Part 14

So Archangel proved, with its sullied record to blight forever the good name of America when soldiers gather to tell of the Great War, and, great as the cost of the campaign had been with 2,485 casualties[1] of killed and wounded and sickened men, its financial loss, over ten times the price paid Russia for the vast dominions of Alaska, there was not a man in the ranks who did not sense the disgrace in our ignoble desertion, there was not an American officer who would not have chosen to have left his bones bleaching white beneath Archangel snows, than been a living witness to the ignominious way in which his country quit and slunk away.

[1] Chief Surgeon's Report.

All felt a personal sense of poignant shame for the failure to see the game through to its uttermost bitter end, or else seek expiation by honest avowal of wrong and humble contrition. It was an inexorable dilemma, one that took the staunchest courage, no matter which course was followed. Perhaps the higher courage would have been the admission of culpable fault. But we took neither course. We merely wilted from Archangel and came away.

On the homeward troopships, among the ice floes of the White Sea, the taunting unspoken reproach galled most bitterly of all, for we left our British allies to extricate themselves from the miserable mess as best they could, and with no explanation and never a sustaining word we left them.

Many trying things in the campaign had aroused the Americans to intemperate speech, which now to recall they would have surrendered all they possessed. Incompetence and tactlessness, and seeming lack of understanding and sympathy by those in power, to which the soldiers of England appeared indifferent, never failed to draw the intense, iconoclastic fire of the Americans. The difference lay in the national atmosphere of the two countries, the divergence in character and traditions, born and nurtured under the republican and the older order. They are a different people from us, the British, though the blood strain be the same. The glory of baseball is lost on them; they play the tedious cricket; but, when the fight is on, the quality of the bulldog, once at grips to hang on with set teeth till death, is British; blinded to all save the solid grimness of the task in hand, their brains seem dull to those imaginative flights which are the curse of the Western soldier.

Thus ended America's share of the war with Russia. At Brest the "mutinous" regiment was shunted in fragments over the seas to America, and in the homeland, these soldiers who had borne arms in conflict six months after the Armistice, were shooed off to civilian life, and the whole embarrassing matter was expunged from the war record.

All inquiry concerning the Expedition has been met by specious pleas in evasive avoidance. No peace was ever made with Russia, as no state of war had ever been recognized, and the legalists might well contend that all who engaged in it are open to indictment for manslaughter, for the enterprise will always remain a depraved one with status of a freebooters' excursion.

At Corbela sat an aged woman with ghastly face, gray as the dirty _platok_ that framed it, her gaunt chin resting on a hand, bony and hideous from relentless toil. With failing despairing eyes, she saw in the dwindling snows only the dissolution of winter, quite blinded to buoyant spring that with tufts of brown turf bursts boisterously through the southern hill slopes, like heedless youth that with surging, eager, passionate desire presses on the reluctant heels of death to life's fulfillment.

Outside the hut a young moujik, with the handsome physique of first unsullied manhood, and the credulous eyes of a child, curiously watching the north marching Americans; a giant of masked strength, needing only the key of trained intelligence to unloose immeasurable dynamic force that might some day rule the world.

Kindle the liberating torch of enlightenment in the nether regions of the Slavs, strike from the millions the shackles of serfdom ignorance, and from the pestilential ashes of present degrading Bolshevism, Russia, the giant, in stupendous power, rises phoenixlike to Jupiter.

To the Russian people we owe a debt that can never be paid except in deepest and very humble gratitude; for, when those gray hosts swept over Belgium and Northern France, Russia invaded Prussia, threatened the gates of Koenigsberg, routed the Austrians in a smashing blow at Lemberg, and, when the German aggressive movement was at its culminating height, drew off to the east two Army Corps and a Cavalry Division from von Kluck's right wing, a fatal diversion of the German forces which enabled Joffre, closing in the breach at the Marne, to save Paris and turn the advance into a complete retirement.

This great battle of the Marne marked the initial phase of the war, and completely frustrated the cherished Berlin plan of gaining quick victory by tactics of overwhelming surprise.

Many anxious months followed as England slowly transformed her energies from peaceful pursuits to those of war, and during this prolonged, crucial time the Russians never wavered from the attack. They massed for repeated hammering offensives in Poland, in Masturia and east of the Vistula in Galicia, so that the German Imperial Staff could never develop full strength, but had to be content with a holding campaign in the West while marshalling most forces to oppose the menacing East.

Not until the beginning of 1916, because of the Russians, could another effort of masses be made. Then every available man was concentrated with the Crown Prince's army as he smashed at Verdun to bring France to her knees, but when the assault was at its height, again obedient to her trust, and faithful, Russia sprang to the attack with such heroism and such devoted and reckless courage, that the controlling German combat divisions which might have gained the fortress had to be diverted from Verdun to Galicia.

Yet again at the commencement of 1917, at Mitau, and, in the summer of that year, when the British Empire assembled its legions at the Somme, Brussiloff struck south to the Carpathian passes, and it was only when Russia collapsed exhausted, and ghoulish Bolshevism looted the prostrate stricken gladiator, that the united German armies marshalled in full strength for a crushing blow. _Only then did Germany have numerical superiority in the West_.

We can gain an impression of what might have happened from the fury of that La Fere-Arras offensive, which shocked the world by its blighting trail of spectral horrors; hardly a British Division was left intact, and France reeled and staggered in a nausea of mortal weakness until Clemenceau in agony cried out to the Allies for sustaining support.

All might have ended then, had it not been for America, but America could never have come, had it not been for the Russian sacrifice in the early days, when the German Divisions, fresh and recklessly rash, were filled with the lust of battle conquest, and the German leaders, careless of casualties, flung their men to death with a high and free hand.

It is well to remember these things when we boast (a little noisily) that American arms won the great war. No one nation won this appalling contest of the nations embattled at Esdraelon, and, great as our offering was, how small it was and how feebly comparable to that of Russia who laid down the lives of more men than all we sent to France, and paid a ghastly toll in crippled, maimed and battle losses, a million souls beyond the sum of our whole military effort!

_A joint Resolution, providing for any needed explanations and reparations which may be due from this country for our invasion of Russian territory was introduced in the United States Senate at the second session Sixty-sixth Congress by Senator France, 27th February, 1920._