n Bolshevist Russia brutality assumed forms
so monstrous that the modern man of the West shrinks from conjuring up a
faint picture of them in imagination. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of
thousands were done to death in hellish ways by the orders of men and of
women. Eyes were gouged out, ears hacked off, arms and legs torn from
the body in presence of the victims' children or wives, whose agony was
thus begun before their own turn came. Men and women and infants were
burned alive. Chinese executioners were specially hired to inflict the
awful torture of the "thousand slices."[281] Officers had their limbs
broken and were left for hours in agonies. Many victims are credibly
reported to have been buried alive. History, from its earliest dawn down
to the present day, has recorded nothing so profoundly revolting as the
nameless cruelties in which these human fiends reveled. One gruesome
picture of the less loathsome scenes enacted will live in history on a
level with the _noyades_ of Nantes. I have seen several moving
descriptions of it in Russian journals. The following account is from
the pen of a French marine officer:

"We have two armed cruisers outside Odessa. A few weeks ago one of them,
having an investigation to make, sent a diver down to the bottom. A few
minutes passed and the alarm signal was heard. He was hauled up and
quickly relieved of his accoutrements. He had fainted away. When he came
to, his teeth were chattering and the only articulate sounds that could
be got from him were the words: 'It is horrible! It is awful!' A second
diver was then lowered, with the same procedure and a like result.
Finally a third was chosen, this time a sturdy lad of iron nerves, and
sent down to the bottom of the sea. After the lapse of a few minutes the
same thing happened as before, and the man was brought up. This time,
however, there was no fainting fit to record. On the contrary, although
pale with terror, he was able to state that he had beheld the sea-bed
peopled with human bodies standing upright, which the swaying of the
water, still sensible at this shallow depth, softly rocked as though
they were monstrous algae, their hair on end bristling vertically, and
their arms raised toward the surface.... All these corpses, anchored to
the bottom by the weight of stones, took on an appearance of eerie life
resembling, one might say, a forest of trees moved from side to side by
the wind and eager to welcome the diver come down amon