"There is no use people raising prejudice against this expedition. Every one knows why it was sent. It was sent as part of our operations against Germany. It was vitally necessary to take every measure in regard to Russia during the war which would keep as many German troops as possible on the Russian front, and reduce that formidable movement of the German armies which carried more than a million men to the Western Front, and which culminated in that immense series of battles which began on the 21st March last year (1918)."
WINSTON CHURCHILL, Secretary of State for War, in the House of Commons, 3rd March, 1919.
XI
RETREAT
When the appeal to patriotism failed, Archangel Province, under British direction, invoked conscription, and by the middle of June, twenty-two thousand Russian soldiers had been assembled by coercive means.
They thronged the backward villages through which the Americans passed on their way to disembarkation, and looked very fresh, like college youths, as they sauntered up and down to an eternal serenade of wheezing accordions, or with sacerdotal, marching chants, went swinging by in platoons and companies, these young conscripts, who knew so little of war and its harrowing disillusionment.
For the moment all breasts were filled with that contagious ardor that springs from every massed effort, no matter its end, but not one in a hundred knew or felt the call of patriotism for the coming conflict of Russian against Russian.
There was cause enough for the fight had it only been revealed to these pliant, guileless, peasant folk. For their country, weakened, helpless and faint from many war wounds, was being debased by vile and vicious poltroons who had stamped out the holy fires of the Revolution, nullified the Constituent Assembly, and stifled every voice of liberty with hands more remorseless than the cruel manacles of the Tsars.
The cause was there, but if their mentors sensed it, they manifested almost incredible obtuseness in failure to impart these moving eloquent reasons for the fight. They were silent about the odious exploitation of the masses under the crafty, artful guise of proletarianism; they said nothing of the wicked violation of sacred property rights, the unprincipled plundering, the trampling down by power maddened feet on all revolutionary enlightenment, the desecration of all things spiritual, the wanton derision of the church which had been the faith of the people and of their venerated, sainted fathers.
Here was reason enough for any Russian with exalted, holy devotion to lay down his life for his stricken country. But instead of such scathing and unequivocal indictment, the British dwelt upon the conduct of the Bolsheviks, shameful and faithless towards the Czecho-Slovaks, and gave out, with venomous vituperation, highly colored stories of enemy atrocities and cruel treatment of prisoners so patently over-extended that they failed to make a convincing impression even on the moujik mind.