"We'll just rush up there and re-establish the great Russian army--reorganize the vast forces of the Tsar," said an ebullient officer in England, wearing the red tabs and hatband of the General Staff. "One good Allied soldier can outfight twenty Bolsheviks," was the usual boast of the Commanding Officer in the early days of the fighting. And it was a boast that was made good in the furious winter combats, when, standing at bay, the scattered companies, with no place to retreat, save the open snow, stood off many times their number of the enemy. In these decisive trials, the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon ever asserted its superiority, but one to twenty is not a very comfortable ratio upon which to form an offensive campaign. And the war against Russia was conceived as an offensive campaign, whatever it turned out to be. RUSSIA THE VAST UNKNOWN "The Emperor fully realized the nature of the task he had before him. To defend himself in Italy, Germany or even Poland against the Tsar was one thing; to invade the vast empire of Russia, was another task altogether--a task colossal, if not appalling. And arrayed against him were two fearful enemies--the Russian Army and winter." WATSON'S _Napoleon_. II RUSSIA THE VAST UNKNOWN Sometimes we are amused by foreign littérateurs and commentators, who come to our great country for a few crowded weeks of teas and symposia, gatherings of the intelligencia in our metropolis, and perhaps a dash into the mushroom dilettantism of Chicago, to set sail and compose screeds and screeds of America, her ways and her people, their manners and their customs. Superficial vaporings, but far better composed and built by far on firmer ground than the idle opinions of those few Americans who have gone to the vast, far stretching empire of the Slavs, and glibly vouchsafed their ex cathedra views thereon. The dominions of Great Russia were spread from the Baltic east to the Japan Sea, and from above the Arctic Circle far south to the Caspian and the Black Sea and Lake Baikal in Siberia. They comprised eight million six hundred and fifty thousand square miles of varied territory, nearly three times that of the United States, and were peopled by heterogeneous people, numbering one hundred and eighty million, as estimated, for no census or even approximate count has ever been attempted. There were the Finns and the Letts, the Lithuanians, the Jews, the Mordvinians, the Estonians, the Siberians, the Great Russians, the Little Russians, the Red Russians, and the White Russians of the Central Provinces, the Cossacks of the south, and the Tartars of the Caucasus; all with no conscious unity, no national identity, not a single common impulse or purpose or interest. In many instances, without a communion of language.