ination of peoples" which
had been the fundamental promise of the League of Nations, and a blatant
hypocrisy on the part of a nation which denied self--government to
Ireland. The ostensible object of our intervention in Russia was to
liberate the Russian masses from "the bloody tyranny of the Bolsheviks,"
but this ardor for the liberty of Russia had not been manifest during
the reign of Czardom and grand dukes when there were massacres of mobs
in Moscow, bloody Sundays in St. Petersburg, pogroms in Riga, floggings
of men and girls in many prisons, and when free speech, liberal ideas,
and democratic uprisings had been smashed by Cossack knout and by the
torture of Siberian exile.

Anyhow, many people believed that it was none of our business to
suppress the Russian Revolution or to punish the leaders of it, and it
was suspected by British working-men that the real motive behind our
action was not a noble enthusiasm for liberty, but an endeavor to
establish a reactionary government in Russia in order to crush a
philosophy of life more dangerous to the old order in Europe than high
explosives, and to get back the gold that had been poured into Russia by
England and France. By a strange paradox of history, French journalists,
forgetting their own Revolution, the cruelties of Robespierre and
Marat, the September Massacres, the torture of Marie Antoinette in the
Tuileries, the guillotining of many fair women of France, and after
1870 the terrors of the Commune, were most horrified by the anarchy in
Russia, and most fierce in denunciation of the bloody struggle by which
a people made mad by long oppression and infernal tyrannies strove to
gain the liberties of life.

Thousands of British soldiers newly come from war in France were
sullenly determined that they would not be dragged off to the new
adventure. They were not alone. As Lord Rothermere pointed out, a French
regiment mutinied on hearing a mere unfounded report that it was being
sent to the Black Sea. The United States and Japan were withdrawing.
Only a few of our men, disillusioned by the ways of peace, missing the
old comradeship of the ranks, restless, purposeless, not happy at home,
seeing no prospect of good employment, said: "Hell!... Why not the army
again, and Archangel, or any old where?" and volunteered for Mr. Winston
Churchill's little war.

After the trouble of demobilization came peace pageants and celebrations
and flag-wavings. But all was not right w