An outpost on the Railway
It was at Kodish that the Bolsheviks strove their uttermost with propaganda, that insidious, warring weapon of which so often they have revealed themselves the masters. Thousands and thousands of pamphlets, leaflets, circulars, manifestoes, announcements, proclamations, appeals—an amazing collection of vitriolic, eloquent literature, were left along the patrol routes in the snow forests. This was true at all fronts, but especially at Kodish, where these persuasive methods were concentrated like a great verbal bombardment, a veritable war of scarifying words, Russian, French, German and English. Many messages of hate and fire, with frank artlessness, urged the Allied soldier to desert and join the Soviet; others, more subtle, displayed a masterful knowledge of human weakness and human passions and prejudices.
The following is taken from The Call published in Moscow and printed in English:
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 principal reason the British-American financiers have sent you to fight us for, is because we were sensible enough and courageous enough to repudiate the war debts of the bloody, corrupt old Tsar?...
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!...
You are kidding yourself that you are fighting for your country. The capitalist class places arms in your hands. Let the workers cease using these weapons against each other, and turn them on their sweaters. The capitalists themselves have given you the means to overthrow them, if you had but the sense and the courage to use them. There is only one thing that you can do: Arrest your officers. Send a committee of your common soldiers to meet our own workingmen, and find out yourselves what we stand for.
The following is from the same publication:
The Bolshevik Revolution marked the culmination of the world struggle to set us all free. Strike off your shackles, comrades, we are your friends not enemies, and the only reason we seek to stamp out the parasitical capitalists by force is because force is the only language they can understand. This is the beginning of a great world revolution which knows no national limitations. It will set the producers free. Join the Soviet Party. We are fighting your fight against the unprincipled capitalistic class. Comrades, you know the meaning of "scab," well, that is the part you are acting in Russia. For shame, comrades! Kill your officers, then shoulder your rifles and come over to our lines which are your own.
These extracts have been taken at random from a hundred others of like incendiary tenor, most of which had little effect on the Americans except to impress them with the coincidence of a striking similarity in style and sentiment between them and many public addresses of American politicians printed in the newspapers that came from home, where a soft going government tolerated perversions of free speech, as hostile to American soldiers in Russia as the most violent preachments from the enemy.