Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/136

 ages of eighteen to forty-five have not yet been forced to mobilise at Helsingfors.

The Red wanted to show their power, they wished to oppress. They silenced the press, and only allowed their own productions to be issued. They arrested and annoyed everybody who did not sanction their measures. Such a thing must, however, be looked upon as the natural consequence of the masses being intoxicated with the power they had acquired, and it is, therefore, in a certain way pardonable. But what can never be pardoned is the unheard-of number of outrages committed by the Red. Violence and oppression will, perhaps, in the way of nature follow in the tracks of a revolution, robbery and murder need not.

The war methods of the Red were, of course, not those sanctioned internationally. You killed as well as you could, apart from all rules. One could hardly expect anything else from such undisciplined bands. But one thing might have been demanded of them, that they had let their prisoners of war live. But this they did not. There is abundant evidence that the Red regularly killed their captives. In the first place, the fact that White prisoners of war were never found with them (with one exception, which will be more fully related below), and in the second place, statements from doctors who had been forced to work with the field ambulances of the Red: they never got White wounded for treatment, not even when the Red accidentally became masters of the battlefield—the wounded White lying there were killed at once. In the third place, we have the evidence of the Red themselves.