“Freed from the old régime, you have fallen into the hands of the English, French, and Americans. Remember, we welcomed your freedom, did not interfere with your internal affairs, and offered you a brother’s hand. We offered you peace and asked you to send representatives from your government to talk over peace. Swindled and bought by English gold, you refused to believe us, but in numberless instances your brothers have proved the historical fact: We are not your enemies. We do not wish you to perish, or your freedom. “Those who fear separate peace furnish you with money and all kinds of material, and all this is a proof of your unbelief in us, which will bring you to your ruin. We stand firm and quiet, and await your advance. The advance of English and French has been defeated, and we will also defeat you. “THE GERMAN SOLDIERS.” “How shall you answer it?” I asked, when the Colonel had finished. A lieutenant from Moscow, whom we had christened _enfant terrible_ because of his bounding spirits and irrepressible pranks, raised his arms to imitate an aimed gun. “_Boom! Boom! Boom!_ we shall answer them,” he said. But it was not so easily done as said. Those verbal gas-bombs, falling upon the simple, trusting mind of the Russian soldier, worked more havoc than heavy artillery and hand-grenade. “My men are behaving pretty well, but I wouldn’t dare order an offensive,” one of the generals told me, just before I left the front. The hereditary distrust between the officer class and the private was growing continually. Old and ancient grievances were unforgotten, and, as always, many of the innocent paid the price of the guilty. There were all kinds of Russian officers, just as there were all kinds of common soldiers. The soldiers were sometimes undiscriminating, even as the officers in their day of absolutism had been undiscriminating. The memory of punitive expeditions that followed the Revolution of 1905, when thousands upon thousands of revolutionists were shot and sometimes brutally tortured by order of Russian officers without even the pretense of a trial, still lingered. The soldiers generally looked upon their officers as the natural enemies of revolution, and regarded orders with suspicion. Tragedy followed tragedy on the Russian front, and enemy treachery and pitiful misunderstanding on all sides were chiefly to blame. Militarism was a product of autocracy, and the Russian front, at terrible cost, demonstrated that the larger freedom and the militaristic ideal can not live in the same world. The Russian revolutionist knew this. He knew in the summer of 1917 that freedoms, large or small, were not safe, in Russia or elsewhere, as long as one militaristic power lived to menace the others. He knew that the sword of militarism must be broken beneath the feet of the peace-hungry multitudes of the world before even the most limited of the freedoms are safe.