On the homeward troopships, among the ice floes of the White Sea, the taunting unspoken reproach galled most bitterly of all, for we left our British allies to extricate themselves from the miserable mess as best they could, and with no explanation and never a sustaining word we left them.
Many trying things in the campaign had aroused the Americans to intemperate speech, which now to recall they would have surrendered all they possessed. Incompetence and tactlessness, and seeming lack of understanding and sympathy by those in power, to which the soldiers of England appeared indifferent, never failed to draw the intense, iconoclastic fire of the Americans. The difference lay in the national atmosphere of the two countries, the divergence in character and traditions, born and nurtured under the republican and the older order. They are a different people from us, the British, though the blood strain be the same. The glory of baseball is lost on them; they play the tedious cricket; but, when the fight is on, the quality of the bulldog, once at grips to hang on with set teeth till death, is British; blinded to all save the solid grimness of the task in hand, their brains seem dull to those imaginative flights which are the curse of the Western soldier.
Thus ended America's share of the war with Russia. At Brest the "mutinous" regiment was shunted in fragments over the seas to America, and in the homeland, these soldiers who had borne arms in conflict six months after the Armistice, were shooed off to civilian life, and the whole embarrassing matter was expunged from the war record.
All inquiry concerning the Expedition has been met by specious pleas in evasive avoidance. No peace was ever made with Russia, as no state of war had ever been recognized, and the legalists might well contend that all who engaged in it are open to indictment for manslaughter, for the enterprise will always remain a depraved one with status of a freebooters' excursion.
At Corbela sat an aged woman with ghastly face, gray as the dirty platok that framed it, her gaunt chin resting on a hand, bony and hideous from relentless toil. With failing despairing eyes, she saw in the dwindling snows only the dissolution of winter, quite blinded to buoyant spring that with tufts of brown turf bursts boisterously through the southern hill slopes, like heedless youth that with surging, eager, passionate desire presses on the reluctant heels of death to life's fulfillment.
Outside the hut a young moujik, with the handsome physique of first unsullied manhood, and the credulous eyes of a child, curiously watching the north marching Americans; a giant of masked strength, needing only the key of trained intelligence to unloose immeasurable dynamic force that might some day rule the world.
Kindle the liberating torch of enlightenment in the nether regions of the Slavs, strike from the millions the shackles of serfdom ignorance, and from the pestilential ashes of present degrading Bolshevism, Russia, the giant, in stupendous power, rises phoenixlike to Jupiter.
To the Russian people we owe a debt that can never be paid except in deepest and very humble gratitude; for, when those gray hosts swept over Belgium and Northern France, Russia invaded Prussia, threatened the gates of Koenigsberg, routed the Austrians in a smashing blow at Lemberg, and, when the German aggressive movement was at its culminating height, drew off to the east two Army Corps and a Cavalry Division from von Kluck's right wing, a fatal diversion of the German forces which enabled Joffre, closing in the breach at the Marne, to save Paris and turn the advance into a complete retirement.
This great battle of the Marne marked the initial phase of the war, and completely frustrated the cherished Berlin plan of gaining quick victory by tactics of overwhelming surprise.
Many anxious months followed as England slowly transformed her energies from peaceful pursuits to those of war, and during this prolonged, crucial time the Russians never wavered from the attack. They massed for repeated hammering offensives in Poland, in Masturia and east of the Vistula in Galicia, so that the German Imperial Staff could never develop full strength, but had to be content with a holding campaign in the West while marshalling most forces to oppose the menacing East.