And if as happened far too frequently, a man’s batch of ancient letters that came after weeks of waiting, contained a brace of scented but whining epistles from the girl he had left behind him and perhaps a third one from a man friend who told how that same girl was running about with a slacker who had a fifteen-dollar a day job, the man had to be a jewel and a philosopher not to become bitter. And a bitter man deteriorates as a soldier.
To the credit of our veterans who were in North Russia let it be said that comparatively very few of them wrote sob-stuff home. They knew it was hard enough for the folks anyway, and it did themselves no good either. The imaginative “Scoops” among the cub reporters and the violently inflamed imaginations and utterances of partisan politicians seeking to puff their political sails with stories of hardships of our men in North Russia, all these and many other very well-meaning people were doing much to aggravate the fears and sufferings of the people at home. Many a doughboy at the front sighed wearily and shook his head doubtfully over the mess of sob-stuff that came uncensored from the States. He sent costly cablegrams to his loved ones at home to assure them that he was safe and not “sleeping in water forty degrees below zero” and so forth.
Not only did the screeching press articles and the roars of certain congressmen keep the homefolks in perpetual agony over the soldiers in Russia, but the reports of the same that filtered in through the mails to our front line campfires and Archangel comfortable billets caused trouble and heart-burnings among the men. It seems incredible how much of it the men fell for. But seeing it in their own home paper, many of the men actually believed tales that when told in camp were laughed off as plain scandalous rumor.
War is not fought in a comfortable parlor or club-room, but some of the tales which slipped through the censor from spineless cry-babies in our ranks of high and low rank, and were published in the States and then in clippings found their way back to North Russia, lamented the fact of the hardship of war in such insidious manner as to furnish the most formidable foe to morale with which the troops had to cope while in Russia. The Americans only laughed at Bolshevik propaganda which they clearly saw through. To the statement that the Reds would bring a million rifles against Archangel they only replied, “Let ’em come, the thicker grass the heavier the swath.”
But when a man’s own home paper printed the same story of the million men advancing on Archangel with bloody bayonets fixed, and told of the horrible hardships the soldier endured—and many of them were indeed severe hardships although most of the news stories were over-drawn and untruthful, and coupled with these stories were shrieks at the war department to get the boys out of Russia, together with stories of earnest and intended-to-help petitions of the best people of the land, asking and pleading the war department to get the boys out of Russia, then the doughboy’s spirit was depressed.
U. S. OFFICIAL PHOTO
Pioneer Platoon Has Fire at 455.
