Many of the crews simply arrested their officers, and some asked them to sign a paper declaring they would support the Revolution. As nearly as I can learn, sixty-five men were killed on the Baltic Sea Fleet, and a hundred on the Black Sea Fleet. The first day of the Revolution, the sailors revenged themselves on the whole order of discipline, and it was hot blood that determined life and death. When the committee was formed, the killing was stopped. At the time of the Korniloff rebellion, four officers belonging to one of the ships were taken out and killed, against the protest of the Central Committee. Once more the sailors, maddened by what they believed to be an attack on the Revolution, took things into their own hands. They put three questions to their officers: “Do you belong to the Soviet and Kerensky, or Korniloff? “If Korniloff takes Petrograd, will you go to take it from him? “If Korniloff tells you to go to Petrograd and fight the Provisional Government, will you go?” Their answers to these questions saved or cost them their lives. The sailors formed their own committee and pronounced the death sentence. The lot of the naval officer in Russia was no more enviable than that of the army officer; but it was a direct and logical result of the régime that made masters of the few and slaves of the many. [Illustration: Korniloff, his staff and Cossack bodyguard from the “Wild Division”] [Illustration: Bicycle troops to the rescue of Kerensky] [Illustration: Baltic sailors’ bayonets speak for the Soviet] [Illustration: A dining-room in the Matrosski Klub (Sailors’ Club), Helsingfors] At Viborg and at some of the other points, the fate of the officers was far worse than at Helsingfors, and the stories told about the deaths they died are not pretty ones. The training and tradition of a naval officer unfitted him for faith in the new order, contradicted the belief of a lifetime and the heritage of generations. The chasm that yawned between officers and men was too wide to be bridged in a day. A few made an honest effort to cross over it, and the men seemed pathetically grateful to them. Others took orders from the sailors for the same reason that the sailors had once taken orders from them--they were afraid to do otherwise. Some were merely biding their time, convinced that the topsy-turvy order would change and they would come into their “own” again. But one thing was evident here as elsewhere in Russia: that, whatever happens, nobody’s “own” will ever again be quite what it has been in the past. Admiral Verderevsky, the Minister of Marine, said that discipline was destroyed at its root not at the moment of the Revolution, but long before; that new and democratic forms should have been created long ago; and that it could never be restored by the lash or the guillotine. Verderevsky blamed former Minister of War Goutchkoff for lack of discipline in the navy.