Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/343

Rh ruined the locomotives. The retreating armies tore up railway tracks, blew up bridges and depots and fired the grain fields and the villages. The Poles not only destroyed the water-works and electric-station of Kiev, but in sheer malice dynamited the Cathedral of St. Vladimir.

The Counter-Revolutionists turned their retreat into an orgy of destruction. With torch and dynamite they laid waste the land leaving behind a black wake of ruins and ashes.

A host of other evils came out of the war—drastic censorship, arbitrary arrests, drum-head court-martials. The high handed measures charged against the Communists were to a large extent measures of war—none the less they were casualties to the ideals of the Revolution.

Then the human casualties! The death toll at the front was large. The death lists from the hospitals were appalling. Medicines, gauze and surgical instruments could not come thru the blockade. So limbs were amputated without anesthetics. Wounds were bandaged with newspapers. Gangrene and blood poisoning, typhus and cholera swept thru the armies unchecked.

The Revolution could have sustained the further loss in man-power—for Russia is vast. But it could not afford the loss in brain-power and soul-power, the wholesale massacre of its directing energizing spirits—the Communists. It was these Communists who bore the brunt of the fighting. They were