THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE.
While our hard-pressed troops are retreating from Mons before overwhelming numbers of the enemy, we must turn to what is called the Eastern theatre of war and see what is happening there. Before, however, I describe the actual fighting, I must tell you something about Russia and the Russian army.
You probably know that Russia is not only equal in extent to half Europe, but stretches right across the northern part of the continent of Asia to the waters of the Pacific Ocean. This vast empire actually covers one-seventh of all the land on the globe. Unlike the British Empire, it is continuous; you may travel from one end of it to the other by rail. You will get some idea of the tremendous railway journey involved when I tell you that the distance from the old city of Warsaw on the river Vistula to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan is about 6,200 miles—that is, about two-fifths of the circumference of the world at the latitude of London.
Naturally you will expect this vast empire to be inhabited by vast numbers of people. In the year 1912 it was estimated that there were more than 171 millions of people under the sway of the Tsar—that is, more than one in ten of all the people on earth. I have already told you of the extraordinary variety of races which dwell beneath the Union Jack; there is almost as great a variety of peoples in the Russian Empire. There are, for example, thirty different races in the Caucasus alone. The bulk of the inhabitants, however, are of Slav race, and are descended from a people who, ages ago, entered Europe from Asia, and gradually conquered the land and settled in it. What are known as the Great Russians form the strongest and toughest race in the whole empire. They are Slavs who in early times intermingled with the Finns and set up the kingdom of Moscow. These Great Russians gradually succeeded in enlarging their borders, until their territory stretched to the Crimea and Turkestan on the south and south-east, to Manchuria in the far east, and to Germany in the west. The Great Russians are now the largest and most important of all the Russian peoples, and they occupy the bulk of the country.
The descendants of the races and tribes which the Great Russians subdued still exist, and they differ as widely from their conquerors as a northern Frenchman differs from a southern Frenchman. One of these conquered races consists of the White Russians, who represent some of the earliest Slav colonists, and live near the sources of the Niemen, the Dwina, and the Dnieper in the south-west of the country. Most of the people of the south, however, are Little Russians. They speak a dialect of their own, love dance and song, and are less fond of work than the peoples of Northern Russia.
Amongst other races in Russia are the Poles, a Slav people with quite a separate language. In Chapter III. of our first volume I told you that in the days of the English King Edward III. Poland was an important and flourishing kingdom. I also told you how the sovereigns of Prussia, Russia, and Austria conspired to seize portions of this kingdom, and how it was gradually gobbled up until the Poles, like the Jews, had no land which they could call their own. From that day to this they have yearned for the time when their old kingdom might be restored to them. On the 15th day of August, when the war was in full swing, the Tsar addressed the Poles as follows:—
"Poles! The hour has sounded when the sacred dream of your fathers and grandfathers may be realized. A century and a half has passed since the living body of Poland was torn in pieces; but the soul of the country is not dead. It continues to live, inspired by the hope that there will come for the Polish people an hour of resurrection and of brotherly friendship with Great Russia. The Russian army brings you the solemn pledge of this friendship which wipes out the frontiers dividing the Polish peoples, and unites them under the sceptre of the Russian Tsar. Under this sceptre Poland will be born again, free in her religion and her language. You will be granted Home Rule under the protection of Russia.
