“I can.” The Captain betrayed a hint of temper. “I suppose I shall have to if I'm to convince you. The stability of the whole of Central and Eastern Europe has been upset by the repartitioning of the Peace Treaty. The situation as it exists to-day is intolerable. The ruin which the war commenced has been completed by the pacification. The old social order has been overthrown; in its place we have a dozen rash experiments. In Russia, instead of the Czar, we have Bolshevism. In what was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire we have a series of Republics, which are nothing more than old racial hatreds entrenched behind newly created frontiers. In Poland, which was prisoner to three nations for two centuries, we have a released convict, vengeful with a sense of past injustice. Instead of reconstruction, we have disorganization. Trade is at a standstill. Money is valueless. Confidence is gone. Poverty has made a clean sweep of class distinctions. Mob-rule has usurped the rights of authority. Like a lean wolf, famine gallops through the desolation in ever widening circles.”
“But Prince Rogovich?” Hindwood recalled him. “What had he to do with it?”
“He was the leader of the monarchist party in Europe—the organizer of a secret movement to set up again the thrones which war has toppled. Incidentally he was to have established a new throne for himself in Poland. Behind him he had the landowning classes and the old aristocracy, which the new regime of haphazard democracy has beggared. He was biding his time till the crisis should become sufficiently acute for him to strike his blow. He had his armies ready. All he lacked was munitions. The floating of the loan in America completed his program.”
“But you said that the fact that he was returning in triumph was known only to a few. If only a few knew it, why should his death have caused this sudden exodus of women on trains running westward?”
“For two reasons: because he was the recognized strong man of the buffer states which lie between Russian anarchy and civilization; and because the crisis of starvation, for which he had been waiting, is now in sight. While Bolshevism was making its drives against Poland, Central Europe was compelled to hold together. Now that Bolshevism is crumbling, that compulsion is relaxed. All the way from Siberia to the frontiers of Germany millions are perishing from lack of food. Presently the Russian millions will commence to march westward to the lands of plenty. They'll march like Death, swinging his scythe. They'll sweep on like a pestilence. They'll lope like gaunt wolves, savage and relentless. The starving peoples of Central Europe, who would once have resisted them, will join them. Prince Rogovich, had he lived, could have prevented them.”
“How?” It was Santa.
“He would have declared a new war, with the return to monarchy as his battle-cry. He had his nucleus armies in readiness; they would have sprung from their hiding-places overnight. There would have been a tremendous rally to him as the only man unscrupulous enough to handle the situation. He would have made his bargain with the Allies.”
“And then?”
“He would have trained his guns on the lean hordes of Russia and would have blown them back across their borders.”
Again Santa spoke. Her voice came low and haltingly. “He would have made the world pass through the fires of Moloch for a second time. The person who murdered him must have known it.”