The effect of this line of propaganda was at last made the subject of an informal protest by Major J. Brooks Nichols, one of our most influential and level-headed American officers, in a letter to General Ironside, whose sympathetic letter of reply did credit to his respect for other brave men and credit to his judgment. He ordered that the propaganda should not be further circulated among the American soldiers. It must be admitted that the French soldiers also suffered revulsion of feeling when the facts became better known. The British War Office methods of stimulating enthusiasm in the campaign against the Bolsheviki was a miserable failure. Distortion and deception will fail in the end. You can’t fool all the soldiers all the while. Truth will always win in the end. The soldier has right to it. He fights for truth; he should have its help.
Our own military and government authorities missed the main chance to help the soldiers in North Russia and gain their most loyal service in the expedition. Truth, not silence with its suspected acquiescence with British propaganda and methods of dealing with Russians; truth not rumors, truth, was needed; not vague promises, but truth.
In transmitting to us the Thanksgiving Day Proclamation, our American diplomatic representative in North Russia, Mr. Dewitt Poole, published to the troops the following: “But so great a struggle cannot end so abruptly. In the West the work of occupying German territory continues. In the East German intrigue has delivered large portions of Russia into unfriendly and undemocratic hands. The President has given our pledge of friendship to Russia and will point the way to its fulfillment. Confident in his leadership the American troops and officials in Northern Russia will hold to their task to the end.” This was a statement made by our American Charge d’ Affairs after the Armistice, it will be noted.
The New Year’s editorial in The Sentinel, our weekly paper, says, in part: “We who are here in North Russia constitute concrete evidence that there is something real and vital behind the words of President Wilson and other allied statesmen who have pledged that ‘we shall stand by Russia.’ Few of us, particularly few Americans, realize the debt which the whole world owes to Russia for her part in this four years struggle against German junkerism. Few of us now realize the significance that will accrue as the years go by to the presence of allied soldiers in Russia during this period of her greatest suffering. The battle for world peace, for democracy, for free representative government, has not yet been fought to a finish in Russia.”
With the sentiment of those two expressions, the American soldier might well be in accord. But he was dubious about the fighting; he was learning things about the Bolsheviks; he was hoping for statement of purposes by his government. But as the weeks dragged by he did not get the truth from his own government. Neither from Colonel Stewart, military head of the expedition, nor from the diplomatic and other United States’ agencies who were in Archangel, did he get satisfying facts. They allowed him to be propagandized, instead, both by the British press and news despatches and by the American press and political partisanships of various shades of color that came freely into North Russia to plague the already over-propagandized soldier.
Of the Bolshevik propaganda mention has been made in one or two other connections. We may add that the Bolos must have known something of our unwarlike and dissatisfied state of mind, for they left bundles of propaganda along the patrol paths, some of it in undecipherable characters of the Russian alphabet; but there was a publication in English, The Call, composed in Moscow by a Bolshevik from Milwaukee or Seattle or some other well known Soviet center on the home shore of the Atlantic.
These are some of the extracts. The reader may judge for himself:
“Do you British working-men know what your capitalists expect you to do about the war? They expect you to go home and pay in taxes figured into the price of your food and clothing, eight thousand millions of English pounds or forty thousand millions of American dollars. If you have any manhood, don’t you think it would be fair to call all these debts off? If you think this is fair, then join the Russian Bolsheviks in repudiating all war debts.
“Do you realize that the principle reason the British-American financiers have sent you to fight us for, is because we were sensible enough to repudiate the war debts of the bloody, corrupt old Czar?
“You soldiers are fighting on the side of the employers against us, the working people of Russia. All this talk about intervention to ‘save’ Russia amounts to this, that the capitalists of your countries, are trying to take back from us what we won from their fellow capitalists in Russia. Can’t you realize that this is the same war that you have been carrying on in England and America against the master class? You hold the rifles, you work the guns to shoot us with, and you are playing the contemptible part of the scab. Comrade, don’t do it!