onfidence as one friend
receives the confidence of another. His advice was honourable advice. He
counselled these friends to set their house in order and to stand firm
in the conviction of their strength. Their finances were a chaos, their
army was disorganized; let them begin in those quarters; let them bring
order into their finances and let them reorganize their army.

While he was at St. Petersburg, after a wide experience in other
countries, he twice saw Russia humiliated by Germany. Twice he witnessed
the agony of his Russian friends in having to bow before the threats of
Prussia. Remember that the rulers of Russia in those days were the most
charming and cultivated people in the world, whereas the Prussian as a
diplomatist was the same Prussian whom, even as an ally of ours in 1815,
Croker found "very insolent, and hardly less offensive to the English
than to the French."[1] The Russians felt those humiliations as a
gentleman would feel the bullying of an upstart.

Lord Carnock was at the Foreign Office in July, 1914. He alone knew that
Russia would fight. For the rest of mankind, certainly for the German
Kaiser, it was to be another bloodless humiliation of the Russian Bear.
Admiral von Tirpitz wanted war: Bethmann-Hollweg did not. The great
majority of the German people, in whom a genuine fear of Russia had
increased under the astute propaganda of the War Party, hoped that the
sword had only to be flashed in Russia's face for that vast barbarian to
cower once again. Few statesmen in Europe thought otherwise. Sir Edward
Grey, I have good reason to think, did not consider that Russia would
fight. He erred with that great number of educated Germans who thought
the sword had only to be rattled a little more loudly in the scabbard
for Russia to weaken, and for Germany to gain, without cost, the supreme
object of her policy--_an increasing ascendancy in the Balkans_. But
this time Russia was ready, and this time Lord Carnock knew Russia would
fight. I am not sure that Lord Carnock was not the only statesman in
Europe who possessed this knowledge--the knowledge on which everything
hung.

It is easy for thoughtless people, either in their hatred or love of
Bolshevism, to forget that the old Russia saved France from destruction
and made a greater sacrifice of her noblest life than any other nation
in the great struggle. The first Russian armies, composed of the very
flower of her manhood, fought with a matchless heroi