Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/96

66 and his funny accent. Then a foolish blunder. I asked, "Who of you have lost someone in the war?" Nearly every hand went up, and a wail swept thru that laughing throng, like a winter wind moaning in the trees. Two old peasants fell against the wagonwheels sobbing, and shaking my platform. A lad ran out of the crowd, crying: "My brother—they killed my brother!" And the women, drawing their platoks to their eyes, or clasped in each other's arms, wept and wept, until I wondered where all the tears could come from. Who would have dreamed that behind those placid faces lay so much grief?

This was but one of the thousands of Russian villages which the war had stripped of every ablebodied man. It was one of countless villages to which the wounded came crawling back, crippled, eyeless, or armless. Millions never returned at all. They lay in that great grave, 1500 miles long stretching from the Black Sea to the Baltic—the Russian front against the Germans. There peasants with only clubs in their hands, driven up against the machine guns of the Germans, were mowed down en masse.

There were plenty of guns in Archangel. They had even been loaded on cars, and started for the front. But merchants who wanted those cars for their wares, slipped a few thousand rubles to the officials; so, ten miles out of Archangel, the munitions were dumped and the cars shunted back to be