Page:Albert Beaumont - Heroic Story of the Czecho-Slovak Legions - 1919.djvu/47

 The accession of Kerensky to power was the first real fatal blow. His decree authorising-in fact, prescribing—the formation of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Councils was the beginnig of the end. Russia was like a madhouse in which the chief lunatics had assumed the direction. The soldiers began to come home from the front. They wandered with kit and rifle into the towns. They came, at first, as solitary deserters, and soon in swarms. We then learned what was going on at the front. The front was breaking up. It immediately opened the eyes of us Czechs. Russia was lost.

The soldiers asked no leave to get away from the front; they simply packed their kits, requisitioned their own trains, and travelled to the nearest towns. From these they found trains to other towns, and soon all Russia saw men coming home without leave or license. They walked into the factories, ten or twelve at a time, and told the workmen they had come to take their places. “You are getting thirty roubles a day. In the trenches we got nothing. It is now time for us to get thirty roubles a day.“ There was no resisting that argument once the flood was let loose. The workmen at home, however, were not to be dislodged so easily. They managed for some weeks, in fact, for a few months, to resist the tide of the deserters to some extent. They had the support of all other workers and the railwaymen. The deserters from the front could not come in such numbers as they wished. Had Russia not been a madhouse, governed by its chief madmen, there might still have been some salvation. Order might eventually have been brought out of the incipient chaos. But unfortunately day by day the elements of disorder got fresh encouragement.

We Czechs were the first to be compromised. To make room for the soldiers who had come home, we were told to get out of the factories. We were taking the bread out of their mouths and the roubles out of their pockets. About 700 Czechs were discharged from our factory and told to go and look for work in the country. There was nothing for us to do but to join the army.

Before the Bolsheviks came we had a foretaste of the extremes to which things were tending, [sic] Before two months were up there was already a mixture of Bolshevism in the speeches. Socialist leaders came from Petrograd and Moscow. They were received like apostles with wonder and admiration. They indulged in denunciations of the rich and the well-to-do classes. They said: “For whom did you work before the Revolution? For the rich. Who rode in fine carriages? Who travelled in first-class railway cars? The millionaires, the rich, and the Tsar. Now every workman is going to travel firstclass!“ Alas, before I left Russia