“Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “I admit that such a conference with the enemy, at a time when the allied armies are engaged in killing that same enemy on the battle-field, would be morally and sentimentally a grave thing. But I am certain that the advantages would have outweighed the disadvantages. All the French socialists, except a group on the right, agree with my point of view.
“After the war the working classes in all the countries will have to stand together, will have to have a common programme, that they may force their point of view on the governments. The Stockholm conference would have furthered that solidarity. I regret that the American working class can not see that.”
I turned the question to the Russian collapse.
“Ah, Russia, a great mystery, is it not? When you think she is about to commit a treachery you see a Brousiloff offensive. When you think she is about to be sublime you behold the Brest-Litovsk surrender. Anarchy! But Russia is too great to fall permanently.
“Why are not France and America there now, helping poor, wounded Russia? All we do is to send a message to the Moscow soviet: ‘Russia will emerge.’ Mon Dieu!”
“To whom would you offer your help, Lenine and Trotzky?” I asked. “Do you think that we can help the Russian people through men who are daily delivering them piecemeal to the Germans?”
“Oh, I do not think Lenine and Trotzky are exactly German agents, although it is evident that they took German money,” was the extraordinary reply. “They are not traitors, they are fanatics. They see nothing except their propaganda. Here was money offered them, money they needed for their propaganda. German money—true, but what of it? They would take any money!”
Monsieur Albert Thomas evidently could not see that men who would take German money were incapable of being honest leaders, sincere prophets, or anything in the world but liars, thieves and traitors. No man can exist half crook, half honest.
“They see nothing but their propaganda.” That is a perfect description of Monsieur Albert Thomas and all the other misguided idealists who walk with blinders obscuring their eyes. They think and talk as though unaware that the world around them was in flames.
On a battle-front of seventy-five miles our allied soldiers are enduring such hardships, are performing such miracles of labor, are suffering such wounds, such horrible mutilations, that no imagination can compass the facts. Every day some of these heroic men give their blood, their beautiful young lives for the freedom of the world.