One final touch of horror, and I have done with horrors. I only mention it as it is characteristic of that Russian morbidity of temperament which Englishmen find it so hard to understand. After the fighting was ended, the dead bodies were collected and stacked in various public buildings. For days this was one of the sights of Irkutsk, and people flocked to see it. Corpses of men, women, and children were piled in heaps for every one to look at. You could see fashionable women daintily lifting their skirts and picking their way between the dead bodies, or young girls and boys staring with naïve curiosity at the sight. In one building the room of the Army Paymaster was requisitioned, and he used to sit at his desk, faced by a wall of dead bodies, while men and women came to receive their money. The prisoners of war went too, and vowed that never should a revolution cause such scenes in Germany; they were prepared to suffer anything rather than that. [SN: SOLDIERS’ COUNCILS] We thus see Bolshevism sitting throned on a pile of dead bodies. Since so many people are still inclined to regard the movement as to some extent an expression of the people’s will, it may be interesting to state exactly how the Bolsheviks came into power. It was only through the soldiers, and these soldiers they won over to their side only by the promise of peace. The elections for the Constituent Assembly at Irkutsk just before the second Revolution showed that the Bolsheviks had no following except in the army. The soldiers were bitterly hated by the people. I have seen peasant women shake their fists in the soldiers’ faces and curse them for the disasters they had brought on Russia. The soldiers merely laughed and shouted, “Peace, peace.” Many of the demobilized soldiers, when they arrived at their homes, were shot by the peasants. Once the Bolsheviks were in power, the soldiers insisted on their promises being kept and on being demobilized. They were implored to stay and fight for the good old cause of Socialism; but they answered roughly, “We are not Socialists. We are Bolsheviks.” They had not the slightest notion what the Bolsheviks were, and if you had told them they were extreme Monarchists, it would have made no difference, so long as they brought peace. A list of volunteers was opened at Irkutsk, and only fifty men enrolled themselves. The Bolsheviks began to feel the disadvantages of the Soldiers’ Councils they had created. The new Government issued an order that the demobilized soldiers were to give up their equipment and rifles. The Soldiers’ Councils met and passed a resolution that each soldier was free to take his equipment home with him. Soldiers were willing to sell their rifles for a song, and the bourgeois were thus enabled to equip themselves for the next struggle with the Bolsheviks. The most amazing scenes took place. A friend of mine was approached by a soldier and asked what he would give for a machine-gun. He thought the whole affair