness of virtue made me feel that the world's championship in hospitality abides with the people of this bleak and inhospitable country. ”

“ The Canadian artillery got there every time.
This Russian gun crew on the railroad front enjoys warmer weather. One awful night when we had been horribly shelled and the evacuation of the town was hourly imminent there were nine frozen bodies laid side by side in the wood-shed behind the hospital. We should have to leave them there just as we had left others at Shenkursk and Shagavari. I had known all these boys—five Americans, two Englishmen and two Russians—and as I stood out there in the cold, dark, snowy night, I knew war. ”

“ In June a splendid new British army took over the fronts in North Russia from the Americans and the Canadians and the old British "category" men. They came to finish the job, to clean up North Russia, to take Kotlas by July fifteenth, Viatka and Vologda in another thirty days, and Petrograd before snowfall. This was quite on the cards. This new army had come to Russia with much boasting and had been received in Archangel with great ceremonial and flourish. They were "men from France" who "knew how to fight," and they would "show the Yankees how to lick the Bolos." ”

“ These Russian peasants have not read American history. They do not know American politics. Most of them probably have not read five hundred words about America in all their lives. But they have heard and talked about America some, and thought about America more. Perhaps there are many well-read Americans who could profitably think about America more, even at a loss of time to read. ”

“ In this frame of mind American boys went through all the dangers and privations and sufferings of a difficult all-winter campaign and some of them went to their last battles. Statistically it is a little thing, if you must measure everything by statistics, but I have been made to feel how terribly great a thing was the death of one man who as I held his hand cursed the fate that made him die in a fight for which he had no heart. ”

“ Villages of from twenty to a hundred houses are strung along so continuously and here and there clustered about a great church so thickly that you wonder where there is land for all these people to cultivate. Never, however, do you find an isolated settler. If it is a forest nobody lives there. ”

“ They cannot agree to disagree in amity. They are inclined to be dogmatic. Like our own youth they are in search of the absolute in truth and righteousness and frequently think they have found it. But no higher ideals are to be found in any people than the political ideals of these Russians, and their interest in politics is a keen and vital one. I have attempted a number of speeches on political subjects to Russian soldiers by the aid of an interpreter and have been gratified both because I was understood and because I was asked questions that indicated real intelligence in political matters. ”

“ CONCERNING RUSSIAN PEASANTS
The peasants of North Russia are generally supposed to be the poorest and least progressive class of Russians, living in the poorest and least desirable part of the country. I think that if this is true the interest which all Russia holds for Americans can hardly be exaggerated.
The people of North Russia are peasants. The professional and trading classes are negligible—perhaps smaller than anywhere else in the white world. The towns are small and few and even the towns are peopled largely by peasants. ”

“ When night after night the firing squad took out its batches of victims it mattered not that no civilians were permitted on the streets. There were thousands of listening ears to hear the rat-tat-tat of the machine guns, and no morning paper could have given all the gruesome details more complete circulation than they received in the regular process of universal news gossip by which Archangel keeps itself in up-to-the-minute touch with all local affairs. ”

“ He was always begging for cigarettes, and one could easily see through his cupidity and simple craft. But I saw American soldiers billeted in Russian homes and mixing with the Russians so much that I am sure that I know the true sentiments in this case. I have been asked by English soldiers more than once: "Why is it that the Russians like the Yankees so much better than they do us?"
I asked this question, without the comparison, of an intelligent looking Russian soldier: "Why do you Russians like the Yanks so well?" "Because they shake hands like men," he answered thoughtfully. ”

“ Some said we were fighting for the capitalists of England and France, others declared that the Bolsheviki were more right than wrong, and everybody felt that our government had made a great mistake and that a life lost there was a life worse than thrown away. ”

“ I had Russian soldiers line up by hundreds to sign their names in a register and not a man would fail to write his own. I had peasants tell me that they knew how to read and write when they were children but had forgotten it since. I have no statistics on the subject, but it would be interesting to have the statisticians go up the Dvina River looking for the eighty-five per cent. In almost every village the best house is the schoolhouse. When it is not the best it is still a very good house. ”

“ In all distributions of land and products now women are counted. This is a result of the revolution and has been brought about not because it was legislated but as a spontaneous product of the common sense of right. When Russia does have an election, as we must hope some day she will, these peasant people all assume as a matter of course that women will vote. ”

“ Americans do not need to be told how backward Russia is in the matter of machinery and especially agricultural machinery. But I gave myself a surprise one day by going to every house in a small village and finding in every house but one a one-horse cast-steel modern plow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If thousands of Americans have gone home thoroughly detesting the name and memory of everything English and if other thousands of Englishmen are telling each other and being told that Americans are cowards and in the same breath that they are insolent and unmanageable, it is chiefly to be blamed on the British method of managing an allied campaign. ”

“ Among hundreds of villages there is not one of twenty houses or more that does not maintain a school eight months of the year.
Russia has but one church. I met a few dissentients—evangelicals and atheists—but the dissent is not organized and there is very little propaganda of reform. The Bolsheviki at first prohibited the church as an evil thing. Many of the un-Bolshevik Russians have dropped the church as a useless thing. ”

“ When it was openly announced that the American troops were to be withdrawn from North Russia the Bolshevik propaganda took every possible advantage of it, claiming that President Wilson was now their friend and America would soon recognize their government. A certain type of Englishman also made use of the opportunity to call the attention of the Russians to the fact that their much praised American friends were now leaving them to the mercy of the Bolsheviki except for the greater friendship of England for Russia. England would not desert Russia. ”