“Soldiers, do not trust these wolves in sheep’s clothing! They call you to fresh slaughter. Well, follow them if you like! Let them pave the path for the return of the bloody Czar with your corpses. Let your orphans, your widows and children, deserted by all, pass again into slavery, hunger, beggary, and disease!”
The speech undoubtedly had a great success. The atmosphere grew red-hot, the excitement increased—that excitement of the “molten mass,” in the presence of which it is impossible to foresee either the limits or the tension, or the tracks along which the torrent will pour. The crowd was noisy and agitated, accompanying with shouts of approval or curses against “the enemies of the people” those parts of the speech which especially touched its instincts, its naked, cruel egotism.
Albov, pale, with burning eyes, made his appearance on the platform. He spoke excitedly of something or other to the chairman, who then addressed the crowd. The chairman’s words were inaudible amidst the noise; for a long time he waved his hands and the flag which he had pulled down, until at last the noise had subsided somewhat.
“Comrades, Lieutenant Albov wishes to address you!”
Shouts and hisses were heard.
“Down with him! We do not want him!”
But Albov was already on the platform, gripping hard, bending downwards towards the sea of heads. And he said:
“No, I will speak, and you dare not refuse to listen to one of those officers whom this man has been abusing and dishonouring here before you. Who he may be, whence he has come, who pays him for his speeches, so profitable to the Germans, not one of you knows. He has come here, befogged you, and will go on his way to sow evil and treason. And you have believed him. And we, who along with you have now carried our heavy cross into the fourth year of the War—we are now to be regarded as your enemies? Why? Is it because we never sent you into action, but led you, bestrewing with officers’ corpses the whole of the path covered by the regiment? Is it because that, of the officers who led you in the beginning, there is not one left in the regiment who is not maimed?”
He spoke with deep sincerity and pain in his voice. There were moments when it seemed as if his words were breaking through the withered crust of those hardened hearts, as if a break would again take place in the attitude of the crowd.
“He, your ‘new friend,’ is calling you to mutiny, to violence, to robbery. Do you understand who will benefit when, in Russia, brother rises against brother, so as to turn to ashes, in sack and fire, the last property left not only to the ‘capitalists,’ but to the poverty-stricken workers and peasants? No, it is not by violence, but by law and right, that you will acquire land and liberty and a tolerable existence. Your enemies are not here, among the officers, but there—beyond the barbed wire. And we shall not attain either to freedom or to peace by a dishonourable, cowardly standing in one and the same place, but in the general mighty rush of an advance.”