Our Bolshevik at Irkutsk was often in danger of arrest, but the soldiers plainly told their officers that they would be shot if anything happened to the agitator. To the rank and file he preached friendship with Germany and peace--a separate peace, of course. He used to magnify Germany’s power, and say the failures at the front arose, not from Bolshevik cowardice, but from Germany’s immense technical superiority. He used to frighten them with tales of German scientists and what they could invent. If the soldiers said a separate peace was dangerous because of Japan, he used to answer, “No, that didn’t matter, Germany would not let Japan take Siberia.” In time two parties in the regiment were clearly marked--the real soldiers and the Bolsheviks. The real soldiers remained very anti-German, and were unfriendly to the prisoners of war. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, used to creep up to the prisoners and say, “You are our friends, you won’t let anything happen to us, will you?” When the Battalions of Death were formed, they were laughed at as fools. And when the other soldiers were ordered to the front, they had their explanation ready. “You are going to die,” they said, “because Kerenski has been bought by the English. He has received millions of pounds to continue the war. You will shed your blood not for Russia but to fill his pockets.” And the soldiers used to march away, their hearts filled with anger and disgust against England and Kerenski. I have never seen a more miserable sight than the Russian troops marching off to the front in 1917. They dragged themselves along, sullen, gloomy, almost abject in their despair, obviously torn between craven fear of the battlefield and rage at the men who were sending them there. At the same time other means were used to bring them definitely over to the Bolsheviks. Everything the Russian peasant held dear was represented as in danger from Kerenski. They were told that, once the Bolsheviks were in power, they could take whatever they had a fancy to. Only those who know the dense stupidity and ignorance of the Russian peasant can imagine how quickly this propaganda took effect. The soldiers had no idea of the issues involved in the war; they were fighting simply because they had to. When the news of Korniloff’s advance on Petrograd came, a soldier said to me, “Where is this Petrograd that everybody is talking about? Is it in England or in Germany?” He was from the Manchurian frontier, and the very vastness of his country prevented him from forming any idea of it. [SN: AMERICA Y.M.C.A.]