Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/184

 shrapnel did burst after we had passed, and wounded a soldier on the road behind us. But the meeting, at which four thousand troops were present, took place without any disagreeable interruptions in an orchard out of sight of the enemy. What struck us most there was to observe among the audience numerous soldiers taking down notes; they were the delegates from Soviets of distant units, who were thus going to let their comrades know what we had said.

Through delivering many speeches to these soldier audiences we had been able to make certain observations on the national psychology, and to find out which arguments were suitable and which were not, and the best method of presenting them. The interpreter's method of translating sentence by sentence gave us time to observe our audiences at our leisure, while the preceding sentence was being translated into Russian. The general conclusion to which we came was that we had to do with more naïve and simple audiences than the average popular audience of the West, but with none the less an extremely