Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/123

 a professor than a soldier. His eyes, behind his short-sighted glasses, look you through and through, but with a smiling glance. He speaks slowly, gently, and kindly. Only the gestures of his hands, with their long, thin fingers, betrayed a slight nervousness, caused, no doubt, by the strain of the gigantic task that this energetic worker has been carrying on during the past three years, and perhaps also expressing the grief that he must have felt at a career cut short so soon. But in speaking Alexeieff showed neither regret nor bitterness. He seemed full of a quiet confidence, praising his successor unreservedly. With not one word of criticism for a Government that had just relieved him of his command because of a word of possibly intentional imprudence which he had uttered during a little address to his officers, when he treated as Utopian the device "without annexations or contributions." And indeed there is not on his part any diplomatic reserve. His friends, and even his enemies, agree in saying, the latter in reproach, the former in his praise, that he has never been able