Who were these leaders? It was enough for America to note that a horde of them, who had been hiding in Switzerland, were loaded into a sealed train by the German government and escorted across Germany and dumped into Russia to make all the trouble they could. That meant Lenin and his crowd were hired agents of the Hun; when they proceeded to attack what they called “allied imperialism,” that was the Kaiser’s voice speaking Russian, and when they published the secret treaties of the allies, taken from the archives of the Tsar, the newspapers in America dismissed the documents as obvious forgeries. Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers. He considered that this “Bolsheviki revolution” was the most terrible event that had happened in the world in his life-time; his face would grow pale as he talked to Bunny about it. America could get no army to France until next spring, and perhaps not till fall, and meantime the Germans had a million men they could move, only a few hundred miles across their country to the West front; they were jist a-goin’ to roll over the British and French, and take Paris, and perhaps the whole of France, and we should have the job of driving them out again. The whole burden of the war now fell onto America’s shoulders, and it would last years and years—neither Dad nor Bunny might live to see the end of it. Dad would read paragraphs out of the papers, details of the horrors that were happening in Russia—literally millions of people slaughtered, all the educated and enlightened ones; the most hideous tortures inflicted, such obscenities as you could not put into print. Before long they began applying their Communist theories to the women of the country, who were “nationalized” and made into public property by official decree; the “commissars” were raping them wholesale. Lenin was killing Trotsky, and Trotsky was throwing Lenin into jail. It was a boiling up from the bottom of the social pit, such savagery as we had hardly dreamed existing in human nature. Bunny could see now the folly of that “idealism” he had been prattling, his idea of letting strikers have their way, and turning industry over to the mob. Here was the thing tried out in practice, and how did he like it? Bunny had to admit that he didn’t like it so well, and he was crushed and sobered.